Violence is not peripheral. It is at the heart of our economy. | the economic letters
Violence is a built-in feature of our economy, something from which we cannot distance ourselves. And so it was from the very beginning. The island of Madeira tells us this story.
The economy claims to be fair and built upon the rational decisions of all participants'. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is a simple built-in tendency in our economy to obfuscate its challenging aspects and unpleasant realities. Examples include:
In Sicily and Spain, refugees are forced into working on vegetable plantations as cheap labour, part of the hidden economy of slavery that’s found all over the world.
In Africa, Asia, and America, wherever weak governance exists, people are forced from their land by international actors in a form of robbery known as land grabbing, which undermines local communities, agriculture, and economies.
When you go to the grocery store and buy your vegetables, or shop online for your new computer device, you do not have any information about your consumption's ecological, social, or political implications. Nor do you understand how all of this influences your life. No one tells you about these aspects of a transaction as long as you do not consciously seek them out. They are glossed over by nice advertising stories or labels and packaging that often claim much more than they deliver.
In reality, the economy and violence are deeply interconnected. Violence is not a marginal phenomenon, as we might think. It is a central part of how we run our economy, and it has been this way from the very beginning.
One of the birthplaces of our form of capitalism is the island of Madeira. The Portuguese rediscovered this island in 1419 and soon established the first form of industrialized agriculture—sugarcane cultivation—and built a global market on it. Sugarcane was one of the first international commodities sought out, especially but not exclusively, in Europe. Inventions central to capitalism were utilized for this, such as international financing and the connection of various local demands and markets into an international trading cycle. Most importantly, this market was built upon the two most significant forms of violence: violence against humans (slavery) and violence against nature (relentless exploitation). Just 50 years later, the wood that gave the island its name was no longer available, because it had been overused.1
The Portuguese took what they learned and replicated it on a much larger scale in Brazil. Madeira was the starting point for an enormous slave trade from Africa to the Americas that followed in the centuries to come.
All those practices still exist: imperial power, ecological destruction, and slavery. Violence is a built-in feature of our economy, something from which we cannot distance ourselves. As active participants in the global economy, we are connected to all of its aspects. If we want to transform the economy into a regenerative servant of our communities, we need to look more closely at how this relationship works.
We will examine three important topics in the coming weeks: the entanglement of governance and economy, as well as the two main forms of violence: against humans and against nature.
More on this: Moore, J.W. (2010) Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the „First“ Sixteenth Century, Part II: From Regional Crisis to Commodity Frontier, 1506—1530. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 33, 1-24.
Moore, J.W. (2009) Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the „First“ Sixteenth Century: Part I: From „Island of Timber“ to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 32, 345-390.