The originators of classical political economy - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others - created a discourse that explained the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism's creation: for it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this? Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention.Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labour. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labour and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists.He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy - to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land. This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold in the industrial age.

Capitalism, slavery and ideology

The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation

Most of the major theoretical traditions in international relations offer little advice on how costly international moral action could be accomplished. The main exception is the constructivist approach that focuses on the spread of cosmopolitan ethical beliefs through transnational interaction. While the logic of this theory does not imply any limit on the scale of goals that might be achieved, most constructivist empirical work so far has focused on relatively inexpensive moral efforts, such as food aid, and so may not identify the conditions under which states will take on much more costly moral projects. In this article, we test the constructivist theory of moral action against the record of the most costly international moral action in modern history: Britain's sixty-year effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade from 1807 to 1867. We find that the willingness of British abolitionists to accept high costs was driven less by a cosmopolitan commitment to a moral community of all people than by parochial religious imperatives to impose their moral vision on others and, especially, to reform their domestic society. Transnational influences also had no important effect. Rather, the abolitionists' success in getting the British state to enact their program was determined mainly by opportunities provided by the fragile balance of power m British domestic politics. Although testing in more cases is needed, these findings suggest that better explanations of international moral action might be provided by a type of domestic coalition politics model based on what we call “saintly logrolls.”

Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain's Sixty-year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade

John Stuart Mill's comment that the British Caribbean was really a part of the British domestic economy, because almost all its trade was with British buyers and sellers, is used to make a new assessment of the importance of the eighteenth-century slave systems to British industrialization. If the value added and strategic linkages of the sugar industry are compared to those of other British industries, it is apparent that sugar cultivation and the slave trade were not particularly large, nor did they have stronger growth-inducing ties with the rest of the British economy.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022050700024670

The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain

Slavery and war have both historically been considered inevitable consequences of human nature. Yet slavery has been abolished, and moral progress may have contributed to slavery's disappearance. Both realists and Marxists are skeptical about the impact of ethical constraints on political decisions, while idealists as well as at least some regime analysts emphasize the role of those constraints. However, elements of all of these approaches support the proposition that moral progress may bring an end to international war.Some historical trends do not support the idea that international war is on the verge of disappearance, but there has not been a war between major powers since 1945. In addition, norms against colonialism are strong. No war has occurred between democratic states, nor does a war appear likely among the rather sizable number of industrialized democratic states in the international system today. Explanations of these pockets of peace based on caution induced by nuclear weapons or on economic interdependence, for example, are certainly not beyond question. Therefore, it may be that norms inhibiting the initiation of international war have already made obsolete not only wars between the richest and most powerful states in the world but also some forms of depradation by the strong against the relatively weak states.

The abolition of slavery and the end of international war

Consumers, consumer goods, brand names, logos, and corporations are increasingly important in global struggles for social justice. Global social justice networks use a variety of innovative means to encourage shoppers to consider the hidden politics behind consumer goods and corporate brand names. They are using this power of mobilization to push transnational corporations to take more responsibility for the social consequences of their policy and practice. There is also a ‘pull factor’ in late market capitalism in the form of new market actors, structures, and vulnerabilities that are pulling global corporations into progressive social change. This article studies the role of the outside (market external) push factor of political consumerism and the role of the inside (market internal) capitalist pull factor in fashioning global social justice. It discusses the three basic forms of political consumerism and why political consumerism has become a global political force. It uses the contemporary anti-sweat...

background

http://digitalmediafys.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/68453563/SocialJusticeConsummerismCjamming.pdf

Fashioning social justice through political consumerism, capitalism, and the internet1

Events that occurred before a given time point

Capitalism, slavery and ideology

Citations

The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation

Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain's Sixty-year Campaign Against the Atlantic Slave Trade

The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain

The abolition of slavery and the end of international war

Fashioning social justice through political consumerism, capitalism, and the internet1

Related Papers (5)

Capitalism And Slavery

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823

The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture

The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810

Slavery and Human Progress