The ‘Dutch Case’ and Its Civilizational Dimensions: Situating the Transition Debate to Capitalism

The Netherlands is considered to be an exemplary case of study of the transition to capitalism. Most studies, however, lack a comprehensive interpretation synthesizing the different aspects and providing a summarized idea of this complex situation. The perception and pursuit of the civilization perspective outlined by M. Weber and F. Braudel, enables the identification of the basic dimensions of early capitalism in the Netherlands. The debate on the transition to capitalism is used as a methodology and interpretative forum for approximation of the views of both scientists and their further development through the prism of contemporary views. The general picture of the epoch of the 17th century outlines the idea that the country has not been completely transformed into capitalist but the process had already started. Certain cultural, economic and political preconditions and factors had contributed to its development whilst it was dependent on their combination both in internal and European and global context. It was found that to a lesser degree the role of the socio-cultural dimensions of capitalism is outlined, which may be based on the factual situation as well as on its incomplete interpretation in the different studies. The pluralistic explanation of the transition to capitalism renders it possible to clarify this assumption and use it in subsequent studies.

Writing at the Origin of Capitalism

In the late sixteenth through seventeenth centuries, England simultaneously developed a national market and a national literary culture. In Writing at the Origin of Capitalism, Julianne Werlin describes how economic change in early modern England created new patterns of textual production and circulation with lasting consequences for English literature. Synthesizing research in book and media history, including investigations of manuscript and print, with Marxist historical theory, Werlin demonstrates that England’s transition to capitalism had a decisive impact on techniques of writing, rates of literacy, and modes of reception—and so on the form and style of texts. Individual chapters discuss the impact of market integration on linguistic standardization and the rise of a uniform English prose; the growth of a popular literary market alongside a national market in cheap commodities; and the decline of literary patronage with the monarchy’s loosening grip on trade regulation, among other subjects. Peddlers’ routes and price integration, monopoly licenses and bills of exchange, all prove vital for understanding early modern English writing. Each chapter reveals how books and documents were embedded in wider economic processes and, as a result, how the origin of capitalism constituted a revolutionary event in the history of English literature.

China, Eastern Europe and Russia compared

After the collapse of the Berlin Wall it was conceivable that China would follow the path towards the cessation of communism, as it happened in the successor states of the USSR, Yugoslavia and the East European satellite states of the Soviet Union. But the Communist Party of China (CPC) managed to retain control and avoided the Russian and East European collapse, a full-fledged transition to capitalism and liberal democracy. For a while, China was on its way to market capitalism with the possible outcome to turn eventually into a liberal democracy. This was a rocky road, with backs-and-forth. But the shift to liberal democracy did not happen. The massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, approved by Deng Xiaoping, was a more alarming setback than the contemporary Western observers were willing to realize. This paper presents an interpretation of the changes under present Chinese leader, Xi Jinping in a post-communist comparative perspective.

Naming Plantations: Toponyms and the Construction of the Plantation System in the English Atlantic

This essay pioneers a critical approach to place naming in early America, which offers new insight into the evolving definition of plantation. In early seventeenth-century England, planting was understood as a public effort to establish new commonwealths. Only gradually around the Atlantic world did plantations become predominantly associated with private places producing staple crops with enslaved labor. This essay uses the radically underutilized evidence of place-names to explore how this slippage occurred on the ground, and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to the places they called plantations reveal how they perceived the plantation and the political, economic, and social relations it structured. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 named tracts of land patented in four Maryland counties between 1634 and 1750, this essay charts the changing popularity of distinct elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, affects of the landowner, and European place-names. It reveals there was no straightforward rush to carve up the land into privatized commercial units. Instead, individuals initially structured plantations around communal frameworks defined variously by manorialism, urban civic traditions, and shared geographic lexicons. As the tobacco economy consolidated into the hands of a slave-owning class, plantation names reframed places as subjective manifestations of planter identities. These conclusions adjust our understanding of the transition to capitalism and slavery in Maryland and they also offer a blueprint for a broader toponymy of the plantation in the Atlantic world.

Marxism and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism in Prewar Japan

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan rapidly industrialized, greatly raising its level of economic productivity. However, the peasants were kept in a state of hunger under a semifeudal agricultural system. How should this semi-feudality be understood? About this question arose a debate among Japanese Marxists in prewar Japan: the Debate on Japanese Capitalism. This article examines the methodologies of three analysists of Japanese capitalism focusing on the level of abstraction of the analysis of capitalism, whose ideas were derived from Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s methodology of downward analysis and upward development: Moritarō Yamada of Kōzaha, Itsurō Sakisaka of Rōnōha, and Kōzō Uno, who distanced himself from both sides. Uno criticized Yamada and Sakisaka for directly analyzing a particular Japanese capitalism with a highly general theory such as Capital, and proposed the Three-Stage Theory: the Pure Theory, which is based on the assumption of a pure capitalism, such as Marx’s Capital; the Stage Theory, which clarifies the historical developmental stage of capitalism, such as Lenin’s Imperialism (1917); and the Empirical Analysis, which analyzes capitalism in each country at a given time. However, Uno’s main concern was to analyze Japanese capitalism in the Stage Theory, doing little to further advance it in the Empirical Analysis. Therefore, this article divided the Empirical Analysis into two levels of abstraction: the domain of theoretical construction of Japanese Capitalism, such as Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), and of data analysis of specific conditions of Japanese capitalism, such as Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), and thus proposed the Four-Stage Theory. It is a hypothesis for complementing Uno’s Three-Stage Theory, which should be further developed by data. Finally, such methodological consideration for analyzing capitalism is applicable to non-Japanese capitalist societies.

Discursive Representations of the (Capitalist) Results of the “Chinese Economic Miracle”

It is unlikely that any other state attracts more attention of the world community than China; there are endless debates about its geopolitical status, social-economic potential, demographic challenges, environmental threats, political structure, etc. However, scientific and popular-science discourses focus rather on finding an answer to the question of what type of social system China has in terms of the classical dilemma of “capitalism vs socialism”, and there are no universal nominations for either the historical past or present. The article aims at identifying the key discursive representations of the “Chinese economic miracle” by reconstructing them from three books recently translated into Russian: Zhang Yu’s China’s Economic Reform: Experience and Implications, Yifu Lin’s Demystifying the Chinese Economy, and How China Became Capitalist, written by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang. The article summarizes the main arguments of the three books. Although their interpretations of the “Chinese economic miracle” differ, including the degree of the politicized enthusiasm and optimism, they agree that developing countries should follow the Chinese path of reforms and ignore a number of this path’s serious problems. The article concludes that the books represent three discourses: an ideological-politicized scenario of developing a special type of socialism “from above”, a description of the capitalist economy developed from both “above” and “below”, and a statement of the completed transition to capitalism not under the party leadership control but mainly “from below” and, despite prohibitions and anti-capitalist rhetoric, “from above”. Such discursive contradictions are especially interesting for the Russian reader who remembers disputes about the type of “Russian capitalism” in the 1990s–2000s, and for the sociologist of the “classical type”, i.e., one studying historical changes to understand current social transformations.