Capitalism and the Market Economy: Connections, Differences, and Implications for the Early Modern World

Meng Zhang, University of California Los Angeles

The concept of capitalism has seen a resurgence in the recent ‘new history of capitalism’ that seeks to combine the methodologies of cultural and economic history to study the material past. Scholars push for liberation from any rigid definition of capitalism and instead seek to understand the constant adaptability and metamorphosis of capitalism. This strategy seems to work well with the new scholarship’s overwhelming focus on North America, the Atlantic, and Europe – where the expansive notion of capitalism has come to encompass a whole range of early modern phenomenon from market development to slave trade. The drawback of such excessive conceptual fluidity becomes apparent if we were to take a global perspective and consider the trajectory of those places that are not usually associated with the historical emergence of capitalism: many of the early modern phenomenon casually dubbed “capitalism” by the new scholarship—such as the maturation of the market economy—also existed in other societies, but people would be hard-pressed to label them as part of the development of “capitalism.” This elusiveness of what constitutes capitalism leaves us with two unsatisfying options: adopting the arbitrary notion that only the West had capitalism and therefore a phenomenon was only capitalistic when it existed in the West, or digging the earth to explain why “sprouts of capitalism” did not fully blown in these other places. Both imply a capitalist teleology and deny the possibility of alternative trajectories towards prosperity (with the side product of justifying the downsides of capitalist prosperity). This paper revisits the notion of the distinction between capitalism and the market economy (as championed by Fernand Braudel and developed by scholars such as Giovanni Arrighi and R. Bin Wong) and discusses its implications for our understanding and imagination of global early modernity beyond the one centered on the West.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 115. Historical Social Sciences and China (III): The State and Empire in Chinese History