the not so secret history of capitalism

"It is true that democratic government, the rule of law, a robust taxation system and a vibrant civil society have been central to Western prosperity. But to suggest that Western nations have become prosperous merely because they have adopted the right norms is to turn history to its head. From the beginnings of the early modern period, there was a conflict between the ideals of liberté, egalité and fraternité and the realities of capitalist society. It was only because Western societies often disregarded those very norms that they were able to accumulate power and resources as they did.

At the birth of capitalism lay not an ‘efficient tax system’ but forced land enclosures, that threw people off the land, and helped create a mass of landless workers that would feed the emerging factory system. As Gerard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers, asked in his 1649 tract, The New Law of Righteousness:

"Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?"

At the beginnings of capitalism lay also slavery, the profits of which provided much of the wealth for early industrial investment. In his groundbreaking 1943 book Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams argued that the profits of the ‘triangular trade’ between Europe, Africa and the New World had ‘made an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development’....

As for ‘mutual regard’ being central to prosperity, it is easy to forget how deeply entrenched racism was in the Western consciousness until recently. ‘The brown, black and yellow races of the world’, the London Times insisted in an editorial in 1910, had to accept that ‘inequality is inevitable’ thanks to the ‘facts of race’. The consequences of such inequality had already been made starkly clear two decades earlier by the soon-to-be US President Theodore Roosevelt in his four-volume history The Winning of the West.  ‘All must appreciate’, he wrote, the ‘race importance’ of the struggle between whites and the rest; the elimination of the inferior races, ‘whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of the wild beasts’ would be ‘for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind’, adding that it was ‘idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality that apply between stable and cultured communities’.

The development of colonial empires, the carving up of the rest of the world by a handful of Western nations, allowed for cheap raw materials and labour, the creation of huge markets for goods, and the ability to control global trade and development. It also reinforced the sense of the moral worthlessness of the Other. Europeans, as Frantz Fanon acidly observed in The Wretched of the Earth, ‘are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.’

Racial contempt was directed not simply towards the peoples of Africa and Asia but towards the working class as home too. ‘The lowest strata of European societies’, the French psychologist Gustav Lebon wrote, ‘is homologous with the primitive men.’ Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, believed that ‘beside… three points of difference – endurance of steady labour, tameness of disposition and prolonged development – I know of none  that very markedly distinguishes the nature of the lower classes of civilized man from that of the barbarians’. In an address to the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris in 1857, the Christian socialist Phillipe Buchez considered the meaning of social differentiation within France:

"Consider a population like ours, placed in the most favourable circumstances; possessed of a powerful civilisation; amongst the highest ranking nations in science, the arts and industry.  Our task now, I maintain, is to find out how it can happen that within a population such as ours, races may form – not merely one but several races – so miserable, inferior and bastardised that they may be classes below the most inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure."....

The West became prosperous, in other words, despite ignoring enlightened values, not merely by pursuing them. Prosperity in turn allowed Western nations to establish progressive social institutions and liberal norms. It was not, however, merely prosperity but social struggle that allowed, or rather forced, Western nations to establish such institutions and such norms, both working class struggles at home and anti-imperialist struggles abroad; social struggles, in other words, many of which were led by the very people that Collier now deems not to possess the right cultural attributes or moral norms.

European nations, and America, developed at a time when the field was relatively empty.  They were able to create markets, develop their economies, expand their influence, flex their power, build an empire at a time when the only competition came from a handful of other similarly developing Western nations. Today’s developing countries find themselves in a global economy already carved up and one in which the richer nations are able to exploit their political economic and military power to ensure that their interests take precedence. Those interests often require global trade to be distorted and the economic development of poorer nations warped. They also often require the political and social institutions of non-Western nations to be corrupted. Western leaders may proclaim the virtues of democracy and liberalism. There is, however, a long history of Western nations propping up dictators who suit their needs, and undermining democracy and the democratic movements that they fear might challenge their interests.

So, yes, let us by all means talk of the cultural and moral deficits faced by poor nations.  Let us talk of the corruption and social fragmentation and political repression and poor governance. These are all important issues and, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, from Nigeria to India, the political elites must be challenged and held to account, the movements for democracy and radical social change supported. But let us not also forget the context of global inequality, nor the history of capitalism, nor the backstory to how rich countries became rich, nor the struggle it has taken to establish progressive social norms. That history is no secret. But it is one that is all too often forgotten."