Return to the Local

Wickham’s position relates to historical economic debates, stimulated by British Marxist historiography, which led to a profound revolution in historical economic thought. But let’s take things in the right order. The dynamism of “local” production, both peasant and artisan, probably has its roots in the celebrated Dobb-Sweezy debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Paul Sweezy emphasized the role of market and exchange economy in the decline of feudalism and rise of capitalism. He looked at feudal economy as producing for the lord, his retinue, and dependent population, that is, for a limited circle. Maurice Dobb instead stressed the role of small producers in the development of capitalism (with particular attention to the English case), who became agents of economic and commercial innovations. In this framework, for instance, the yeomen of the late Middle Ages and early modern era became important players in the markets. At the same time, Dobb also argued that small artisan producers may have been among the key actors in the formation and development of manufacturing.

Wickham, too, emphasizes the role of small producers, rather than large commercial capital, in the development of manufacturing. Another fundamental step in this direction was taken by Rodney Hilton, a medieval historian and professor in Birmingham, who, with his studies on the late-medieval English economy, has offered remarkable examples of this role of small producers in economic dynamics.

Wickham explicitly takes up this idea in relation to various themes, among others on the relationship between class struggle and economic dynamics, as we will see later. This debate recently gave rise to important historiographical developments, especially in the English-speaking world (not only Wickham, but also John Haldon and Jairus Banaji, an Indian Marxist historian publishing in English).

This is not to say, of course, that long-scale exchange relations could not have influenced the structuring of the economy (something that was not denied even by Dobb in the famous debate with Sweezy). But it is still the case, even in these systems, that regional exchange structures enable these longer relations to be held together. In the preindustrial world, long-distance and large-scale transport systems certainly existed. However, even in the contemporary economy, the role of long-distance trade is not as large as one might think. Wickham writes that US exports have only once exceeded 10 percent of GDP per year in the last two centuries and have mostly been less than 7 percent; French and Italian exports only exceeded 20 percent after 2000 and British exports have never exceeded 25 percent of GDP.

The return to the local scale allows for an integrated analysis of the economy that has greater explanatory force than that developed by world systems theory, which had its main exponent — in a sense, its founder — in Immanuel Wallerstein. He emphasized precisely the global system scale as the primary unit of social and economic analysis: One of the results of this is that world-systems theories relating to the major economic developments of the modern period, which place great emphasis on international connections, have no real explanatory force.

The questions that Wickham proposes to answer are: Who produces? Who sells? Who buys? Where does the engine of exchange start and what keeps it going? In Wallerstein, the focus on internal productive transformations is missing, there is an emphasis on distribution rather than production. Wickham links markets on a regional scale to production, and to the class relations that help define purchasing and investment capacities (in this following Hilton, as we shall see):

But focusing on individual regional economies as the basis for an analysis of the transition to capitalism is undoubtedly a better procedure than the invocation of global economic interrelationships as the main cause of that transition, an invocation that characterised Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory in the 1970s and now characterises that of many theorists eager to avoid Eurocentrism. This desire is laudable, but one result of it is that international exchange relations are invested with precisely the kind of explanatory power that this entire book seeks to demolish.

Modes of Production and Cultural Anthropology

One of Wickham’s fundamental questions is to understand what can be called (and what he calls) the internal “logic” of those economies. We cannot analyze every economy with the concepts and approaches developed for contemporary economics. The problem has been addressed in different ways. As Wickham himself argues, substantivist anthropology has played a key role in addressing the problem. This refers to the perspective of scholars such as Karl Polanyi and later Marshall Sahlins. This current of thought emphasizes how human beings depend on the natural and social environment for their sustenance, and therefore economics should study the interchange between human beings and the social and natural environment in its entirety.

Wickham had already expressed a favorable view of substantivist anthropology in his 2005 book Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800, where he had pointed out that scholars of this school of thought had discussed at length whether the economy as a system should be understood essentially in terms of the rules that characterize exchange for profit, or if alternative forms of exchange should be analyzed according to different rules.

Wickham also points to this in his new book, where he emphasizes the role played by the empirical research of substantivist anthropologists in opening up new horizons. As he writes:

The most systematic challenge to this, of course, comes from Marxism itself, which takes it as axiomatic that capitalist rules are contingent, and can in the future be superseded; but this has remained a challenge on the level of economic and political theory, as actual empirical examples of post-capitalist economies have been hard to establish on any long-term basis so far.

The most sustained empirical challenge has, in fact, come from substantivist anthropology, which has identified and theorized the economic practices of relatively egalitarian societies across the globe, dramatically divergent as they generally are from any capitalist logic; but in practice this work has been mostly restricted to societies without classes, and it scales up less well once issues of political and economic dominance come in.

For Polanyi, the economy acquires stability and unity through the interdependence of its parts: “this is achieved through the combination of a very few patterns which may be called forms of integration [. . .]: empirically, we find the main patterns to be reciprocity, redistribution and exchange.” These are, therefore, very different categories from those of mode of production, not least because, as Wickham says, they do not take class relations into account.

Polanyi had maintained that the rise of markets was linked to the fact that land and food were mobilized through exchange, and labor became a commodity that was bought on the market. But we know that in capitalism labor is not “free,” and that capitalist systems can exploit direct coercion such as through slavery, as shown in particular by Banaji. The “free market” of labor is not capitalism. As Wickham shows, looking at the mode of production implies looking into an economic totality that Polanyi with his various interchanges is unable to see.

In an article published in Historical Materialism in 2008, Wickham had pointed out that Polanyi’s approach in some ways challenges the existence of any general economic law, such as the law of supply and demand. In Sahlins’s revolutionary Stone Age Economics (published in 1972), we find important reflections on so-called “primitive economies”, with an open criticism of the arbitrary extension of contemporary economic categories to societies of a different kind.

Like Polanyi, he emphasizes the need to see the economy in the context of overall social relations: “A material transaction is usually a momentary episode in a continuous social relation.” Exchange is undeniably linked to the dimension of society as a whole: “every exchange, as it embodies some coefficient of sociability, cannot be understood in its material terms apart from its social terms.”

We thus have in Sahlins a direct comparison between “bourgeois” and “primitive” economies, but the possibility of finding a theoretical basis appropriate to the other precapitalist economies in their variety, according to their specific logics, is lacking. Indeed, Sahlins’s thought, and that of his former student David Graeber, has increasingly culturalist outcomes. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish economic activity from the overall combination of sociocultural relations. For example, substantivist anthropology tends not to distinguish exchanges that have pure ritual significance (exchanges of gifts in a ritual context) from economic exchanges as related to the material perpetuation of society. Sahlins, in the 2003 preface to Stone Age Economics, argues that the merit of his book is precisely that it has encouraged us to rethink economics or politics simply as part of culture:

Not that the interest in the many social varieties of material or political life has slackened, so much as what had been confidently called “the economy” or “the political system” is being rethought as “the culture.” Rather than a separate sphere of existence, economic activity is perceived as encompassed in cultural order. . . . I would like to think of Stone Age Economics as an early contribution to that desirable end.

But as the link between the cultural and economic becomes inseparable, Wickham argues, economic dynamics are lost as well as the ability to understand relations of class domination.

Following Marxist theoretical categories, Wickham adopts the concept of mode of production. Analyzing a mode of production means to understand how a society mobilizes social labor, considering this in the context of human relations to the natural environment, the social relations among people, the institutional structures of state and society that guide these relations, and the ideas through which these relationships are conveyed.

This approach is based on Wickham’s conviction, already expressed in an article for Historical Materialism in 2008, that “the way techniques and the labour process, on the one hand, interact with exploitation and resistance, on the other, is dependent on the economic logic of specific modes.” As John Haldon, another of Wickham’s reference points, wrote in his The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (1993), the concept of the mode of production can be a device for interpreting the specificity of economic systems.

If adequately theorised (that is to say, if the relations between its constituent elements are coherent), it should serve as a heuristic device intended to suggest what questions should be asked of the evidence about a particular set of social and economic relationships, and how one can set about understanding the disparate and disjointed historical data as representative of a dynamic social totality.

Two Logics

For his part, Wickham mainly defines two logics of production systems:

there are fundamental differences between, in particular, economic systems that are based above all on the taking of surplus in products, services, or money from peasants and those that are based above all on paying wages or salaries to workers. There are other such systems too, but these two have been the most widespread in recorded history.

The first of the two, what Marx called the feudal mode of production, was the most widespread and longest lasting of all; capitalism, the second, has only had a couple of centuries of existence as a dominant mode. But it is capitalism whose internal logic and whose patterns of development and change have been by far the most fully studied, from Marx himself onwards.

It is worth emphasizing here that Wickham’s understanding of the feudal mode of production coincides with what Haldon and Egyptian economist Samir Amin have called the tributary mode of production. To try to summarize Haldon’s definition: this mode is based on a system of surplus extraction from peasant production and is ultimately reliant on coercion.

“Tax” and “rent” are two possible forms taken by this coercive surplus extraction. Haldon suggest that the two forms of surplus appropriation form a continuum: tax and rent are just two subdivisions of the same form of surplus extraction, with this surplus being distributed between different levels of the elite (e.g., landlords and state bureaucracy). These elites could appropriate surplus directly in the form of rent or indirectly in the form of wages through the redistribution of tax income.

The reference to the economic dynamism of the small producers, which must be seen in their conflicting, class-based relationship with the lords is an aspect of the analysis of the feudal system that leads us back to Dobb’s and (even more so) Hilton’s analyses. The latter criticized mainstream historians such as Georges Duby precisely because they saw only one side of the dynamics of the feudal economy. In a comment that is still remarkably effective today, and worth quoting in full, Hilton states:

He [Duby] stresses the pressure of the lord on the peasant. He does not pay the same attention to the efforts of the peasants to retain for themselves as much of the surplus to subsistence as was possible given the sociopolitical balance of forces. But this peasant resistance was of crucial importance in the development of the rural communes, the extension of free tenure and status, the freeing of peasant and artisan economies for the development of commodity production and eventually the emergence of the capitalist entrepreneur.

Class struggle influences how much surplus remains in the hands of the peasants, but also how and how much they can act in the markets, and their personal status (free or not). Thus, as in Wickham, the dynamism of this mode of production can only derive, in the first place, from the function of small producers.

Wickham mentions that he drew on Hilton’s focus on class conflict in the economic development of the feudal system. The element of participation in the exchange of rural society after the extraction of the surplus is found in Hilton, one of the aspects that Wickham traces back to the development of the Mediterranean economies in the centuries addressed in the book and the Egyptian one in particular:

I have argued that the framework for serious growth in this period was, empirically, twofold. There needed to be enough elite demand (that is to say, the demand of landowners, state officials, and the state itself, or of towns as collectivities and the urban rich as individuals) to allow productive specializations to develop, in particular in cloth, ironwork, and (the most visible but least important) ceramics — plus some foodstuffs, notably wine and olive oil — and to help establish or maintain the networks which moved goods around, which would make them available at all. And there also needed to be peasant demand for the development of mass markets (by medieval standards), which in turn could allow for the development of mass production (again by medieval standards). These were not only complementary, but necessary for growth on the scale we have seen for some regions to be possible.

Class Struggle and Institutions

Wickham’s view of the feudal mode of production, which echoes Amin and Haldon’s view of the substantial “continuity” between taxation and rent, once again brings up the question of the role of the state in economic life, an aspect that Wickham himself emphasizes:

State institutions, however, are another matter. I have argued that they were less dominant in structuring the economy during our period than under the Roman Empire; all the same, at the regional level, the single institution which had most effect on the economy in our period was indeed the state, through its taxation, its wider bureaucratic structures, the at least potential regularization of transaction costs in its area of rule, and, of course, its buying power, together with that of its officials.

This point is at least a nod to New Institutional Economic (NIE) arguments, but I would argue that in our regions state and official demand (plus investment) was rather more important than the lessening of transaction costs and other moves to encourage economic stability and fluidity, which NIE theorists tend to focus on, even if, to be sure, states everywhere helped to underpin contract enforcement and security in market areas, and the regularity of expectations as merchants travelled (as did all medieval powers, in fact, but states were better at it).

NIE is an economic school that emphasizes the role of institutions in determining and changing economic activities: this school has deeply influenced economic history in recent years, as shown for example by the success of Avner Greif’s Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (2006), which also focuses on Mediterranean medieval economies. NIE defines as institutions those interconnected systems of rules, beliefs, norms, and organizations that guide and motivate economic actors’ behavior. But these interconnected systems of rules, we can say following Wickham, are determined by the social and political relations that bind the actors acting in the market — this is to say, by the way class struggle changes these very rules.

In practice, we again get to the crucial role of class struggle, as it influences not just the surplus available to ruling and producing classes in a feudal economy (and therefore, as Wickham explains, the dynamics of economic demand), but also “institutions.” Hilton had pointed out, for example, how precisely the emerging groups in the producer class could confront the ruling class on issues such as measures to regulate the market for consumer goods, land, and labor. Wickham thus shows the vitality of Marxian categories of economic analyses that had been developed in particular by the British social historiography stemming from the historians connected to the journal Past and Present (which started publication in 1952).

His position shows similarities not just with Hilton’s analysis, but also that of Christopher Hill, who in his works on the English revolution had emphasized the role of political struggle in determining the transformations of economic institutions. Once again, the position of NIE, which sees institutions as isolated from the dynamics of conflict between social classes (as already anticipated by Hilton) and from the dynamics of demand and investment that depend on the control of surplus (as already expressed by Dobb and Hilton, but taken up and clarified by Wickham), reveals its abstractness and inability to clarify economic reality. The Marxian tradition of economic analysis shows once more its usefulness for understanding the dynamics of economic history.