Description

Banaji’s Brief History presents an alternative account of the history of capitalism, that starts not with the so-called Industrial Revolution but with the way commercial capital led over the centuries to the evolution of a world market that first emerged with the expansion of Italian capital into the Byzantine empire. The book straddles whole centuries of commercial development, showing how at every stage the state was crucial to the conflicts between rival mercantile centres and the networks they formed (Venice, Genoa, Portugal, the Dutch, and eventually Britain), with struggles that became increasingly violent and covered ever larger parts of the globe. After an initial survey that shows how a certain Marxist orthodoxy abandoned this field of research to other traditions, the chapters move rapidly across topics such as the infrastructures merchants needed to operate globally, the competition of capitals, Britain’s mercantile capitalism and the way it worked in India, the putting-out system (viz. merchant manufacturing), and finally features related to the circulation of capital, not least the supply chains through which household commodity producers were integrated into accumulation internationally. As one reviewer wrote, the book is a ‘remarkable achievement for the concision alone’, a panorama of economic history compressed into 124 pages of text followed by an Appendix on ‘Islam and Capitalism’ and by copious endnotes. 

Contents:

• Reinstating Commercial Capitalism
• The Infrastructure of Commercial Capitalism
• The Competition of Capitals: Struggles for Commercial Dominance from the Twelfth to Eighteenth Centuries
• British Mercantile Capitalism and the Cosmopolitanism of the Nineteenth Century
• Commercial Practices: Putting-Out or the Capitalist Domestic Industries 
• The Circulation of Commercial Capitals: Competition, Velocity, Verticality

Appendix: Islam and Capitalism
Extensive notes, and select bibliography and index

Praise for the book

“Jairus Banaji’s A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism is a brilliant, wide-ranging yet succinct study of merchant capitalism from the 12th to the 19th centuries.” —Srinath Raghavan, historian 

“(This is an) extraordinarily distilled, book-length essay on the deep history of commercial capitalism. Highly recommended…To me Banaji’s book reads not only as a history and as a theoretical statement, but also, intriguingly, as an effort to situate Marxist thinking about the commercial capitalism issue in its historical context. Far from absolutizing an eternal return of commercial capitalism (though it does return), Banaji is making an effort to chart precisely what Marx and others in the tradition could and could not see between the 1850s and the early 1880s.” —Adam Tooze, author of Crashed

“This slim book packs in a lot of scholarship… (The following chapters) offer a superb insight into the role that money in its various forms as credit and capital played in sea-borne trade from Gibraltar via the Mediterranean and Arabian Sea reaching all the way to China. Banaji has command over several languages and has studied literature both old and new on many centres and countries, tracing the wholesale trade in spices, pearls, coffee, and raw silk across Venice, Genoa, Beirut, Constantinople, Calicut, and Guangzhou …Banaji brings us to the point when a new history of capitalism can be written free of the fetters put in place by Enlightenment philosophers.” —Lord Desai in Economic History Review, 73,4 (2020)

“Jairus Banaji’s A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism brings together countless sources — in a variety of languages — to paint a panoramic picture of the history of trade and capital accumulation across the globe over one thousand years, give or take…a narrative of such scope paints a fascinating picture of the ways in which commercial capitalism has had merchants traveling the globe for centuries…Against the orthodoxy of a capitalism born in England, or even western Europe, he views commercial capitalism as international from the start.”—James Parisot in Science and Society, 2021

“In this majestic work of critical historical scholarship, Jairus Banaji has built a de finitive argument that commercial capitalism is the essence of capitalism, that it has dominated eras usually asserted to be pre-capitalist, and that it has persisted into the present.”—BARBARA HARRISS-WHITE, emeritus professor of development studies, Wolfson College, Oxford University

“This book is Jairus Banaji at his scholarly and provocative best. With his remarkable knowledge of world literatures, Banaji has produced a major exercise in the global and historical analysis of capitalism, affecting how we grasp capitalism today and how we understand and use Marx to do so—theory as history indeed.” —HENRY BERNSTEIN, emeritus professor of development studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

“With mind-boggling erudition, command over an extraordinary range of historical materials in multiple languages, and a theoretically sophisticated irreverence for received dogma, Jairus Banaji dislodges many a eurocentric account to offer an absorbing, thought-provoking, and truly global story of the emergence and varieties of capitalism.”—LALEH KHALILI, professor of international politics, Queen Mary University of London and author, Sinews of War and Trade