Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, in his Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974), considers himself to be following historian Fernand Braudel’s earlier theories on the rise of capitalism. Both authors speak of the emergence of capitalist trade and the European world-economy (or world-system), and both focus on the revolutionary political-economic developments of the 16th century. But Braudel’s story, in his The Wheels of Commerce (1979), looks very little like Wallerstein’s. While both authors place the genesis of the European capitalist revolution in a period broadly defined as the 11th through 14th centuries, each uses this period of pre-capitalist expansion differently in his argument. This paper will explore the contrasts between Braudel’s and Wallerstein’s views of the medieval period as a pre-cursor to the explosion of the capitalist world network in the 16th century. For Wallerstein, the late middle ages set the stage for capitalism’s later rise; for Braudel, capitalism already exploded onto the scene in this period.
Wallerstein tells quite a simple story of the development of the modern economy. Late medieval Europe progressed through three main stages before it birthed the capitalist system we as 21st-century readers know. First, the economy expanded aggressively into the farthest peripheries of the known world between 1150-1300; then, fortunes and political stability crashed across the continent; finally, states and economies again began expanding with unprecedented speed in the late 15th century, this time beyond its known horizons. Wallerstein simplifies these temporal divisions because he primarily concerns himself with top-level systems. As a world-systems theorist but not a historian, he intentionally frees himself from the labyrinth of nitty-gritty historical details (“simplify,” in his words on page 7) by showing only the broadest system-level patterns of history. He situates the development of capitalism in perhaps the easiest possible narrative to follow while still exploring the core forces at work. Wallerstein also identifies two “watershed moments” of human history in its entirety: firstly, the agricultural revolution (6,000-10,000 years ago), and secondly, the “creation of the modern world” (3). This second watershed moment begins, although does not take hold, within the medieval growth period.
Circa 1150-1300, the European world began pushing up against its ancient feudal boundaries. But, Wallerstein argues, the European economy did not yet break those boundaries in this period. In these centuries, the European political economy expanded to the limits of the feudal structure and sowed the seeds of capitalism without yet making a major breakthrough in either of those realms. He agrees with B.H. Slicher von Bath’s thesis that market-oriented agriculture (rather than subsistence agriculture) emerged as a critical feature of the European world only after 1150. However, Wallerstein diverges from previous narratives primarily by insisting that trade grew not into a new capitalist mode, but rather to the hard limits of the feudal system. In the author’s words, “feudalism as a system should not be thought of something antithetical to trade. On the contrary, up to a certain point, feudalism and the expansion of trade go hand in hand… yet a feudal system could only support a limited amount of long-distance trade.” The limitations which feudalism placed on trade stem from the lack of state-level division of labor and markets[1]—a division which was only made possible in the creation of a transregional European world-economy to come later. Wallerstein continues, “the principle economic activity [in this period] remained food and handicraft production traded within small economic regions. Nonetheless, the scale of this economic activity was slowly expanding.”
For Wallerstein, medieval economic expansion instead created a crisis. Capitalism could not have emerged in the 16th century without the collapse of feudalism, and feudalism would not have collapsed without being pushed to its limits in the first period of growth. More specifically, circa 1150-1300 the European economy expanded outward into most of the corners of the known world from the eastern Baltic to southern Iberia, and inward into wilderness areas.[2] This finally brought feudal Europe to the threshold of diminishing returns[3] (37). The European economy reached the limit of its ability to feed its own growth once it exhausted all known routes. In order to continue to grow, the system needed a “new form of surplus appropriation”; it needed to build “a capitalist world-economy” through the nearly limitless growth potential found in the Americas and other colonial regions later on. Without this potential—and with the destabilizing explosion of war in the 14th century (21)— Europe’s limits in the 12th and 13th centuries doomed the system to implode when it could no longer support its own patterns. The period of medieval expansion may not have created a capitalist world, but per Wallerstein’s argument, it created an environment out of which capitalism could grow.
Braudel takes a far more complicated approach to the medieval growth period. As a historian of local markets and transregional networks, Braudel elucidates the complexities of life that Wallerstein’s simple and abstract systems lack. The towns, merchants, industries, trade nodes, fairs, market geographies, and “instruments of exchange” that fill Braudel’s writing lend a tangible and labyrinthine complexity missing from Wallerstein’s birds-eye-view analysis. Braudel argues that Europeans tangibly felt the effects of medieval economic growth: the European economy in that early period grew at the town level, and the seeds of capitalism first burst through in the towns. Like Wallerstein, Braudel sees price and commodity diversity as critical components of modern capitalism, but unlike Wallerstein, he sees this diversity emerging more pronouncedly in this earlier period:
By the fifteenth century, the most archaic forms of exchange had already been eliminated [in Europe]. All evidence relating to prices as early as the twelfth century indicates that they were already fluctuating, evidence that by then ‘modern’ markets existed and might occasionally be linked together in embryonic systems, town-to-town networks. For effectively only towns (or very large villages) had markets… the western town swallowed everything, forced everything to submit to its laws, its demands, and its controls. The market became one of its mechanisms. (Braudel, 27-28).
Beyond the difference in foci (systems versus ground-level developments), Braudel diverges from Wallerstein here in his views on the origins of capitalism. Modern capitalism, Braudel says, already took hold as early as the 12th century, in the tangible domain of town markets. This is a far cry from Wallerstein’s argument that the expansion of the 12th and 13th centuries merely held the seeds for the crisis that would in turn lead to that revolution. Likewise, Braudel argues that the geographic division of labor—between town and country, “center” and “periphery”—already erupted in this period. In Capitalist Agriculture,such a division only rears its head much later on in Wallerstein’s analysis of capitalism in the 16th century. The authors agree that feudalism did not preclude trade; but whereas Wallerstein’s feudal system had to fall (in the 15th and 16th centuries) before capitalist trade could emerge, Braudel finds capitalist trade in the towns of the 11th and 12th centuries.
And the towns indeed hold all for Braudel; if markets led to capitalism, and towns led to markets, then the growth of towns in the medieval period imbued the European economy with a kinetic energy. In Braudel’s words, “when in the eleventh century, towns were created or re-created all over western Europe, and the markets became busy once more, the burst of urban growth established a clear distinction[4] between town and country. In the former were concentrated both newly-born industry and the consequently active artisan population” (62). His language in describing the medieval process of economic expansion is a far cry from Wallerstein’s late-feudal “limbo state”[5] leading up to the 16th century. In this moment, Braudel sees the first concrete steps of a revolution.
In this sense, Braudel adopts a more teleological model for the development of capitalism. Whereas Wallerstein merely claims that the shifts of the medieval period set a stage for the modern world-economy, for Braudel, capitalism already began snowballing directly (perhaps irreversibly) towards its modern manifestation in that early period. Both authors embrace medieval economic expansion as critical in the later development of modern capitalism. Both would certainly say that the twinkling of a long-distance trade economy could already be found in the 1100s. But Wallerstein, as a world-systems theorist, cares less about the twinkling than the global explosion of the European world-economy in the 16th century; Braudel, with his historical microscope, sees explosions in that same twinkling.
[1] This division becomes critical to his analysis later, but he does not explicitly definite it at this moment.
[2] E.g., forests and marshland.
[3] Emphasis mine
[4] A critical element of Wallerstein’s capitalist geographic division of labor, center and periphery
[5] Scare-quotes mine.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “Europe’s Commercial Revolution” at Columbia University, March 2021
Haus Lilienfeld 