Beyond market dependence: The origins of capitalism in Catalonia

Javier Moreno Zacarés

doi:10.1111/joac.12263

Abstract

AbstractBuried in the footnotes of his famous 1976 essay, Robert Brenner left the remark that Catalonia had experienced an agrarian transition to capitalism in parallel to England. This important claim has been completely forgotten by his followers of the political Marxist tradition, who since then have developed his views on the origins of capitalism. Building on the specialist literature, this article revisits the question of the Catalan transition through the prism of political Marxism and teases out its implications. In particular, it argues that the Catalan case illustrates the centrality of agency and subjectivity in the process of capitalist change. Contrary to Brenner's claim, this paper will argue that pre‐capitalist social property relations persisted in agriculture throughout the period of transition. Instead, the region's capitalist breakthrough was prompted by sociocultural struggles in its 18th‐century proto‐industry.

Highlights

In the 18th century, Catalonia, a region in the north‐east corner of the Iberian Peninsula, witnessed the rise of a powerful commercial agriculture and a dynamic textile industry that was described by contemporaries as “a little England in the heart of Spain” (Pollard, 1981)
Brenner's work has only recently been reappraised and redeployed for the Catalan case by Julie Marfany, who has reclaimed his notion of market dependence to explain the commercial transformation of the Catalan peasantry in the 18th century, a pattern of development which she identifies as a “transition to agrarian capitalism.”
As Wood pointed out in the midst of her dispute with Brenner over the Dutch transition, the pressures forcing social actors to engage in market exchange to fulfil their social reproduction cannot explain the emergence of drives to permanently improve the productivity of labour when producing for the market

Summary

Introduction

In the 18th century, Catalonia, a region in the north‐east corner of the Iberian Peninsula, witnessed the rise of a powerful commercial agriculture and a dynamic textile industry that was described by contemporaries as “a little England in the heart of Spain” (Pollard, 1981). Brenner's work on the Dutch transition prompted a schism with political theorist Wood (2002b), who came to reject the usefulness of the concept of market dependence to track the genesis of capitalist development, and instead proposed a theorization of the origins of capitalism that focused on the emergence of market imperatives— the competitive pressures to systematically improve the production process—highlighting the creative agency of social actors in the process of transition.

Results

Conclusion