Transformations of value and the production of "investment" in the early history of the English East India company

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 611-641

  Forman, Valerie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

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EID: 63749103640     PISSN: 10829636     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10829636-34-3-611     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. For example, C. P. Macpherson, "Capitalism and the Changing Conception of Property," in Feudalism, Capitalism, and Beyond, ed. Eugene Kamenka and R. S. Neale (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), 105-24, argues that the seventeenth century underwent a shift in understanding property as a right in things (a form of use) to a right to things (a form of ownership). The period also saw radical increases in the commodification of land, labor, and capital itself
2. See Robert DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
3. and "Capital Formations," in The Culture of Capital: Properties, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry S. Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 27-49
4. See also, G. E. Aylmer, "The Meaning and the Definition of 'Property' in Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present 86 (1980) : 87-97, and the reply by Andrew Reeve, 139-43
5. For a detailed history of the early years of the English East India Company, see K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600-1640 (New York: August Kelley, 1965)
6. Robert Brenner also argues, against the traditional account, that this company concentrated on imports. See Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993)
7. Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade From England unto the East-Indies (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 26
8. For example, see Letters Received by the East India Company, 1: 18
9. See also, Chaud-huri, English East India Company, 41
10. Thomas Mun, England's Treasure by Forraign Trade (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1928), 16. Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text by page numbers. Though published in 1664, the text was probably written between 1623 and 1628
11. Most importantly for Marx, this process obscures the labor used to produce the objects. I will return to this point later. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 163-77. Further citations will be given parenthetically in the text by page numbers
12. The logic of capitalist exchange thus builds on even as it inverts the logic of fetishism. Building on William Pietz's study of the origin of the fetish, Peter Stallybrass argues that the fetishization of commodities reverses the history of fetishism. See his "Marx's Coat," in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), esp. 183-84
13. Bullion was in short supply in Europe since at least the late Middle Ages, but it was a new problem for England. In Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 388-90, Peter Spufford compares England in the Middle Ages to an oil-producing nation, "an island well supplied with money, because of its wool, even when the rest of Europe was suffering from a bullion shortage." In fact, he analogizes the flow of silver to England in the Middle Ages to the flow of silver sent to the East by the English East India Company in the seventeenth century - the very outflow defended by Mun
14. Valerie Forman, "Material Dispossession and Counterfeit Investments: The Economies of Twelfth Night" in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 113-27
15. On the understanding of the possible effects of clothing on the wearer in the early modern period, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
16. In the early seventeenth century, the most common distinction drawn between usury and mercantile profit was the absence or presence of risk. Usury was offensive, not only because it was unneighborly, but also because there was (supposedly) no risk involved; usury was simply, from Aristotle, money breeding money - a perversion of means into ends. On the later medieval and early modern evolution of the conception of risk in economic and theological thinking, with extensive bibliography, see Giovanni Ceccarelli, "Risky Business: Theological and Canonical Thought on Insurance from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Century," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 607-58
17. On the relationship between Marx and Aristotle, see Henry Turner, "Nashe's Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe," English Literary History 68 (2001): 529-61
18. See also Eric Spenser, "Taking Excess, Exceeding Account: Aristotle Meets the Merchant of Venice," in Money and the Age of Shakespeare, ed. Woodbridge, 143-58
19. On the company's finances, see also W. R. Scott, Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint-stock Companies to 1721 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910-12)
20. And on the early modern relationship between stock and capital, see DuPlessis, "Capital Formations," 34
21. and Scott, Constitution and Finance, 155-59
22. Marx argues that the division of labor is necessary for the shift from use- to exchange-value. "Only the products of mutually independent acts of labour, performed in isolation, can confront each other as commodities" (Cap., 132)
23. The First Letter Book of the East India Company, 1600-1619 (London, 1892), 19-21. I am grateful to Timothy Morton for bringing this letter to my attention
24. Chaudhuri, English East India Company, 21
25. See also Edward Misselden, The Circle of Commerce, or the Balance of Trade, in defence of free trade (London, 1623)
26. R. W K. Hinton, "The Mercantile System in the Time of Thomas Mun," reprinted in The Early Mercantilists, ed. Blaug, 73
27. In part, Mun is defending the East India Company trade against accusations that English bullion was wasted on luxury expenditures. Tobacco had been a prime target of arguments against wasteful expenditures, in part, because of its associations with the "Indians" of the Americas and its profitability to the Spanish from whose colonies tobacco was initially imported. Tobacco, unlike calicos or spices, was not understood to be transformable (according to Mun and others, including James I) into profits. Instead, money spent on it just went up in smoke. See James I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (London, 1604)
28. For a detailed discussion of the significance of tobacco in the early modern period, see Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from "Utopia" to the "Tempest" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). I am grateful to Jonathan Gil Harris for recalling my attention to Mun's antipathy to expenditure on tobacco
29. In the period, the circulation of coin was also likened to the blood of the nation whose circulation was necessary to sustain (economic) life. See C. E. Challis, Currency and the Economy in Tudor and Early Stuart England (London: The Historical Association, 1989)
30. and M. J. Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
31. In double-entry bookkeeping, wages are, of course, categorically separate from revenues - credits rather than debits. On the relationship between the early mercantilists and double-entry bookkeeping, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 29-91
32. First Letter Book, 344, March 1610. While this argument might seem an easy target, it closely resembles the now sedimented logic of capitalism
33. While there is not, as tar as I know, a history written of the wage-labor force of the company, these events provide some evidence that the workers felt they were not being treated fairly. In addition to the incident of 1623, in 1626 all the carpenters walked out together because they were being subject to search as a result of some theft of nails (97). For a history of the maltreatment and economic exploitation of sailors in the eighteenth century, see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seaman, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
34. Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 39-62
35. This still says nothing about the appropriation of these commodities from "India," which I have discussed earlier. For a detailed investigation of what was conceptually designated as "India" in the early modern period, see Shankar Raman, Framing India: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002)
36. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 57, 83-89
37. For an insightful analysis of the displacement of the anxiety about idleness from capitalists to the nonworking poor, see Scott Shershow, "Work and the Gift: Notes Toward an Investigation," in Money and the Age of Shakespeare, ed. Woodbridge, 97-112
38. First Letter Book, "Bill of adventures to the subscribers," 17 Feb. 1601, 139-40
39. Prior to the Middle Ages, adventure referred primarily to chance or blows of fate. In the courtly romances of the Middle Ages, adventure becomes something actively sought out and glorified. For a discussion of shifts in the ideology of adventure, see Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100-1750 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
40. Valerie Forman, "The Economics of Redemption in Early Modern English Tragicomedy," unpublished manuscript