The Tudor revolution
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Yes I would think that the resistance to Napoleon would be the beginning of Spanish nationalism but that’s outside the period we are talking about. The question is was there such a feeling or a ruling class attempt to inculcate such a feeling amongst the subjects of the Habsburg empire living in the Iberian Peninsula in the 17th century.
I don’t think the example of the Japanese Empire is a valid analogy as you could say the same about the British Empire. In any event, nationalism, as the belief that the people of a particular geographical area share a common interest and destiny, had become a common bourgeois ideology in the 19th century.
And going back to the 1600s, were the Ottoman and Chinese dynastic empires, which also participated in world trade, also thereby capitalist nation-states?
No, and the Chinese peasantry and small national bourgeoisie hated the Manchus. Even so, many eagerly joined the Court-engineered Boxer Rebellion in 1900, with a “nationalist”-type fury – but that was the Court exploiting a new national sentiment … which as quickly turned against the former again by 1911.
“A slow economic recovery began in the last decades of the 17th century under the Habsburgs. Under the Bourbons, government efficiency was improved, especially underCharles III‘s reign. The Bourbon reforms, however, resulted in no basic changes in the pattern of property holding. The nature of bourgeois class consciousness in Aragon and Castile hindered the creation of a middle-class movement. At the instance of liberal thinkers including Campomanes, various groups known as “Economic Societies of friends of the Country” were formed to promote economic development, new advances in the sciences, and Enlightenment philosophy (see <i>Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País</i>). However, despite the development of a national bureaucracy in Madrid, the reform movement could not be sustained without the patronage of Charles III, and it did not survive him.
Jan Bergeyck (advisor to Philip V) “Disorder I have found here is beyond all imagination”. Castile’s exchequer still used Roman numerals and there was no proper accounting.” (Wikipedia)
Gosh! They still used Roman numerals! And that in spite of 700 ,years of the Moors!
I was thinking of China and the Ottoman Empire in the 1600s but the case of China raises the question of why capitalism developed in the west of Europe but not in China when in the 1600s both these parts of the world were at the same stage of economic and technological development. The question is addressed in this article (don’t worry, it is not all in Portuguese):
https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101-31572017000100167&lng=pt&nrm=iso
The article suggests that it was due to the state there being so strong that it didn’t need to depend on taxing merchants to survive and so did not have to make concessions to them,
If this is a correct analysis, it suggests that, if Spain had prevented the establishment of the Dutch Republic and if the Spanish Armada had conquered England, then capitalism might not have taken off in Europe either, as the Spanish empire would have been too strong.
I am not saying it is correct but it seems at least plausible — and perhaps a reason for saying that Habsburg Spain was not a capitalist state.
Which raises the question of when did Spain become a capitalist nation state?
Apropos China, I read that the Mongol conquest of the 13th century which destroyed the Sung Dynasty also wiped out a nascent capitalism emerging here and there.
Are we saying that the immense overseas empires of Spain and Portugal were created by feudal kingdoms? (Including the Atlantic slave trade)?
The land empires of Russia and China don’t count, because their territories were added over centuries (millennia in China) as a result of ethnic and warlord feuding.
But Spain?
I was thinking more of the Spanish Empire in Europe. Loot from its overseas empire might have made the dynastic state less dependent on taxing merchants in Europe and so less need to make concessions to them. I don’t know. Just putting forward an idea to investigate.
ps I am not saying that China at the time was feudalism. One theory is that it was a development of Marx’s Asiatic Mode of production, sometimes also called Oriental Despotism.
The works of mao tse tung indicated that capitalism should have developed in China before England and the European nations but that development was paralyzed by all the wars and intervention of the European powers
On Marx ethnological notebooks iti shown that he was working on the asiátic mode of production which was different to the European feudalism
china had more commercial trades than all the European nations and they had the biggest commercial naval fleet biggest than Spain and some historians had indicated that they were the first one to teach the coast of the americas
In the New York tribunes Marx and Engels extensively wrote about China
China was feudal. It had the longest feudal era, 220 B.C.E. to 1911 C.E.
Not saying it was the same as Europe.
I’d take Mao with a pinch of salt. More than a pinch. The Maoists wanted Chinese development to match Europe’s, so they invented ancient chattel slavery for the period before Chin Shih Huang. But as others have pointed out, there was no slave society equivalent to Rome in China. Free farmers were bit by bit absorbed as feudal serfs, the process being finished in the Han Dynasty.
There appear to be many countries where the stock model of a bourgeoisie taking up arms and overthrowing the aristocracy just doesn’t fit.
You say that but to call China feudal is to beg the question. In fact, the nature of Chinese pre-capitalist society was highly controversial within the Moscow-directed “Communist “ parties in the 1920s and 1930s.
Some China specialists inside and outside Russia took up Marx’s suggestion that besides ancient slave society, feudalism and capitalism there was a fourth type of class society that he called the Asiatic mode of production. In this communistic village communities continued to exist but society was ruled by a bureaucracy, headed by an absolutist ruler, whose economic role was to organise and maintain irrigation systems on which the agriculture practised in the village communities depended and which were taxed to pay for this (and the maintenance of the bureaucracy).
This meant that society was ruled by a collective ruling class based on the state ownership of key means of production (the irrigation works). Some of Stalin’s ideologists realised that this could be applied to Russia — and in fact it was, as by the dissident Boris Souvarine in his book Stalin in which he argued that Russia was a modern society of this type where a ruling class owned the main means of production collectively with a despot at their head — and from then on further investigation of this concept was banned and it was decreed that all pre-capitalist societies throughout the world were “feudalism”.
Can we say India’s caste system was feudal? Or AMP?
It seems casteism can co-exist with capitalism, as did apartheid, although i believe the Party’s case was it wasn’t the boycott of South Africa or the ungovernable social unrest that ended apartheid but the requirement of business to incorporate the African and Indian population
My sources however, such as Rodzinski, are not Bolsheviks, and don’t take orders from the Stalins and Maos.
Landlords collected taxes for the state but pocketed much for themselves. And peasants would often be at the mercy of these, and of warring princes.
“Feudalism became popular during the Chou dynasty, a practice in which the king shared his power with lords, who in turn paid the king for their lands and titles. As the Chou dynasty weakened, lords fought among themselves. This Warring States period (403-221 B.C.E.) only ended when all of northern China was united under the Ch’in regime.
The Han dynasty immediately restored feudal lords to their positions of power.”
(ushistory.org)
It is not a matter of taking orders. It is matter of reading different sources that you have not read and studied in any way you are taking orders from somebody else.
Donald Trump said that he knew mote than the generals and he never participated in a war
Leon Trotsky also wrote about china due to the fact that Stalin wanted to apply the same mode of production on Russia like he applied Ford assembly line
The best source of information about China mode of production is Karl Marx he cleans the floor with anybody else and his ethnological notebook is an accurate description
It was not feudalism it was something different called as the asiatic mode of production
Many maoists organizations during the 60 wrote about China mode of production and it was internally discussed too
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