Where did most capitalists reside during the late nineteenth century?

Abstract

To understand the economic character, transnational politics, and labor regime characteristic of contemporary globalization, it is useful to revisit the concept of “merchant capitalism,” a form of market exchange that dominated trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then as now, commodities proved crucial to world commerce, merchants held the whip hand over manufacturers, while workers found their remuneration and working conditions subject to competitive pressures that often debased their status. The transnational retailers who today dominate so many global supply chains therefore play many of the same roles as did the antebellum merchants of New York and Liverpool who favored free trade and formed an alliance with those who deployed unfree labor to grow the cotton and other commodities upon which the trading system of their day was built.

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44. Proponents of such an analysis can be found on the left, the center, and the right. Sociologist Richard Appelbaum and American Studies theorist Andrew Ross see such a future as men of the left. Thomas Friedman and Niall Ferguson, in the center, agree albeit with some alarm; and on the right it is the near universal view that China's stratified economic enterprises will soon eat our lunch. Ross, Andrew, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; and for an indication that the Chinese government is looking for ways to raise labor standards and push production up the supply chains, see Appelbaum et al., “China's New Labor Contract Law,” 485–490.

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