Continuities and Discontinuities in Imperial Strategies

The empires briefly reviewed in the preceding sections vary enormously in geo­graphical extent, population size, and institutional framework, from the few million inhabitants of the Aztec realm in 1519 to the 650 million citizens of the British Empire four centuries later, but in order to understand the world-historical transformations leading from tributary agrarian states to mercantile and industrial expansionism, we need to address the continuities as well as the discontinuities.

As argued earlier, most of the productive potential of “land” and “labor” in an agrarian society ultimately represents solar energy captured through photosyn­thesis. The mainly agrarian, tributary empires in our sample (Han China, Rome, Inca, Aztec) relied on a combination of religious devotion and military coercion to channel such energy so as to make it accessible to elite control. In the final two cases (the Spanish and British empires), we can more clearly see how they were at least in­itially geared to global market conditions, relying on advantageous exchange rates to complement religion and coercion in guaranteeing the accumulation of wealth. Market institutions were variously also employed in imperial China, Rome, and Mexico (less so among the Inca), but the divinity and military power of the em­peror remained the dominant prerequisites to accumulation.

If the acceptance and use of market institutions prompt us to draw a distinc­tion between those imperial expansions that are more or less dependent on such institutions, and those that are not, we also need to consider the distinction be­tween primarily mercantile empires (such as the Spanish in the sixteenth century) and industrial empires (such as the British became in the nineteenth century). As suggested earlier, the industrial strategy of accumulation can be visualized as a subset of the mercantile strategy, in that both rely on global discrepancies in the market prices of labor and land-based resources. It is trivial to reiterate the eco­nomic rationality of, for instance, the spice trade, in which the opportunity for accumulation hinged on the huge differences in the market price of spices in Indonesia and Europe. It is considerably less trivial, however, to observe that for eighteenth-century Europeans to find it rational to replace local labor with me­chanical devices requiring the input of labor and natural resources from some re­mote periphery (such as forests and iron mines in Sweden, or coal mines in the northwest of Britain), the relative price of local versus peripheral labor should be a crucial consideration. By way of concrete illustration, let us imagine how different the conditions for industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain would have been, if the labor that harvested the cotton fiber in the colonies had been paid standard British wages, and the land rent for colonial plantations had been equivalent to that for prime British farmland.

Having reconceptualized industrialization as an imperial strategy comparable to ac­cumulation through tribute or mercantile capitalism, we next ought to reconsider the concept of “capital” itself, as well as the ideologies that tend to accompany and legiti­mize these various modes of capital accumulation. In a comparative, world-historical perspective, capital accumulation can be understood as a recursive (self-reinforcing) relation between some kind of material infrastructure and a symbolic or coercive ca­pacity to make claims on other people's labor or land-based resources. This very ge­neral definition of capital would thus include, for instance, not only the specifically “capitalist” relation between nineteenth-century British textile factories and the institutions of wage labor and market exchange, but also the similarly recursive rela­tion between sixteenth-century agricultural terraces in Peru and the Inca institution through which maize beer was ceremonially redistributed in exchange for labor. With this definition, both the textile factories and the terraces qualify as capital in the sense of a material infrastructure that is accumulated through a specific cultural strategy for appropriating a net social transfer of labor and resources, and the expansion of which enables an expanded appropriation of such transfers in the future. In the sample of empires reviewed here, we have recognized as examples of such accumulated cap­ital a range of investments including agricultural infrastructures, roads, canals, ships, armies, ceremonial architecture, factories, and railroads.

Moreover, accumulation presupposes objectively quantifiable rates of une­qual exchange that guarantee net transfers of labor time or natural resources from one segment of society to another. Following Godelier,^[1108] however, we expect such asymmetries in exchange to be systematically mystified and instead presented as re­ciprocal or fair. Using our earlier comparison, we can thus juxtapose Inca concepts relating to the redistribution of maize beer with modern concepts of “wages” and “market prices” as comparable instances of mystification. Other examples of cul­tural ideologies that have represented appropriation as reciprocity would include beliefs concerning the various divine services of emperors in Han China, ancient Rome, and the Habsburg version of the Holy Roman Empire.