Capitalism and Conquest

Medieval craftsmen 

Beginnings of Capitalism

What began as a new way to organize economic interaction, referred to as capitalism or mercantilism, had a profound impact on the next several centuries.

Having brought impoverishment to the domestic peasantry, especially in England, the land-owners and budding manufacturers were stimulated to promote overseas conquest and colonization.  With their control of the state they could carry on such commercial activities under the guise of legality, international law and the law of states and conquest.

First the Spanish and Portuguese, and then the British, turned towards America, and the British annihilated whole societies in North America, in both cases rearranging the survivors under their control.  The Dutch and French also penetrated North America and the Caribbean with the same motives, goals and results.

The advent of capitalist production brought fundamental changes in the structure of European society, and through colonialism, affected the entire world.  Two new classes appeared wherever capitalism intervened: owners of the means of production, and dispossessed persons who were forced to sell their labor cheaply to those owners.

For the first time in human history, the majority of the people depended for their livelihood on a small minority, a phenomenon which became associated with colonialism worldwide.

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Indians of the Americas, 10

http://www.worldrevolution.org.uk/oldsite/pages/ideas_pages/birthofcapitalism.html

Dangerous Voyages

The legend of sailors beaching their ships on the back of a whale in the mistaken belief that they had found land was a popular one throughout the Middle Ages. 

Highly motivated men dared to undertake dangerous voyages to strange lands, willing to risk their lives on the high seas on perilous journeys, traveling farther than anyone had every ventured before.  A combination of circumstances in fifteenth-century Spain provided the incentives and the context: the violence, poverty, and disease common in the lives of the people; the rise of nationalism out of the hierarchical feudal system with  its acceptance of the domination of one class over another; an impoverished nobility yearning for wealth; a recognition of the importance of material wealth and an awareness that other nations were getting it through commerce; and an insistence on the universality of the Christian culture, with a tradition of waging battles against heretics and a missionary spirit to “save the world.”

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/history/middleages/trade.html