Ever since credit and crunch became the most popular words of this new millennium, copies of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital have been flying off the shelves. The re-issue of these books – as the market demands – proves that capitalism subsumes everything eventually – even anti-capitalist manifestos. Yet there has also been a significant renewal of interest in the works of the right-wing capitalist writer Ayn Rand, particularly the novel she is best known for, Atlas Shrugged. Joyce Appleby, a notable American historian, therefore provides a timely tome with her latest book, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism.
While Appleby covers a broad canvas, one of her driving questions asks just how deep the roots of capitalism really are? She says they are as deep as England’s own soil, and it is on England that she rests her focus for “only in England” did an entirely new system for producing goods emerge, which far surpassed the simple trading of goods. The Jews, Arabs and Chinese were all exceptional traders, but were pioneers of neither the industrial nor the agricultural revolutions.
Appleby also engages with the “clash of civilisations” between the West and Islam, in which she refers to the distaste and incomprehension of Western capitalism because of those who have powerful ties of ritual and shared beliefs that travel back centuries. She states that “these [capitalist] preoccupations of ours are as distasteful to them as they were to men and women in 16th century Europe”, which can be read as meaning that we in the West have “progressed” far beyond Islamic nations because they are currently where we were all the way back in the 16th century. Except it is not as cut and dried as that, because she does not rate capitalism as progression. She implies that those countries, in which people live within religious structures and under particular religious strictures, have something far richer than capitalism.
Religion plays a large part in this history, not least because she has included many Biblical allusions, as well as taking time to consider Weber’s seminal text, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is this link, between the rise of capitalism and the Puritans, who invested their work with religious reverence, which is emphasised for those unfamiliar with Weber.
A bland economic theory this is not. The Relentless Revolution is more of a story – the story of capitalism as a culture; how, where and why it spread when, for 4,000 years, humans had got on well enough with day-to-day trading and bartering. Appleby takes great care to emphasise this distinction – trading did not capitalism make. Yet, given that her focus is on England, I feel there is far too little on figures such as Elizabeth I who, in many ways, can be likened to that other arch capitalist, Margaret Thatcher. Appleby engages with neither figure. Thatcher is mentioned just twice, compared to Elizabeth’s thrice.
She takes care to cover those who made valiant attempts to play devil’s advocate where money was concerned. Shakespeare, who was at the cradle of capitalism as we know it today, used it as a motif in a number of his works, The Merchant of Venice being the prime example. There are also his recurrent motifs of the idyll of the forest – neutral nature as the antidote to concerns of court and commerce.
It is hardly surprising then, to realise that Marx was obsessed with Shakespeare – could recite him at the drop of a hat and would pepper conversations with Shakespearean allusions. Then came the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848 that occurred throughout Europe, except, of course, here, where despite the Chartists using anti-capitalist arguments, encouraged by the works of Romantics such as Blake, Byron and Shelley, they were often ridiculed.
Overall, it makes for a multi-stranded tale as rich as its subject. Yet, while Appleby has, thankfully, plumped for the qualitative over the quantitative, the book sadly lacks a real core that would have held it together to create a meaningful whole.
