I'm Andrew Edwards, and I'd like to actually I'd like to think this was actually in my speech, so, you know, I'd like to thank Claire Phillips.
Chris, Jeremy, Becky, you are. And everyone else for helping bring this group together and all of you for assembling
to discuss the conjuncture and disjuncture is marking the dawn of the modern era.
So I'm an American, mostly by training. But at Oxford, I've been working in conversation with Chris,
with Peter and other colleagues in the Global History of Capitalism Project and
the political economy and Culture and Global History Workshop now workshop,
I hope, on the historical construction of capitalism's basic categories, like the subject of my talk today, the commodity.
So my talk is entitled The Spaces In Between What is global about the history of Capitalism notes towards the history of the commodity.
So the history of the commodity, as we all know, is a history of goods for sale now, more particularly in recent work.
And it's been the history of goods intended for mass consumption at their best histories of goods from textiles to uncover the human relations.
The seemingly impersonal flows of commodities conceal tracking them from the point of production through processing, marketing and sales.
These histories remind us the commodities do not act for themselves, even if they sometimes seem to and exposing these relations.
Historians are fighting against a persistent myth the idea of all commodities as the impersonal
embodiments of what of an Adam Smith's terms later appropriated by David Ricardo and Karl Marx,
value in use and value in exchange, or more simply,
a good with a price like these above the trading pits in the old Chicago Board of Trade circa 1948,
or more closely related to today's talk and our location.
The prices of large oxen in London's Smithfield Market in August 17, 07.
So at the same time, historians wrestle with the fact from the perspective of economic history,
as recently argued by Kevin O'Rourke that commodities and their simplified form offer a window on global history with few viable alternatives,
providing the basis for studies showing how prices converge as global market links become more efficient, for example,
as well as a means to establish and compare the purchasing power of workers daily wages historically on a global scale.
But a historian, like any labour perhaps is no better than their tools,
and if these tools are concepts like the commodity, they should not pass unexamined.
We must consider that what many historians view a material culture view as the myth of the commodity.
It's in personality stripped of extra economic values and associations like all myths, perhaps has a basis in history.
So today I want to consider the possibilities for exploring the history of the commodity as a category in capitalism that has
changed over time and link that examination with an appraisal of the significance of the global and the history of capitalism.
So in order to tell that history, we need to reimagine.
I would argue the commodity itself, considering it as an object what Loraine Das and has called historical epistemology less US goods themselves.
Then as a way of interpreting and understanding goods.
That way, I will argue a route arose out of what I'll refer to referred to in my title as the spaces in between global encounters and exchange.
So the Anglo-American specificity of my account is deliberate, but I hope not fatal.
The primary danger of Euro centrism is, Cedric Robinson has argued, is to mistake for universal verities,
the structures and dynamics of Europe's own distant and more immediate pasts that I hope to have avoided here.
The goal is to contribute in Marshall songs his words to a global history of capitalism,
attesting to the authenticity of other modes of existence, in part by any naturalised in our own.
So today I want to do two three things. First, I want to present the notion of the commodity as a way of knowing by showing it in action.
In 17th century Britain and its Atlantic periphery,
suggesting that this peripheral global experience was crucial to the commodities epistemological development.
Second, I want to suggest how the commodity transformed after being embedded in British political economy
and emerging by the 18th century as a kind of moral economy of knowing within the British Empire.
And finally, I want to suggest the significance of a historical epistemology of the commodity for new approaches to the global history of capitalism.
So first, to return to the coin. As literary theorist of long known, the notion of the commodity was in flux in early modern Britain, slipping as.
Douglas Brewster has observed between two different meanings. One is something like a convenience or a comfort.
And another as an exchangeable goods are wares.
So these are both from Shakespeare, from the flux itself is less interesting, perhaps,
than the way it reveals how the commodity as a way of knowing had emerged as a way of critiquing non-commercial cultural values,
serving as a means to familiarise them to ironic effect so we can see this poetic lindsay in effect of the commodity, for example here.
And Henry, the fourth part one and all's well that ends well, the joke.
Or anyway, the play and these lines so fast off the Hound Paroles to Helena comes out of the way they deploy
commodity and its dynamic economic sense as a means to familiarise reputation on the one hand,
so I would to God Darwin, I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought and virginity the commodity that
will lose its gloss and line on the other by equating them with goods to be bought and sold,
things that are bendable and pearls words. So in Shakespeare, the use is reflexive.
Its internals poetic,
a kind of auto critique of the cultural valuation as part of what Raymond Williams might have called Britain's early modern structure of feeling.
But with Empire, the expansion of settler colonialism in the Americas, the trade to Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the same process,
the same sort of way of seeing turned outward as Europeans began to interact more directly with regimes of value
other than their own and began to take in the commodity began to take on a more specific cross-cultural form.
So let me give you an example of what I mean.
In Sixteen Twenty Seven, William Bradford, so then-Governor of Plymouth Colony in what is now southeastern Massachusetts,
discovered that the beads made from the tubular heart of boozy con whelks and the Quahog Clam Mercenary,
a mercenary, discovered that they were a commodity. Let me, according to Bradford, the discovered happened like this.
These, by the way, are the shells.
Obviously on the left is the wealth and then in the middle, as a mercenary mercenary of be the purple one on the right.
So according to Bradford, the discovery happened like this. Bradford had seen some of the beads before on some quote stations and special
persons that were a little bit for ornament but had not known what they were.
So here's actually eighteenth century Mohawk leader Joseph Brent draughted draped in similar beads to give you an idea of what he was seen.
Well, this is obviously a hundred years or a hundred and fifty years later.
So in the fall of sixteen twenty seven, Isaac there as year, an official dispatched the year before by dust with dust,
which West India Company came to Plymouth and part in order to inform him of the beads potential.
This is the Living Museum of Plymouth today. You can see on the horizon the container ship perhaps a harbinger of things to come.
Yeah, the most interesting consequence of Fraser's visit visit, Bradford recalled, was a quote entrance into the trade of Wampum Peak.
This entrance took the form of a sales pitch in which Rangers tried to convince
Bradford that the beads which he had brought with him were a commodity.
Razors, in effect, asked Bradford to apply the same creative lens Shakespeare deployed on reputation,
and Henry the fourth part one to see something of evident cultural value in terms of its commercial value.
The pitch had two parts.
Both were attempts to get Bradford to see the beads differently and both crucial for understanding the development of the commodity.
First Eyes told Bradford that the beads were bendable,
emphasising how incredibly attractive they were in the first trade with the powerful five nations of the Iroquois.
The Dutch settlement of Port Orange, Modern Day Albany, New York and second razors attempted to convince Bradford how attractive the
beads would be to the Algonquin speaking peoples along the Kennebec River,
hundreds of miles to the East. This was a difficult sell, but Ratio's was persuasive.
He succeeded in offloading 50 pounds sterling worth of the beads, which indeed grew in Bradford's formulation to be a commodity.
As soon as coastal peoples began trading the beads into the Algonquin interior,
English trade transformed because the shells had been confirmed as a commodity bendable across cultural lines,
making it seem as if the shells had value inherent in themselves independent of local cultural variables.
Paradoxically, this meant then when it came to establishing the beads commercial value,
the discrete cultural practises that made the beads valuable in any one place were irrelevant, perhaps even misleading.
Indeed, the colonists themselves who went into the shell trade in a massive way and one Iroquois on site alone,
archaeologists have uncovered a quarter million of the beads they constantly mistook the source of the value of going to wampum as the beads.
It's going to be called as the money of the Native American Northeast when their primary purpose,
in fact, was as a means of ritual inter-regional communication.
In fact, it might be more accurate in light of anthropologist Keith Hart's recent work on money is
fundamentally a medium of global communication to call money the wampum of the 21st century.
But mistaking wampum for money was a feature,
not a bug of the commodity as a way of knowing cultural particularities only obscured the value that arose the places in between.
Simultaneously, though, as we see in this quote from Bradford's memoirs,
Native Americans soon realised with the significance that their transplanted neighbours new way of
understanding the Bede's value was going into manufacturing for themselves and driving hard bargains for guns,
powder and shot that Bradford resented.
They played on the significance of the beads as a commodity and Bradford Sense and within a few years as money as well,
after the Dutch and English made wampum a legal tender. And that should alert us to another aspect of the recognitions at play here.
Those from the perspective of people encountering Europeans to the Narragansett and this quote
the commodity as a way of knowing presented itself as a specifically European cultural practise,
which could be exploited in turn. This is also suggests, then, that commodification has a history.
We're in the process of reducing the commodity as the source as a complex social
object to a good with a price begins not in the act of stripping qualities,
leaving only quantities. But a new way of understanding how particular items moved in cross-cultural exchange on the Senate,
their value rather than within particular cultures and the places between them.
So that brings us to part two.
Bringing it all back home the moral economy of the commodity is a way of knowing the commodity as a way of understanding.
Goods eventually came back doing critical work in the reformation of English political economy of the dawn of the 18th century.
In the course of this work, the commodity is a way of knowing transformed taking on with Lorraine and is referred to as a moral economy of knowledge.
This transformative tension, I think, is especially clear when authors discussed not what a commodity was,
but what it was not tweaking the commodities relatively new definition as an object and trade.
Take, for instance, this very famous passage from Locke, 17, in a 16 95 year.
Locke is arguing that silver value by wheat and fineness was naturally money,
which might be and has been seen as a primary instance of the commodification of money.
Because Locke's definition had the effect of stripping traditional elements of the sovereign
prerogative around money by reducing it to an institution in effect as an object with a price,
establishing it as equivalent with a commodity value of fine silver in international trade.
And yet, as we see here for Locke,
one of the key elements of silver as money was that it was not a commodity or at the very least, not only a commodity.
Like other metals. It could not be strictly a commodity, I suggest, because its value was not located in the spaces in between silver,
from stamped shims to milled coins had been money in Britain for centuries.
Here are some examples a history the LOC did not disavow.
Rather, he used the recognition of the value of silver had elsewhere to assign it a special status.
We might think of this as a moment where the commodity became moralised silver,
and Locke's account is the money of the world and not merely a commodity because its value arises not from nature itself, but from human nature.
Inasmuch as it is, the measure of value for the entire trading world is a marker of human rationality itself.
The implication was that those who felt differently were somewhat less than fully reasonable and perhaps less than fully human.
I want to suggest the effect was to imbue the commodity as a way of knowing with this moral economy,
a basis for a valuation of alternative epistemology and ways of knowing goods and trade because it is seen
to be the only good and correct way to view them and more significantly to the history of capitalism.
It made the commodity as a way of knowing seemed to be the only rational basis for a political economy.
This moral economy has been especially significant to me because of the difficulty of explaining
the cultural logic of British imperial administrators at the end of a seven year war.
I work on the revolutionary period in America, often the transformation of money during that period.
So when confronted for the first time with a truly global empire straddling three continents from Boston to Bengal,
these administrators attempted to establish the fiscal basis for that empire.
The institutions that would ensure profits made it one of the end of the Earth would be Commencer Bowl, with profits made as the other.
Their choices in doing so in the 17 sixties and seventies were unambiguously disastrous.
They, at the very least exacerbated a famine that led to the death or migration of some 10
million people in North India and through the imposition of taxes paid in silver that,
in the final estimation, were impossible to pay in the American Revolution.
But in my recent work, I've attempted to explain these decisions functionally.
To show how the decision to form an empire around a silver standard was not simply a continuity of Locke's analysis,
but also a reasoned response to what I and my co-authors describe as China's early modern
global monetary hegemony that made silver valued by wait and find this the money of the world.
But that analysis was useful as an explanation of much of the available evidence does not account for something I have found harder to explain.
Not simply the sense of necessity surrounding the imperial fiscal system,
but the evident distaste verging on disgust imperial administrators had for alternatives.
The monetary component of the system of imperial form forwarded by George Greenville's administration,
for instance, had its roots in a March 1764 memo authored by the Earl of Hillsborough for King George the third.
The memo, while it was arguably part of the process of imperial reform,
made no mention of the larger picture of India of China, the world Britain was trying to reduce to a system.
Rather, Hillsborough accused the Americans rather bizarrely with fraud for Hillsborough.
The American monetary system was not simply undesirable. It was strange and deceitful, its nature founded in fraud and injustice.
At the same time, however, this fraud was based on a misunderstanding on the part of the Americans regarding the nature of money,
which we can sort of see here that that American money was not simply his.
He said the Americans were wrong because they believed that money was simply a measure.
And here we see a direct lot echo of Locke's language.
While money was not simply a measure, it was also an equivalent, which is to say, as Hillsborough went on to explain.
Money must be the equivalent of gold or silver or other valuable commodities.
The measure argument was a reference to the intellectual foundation of American bills of credit,
which were organised ultimately around a non commodity concept of money a happy concept.
I'd be happy to go into further in our discussion. However, as you can see,
Hillsborough jumps immediately from this intellectual assault to a kind of exasperation with
the idea that Americans would designate paper as something of universal intrinsic value.
For one perspective, this makes very little sense if Americans think of money as something other than an equivalent.
Then why would they be concerned with a physical material value of their bills?
And also is a Hillsborough demonstrating a remarkable ignorance of its own monetary system,
which, as we know, was proliferating paper monies of various sorts?
So bank bills, navy bills, army bills, inland bills of exchange bills, of course, occur at the exact same time.
But if we consider the commodity as a way of knowing and one that had acquired a
morality in the century since William Bradford discovered that wampum was a commodity,
it makes sense. Hillsborough returns repeatedly, as economic historians have done ever since the idea of money American money as paper
because he has difficulty seeing an object and trade as anything other than a commodity.
He has been made aware of the American intellectual, institutional practical justifications of their monetary practises over two months of hearings,
but insists on stripping that away as if the true worth of America's paper money can only ultimately resolve reside in its intrinsic commodity value.
Founded in papers dubious cross-cultural vind ability as an object in trade, anything else, he observes, would be absurd fraudulent.
He might have added immoral because it not partake in the universal way of knowing objects as commodities in the world.
So in closing? When people think of the global history of capitalism, they tend to think of a diffusion story.
That's true whether we consider capitalism as a world system like the late Emmanuel
Wallerstein or as a Congress of practises most closely directed with wage labour.
Both views, though, missed the significance of encounters with non-European parties and cultures in the construction of
capitalism as the basic categories like the commodity and their subsequent projection on the world.
What Peter has suggested calling capitalism's systolic diastolic process after the pumping motion of the heart.
What I would like to propose here as we reconsider the divergence debates,
is that the history of early modern capitalism is instead in large measure, an infusion story.
Capitalism considered institutionally and intellectually in terms of its basic categories and habits of mind as truth claims its epistemology,
its paradoxical claim to be both universal and universal rising was the product of encounters
with the world that were moralise systematised and turned against the other itself.
And at the core of that story and the global history of capitalism is a history of the quantity as a way of knowing centred in the spaces in between.
Thank you.