In the main, that's what I've been saying: the first colony for primitive accumulation = the first colony under emergent capitalism. Or at least that's what "primitive accumulation" means in the Marxist tradition -- the expropriation of the agricultural population from the land, to increasingly transform agriculture for capitalist agriculture and to turn the former peasants into proletarians.
>I think you would be better off arguing that "Ireland was the first
>capitalist colony" than to try and argue that pre-capitalist
>colonies weren't colonies, or weren't exploitative, or didn't
>contribute to the ruling class surplus or imperial advantage.
>Because none of those things are true.
It's one thing to say that class relations internal to colonies in the ancient Greek world were exploitative -- they were exploitative by definition in so far as they were class societies, and the more dependent they were on slave labor (rather than peasant household production), the more exploitative they were. That in itself, however, doesn't make the external relations between city states and colonies founded by their citizens resemble those under modern colonialism with which we are familiar. That's M. I. Finley's point, I believe, when he says that "each [colony _apoikia_] was, from the onset and by intention, an independent Greek community, not a colony as that word is customarily understood" (The Ancient Greeks_, NY: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 38).
Later a new type of colony developed: "By the 5th century, Athenian coinage became the predominant medium of exchange in the Greek world, though after the Peloponnesian War, the Rhodian standard replaced it in Ionia. Temples continued to serve as depositories of money, but c. 500 B.C.E., private bankers (trapezitai) took over most of the business of exchanging and lending money. Bottomry loans (nautika) developed, repayable only if a cargo safely reached its destination; often given by groups of investors, such loans spread out risk and encouraged trade. Around the same time, the Athenians developed a new kind of colony, the cleruchy. Each settler received an allotment (kleros) but retained Athenian citizenship" ("4. The Classical Age, 510-323 B.C.E. a. Economy, Technology, Society, and Culture," _The Encyclopedia of World History. 2001, <http://www.bartleby.com/67/186.html>).
However, what is interesting, "the tribute of a city always _decreased_ when a cleruchy was planted in it" (emphasis added, "Ancient History Sourcebook: 11th Brittanica: Delian League," <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/eb11-delianleague.html>). If the city-colony relation were like modern colonialism and tributes were like colonial profits, wouldn't you expect the opposite correlation, i.e. the tribute increasing with the plantation of a cleruchy?
>And if by first colony you mean "first colony to provide the
>primitive accumulation necessary for capitalism to get off the
>ground" I think those were in fact in Latin America. Marx thought
>the gold that was dug out there by slaves and shipped back to Europe
>played an indispensable role getting capitalism beyond the stage of
>mere commodity production; Eric Wolf expanded on this idea and said
>that the precapitalist colonial surplus of many different sorts was
>the since non qua for capitalism to get off the ground. That would
>seem to make these capitalism's first colonies.
Mining gold in colonies and shipping it back to colonists' states of origin, generating profits in the process, is not sufficient to get capitalism off the ground. In fact, ancient Greeks engaged in the same activity -- e.g., the gold mines in Amphipolis in Thrace, for the failure to defend which Thucydides got exiled for twenty years -- without starting capitalism.
>Ireland's contribution to the system's primitive accumulation was
>relatively minor.
Michael Perelman writes: "In 1794-96, Ireland supplied 44 percent of Britain's imports of grain, meat, and butter. From 1800-1814, no less than 35 percent of all British imports of grain, meal, and flour came from Ireland. . . . Jonathan Swift. . . , writing in _The Draper Letters_, summed up the situation succinctly, 'Poor Ireland maketh many rich'" (_The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation_, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000, p. 307). The reduction of Ireland to the breadbasket of England certainly had an impact of facilitating the proletarianization of the English -- after all, formerly self-sufficient English peasants, now turned urban proletarians dependent on the market for food, had to be fed. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>