Capital

What characterizes the dawn of the era of capitalist production? Gold and silver were discovered in America; the native population there was wiped out, enslaved, and entombed in mines; India was conquered and plundered; and Africa was turned into a commercial hunting preserve with dark-skinned people as the prey. These idyllic processes largely constitute original accumulation. Following right behind them was the European nations commercial war, whose battlefield encompassed the entire globe. This war began with the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain, swelled to gigantic dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and continues into the present day as the Opium Wars against China.

The different aspects of original accumulation were put in motion by, in particular, Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England, more or less in chronological order. In late seventeenth-century England, they were methodically combined in a number of systems: the colonial system, the national debt system, the modern tax system, and the system of protec-tionism. These methods relied in part on the most brutal violence-for example, the colonial system did. But they all employed the power of the state, the concentrated, organized violence of society, to quicken the transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, as though in a hothouse, and to shorten the transitions. Violence is the midwife for every society pregnant with a new one. It is in fact a kind of economic power.

Karl Marx

1818 - 1883