So thanks very much, first to Andrew, Jeremy and Chris for inviting me as a non economic historian to participate in this set of conversations,
and I should also point out that what I'm presenting today has come out of another series of conversations I've been having with Andrew and others,
some of whom are in the audience over the last several months as part of a project called Political Economy and Culture and Global History.
So if you're in need of Googling, things might be better to Google that rather than me.
I'm drawing here very much on the collective work of this group.
In response to yesterday's discussion, I want to begin by briefly situating what I'm going to say in relation to the Great Divergence debate.
As I understand it, this debate assumes discrete, separable geographical units, which can be compared with each other.
One unit becomes, broadly speaking, capitalist and other remains non capitalist.
The divergence is then explained based on factors internal to each unit, and we heard about various such factors yesterday.
The major difficulty with this for me, is that over this period, when divergence is being demonstrated,
these different parts of the world, however we want to define them into units, were becoming more and more connected up with each other.
So that suggests that as divergence increases, the likelihood we can explain it by internal factors within each unit is decreasing.
And I think it's this kind of consideration which led the late Emmanuel Wallerstein,
whose name has been invoked a few times to come to the notion of a single world system
which unified divergent areas and distribution costs and benefits unequally between them.
So I'm concerned in this paper with how very different if you like.
Divergent spheres can coexist in close connexion with each other and how they can mutually reshape each other over time.
I'm going to talk about this first, really in terms of two spheres, which I'm calling the economy and the household.
I'll start with a brief history of the categories. Look at their role within certain transitions, within the history of capitalism,
and then as a way of modelling how the two categories can coexist in close connexion with each other.
And finally, I'll suggest the possible wider salience of this kind of modelling for global history more generally as a way of addressing the issues.
The Great Divergence debate is coming out from a rather different direction.
So in some economics, at least a household is used as a kind of basic unit measures such as household income, as in this graph from the OECD.
Not very much analytical work seems to be going into defining what the household is.
This definition that accompanies it has lots of interesting other things.
Income net grows real, etc., but not household in one piece of the literature on this kind of definition.
This paper by meeting Lindberg, they call it a unit, the unit,
which most closely captures resource sharing that can then be used as a base unit within economic analysis.
But what goes on inside the household?
This resource sharing, which includes a lot of labour, is not usually dealt with by Orthodox economic analysis, as far as I'm aware.
So this initial polarity is where I'm starting from.
There is this great encompassing sphere called the economy, which has its rules and norms,
and then these small but more or less universally present household spheres embedded within it,
which act for certain purposes as what we might call economic units, but internally work according to very different norms.
Now here, as some of you may have suspected, we encounter an etymological irony because of course,
the term economy derives from the Greek economy and household management.
If we go back to Aristotle and I'm drawing here on this account by Keith Tribe, we find he defines Aristotle defines,
although not in very much detail, something called economic techno, the house, the art of household management.
This entails the good management by the master of a household, which consists of his property,
which includes other members of the household, wife, children, servants and slaves.
Also, animals and importantly, land. It's basically conceived of by Aristotle, according to Tribe, as a rural household.
It is ruled by a hierarchical order by the master who is and only could.
A spot is the despots of the household, so it's distinct from the sphere of politics,
the polis being an association of free men and equals for Aristotle.
But it is also ruled by a moral order, so it's destroying things from this other sphere, which he calls crematories most money getting.
This is an amoral or immoral activity which happens outside the household.
Those are his two terms already in Hellenistic times.
Again, following tribe, the metaphor of our economy was based.
Applied metaphorically to things other than the household with the sense of a properly governed harmonious order, the autonomy of one's own life,
of the affairs of a city of the cosmos that is nature in early modern Europe, it begins to apply,
be applied very often to monarchical policy with a king who enforces the moral hierarchical order.
But from the 18th century, a new kind of metaphorical use begins to emerge by way of a familiar story,
really of Lock Rousseau, Physicalize and Adam Smith, which maintains the idea of an internal ordering or balance in the sphere of human livelihood,
but does away with the notion that this order is actively directed in a moral and hierarchical way.
Instead, it is governed by natural law becomes an internally balanced, harmonious machine.
It can run itself with increasing perfection.
If only we could be masters can be prevented from interfering with it so gradually and unevenly from the 18th to the 20th century.
Over much of the world, this idea of a household without a master the economy becomes a dominant when it comes to just describe a sphere which,
from the older perspective, might be seen simply as money getting as crematories.
Most underpinning its rise, though, is the encroachment of the sphere,
with its new naturalistic justification onto the domain of actual households and other spheres,
which did not operate according to this new economic logic.
So more and more of the activities of human livelihood, notably labour and production,
but also distribution etc are removed from the original economic,
particularly thinking here of the rural household and other morally and highly governance spheres,
and instead come to be governed by what we can now call economic rules.
So the relative importance of these two spheres becomes, in a sense, inverted, but the household doesn't just wither away.
Instead, we can see that changing relationship as a mutual reshaping.
This can be seen if we look at a few probably familiar instances from the history of capitalism.
I'm thinking here initially of what the new economic model represents, often as relations between individuals.
So there's a central tension which Andrew Sartori has pointed to in his book Liberalism in Empire Within Liberal,
or what he calls lock in thinking between capitalism as a set of horizontal exchange relations between reasonably equal economic actors.
So. Like that and capitalism as providing for capital accumulation, which leads to the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy.
What we might think of as the individual actors in this diagram,
where in fact most often in Locke's world and in much of the history of capitalism, the heads of households.
And as such, they were generally men. So they were masters of wives, children, slaves or servants.
Even in the state of nature, Locke is referring to people as having servants. This,
I think this kind of conceptualisation illuminates many of the concepts the
contexts within which this kind of lock in tension can be seen as operative.
So to take a classic example, in early 19th century England,
male handloom weavers are working with their families on the so-called domestic system, weaving at home with the assistance of family labour.
There's great stigma attached to the new factory system, under which factory owners try to get workers initially,
mainly women and children, to become wage labourers in large factories outside the home.
So for a man to become a wage labourer was to lose his independence, his role as master,
his birthright and becoming incorporated into another man's household for women and children to become incorporated wood,
it was thought, break up the patriarchal family. One might suggest that what's being objected to here is not so much the
accumulation of capital as of people of members of the household into another's,
if interpreted in the older household, derive terms.
This is what the factory system looked like and unnaturally expanded household encroaching on those of normal size.
As it turned out, as it eventuated, a solution is reached in England and elsewhere,
which allows wage labour in large economic units to coexist with the patriarchal family through a series of labour political struggles.
A new norm is developed whereby a man with labour outside of the home would be paid a family wage,
a breadwinner wage sufficient to support wife and children. A household has ceased to be a unit of production, but it remains one of consumption.
Late wage labour gains its own dignity.
It's not regarded anymore as degrading incorporation into another household, but as a transaction in this other sphere, the sphere of the economy.
So another way to take another example to accumulate people besides employing wage labour is to acquire slaves.
So part of the contest, at least in the 19th century USA over slavery, can be seen in similar terms of small and large households.
So much of the animus against slavery amongst white people comes from the sense that the
institution allows a few plantation owners owners to hugely enlarge their households like that,
gaining enormous wealth as well as political influence and giving them great advantage over the other smaller households.
So these are, you know, rural homesteads which have perhaps the the old slave or servant, but largely depends on the family,
which could otherwise exist in the sort of lock and egalitarian horizontal relations abolition of slavery
was supposed to operate rather like antitrust laws would later on breaking up unnaturally large units.
In another context, again, the transition from slavery to high wage labour in the British West Indies, we see another variant.
I'm drawing here on the work of Catherine Paul in this book and other work I've seen,
which is in progress under slavery, especially when the Atlantic slave trade is still operating.
Masters are generally not paying very much attention to the kinship or domestic arrangements of slaves,
slaves and notionally incorporated into these enormous households called the
plantations with patriarchal heads who conduct economic and political transactions.
But within these great households, the slaves actual living arrangements remained,
in many cases, matrimonial continuing African patterns in the transition towards free labour.
Slaves were expected to take on the role not just of individual wage workers, but also small families,
and therefore to follow patriarchal norms and having male heads who again took on political and economic responsibilities.
So from that, you get again something like the Lock-In model.
The matter of focal family recedes in favour of the patriarchal one.
And at the same time, the sphere of the economy traumatised most comes to organise relations amongst these smaller household units.
So this is all very quick. So far, I've been looking at transitions over time in the direction of the increasing
importance of the economy and the decreasing importance of the household. I now want to look at the enduring condition of mixed fitness of the two,
the household and the economy, as had spheres articulated to use an older vocabulary together.
I will come to this later, but I will put it there for people to absorb one way of conceptualising.
This condition of articulation comes from the area where the old pattern of economy has survived most fully, which is peasant agriculture.
This is far from a most.
Case even today, nor is it irrelevant to the instances of transition I've just outlined or indeed those that Andreas was just talking about,
the demand for wage labourers to have small holdings as a reserve as something to
fall back on is very familiar from the various stages of the history of capitalism.
It's not always a question of wanting to withdraw from the sphere of the economy or money getting all together,
but of having enough options to ensure a positive relationship with it instead of one of dependence.
So to understand. Or one way of understanding this, this kind of relationship, I'm going to look at this model elaborated by Januvia van der Plug,
an extended version of the balances proposed by Alexander Chine off in the early 20th century
China of imbalances is supposed to be trade offs between things which are incommensurate.
So you have quantities or qualities that are not part of a smooth, a smoothly operating economics circuit.
And so the relationship between them is not automatic. The optimum balance has to be finely calculated between peasant farmers.
This is one of the balances which found a plug is describing not one of the original ones of China.
And it's a balance between commodity and non commodity circuits. The commodity circuit is external to the farm or household unit.
This is the involvement of this unit in the wider capitalist economy, if you like,
the non commodity circuit is here seen as internal to the farmer household here on to collapse.
Diagram Relation A is measuring the degree of the farm households participation in the capitalist economy or its withdrawal from it.
There's also relation be the ratio between what the farm needs to buy from this external economy and what it can sell to it.
It's not always, as I said, in the peasants farmers interest to minimise participation in the capitalist economy.
So to slide relation a right down to the bottom, but rather to seek an optimal relation,
be to slide it all the way along to the right that is, to sell more than they need to buy.
In order to do this, though, and to guard against market fluctuations, etc.,
it is wise to maintain the ability to withdraw at least partially from the external commercial economy.
If they don't, they will risk to one of two fates,
either being absorbed into the commodity circuit entirely the internal workings of the farm coming to be organised in a
capitalist way or being held in a long term state of dependence where they must sell to the market at almost any price.
Being all the way along to the left of relation be labour,
thus being remunerated at far lower rates in this internal household economy than it is in the external capitalist economy.
OK, I'm now going to suggest some of the wider significance of the logic expressed by this model,
although it is drawn from the peasant farming household.
It may help to understand other situations of relatively prolonged symbiosis between capitalistic systems and other kind of systems.
Whether we're thinking of a large planned economy in agricultural cooperatives or a domestic household in a capitalist society.
So to take on the example that we heard the statement about yesterday to take the ching in the 18th century,
they don't need very much from the outside European dominated economy. They don't need or want to buy very much.
But Europeans do want to buy their tea. They become highly involved in the market in the market, but within with a strong position on relation,
be towards the right or to take a nuclear family if you like under capitalism.
This is the insight of, I think originally the wages for housework collective, the socialist feminist collective from the 1970s,
the labour done within the house were hold largely by women is remunerated at a far lower
rate than it would be on the external labour market because it's in this distinct sphere.
But they have very little autonomy to move to a non commodity form of livelihood altogether,
so they're stuck at the left hand end of relation, be quite high up on relation a and incapable of moving downwards en relation.
And therefore withdrawing from the, well, the wage labour and the market economy to a greater extent.
You could also imagine extending this kind of model to the interaction between the capitalist economy in the natural world.
That is nature as a self-sustaining system that reproduces its own conditions of existence, a circular arrow,
if you like, and the economy as an unsustainable system that reproduces itself by leeching resources from the other.
That's something that we could go into later. How much time do I still have?
Four minutes? Three minutes? Okay, so I have a couple of instances of an anthropological kind.
I may only get through one of them to take very briefly.
This study by Patricia Galloway of Choctaws in the Mississippian Shatter Zone.
This Native American people in 17th century is conceiving of exchanges between themselves and Europeans as reciprocal,
gift-giving between fictive kin within particular distinct spheres of exchange.
Anthropological notion of spheres of exchange is important here Europe.
Particularly the English say, to trade or as gifts, which are designed to grease the wheels of trade.
The other instance is he was just mentioned actually James Ferguson, an older an older article on different spheres of economic activity in the Suta.
Many of the men Soutine men are making a living as migrant workers in South Africa under apartheid.
Back in the villages in the south, too,
they are using much of the cash they get to buy cattle that very then they're then very reluctant to sell these cattle.
Cattle act as a reserve of wealth, which is not readily available,
so it's protected from the demands of needy dependents, as well as from if you like market forces.
It also supports a communal network of reciprocity and exchanges.
Cattle can be lent away and gifted and maintains a certain patriarchal family on order as well from the point of view of the external economy.
The man's main role may be like migrant labourers. Their obsession with cattle may be an uneconomic indulgence,
but from the point of view of the people who are imbued with what Ferguson calls the bovine mystique,
the world of money getting might appear as simply a helpful convenience that allows them to amass a mass real wealth, which is in the form of cattle.
So in each of these two cases,
the two alternative interpretations of the relationship from the two sides of these different spheres could co-exist as long as
the distinct non economic sphere can maintain its relative autonomy from the capitalist economy when it falls into dependence,
which may be often due to the intervention of outside factors.
Drought killing of cattle in the suitcase war writing for slaves seizure of territory In the Choctaw case,
this becomes precarious so the world of the economy.
The Marsalis household takes another step forward and comes to organise another layer of relations amongst people or indeed between people and nature.
But these are the reshapes fears are still maintained, which operate according to different logics.
To conclude very quickly, one way of conceiving the history of capitalism on a global scale is, I think,
as a series of these articulations or symbiosis between a capitalist sphere and these other spheres,
the trend over time is for the sphere of money getting to play an increasingly important part at evermore granular levels of life,
both human and non-human. The autonomous units tend to get split up into smaller ones, reshaped deprived of central functions,
ever smaller if you like divisions of labour and of livelihood.
But if we remember the centrality of the household, even in the highly capitalistic economy, we remember what Andreas was just talking about.
Now this process is far from complete and far from linear throughout its history.
The economy can be seen then as having these distinct spheres human and natural, with which it was symbiotic and into which it could expand.
It may also be that overall,
and this is the sort of thing which Wallace was suggesting the economy could draw resources from these other spheres and offload costs onto them,
something we might call the continued existence of primitive accumulation to refer again to undresses paper.
We could then suggest that in the case of the natural world, at least if not of other human spheres,
the economy itself is now coming up against a hard limit that it is incorporated so much within itself.
There's not enough of an outside left to absorb its costs.
Thank you very much.