Commentary on 2019 Roepke Lecture “War, Capitalism, and the Making and Unmaking of Economic Geographies”

Commentary

Erica Schoenberger has done yeoman work over the years digging into European history to reflect on the origins of markets and money. Her Roepke lecture builds on this earlier work to the question of the origins of towns and burghers in the Middle Ages, roughly 800–1400. Schoenberger’s work has not received the attention it should have among economic geographers, for three reasons. One is that most economics is based on modeling, not history. Another is that translating the lessons of history to today is difficult. A third is that economics and economic geography are rooted in a view of the world that naturalizes markets and money (Schoenberger and Walker 2017).

Schoenberger’s story of markets and money grows out of the work of Karl Polanyi and others who have debunked the view that markets are the normal form of economic interaction in premodern societies, when they are the exception. Market exchange does not grow up organically from simple barter, as posited by Adam Smith. Nor do modern markets scale up from village squares, as in the just-so story of Leon Walras, one of the fathers of neoclassical economics. Extensive markets and commercial societies are modern inventions (Schoenberger 2008, 2010).

Notes

¹ I use the term feudal to refer to a society dominated by a landed aristocracy with extensive ties of fealty and extracting surplus from peasant producers—sometimes as serfs, but not always (Bloch 1961).

² Note, however, that Abulafia and Pye are both adherents to a Smithian theory of market-led development.

³ Brenner’s version focuses on agrarian relations and ignores cities, which is correct but not sufficient.

⁴ Though the London merchants were badly split in their political allegiances, many of them aligned with the king.

⁵ Ingham (2004) provides a fine history of these developments but treats them as an extension of a long history of abstract money of account—missing the role of value (he gets Marx quite wrong).

⁶ Thanks to Jason Moore. In a personal communication, he notes that a crucial rupture leading to new forms of credit money was the bullion famine of the fifteenth century, which included massive hoarding, decommercialization, and lack of confidence in the value of coinage (see also Arrighi 1994).

⁷ A similar story of early manufacturing in Germany is told by Kriedte, Medich, and Schlumbolm (1981). The other great field for the development of capitalist production was, of course, in British agriculture from the 1500s on (Dimmock 2014).

⁸ The Fuggers did invest substantially in mining production and improvements and were beginning to act like competitive capitalists before they were brought down by the bankruptcy of the Spanish Empire.

⁹ Similar things were happening internally in British and Dutch agriculture at the same time (Brenner 2001).