O que é este blog?

Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.

Mostrando postagens com marcador Sven Beckert. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Sven Beckert. Mostrar todas as postagens

quinta-feira, 24 de outubro de 2019

Capitalismo escravocrata: uma nova história econômica dos EUA - Sven Beckert e Seth Rockman

Slavery's Capitalism by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman

(excerpts)
In the 1700s, China was the largest economy in the world. However, it was overtaken in the 1800s, first by England, then the United States. Some economic historians suggest that slavery -- tragic and horrifying slavery -- was central to this transformation, first through England's lucrative slave-based colonies in the Caribbean and North America, then, after America's independence, through America's slave-based tobacco and cotton industries. In America, the financial value of slaves alone exceeded the combined financial value of all the nation's rail­roads and factories:
"During the eighty years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery was indispensable to the economic development of the United States. Such a claim is at once self-evidently true and empirically obscure. ... Only in the past several years has scholarship on finance, accounting, management, and technology allowed us to understand American economic development as 'slavery's capitalism.' And only now is there enough momentum to leverage some basic facts -- that slave-grown cotton was the most valuable export made in America, that the capital stored in slaves exceeded the combined value of all the nation's rail­roads and factories ...
Ledger of sale of 118 slaves, Charleston,
South Carolina, c. 1754
"Nineteenth-century Americans had little difficulty grasping slavery's capitalism. Advocates of national economic development presumed the recipro­cal relationship of the slaveholding and nonslaveholding states, as well as the mutual interests of the slaveholder, manufacturer, and merchant. 'On the White mountains of New Hampshire we find the sugar of Louisiana, and in the plains beyond the Mississippi the cotton cloths of Rhode Island are do­mesticated,' explained the famed editor Hezekiah Niles in 1827. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison recognized the North as a 'partner in iniq­uity' and credited the Panic of 1837 with delivering a deserved ruin to those New York City mercantile firms engaged in commerce with the South. In turn, southern nationalists lambasted northern sanctimoniousness. 'Many of the abolitionists of the present-day affect to have such tender consciences, and to feel such abhorrence of slavery, that they declare they will not wear the cot­ton of the South, because it has been cultivated by slaves,' observed the Bal­timore minister Alexander McCaine, 'yet, these extremely sensitive, and pre-eminently holy characters, feel no qualms of conscience, to sell Southern planters their boots and shoes, their negro cloth, and all the et cetera that make up a cargo of Yankee notions, and put the money, arising from the labour of slaves, in their pockets.' Indeed, an 1845 manufacturing census found that nearly half the woolens manufacturers in Rhode Island produced textiles for plantation markets. A South Carolina industrialist such as William Gregg might rightfully lament that such thriving northern cities as Bridgeport, Con­necticut, had 'been built by the capital of Charleston,' while a compatriot writing in De Bow's Review could declare slavery the 'nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.'
"The escalation of political tensions in the 1850s generated ever more vivid renderings of the economic relationship between the sections. The New England minister Orpheus Lanphear described slavery as 'a huge serpent' menacing 'Northern Capital, Trade, and Manufactures': its 'hiss was heard in the Stock-market, and in the Counting-house, making the very Ledgers tremble in their cases. It was audible in the whirl of every spindle, and the vibration of every loom, in the muttering of every waterwheel, and in the whistle of every engine; and rang its menace along the edge of the ship-carpenter's adze.' ... 'Every man at the North, who makes a plough, a hoe, a shovel, or a cotton-gin, to aid the production of cotton, should be counted as a hand engaged in that crop,' argued one advocate of reconcilia­tion. It was a familiar refrain that the North was poised to kill the goose that has laid their golden egg.' ...
"As capitalism expanded from within the world market it had created, slavery came to play a central, even decisive, role­ -- first in the Caribbean and Latin America, and then in North America­ -- tightly connected to the world-altering Industrial Revolution and the so-called Great Divergence. ...
"More than a century ago, W. E. B. Dubois recognized American slavery as an outgrowth of European colonialism, and scholars such as Stuart Hall, Eric Wolf, Ced­ric J. Robinson, and Robin Blackburn have long situated the plantation-driven economies of British North America and the subsequent United States within an international history of capitalism and empire. Economic history has more recently explored comparative questions, puzzling over the late emergence of England as a rival to China for global economic dominance. Slave-mined sil­ver in the Americas first provided European empires the opportunity to gain access to Chinese markets and consumer goods, and slave-grown agricultural commodities gave England specifically the possibility of supplanting China by escaping the environmental constraints on its population growth. As Ken­neth Pomeranz has argued, one factor in England's ability to break the 'Mal­thusian trap' was that nation's access to calories and fibers in the form of sugar and cotton harvested on American plantations."
Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Early American Studies)
Author: Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Copyright 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
Pages: 1-3, 8

domingo, 1 de fevereiro de 2015

O Imperio do Algodao: uma historia global - Sven Beckert (book)

Acabo de terminar de ler este livro, que recomendo vivamente, por se tratar, realmente, de uma história global do algodão, de sua cultura, de seu comércio e sobretudo de sua industrialização, o primeiro empreendimento da revolução industrial e a primeira indústria verdadeiramente global, com seu centro em Manchester, depois se espalhando pelo mundo inteiro. A informação disponível sobre o Brasil é da melhor qualidade, baseada em nossos historiadores econômicos, em teses universitárias e no famoso livro do brasilianista Stanley J. Stein, The Brazilian Cotton Manufacture. Transcrevo aqui a parte final, por mim traduzida, de suas referências ao Brasil, quando a industrialização realmente deslancha:

“As três décadas pós-1892 foram chamadas de a idade do ouro da manufatura brasileira de algodão. Foi na sequência da emancipação da escravidão que as elites manufatureiras ganharam mais influência sobre o governo e conseguiram induzir políticas coerentes com os seus interesses, especialmente tarifas. Em 1860, a tarifa sobre o algodão era tão baixa quanto 30% sobre o valor das importações, em 1880 ela tinha dobrado para 60%, e, depois de batalhas delongadas, elas se elevaram para 100% em 1885. Elas ainda ascenderam em 1886, em 1889 e em 1900. As tarifas protecionistas de 1900 permaneceram então em vigor durante três décadas, criando um mercado protegido altamente lucrativo para os fabricantes. Como resultado, em torno de 1920, 75 a 85% de todos os produtos de algodão usados no Brasil eram fiados e fabricados internamente. Um inglês disse com grande pesar em 1921 que '21 anos atrás o Brasil era um excelente mercado para Manchester... Primeiramente os tecidos ordinários caíram fora, e agora todos esses bens estão sendo fabricados no país, e apenas os de qualidade superior ficaram para ser importados'”. p. 400, frase do inglês citado, no livro de Stanley Stein, p. 101."

Um grande livro de história econômica e de história do capitalismo.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida  

Sven Beckert: The Empire of Cotton: A Global History 

 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, 616 p.; ISBN: 978-0-375-41414-5)

About The Book

9780375414145Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, and combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially reshape the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia, and how industrial capitalism gave birth to an empire, and how this force transformed the world.

The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.