Reading 1. A Brief
History of Trade
http://mmbc.bc.ca/source/schoolnet/exploration/index.html |
 |
Trade is an ancient activity; it is
only in the culture of capitalism that it is believed to be the source of all
well-being. This selection from the Virtual Maritime Museum provides a brief description of trade through
the eighteenth century. As you read the article, explore the links on the trade in silk,
gold, porcelain, salt, and spices, and travel the trade routes of early merchant
adventurers. |
Reading 2. Gold, Greed & Genocide in the
Americas
http://saiic.nativeweb.org/ayn/goldgreed.html |
|
This article by by Pratap
Chatterjee in Abya
Yala News traces the relationship between the European quest for riches and the deaths
of indigenous people in the New World. His major point is that these deadly
consequences that began in the fifteenth century have continued to the present day. |
Reading 3. The Slave Trade
http://www.rit.edu/~nrcgsh/bx/bx02a.html |
|
This excerpt from The Immigrant Heritage of
America by Norman Coombs describes the slave trade as it existed and developed in the
sixteenth century. However, as Coombs says, slavery in America was
a very different institution from what it was in Africa. |
Reading 4. The Growth of the Slave
Trade in North America
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1narr5.html |
|
This reading is part of the PBS Africans in America Web
Site that accompanied the documentary series of the same name. The article describes
the early history of the slave trade in North America and what was required to maintain
it. There are links to many other brief articles, maps, and illustrations. You
can read about The
Arrival of the First African Americans to the Virginia Colonies, or read a description
of the First Slave
Auction in New Amsterdam (New York City). And you can browse the articles that
trace the evolution of the slave trade through the end of the Civil War. |
| B. The Era of the
Industrialist |
|
After the expansion of global trade in the
fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, industrialization was the next major stage in the
economic development of the capitalist. There are various reasons proposed for what
has been termed "the industrial revolution," some of which are discussed in the
readings in this section. The consequences, however, included the concentration of
wealth in fewer hands, the greater exploitation of labor, and the increase of availability
of goods to consumers who had the money to pay for them. We have also included a
discussion of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which laid the ideological foundation for
the culture of capitalism.
|
Reading 5. History of Technology and
Work
http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/dot/histwork.html |
|
This article by by Patricia Ryaby
Backer traces the origins of the industrial revolution from the growth of the textile
industry in England, to the emergence of "scientific management," or
"Taylorism" in the United States in the early twentieth century. |
Reading 6. Early Industrialization in the United States
http://www.si.edu/lemelson/centerpieces/whole_cloth/... |
|
This essay is part of the Whole
Cloth Online Exhibit at the The Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the
Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution. It describes the development of the textile industry in the
United States. It also details the links between textile development and the growth of
slavery. |
Reading 7. Adam Smith: The Wealth
of Nations
http://www.mq.edu.au/hpp/politics/y64l02.html |
|
We mentioned in the previous
section of readings that the Communist Manifesto was one of the most influential documents
ever written; not far behind, however, is Adam Smith's An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Written in 1776,
the book has sometimes been called "the Bible of capitalism." You can, of
course, read the original version, but it is a little long to be included in a
reader. However this lecture by R. J. Kilcullen that forms part of an Online course
on political economy does a good job summarizing the main points. |
Reading 8. How Victorians Could Invest Their Capital
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/... |
|
This brief description of Victorian
investment opportunities by Dale H. Porter, underscores how limited the opportunities for
making money were prior to the twentieth century. |
| C. The Growth of
Corporations |
|
The next stage in the concentration of
capital was the emergence of the corporation. We suggest in Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism that an 1886 United
States Supreme Court decision gave corporations a way to use their economic power to
influence the government that they had never possessed. It enabled capitalists, such
as John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan, to amass wealth on a scale never before
imagined.
|
Reading 9. John D. Rockefeller and
Standard Oil
http://www.micheloud.com/FXM/SO/rock.htm |
|
British
philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that Rockefeller in economics and the German leader
Bismarck in politics refuted the liberal dream of universal happiness by substituting
economic monopoly and the power of the nation-state. At this Web Site,
Francois Micheloud provides seven brief hyperlinked chapters that
cover nineteenth century oil industry technology, trusts and monopolies, Rockefeller
commercial practices, and the development of the Standard Oil Company, among others. A superb case study of how enormous wealth became concentrated in a few
hands during the late 19th century and the earliest 20th. The text is translated
from French and is a little rough, but quite readable |
| D. The Ideology of
Free Trade |
|
Capitalists want as few restrictions as
possible on their ability to trade, manufacture, and invest. For that reason, global
economic integration is highly desirable. This enables the capitalist to seek out
the cheapest source of labor, to manufacture with few environmental restrictions, and to
easily move goods and capital from country to country in search of the greatest
profit. However, there are arguments that global integration is harmful to people,
to the environment, and to general well-being. The following articles address that
debate.
|
Reading 10. Fifty Years of the GATT/WTO
http://www.iie.com/CATALOG/WP/1998/98-3.htm |
|
In 1944 at a New Hampshire resort
hotel in Bretton Woods, financial leaders from the major industrial nations of the world
met and proposed the establishment of a World Bank to
provide funds for post-W.W.II reconstruction, of the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) to help regulate currency dealings across nations, and the Global Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade to ensure the free flow of goods across international borders.
This article by C. Fred Bergsten represents an unabashed defense of free trade and the
continued implementation of GATT and its more powerful offspring the World Trade
Organization (WTO). Bergsten refers to varous "rounds" of negotiation in
GATT; these refer to major gatherings of member states to negotiate less restrictive
national trade policies. |
Reading 11. GATT and Democracy
http://www.mai.flora.org/library/nafta2.html |
|
The article by David Korten offers
a stark contrast to that of C. Fred Bergsten. Korten argues that the provisions of
the WTO will allow businesses to challenge laws that seek to protect the environment or
that seek to protect people from harmful substances on the basis that they represent an
unfair restriction on trade. In Global Problems and the Culture
of Capitalism we also discuss Korten's concept of "corporate libertarianism"
that characterizes the culture of capitalism. |
| E. The Effects of
Globalization |
|
There is little doubt that globalization,
the integration of the world capitalist economy, has been good to investors. The
question is how good has it been to everyone else? Worldwide, some one billion
people live in poverty; the environment is being destroyed; in spite of modern medical
discoveries, infectious disease remains a greater problem today than it did twenty years
ago; social unrest and protest continues to plague nation-states. Are these problems
a consequence of globalization, or are they disconnected from it? This is the major
issue addressed by the following readings.
|
| Reading 12. Global Debt and
Third World Development http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/globdebt.htm |
|
Arguably the single largest factor
in promoting poverty, hunger, social unrest, and environmental devastation is the global
debt, that is the money that poor countries owe to rich countries. In this excellent
summary of the problem, Vincent Ferraro and Melissa Rosser describe the origins, extent,
and consequences of the "debt crisis." |
Reading 13. The End of a
"Miracle"
http://www.essential.org/monitor/mm1998/... |
|
In 1997 the collapse of currencies
in Thailand initiated a chain reaction of economic crisis that soon spread to Malaysia,
South Korea, Indonesia, and beyond. Economists still disagree over what led to the
collapse, but Walden Bellow in this article offers, we believe, one of the best
explanations. It revolves around the role of "capital controllers," those
individuals or institutions who control vast wealth, and freely move (or remove) it from
country to country in search of the highest possible return. |
Reading 14. The Cultural Effects of Globalization
http://www.consciouschoice.com/issues/cc094/... |
|
This article by Jay Walljasper that
appeared in Conscious
Choice argues that many of the current world (and local) problems are the result of
economic globalization and "an ideology imposed on the world by transnational
corporations and their followers in governments and universities [that]... have elevated
theories about market economics, free trade, consumer choice, and economic
"efficiency" to the level of a religion -- indeed, to the level of scientific
fact, akin to the laws of physics -- because it boosts their profits and expands their
political control." |
Reading
15. The
Biology of Globalization
http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/globalize.html |
|
In this challenging article,
biologist Elizabeth Sahtouris examines how the expansion of free trade is affecting the
biology of our planet. She argues that that "communal values
have been overridden in a dangerous process that sets vast profits for a tiny human
minority above all other human interests." Globalization, she says, will
continue, but it must be based on sounder democratic and environmental principles.
She examines some of the ways this might be done. |
Click Here for Additional
Web Resources on the Capitalist |
