The Blood of the Commonwealth
War, the State, and the Making of World Money
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by David McNally in
Current site
Google Scholar
Insisting on the status of money as a creature of both the market and the state, this article challenges dualistic understandings of capitalist imperialism as entailing two fundamentally distinct logics, one capitalist, the other territorial. In opposition to the dual-logics position, the article argues for the distinctiveness of capitalist money in terms of a complex but unitary socio-economic logic. The social dynamism of this logic involves the spatial-territorial extension of the domain of modern value relations, embodied in fully-capitalist money. Departing from the development of coinage in ancient Greece, the article proceeds to identify the 1690s in Britain as the decisive moment in the emergence of a new and distinctively capitalist form of (world) money, institutionally based upon the Bank of England, in which state debt was thoroughly integrated with private financial markets. The crucial role of the Bank of England in this new monetary system is shown to have pivoted on its capacities to finance Britain’s inter-colonial wars. Colonialism, war, slavery and dispossession underline the omnipresence of ‘blood and dirt’ (Marx) in the development and reproduction of capitalist impersonal power as expressed in world money. Undoing the impersonal power characteristic of bourgeois money thus entails undoing the economic dispossession of the labouring poor, which forms the basis of their ‘possession’ by capital.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Anderson Kevin B. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies 2010 Chicago University of Chicago Press
-
Appleby Joyce Oldham Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England 1978 Princeton Princeton University Press
-
Aquanno Scott Panitch & Konings ‘us Power and the International Bond Market: Financial Flows and the Construction of Risk Value’ 2009 2009
-
Aristophanes Barrett David The Frogs The Wasps, The Poet and the Women, The Frogs 1964 Harmondsworth Penguin Books
-
Arrighi Giovanni The Long Twentieth Century 1994 London Verso
-
Banaji Jairus ‘Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History’ Capital & Class 1977 1 3 1 44
-
Banaji Jairus Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation 2010 Leiden Brill Historical Materialism Book Series
-
Barbon Nicolas A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter 1696 London n.p.
-
Beattie John M. Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror 2001 Oxford Oxford University Press
-
Brewer John The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 1989 New York Alfred A. Knopf
-
Caffentzis Constantine George Clipped Coins, Abused Words and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money 1989 New York Autonomedia
-
Campbell Gwyn, Miers Suzanne & Miller Joseph C. Women and Slavery, Volume 1, Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic 2007 Athens, OH University of Ohio Press
-
Carruthers Bruce G. City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution 1996 Princeton Princeton University Press
-
Clapham John The Bank of England: A History 1966 Volume 1 Cambridge Cambridge University Press
-
Cook Robert Manuel ‘Speculations on the Origins of Coinage’ Historia 1958 7 3 257 262
-
Craig John ‘Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 1963 18 2 136 145
-
Craven Paul & Hay Douglas Lovejoy & Rogers ‘The Criminalization of “Free” Labour: Master and Servant in Comparative Perspective’ 1994 1994
-
Dalton George Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi 1968 Boston Beacon Press
-
Davenant Charles ‘Memorial Concerning the Coin of England in which are handled these 4 Questions’ 1963 [1696] excerpted in Li 1963
-
Davies Glyn A History of Money: From Ancient Times to the Present Day 2002 Third Edition Cardiff University of Wales Press
-
Dickson Peter George Muir The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 1967 London Macmillan
-
Eckers Michael, Hart Gillian, Kipfer Stefan & Loftus Alex Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics 2013 Chichester Wiley-Blackwell
-
Einaudi Luigi Lane Frederic C. & Riemersma Jelle C. ‘The Theory of Imaginary Money from Charlemagne to the French Revolution’ Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History 1953 London Allen and Unwin
-
Finley Moses I. The World of Odysseus 1965 Second Edition Harmondsworth Penguin Books
-
Finley Moses I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology 1983 Harmondsworth Penguin Books
-
Flint Christopher ‘Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction’ PMLA 1998 113 2 212 226
-
Foley Duncan Moseley Fred ‘Marx’s Theory of Money in Historical Perspective’ Marx’s Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals 2005 Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan
-
Gerriets Marilyn ‘Money in Early Christian Ireland According to the Irish Laws’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 1985 27 2 323 339
-
Gerstenberger Heide Fernbach David Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State 2007 Leiden Brill Historical Materialism Book Series,
-
Gleick James Isaac Newton 2004 New York Vintage Books
-
Goody Jack R. ‘Marriage Prestations, Inheritance and Descent in Pre-Industrial Societies’ Journal of Comparative Family Studies 1970 1 1 37 54
-
Graeber David Debt: The First 5,000 Years 2011 New York Melville House
-
Grierson Philip The Origins of Money 1977 London Athlone Press
-
Harvey David The New Imperialism 2003 Oxford Oxford University Press
-
Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Wood Allen W. Elements of the Philosophy of Right 1991 Cambridge Cambridge University Press
-
Herodotus The Histories 2003 Harmondsworth Penguin Books translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt and revised by John M. Marincola
-
Hinshelwood Brad ‘The Carolinian Context of John Locke’s Theory of Slavery’ Political Theory 2013 41 4 562 590
-
Hobbes Thomas Macpherson C.B. Leviathan 1968 Harmondsworth Penguin Books
-
Horsefield J. Keith British Monetary Experiments, 1650–1710 1960 Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press
-
Howgego Christopher J. Ancient History from Coins 1995 London Routledge
-
Ingham Geoffrey The Nature of Money 2004 Cambridge Polity Press
-
Innes A. Mitchell Wray L. Randall ‘What is Money?’ Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes 2004 [1913–14] Cheltenham Edward Elgar
-
Jones D.W. War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough 1988 Oxford Basil Blackwell
-
Jordan Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 1968 Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press
-
Kraay Colin M. ‘Hoards, Small Change and the Origins of Coinage’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 1964 84 76 91
-
Kraay Colin M. Archaic and Classical Greek Coins 1976 Berkeley University of California Press
-
Kurke Leslie Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece 1999 Princeton Princeton University Press
-
Laslett Peter ‘John Locke, the Great Recoinage, and the Origins of the Board of Trade: 1695–1698’ The William and Mary Quarterly 1957 III, 14 3 370 402
-
Lefebvre Henri Nicholson-Smith Donald The Production of Space 1991 Oxford Blackwell
-
Levenson Thomas Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist 2009 Boston Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
-
Li Ming-Hsun The Great Recoinage of 1696 to 1699 1963 London Weidenfeld and Nicolson
-
Locke John Locke ‘Some Considerations of the Consequences of Lowering the Interest and Raising the Value of Money’ 1824a [1691] 1824c
-
Locke John Locke ‘Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money’ 1824b [1696] 1824c
-
Locke John The Works of John Locke Economic Writings and Two Treatises of Government 1824c Volume 4 Twelfth Edition London C. & J. Rivington et al.
-
Locke John Laslett Peter Two Treatises of Government 1963 Revised Edition Cambridge Cambridge University Press
-
Lovejoy Paul E. & Rogers Nicholas Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World 1994 Abingdon Frank Cass
-
Mann Geoff Eckers Hart, Kipfer & Loftus ‘State of Confusion: Money and the Space of Civil Society in Hegel and Gramsci’ 2013 2013
-
Marx Karl Theories of Surplus Value 1971 Volume 3 Moscow Progress Publishers
-
Marx Karl Nicolaus Martin Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) 1973 Harmondsworth Penguin Books
-
Marx Karl Fowkes Ben Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1976 [1867] Volume 1 Harmondsworth Penguin Books
-
McNally David ‘Locke, Levellers and Liberty: Property and Democracy in the Thought of the First Whigs’ History of Political Thought 1989 10 1 17 40
-
McNally David Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique 1993 London Verso
-
McNally David Laxer Gordon & Soron Dennis ‘The Commodity Status of Labour: The Secret of Commodified Life’ Not for Sale: Decommodifying Public Life 2006 Peterborough Broadview Press
-
McNally David Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism 2012 Chicago Haymarket Books Historical Materialism Book Series
-
Melville-Jones John ‘Why Did the Ancient Greeks Strike Coins?’ Journal of the Numismatic Association of Australia 2005 17 21 30
-
Miller Joseph C. Campbell Miers & Miller ‘Introduction: Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves’ 2007 2007
-
Panitch Leo & Gindin Sam The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire 2012 London Verso
-
Panitch Leo & Konings Martijn American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance 2009 Revised Edition Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan
-
Patterson Orlando Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study 1982 Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press
-
Polanyi Karl Dalton ‘The Semantics of Money Uses’ 1968 [1957] 1968
-
Pradella Lucia ‘Imperialism and Capitalist Development in Marx’s Capital ’ 2013 21 2 117 147 Historical Materialism
-
Roberts Clayton ‘The Constitutional Significance of the Financial Settlement of 1690’ The Historical Journal 1977 20 1 59 76
-
Rogers Nicholas Lovejoy & Rogers ‘Vagrancy, Impressment and the Regulation of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ 1994 1994
-
Roseveare Henry The Financial Revolution, 1660–1760 1991 London Longman
-
Seaford Richard Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy 2004 Cambridge Cambridge University Press
-
Shaikh Anwar ‘Foreign Trade and the Law of Value, Part I’ Science & Society 1979 43 3 281 302
-
Shaikh Anwar ‘Foreign Trade and the Law of Value, Part II’ Science & Society 1980 44 1 27 57
-
Stasavage David ‘Partisan Politics and Public Debt: The Importance of the “Whig Supremacy” for Britain’s Financial Revolution’ European Review of Economic History 2007 11 1 123 153
-
Thomas Hugh The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 1997 New York Touchstone
-
Valenze Deborah The Social Life of Money in the English Past 2006 Cambridge Cambridge University Press
-
Vilar Pierre A History of Gold and Money: 1450–1920 1984 London Verso
-
Wennerlind Carl ‘The Death Penalty as Monetary Policy: The Practice and Punishment of Monetary Crime, 1690–1830’ History of Political Economy 2004 36 1 131 161
-
Wootton David Political Writings of John Locke 1993 New York Mentor
-
1
Hegel 1991, p. 23.
-
3
As is argued powerfully in Seaford 2004.
-
4
Howgego 1995, pp. 47–8, 97; Kraay 1976, pp. 73–4. ‘Archaic’ owls were first produced around 525 bce; the ‘classical’ variant emerged about fifty years later.
-
7
Grierson 1977, p. 16. Ingham 2004, p. 4, insists on beginning with the ‘unit of account’ function of money. While this does refer to money’s operations as a measure of value, his account is a formalist and nominalist one having to do with how a specific standard of measure (unit of account) is selected, rather than with the social conditions which establish relations of commensuration and exchangeability in the first place.
-
8
Grierson 1977, pp. 16–17. On archaic Greece, see Finley 1965, p. 67. For medieval and early-modern Europe, see Einaudi 1953.
-
11
Innes 2004, p. 31.
-
13
Polanyi 1968, p. 198.
-
14
Grierson 1977, pp. 21–2. Some systems of fines were also governed by the social rank or status of the injured individual.
-
15
Gerriets 1985, pp. 333–5. Interestingly, the cumal became a pure unit of account by the eighth century, when female slaves seem not to have been used as means of payment even though the unit, cumal, was used to measure fines, which would then be translated into amounts of silver, grain or cattle.
-
16
Patterson 1982, p. 148.
-
18
Patterson 1982, p. 178.
-
19
Finley 1983, p. 75.
-
21
Patterson 1982, pp. 25–6. See also McNally 2006.
-
23
Melville-Jones 2005; Kraay 1964; Cook 1958, p. 261; Herodotus 2003, Book 1, Chapters 26–94.
-
25
Dickson 1967, p. 399.
-
28
Clapham 1966, p. 1.
-
29
Brewer 1989, pp. 29, 38, 114, 40, 137. See also Jones 1988.
-
32
Clapham 1966, p. 26.
-
33
Clapham 1966, p. 101.
-
35
Davies 2002, p. 282.
-
37
Dickson 1967, pp. 254, 260, 273, 285.
-
38
See Gerstenberger 2007, who tends, however, to underplay the centrality of what I have called ‘the autonomous power of money’ to the emergence of the impersonal bourgeois state-form.
-
39
See Roberts 1977, pp. 59–76, and Roseveare 1991, p. 47.
-
41
Li 1963, p. 53.
-
42
Li 1963, p. 51; Horsefield 1960, p. 26.
-
44
Wennerlind 2004, p. 147. So zealous was Newton in the cause of the death penalty as monetary policy that he had himself made a Justice of the Peace in order to oversee prosecutions personally.
-
45
Craig 1963, p. 129. See also Gleick 2004, pp. 160–1; and Levenson 2009.
-
47
For details see Levenson 2009, pp. 140–3.
-
49
Locke 1824a, p. 84. This edition of Locke’s Works can be found online at <http://oll.libertyfund.org/people/john-locke>.
-
50
Locke 1824b, pp. 191–2, 169–70, 158, 144.
-
51
Locke 1824a, pp. 22, 6.
-
52
Locke 1824b, p. 195.
-
53
Locke 1824b, p. 169.
-
54
Locke 1824a, pp. 49, 50.
-
55
Vilar 1984, p. 205.
-
56
Caffentzis 1989, p. 119, in a book that deserves a much wider readership in the literature on Locke, classical political economy and the rise of capitalism.
-
57
Hobbes 1968, p. 300.
-
59
Gleick 2004, pp. 142–5.
-
60
Thomas 1997, pp. 199–201, 235–41.
-
62
See Laslett 1957, who describes Locke’s colonialism as ‘a striking paradox’ (Laslett 1957, p. 371). For the argument that Locke’s position was anything but paradoxical, see McNally 1989, pp. 17–40.
-
65
Roseveare 1991, p. 47.
-
66
McNally 1993, Chapter 1.
-
67
Beattie 2001, pp. 328–9.
-
68
Valenze 2006, p. 234.
-
69
Craven and Hay 1994, pp. 71–101.
-
70
Rogers 1994, pp. 102–13.
-
71
Jordan 1968, pp. 47–8.
-
72
Valenze 2006, p. 240.
-
73
Marx 1973, p. 326. Patterson 1982, pp. 24–6, explores these overlapping relations of slavery and wage-labour. The crucial intervention on these points is Banaji 1977, now reprinted in Banaji 2010.
-
74
Locke 1963, 1.130.
-
75
McNally 2012, Chapter 1.
-
76
See Valenze 2006, pp. 72, 78–88, 161; and Flint 1998, p. 212.
-
77
Valenze 2006, p. 202.
-
78
Harvey 2003, p. 27.
-
79
Lefebvre 1991, pp. 86–8.
-
80
Marx 1976, pp. 919, 922.
-
81
Marx 1976, p. 925.
-
84
Marx 1971, p. 253.
-
85
See Anderson 2010.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1432 | 290 | 17 |
| Full Text Views | 780 | 82 | 8 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 1282 | 172 | 20 |
The Blood of the Commonwealth
War, the State, and the Making of World Money
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by David McNally in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Insisting on the status of money as a creature of both the market and the state, this article challenges dualistic understandings of capitalist imperialism as entailing two fundamentally distinct logics, one capitalist, the other territorial. In opposition to the dual-logics position, the article argues for the distinctiveness of capitalist money in terms of a complex but unitary socio-economic logic. The social dynamism of this logic involves the spatial-territorial extension of the domain of modern value relations, embodied in fully-capitalist money. Departing from the development of coinage in ancient Greece, the article proceeds to identify the 1690s in Britain as the decisive moment in the emergence of a new and distinctively capitalist form of (world) money, institutionally based upon the Bank of England, in which state debt was thoroughly integrated with private financial markets. The crucial role of the Bank of England in this new monetary system is shown to have pivoted on its capacities to finance Britain’s inter-colonial wars. Colonialism, war, slavery and dispossession underline the omnipresence of ‘blood and dirt’ (Marx) in the development and reproduction of capitalist impersonal power as expressed in world money. Undoing the impersonal power characteristic of bourgeois money thus entails undoing the economic dispossession of the labouring poor, which forms the basis of their ‘possession’ by capital.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1432 | 290 | 17 |
| Full Text Views | 780 | 82 | 8 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 1282 | 172 | 20 |
