Tim Di Muzio

The ‘Art’ of Colonisation: Capitalising Sovereign Power and the Ongoing Nature of Primitive Accumulation

In order to dispel Adam Smith’s liberal narrative of original accumulation, Karl Marx offered his own historical account of the rise of capitalism in England. He also pointed to the English colonies, where the conditions for capitalist development were being created by government intervention in his own era. Playing on the discussion of the ‘art of colonisation’ in Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s comparative study of England and America, Marx argued that Wakefield’s candid advice on colonial policy and prosperity revealed the shaky foundations upon which Adam Smith’s concept of original accumulation was built. According to Marx, the value of Wakefield’s work rested in his recognition that the social property relations of capital did not evolve naturally and spontaneously as liberal speculative history might imply, but had to be enforced by state power. In this case, ‘wasteland’ in America had to be sufficiently priced so as to render it difficult for most immigrants to obtain land. Without access to affordable land, newcomers to America would have little choice outside starvation but to work for someone else upon arrival. In this way, state policy featured as a prominent lever of primitive accumulation insofar as it blocked people from gaining the means by which they could work for themselves and their families. Thus, even a cursory consideration of state policy in the colonies made a mockery of Adam’s Smith’s claim that capital was ‘silently and gradually accumulated by the private frugality and good conduct of individuals, by their universal, continual and uninterrupted effort to better their own condition’. One would not be too hard pressed to find the liberal intelligentsia pontificating on ‘the art of colonisation’ today, though with the important caveat that the permanent territorial administration of a country is not needed to effect a transformation in social property relations. However, while direct colonisation or annexation of a political community is seldom argued for, what seems to be unfolding in our own era is the development of knowledge and practices for a new art of military intervention premised on the temporary occupation and technocratic reconstruction-reconstitution of illiberal societies. While critical New Political Economy, Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2007FROM THE ARTICLE: . . . what many critics of the war on terror or US imperialism have so far failed to appreciate is how this project would be impossible without the capitalisation of the state. In this article, I therefore want to suggest that Marx’s re-theorisation of the concept of primitive accumulation, combined with a non-Marxist theorisation of state power offered by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, can help us account for the intimate connection between ongoing primitive accumulation and the capitalisation of the US government. . . . I try to show that we can accept their novel theory of capital as a capitalised and commodified form of power, but argue that the concept of primitive accumulation still has considerable analytical value for theorising the extension and depth of capitalist social property relations within and across political jurisdictions.

The liberal renaissance and the end(s) of history

Addressing the historical turn in International Relations (IR), this article offers a critical appraisal of what I call the liberal renaissance by interrogating liberal discourse and its renderings of history. The main argument advanced is that whether implicitly or explicitly, liberal perspectives in IR are heir to two overlapping and often contradictory narratives of history that masquerade as universals when they can be shown to be particular (and indeed peculiar). The first narrative is animated by a juridico-philosophical discourse while the second is informed by a stadial-historical discourse. I suggest that both of these narratives contribute to a triumphant, universal and relatively pacific reading of the liberal project, the aim of which is to encourage — through a variety of strategies, tactics and technologies — liberal democratic market societies so that the world will one day be united by capitalist commerce and the institutions of polyarchical democracy. I conclude the article by considering some of the consequences of holding to these historical appreciations for contemporary IR and advocates of the liberal project.

Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West

Abstract This article offers a critique of Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu’s How the West came to rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism. We argue that while all historiography features a number of silences, shortcomings or omissions, the omissions in How the West came to rule lead to a mistaken view of the emergence of capitalism. There are two main issues to be confronted. First, we argue that Anievas and Nişancioğlu have an inadequate and misleading understanding of “capital” and “capitalism” that tilts them towards a theoretical stance that comes very close to arguing that everything caused capitalism while at the same time having no clear and convincing definition of “capital” or “capitalism”. Second, there are at least three omissions—particular to England/Britain within a geopolitical context—that should be discussed in any attempt to explain the development of capitalism: the financial revolution and the Bank of England; the transition to coal energy; and the capitalization of state power as it relates to war, colonialism and slavery. We conclude by calling for a connected-histories approach within the framework of capital as power.

Energy, Capital as Power and World Order

Until late, the subject of energy and its importance for capitalism and the constitution and reconstitution of world order has been sorely overlooked in the international political economy (IPE) literature. Indeed, only two of the major textbooks in IPE have chapters on energy (Di Muzio and Ovadia 2016). This is also true of the literature known as classical political economy. With few exceptions, the main questions that animated the classics such as the origins of the wealth of nations and the distribution of wealth are somehow disconnected from the production and consumption of energy. Marginal exceptions granted, there is little acknowledgement that the last three centuries of uneven and combined “progress” and “development” have anything to do with the exploitation of coal, oil and natural gas. However, if recent scholarship is any indication, this appears to be changing both within IPE and within other academic fields such as geography, sociology and environmental studies. In this emergent literature, we can find an argument that energy should not be treated as auxiliary to our analysis of the global political economy but essential to understanding and interpreting its emergence, transformations and future trajectories (Di Muzio 2015). Since fossil fuels make up an overwhelming share of global energy production and consumption (see Fig. 14.1) I will mainly concentrate of non-renewable fossil fuels and aim to provide a critical political economy approach to energy, capitalism and world order by using the capital as power perspective.