Cui Yanwang (Department of History, College of Letters, Shanghai University)
The March 2020 American Historical Society Journal provides a multidimensional presentation on "The Relationship between Capitalism and the American Empire," compiled and edited by Dr. James Parriso, on the relationship between land, agriculture, and capitalism in the United States, on the relationship between the American Revolution, class, and racial factors, and capitalism, as well as on military public works, postwar global military occupation, and capitalism.
Founded in 1988, the Journal of Historical Sociology believes that historical and social studies ultimately have a common theme that can only benefit from the exchange of ideas and opinions. Edited by a peer-reviewed panel of renowned international historians, anthropologists, geographers and sociologists, the book is both methodologically interdisciplinary and innovative in content. In addition to reference articles, the magazine also offers review articles and commentaries in its Issues and Agendas section, which are designed to spark discussion and debate.
Journal of Historical Sociology
First, the multifaceted nature of rural capitalism in the United States
Christopher Clark is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and his books include The Roots of Rural Capitalism and A History of Working People and Nations. Christopher Clark grew up in the London area, attended the University of Warwick, and received his PhD in history from Harvard University. He taught at the University of York for 18 years, then another 7 years as Professor of History at the University of Warwick in North America, before transferring to the University of Connecticut in 2005. He has served as a visiting scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge, as well as at the National History Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and St Catherine's College, Oxford. It can be said that Christopher Clark has a deep academic understanding and vision of the grasp and understanding of American social history.
American History Magazine once described his book, The Roots of Rural Capitalism, as the latest and most comprehensive introduction to the debate on the pre-industrial American peasant mentality and the social significance of the "Great Transformation" in the countryside. Focus on the Connecticut Valley and civil war in western Massachusetts during the American Revolutionary War. The roots of rural capitalism are an important and multifaceted study that takes this debate to new levels of nuance and complexity. ”
The Roots of Rural Capitalism
Christopher Clarke's article is a study closely related to his book. In this article, Christopher Clark joins the active debate on the "transition to capitalism" with a completely new interpretation, combining insights from previous studies with his detailed findings. Largely rejecting the assumptions of recent scholars that economic change can be explained primarily by markets, he constructs a broader rural economic and social history and traces the complex interplay between the social structures, family strategies, gender relations, and cultural values that drive rural economic development. Rural areas move from one economic system to another.
Clarke insists that the territorial growth and capitalist development of the United States, which began at the end of the 18th century, led to a massive expansion of agriculture and continued until the 1920s, was not the result of a single "transformation," nor was it a single pattern of global commodity, financial, and labor mobility; rather, it was the accumulation of new institutions and practices that occurred in two broad chronological phases of two generations. His unique contribution is to demonstrate that the family-based family economy (which lasted until the 19th century) coexisted with a market-oriented system of production and exchange, often considered to have matured in the 18th century. Even the destruction of slavery during the Civil War and the subsequent emergence of industrial and financial capitalism were not uniformly imposed on American agriculture, nor did they undermine independent, family-based, independent agriculture. But powerful immigrant colonialism, the intersection of property and labor systems with commerce and finance, the intersection of different social structures and international markets, all of these have given American rural capitalism a different trajectory.
Classes, states, and revolutions in the history of American capitalism
Tom Cutterham is a historian of the American Revolutionary War and the Atlantic world of the late 18th century. He teaches courses on Women in The American Revolution from the First British Colony to the Late 19th Century in North American History, including women's courses in the American Revolutionary War and the meaning of freedom in American history. He is particularly interested in projects that address the changes in the Atlantic world in England in the 18th century, including the American Revolution, and work that attempts to address the history of commercial, capitalist, and/or political thought of this period. His first book, The Gentleman's Revolution: Power and Justice in the New American Republic, explores the role of class, commerce, and culture in the revolutionary era, as well as the emergence of capitalism in the imperial world, showing how the struggles of gentry revolutionaries in terms of status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideology and institutions of this emerging state.
Americans cherish the "American Dream" — the idea that anyone can achieve economic success and happiness in america. This idea is based on the assumption of equality and freedom in the American capitalist market economy. Tom Catalham's The Revolutionary Gentleman explores the origins of the myth of economic equality, a product of the elite business culture of the 1780s. Cullerum depicts a culture of gentlemanhood, emphasizing the interconnectedness of business activities, elite communities, and the importance of credit, reputation, and character.
His essay "Classes, States, and Revolution" also uses the book's broader context as a clue to provide important insights into the transformation of merchants, bankers, and land speculators in the northern colonial ruling class during the American Revolution. But the importance of the American Revolution is generally downplayed in describing the rise of American capitalism, especially those reported from a critical perspective. However, new methods of studying the history of capitalism emphasize the centrality of the state. This runs counter to the research that the authors had hoped for. The author argues that the role of the re-centralized state in the history of capitalism is very important and that attention should be refocused on the major reorganization of the American state during and as a result of the revolution. At the same time, he argues, this reorganization cannot be understood historically outside the context of the formation of the class in which it is located. In the short term, the revolution shaped the capitalist class in this new country, which far surpassed the working class. This reorganization encompasses and transcends innovations in the new political system, and in the long run it has helped underpin the peculiar development of American capitalism.
Economic Transformation, Class Formation, and Oversight States in the Midwest: 1850-1900
Dr. Bradley A. Bauerly specializes in international political economy, comparative politics, international relations, and food studies. His research interests lie in the political relationship between economic change, social and political movements, and capacity-building of State institutions. His current research projects include the political history of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a comparative study of the relationship between rising economic inequality, national austerity policies, and far-right political movements in advanced democracies.
His book, The Land Seeds of Empire, traces the relationship between U.S. economic development and the land movement, outlining how peasant resistance produced unique forms of nation-building and institutional forces. This seminal work argues that American capitalism is rooted in a powerful peasant movement that was crucial to america's early political development. It is the combined efforts of these social movements and nation-building that have allowed the industrial production of agriculture in the United States to be integrated. His article continues the book's fundamental ideas about American agriculture, outlining and clarifying the complex relationships between economic development, class formation, the response of political movements to these changes, and the capacity building of state institutions in the Midwest. It seeks to correct the view of the transition from the United States to capitalism, and Bradley A. Ballley argues that the previous view was too narrow to focus on a transition moment, establishing a long, politically controversial process of class formation by elucidating the specific interplay between agriculture and the trade union movement and the process of nation-building. While Dr. Bradley A. Ballley's research reveals the important role that the state plays in changing class positions by accepting the common development process of economic change, political resistance movements, and nation-building, it can be said that Dr. Bradley A. Ballley provides a more objective approach to the study of "the link between American state building, colonialism, and capitalist transition."
Bring capitalism back to the "new" history of capitalism
Paul Kershaw is a historian of 20th-century American and Mexican history, specializing in the United States and the world, economic politics, and capitalist history. He argues that for more than a decade, more and more historians, especially American historians, began to position themselves as historians of capitalism and established a subfield often referred to as the New History of Capitalism (NHC). Their efforts have prompted university history departments to devote significant resources to formal courses, individual courses, seminars, academic conferences, and even a summer "boot camp," all dedicated to the study of the history of capitalism. Thus, historians developed an important institutional infrastructure to train their own students, but also to present ideas and form a dialogue about the political economy of the United States within the university and in the broad intellectual community of the public. In addition to accumulating resources and expanding dialogue, capitalist historians have broadened the scope of their research agendas and methodologies.
Paul Kershaw
The authors argue that while these achievements are considerable, they should be commended. However, the lowering of institutional and intellectual barriers between disciplines and the expansion of the research agenda do not necessarily constitute a historical study of capitalism in itself, as does the more traditional study of the history of commerce, labor, and economics. Even in the 20th century, when capitalism prevailed, not everything that happened could be explained by capitalism. Paul Kirsch further explains that all concepts of "wages, labor, money, investment, profits, debts, technological improvements, market formation, class identity, trade, crises", etc. originated before capitalism, and although these phenomena are ubiquitous even in capitalist societies, historians have shown that they are not always examples of capitalism, and therefore, before historians who claim to write the history of capitalism can figure out the causality of capitalism, These historians must first clarify to their readers (and themselves) what they think capitalism is.
In contrast, Paul Kershaw argues in this paper that historians must explicitly study the theoretical dimensions of capitalism because it is relevant to their research questions and arguments. Historians who fail to articulate the concept of capitalism are bound to conceal from their readers the necessary criteria to assess whether they have really succeeded in historicizing capitalism. A central part of what historians do is to create, inquire, modify, or somehow align or contradict their research with the categories of analysis.
He argues that capitalism is both a category of historical analysis and a historical phenomenon that transcends time and space and manifests itself in very different and ever-changing ways. As an analytical category, capitalism must meet two criteria: first, it must be specific enough to identify the common features of all historical cases of capitalism; second, this particularity must allow, not deny, the great historical contingencies in the way capitalism develops. Therefore, we must engage in the debate about the various concepts of capitalism to understand how they interpret historical evidence, what their limitations are, and whether these limitations make them an apolitical basis for the problem or evidence we study.
Capitalism slavery
John J. Clegg is a historian at the University of Chicago whose primary research interests focus on slavery and prewar capitalism. John Craig argues that the relationship between slavery and capitalism has become a new topic of debate, but scholars have yet to agree on a definition of capitalism. To some extent, capitalism seems to be divided over norms that are tainted by its relationship with slavery. Most scholars now agree that slavery before the Civil War was in a sense "capitalism" in the United States, but they usually avoid defining the term.
John Clegg
Thus, left-wing historians can today portray slavery as the "original sin" of capitalism, while right-leaning neoclassical economists can rationally insist that capitalism and slavery have nothing in common. Strikingly, the political and disciplinary aspects of this debate appear to be the exact opposite of the 1960s and 1970s, when Marxist historians argued that American slavery was not capitalism and that neoclassical economists considered it capitalism. In this article, Dr. John Clegg clarifies some misconceptions and places the debate in the Marxist tradition. Dr. John Craig argues that while non-Marxist depictions of capitalism fail to explain the key social shifts that accompanied the global rise of capitalism, Marxist descriptions also fail to understand similar shifts that took place on American slave plantations in the 19th century.
Dead or Alive: Racial Finance and the Corpse Value of the Bodies of African American Slaves
Based on a collection of manuscripts from the Library of Congress studying black history, Dr. Amy Bride of the University of Manchester explores how the financial mechanisms of the slave trade — from insurance to speculation to divestitures to securities — reveal a terrible turning point in the history of slavery in the United States where the corpses of blacks became more valuable than alive.
This turning point not only "legitimized" the murder of African Americans, but also demonstrated how corpses during the domestic slave trade and economic racial violence were directly related to the deregulation of the slave market and the subsequent valuation of the corpses of slave bodies. The authors' research is important for examining current understandings of slavery and capitalism to show how the commodity fetishism of the black body triggered not only racial capitalism in the slave trade, but also racial finance in particular.
The authors argue that this racial finance occurs when the value of the negro body is not because of the economic capital they generate through manual labor, but because of the intangible value that white speculators, insurance companies, and creditors acquire simply because of their physical existence. Along the way, the authors show how the practice of viewing racial capitalism as self-evident undermines the understanding of racial capitalism, and highlights in detail how contemporary racial capitalism abuses power as part of a national precedent in which black Americans, dead or alive, are conceptualized primarily based on their values to whites.
The Road to the American Empire: American Military Public Works and the Transformation of Capitalism
Jackson Justin, who taught at New York University, wrote The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Formation of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines, which focused on the U.S. Army's use of limited manpower and resources to force it to hire thousands of Cuban and Filipino residents to participate in the Spanish, American-Philippine, and Moro Wars, and to administer civil administration in Cuba and the Philippines. In the Pacific and Caribbean, the exploitation of ordinary colonies by U.S. forces has reinvigorated the often coercive colonial system, such as contract labor for Chinese immigrants, forced labor for public works such as roads, and the impression of interpreters and tour guides and other intermediaries in military operations. The influence of U.S. military and labor relations in war and occupation continued into the civilian rule of these countries, shaping racial and immigrant politics, infrastructure development, and public obligations, as well as the civil institutions of colonial and neo-colonial nations.
Jackson Justin
His essay, a study closely linked to his work, focuses on the simultaneous and continuous U.S. military intervention and occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic between 1898 and 1934, when American soldiers turned public works, especially roads, into a global imperial technique. By comparing global and intra-imperial approaches, the authors present infrastructure as a factor in state formation and capitalist transformation in imperial space, as a way to study American empires and their impact on foreign societies, which are often excluded. Both before and during the U.S. intervention, U.S. military public works expressed and advanced the common political and economic logic of national centralization and capital accumulation. Plantation agriculture, the degree of proletarianization of the countryside, world commodity markets, and geographical and natural events varied, but all determined the outcome of the infrastructure of the American Empire. By the 1930s, the U.S. military had elevated infrastructure improvements to an important skill of the American empire in the world, and it continued to exist as the United States emerged from formal colonialism during the Cold War and decolonization era.
The Origins of Chinese Capitalism and the Trans-Pacific
Peter P. Dr. Peter E. Hamilton is a scholar of modern Chinese history, focused on The Chinese Cross-Border Trade and Migration Networks of the 19th and 20th Centuries, with a particular interest in the intersection between business and education. His research in this area is epitomized by his book Made in Hong Kong: Trans-Pacific Networks and a New History of Globalization, which examines the transformation of Hong Kong from a struggling British colonial outpost into a global financial capital between 1949 and 1997. Made in Hong Kong provides a new narrative for this metamorphosis, revealing that Hong Kong has been both a key engine of postwar global capitalist expansion and reinvention and a key to Sino-US trade since the 1970s.
Peter P. E. Hamilton explores the role played by the neglected transnational Chinese elite who fled to Hong Kong during the war and revolution. Despite the loss of material wealth, these industrialists, bankers, academics, and other professionals maintained vital ties to the United States. They have used these connections to link themselves and Hong Kong with the United States through business contacts and higher education. By the 1960s, Hong Kong had become a manufacturing region supplying U.S. consumers, and by the 1970s, it was the world's largest exporter of foreign students to U.S. colleges and universities. Hong Kong's repositioning of America's international leadership has enabled its transplanted Chinese elite to benefit from America's expanded influence in Asia and position them as shepherds for China's re-engagement in global capitalism.
The book analyzes untapped archival resources from around the world and illustrates why we cannot understand postwar globalization, China's economic rise, or today's U.S.-China trade relationship without focusing on Hong Kong.
His article, which is also closely related to his book, focuses on revisiting Hong Kong's economic history during the Cold War through Hong Kong's trans-Pacific network with the United States, and Hong Kong's role in promoting the recovery of Sino-US trade since the 1970s, and restoring early colonial Hong Kong to the history of capitalism and as a key player in the process of U.S. Pacific integration. The authors argue that in the 1840s, Hong Kong became not only the first identifiable capitalist region of China, but also the link between China's coastal areas and the expanding Anglo-American imperial system. It begins by showing how The colonial regime in Hong Kong quickly reorganized social property relations on the island and provided scaffolding for the residents who were accumulating capital. It then examines how Capitalism in China relates to the westward expansion of American capitalism in the 1840s, and analyzes how the trans-Pacific network in Hong Kong in the late 19th century facilitated the expansion of the capitalist system in China, particularly in Shanghai.
The Postwar Reorganization of the U.S. Empire and the Global Military Occupation: The Struggle for the Siege of Okinawa
Janice Matsumura of the University of California is a scholar of modern Japanese history, and Dr. Matsumura is involved in research on class antagonism, gender oppression, and the development of racialized discourse in Japan. She focuses on the various life experiences, political commitments, and changes in learning styles that have resulted from the development of modern Japan. In her book The Limits of Okinawa, Matsumura tells the story of how Okinawa has been regarded as an exotic "south" by Okinawans and Japanese since its incorporation into the Japanese nation-state in 1879, which is very different from modern Japan in both space and time. Matsumura traces the emergence of this sense of Difference in Okinawa, showing how local and mainland capitalists, intellectuals, and politicians resolved conflicts with labor by calling for the idea of a unified Okinawan community. Their many confrontations with small producers and cultivators who refused to be exploited for the sake of this ideal resulted in and copied Okinawa as an organic, cross-historical entity. Matsumura offers a new understanding of Okinawa's place in Japanese and world history, and establishes new places, nations, and identities for considering the relationship between empire and capital.
Her article examines an anti-base struggle that broke out in Okinawa in the early 1950s, and argues that it is necessary to consider the impact of the so-called new imperialism on the transformation of social relations after World War II. It asserts that as the United States establishes military bases in Okinawa, the focus on the gender dimension of hostility allows us to see that self-sufficiently-dominated farming communities, often led by women, fundamentally challenge the enclosures associated with the foundation and promote constant ideological work, namely the role that the language of exceptions plays in the normalization of general capitalist social relations. Women farmers challenge the society as a whole and inspire others to do the same. This action was born out of generations of survival and anti-capitalist struggles under Japanese rule and was shared as a form of knowledge by local leaders who opposed deportations in other parts of Okinawa. Although this short struggle is to maintain relations and obtain the necessary resources to multiply, if we look at its uniqueness, it does not seem to be an anti-capitalist struggle, if we remember that these islands are only one place in a global military empire that, at the height of the Cold War, consisted of hundreds of military installations and thousands of bases in 64 countries, and enclosures were material and ideological sites for the naturalization of capitalist social relations. And the unstable forces of the enclosure struggle as important shapers of the contours of the American empire after World War II should not be underestimated.
Conclusions on topics in the Journal of Historical Sociology
The article in this special issue of the Journal of Historical Sociology clearly proves that the theoreticalization of serious research into the origins and processes of American capitalism over the past three decades has been an important step forward in the discussion and debate about the origin and development of American capitalism. These contributions challenge our existing conceptual framework and provide new historical insights into the origins of capitalism in the formation of the most dynamic industrial capitalist society on Earth. In the future, we need more empirical research with theoretical precision to deepen our understanding of the necessary relationships and processes of capitalism.
Editor-in-Charge: Yu Shujuan
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang