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HOW ORANGEISM PAVED THE WAY FOR BRITISH CAPITAL
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Mark Hackett
July 29, 2024
Monthly Review
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_ William’s rise to power brought new means of exploitation and
expropriation, by which the assets and rights of the common people
were eroded and a massive concentration of wealth at the top end of
the scale enabled. _
William of Orange being welcomed to England in 1688. William and his
wife, Mary, were crowned king and queen of England in the Glorious
Revolution., Hulton Archive/Getty Images
They built the world as we know it, all the systems you traverse.
Thus sang The Fall’s Mark E. Smith on the Manchester band’s 1988
record, _I Am Kurious Oranj_
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based on the 300th anniversary of William of Orange’s ascension to
the English throne. While some of the credits Smith bestowed on King
William III warrant closer inspection—having “paved the way for
the atom bomb” and “inventing birth control,” for
instance—what the revolution of 1688 did pave the way for was the
radical transformation of Britain’s socioeconomic order in favor of
capitalist accumulation. With William’s rise to power, the
country’s emergent bourgeoisie secured the political hegemony needed
to bend the apparatus of the state to their collective will, smashing
up the existent feudal and familial alliances that characterized the
pre-capitalist economy, enabling the mass appropriation of common land
by industrial agriculture, and forcing the newly dispossessed
peasantry to take up the mantle of wage labor. Often styled the
“Glorious” or “Bloodless” Revolution, 1688 enshrined the
conditions by which state power became an instrument for subordinating
land and labor to the demands of capital.
BARRIERS TO CAPITAL BEFORE 1688
The wealth of the English bourgeoisie—loosely made up of merchants,
manufacturers, financiers, and landed capitalists—accumulated
rapidly in the century leading up to revolution, as the country’s
manufacturing and commercial enterprises experienced rapid
development. Such prosperity was assisted in no small part by
England’s lucrative stake in the Atlantic Slave Trade: between 1676
and 1726 the number of enslaved people transported by British traders
from Africa to North America increased from 243,300 to 490,500. Such
was the expansion of Britain’s involvement in global trade that by
1688 its commercial and industrial enterprises were generating over a
third of the national income. But for the profits accruing to the
bourgeoisie to continue unchecked, it was vital that their economic
power translate into the political influence capable of uprooting the
legal barriers to monopolization. These barriers consisted largely of
property rights preventing the commercialization of common land and
the transferring of funds from the countryside to the city. Historian
Geoffrey Hodgson explains that
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the beginning of the eighteenth century about one quarter of arable
land in England was held in commons, where villagers shared rights to
the use of pastures, water sources or woods. This common land could
not be sold or mortgaged.” Such restrictions posed an intolerable
legal obstacle to the appropriation of arable land for large-scale
industrial farming—an obstacle that the architects of the 1688
Revolution were intent on shattering from behind a royal mask.
THE DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS
The Dutch-led invasion brought with it an influx of Dutch financiers
and businessmen who, with their relatively sophisticated knowledge of
public and private finance, helped remodel England’s financial and
administrative institutions to facilitate the bourgeoisie’s
political hegemony. This came about in a series of Acts—beginning
with the 1689 Declaration of Rights—which succeeded in eroding the
legal protections concerning the sale of common land, entails, and
“strict settlements.” Such acts also succeeded in hobbling the
prestige of the nobility and landed gentry, whose vested interest in
the feudal nature of property rights was sorely affected by the
government selling off land for industrial farming. But as the state
became increasingly dependent on the bourgeois class to fund the
country’s various European wars (funding which increased from
£2,000,000 per year before 1688 to £6,000,000 between 1689 and
1702), so it became increasingly receptive to their demands for
deregulation and the privatization of common land.
ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION
The impact of this institutional shakeup on the majority of the
population offers an object lesson in the art of what David Harvey
refers to as
“accumulation by dispossession.” The rural peasantry was swept of
the newly privatized land to make way for sheep farming and large
landed estates. The traditional agrarian communities were broken up
and the mass of displaced people, with little option but to sell their
labor power in the new urban industries, were forced into the ranks of
the proletariat. As Karl Marx observed, this forcible alienation of
the rural populace from their land produced “a degraded and almost
servile condition of the mass of the people, their transformation into
mercenaries, and the transformation of their means of labour into
capital.”
The Highland Clearances provide a stark example of the kind of
systematic theft of communal property, and the attendant forced
evictions, that were made possible under the reorganized state. The
Clearances involved the forcible transformation of the property of the
Highland clans—common land on which the rural communities of
northern Scotland made their living—into the private property of
English nobles who coveted the land for pasturage. With the aid of the
English military, the families who for centuries had lived in this
region were systematically expelled and exterminated to make room for
sheep and cattle farms; their villages razed and homes burned.
Sporadic resistance to eviction was met with brutal reprisals,
terrorism, and executions. Most of the newly appropriated land was
subdivided into large sheep farms, mostly occupied by English
farm-laborers paying rent to an absentee lord. In the case of the
one-million-acre estate she seized, the Countess of Sutherland was
“generous” enough to sell 6,000 acres of barren rock back to the
15,000 men, women, and children evicted from their homes.
CREATING THE LABORING POOR
This type of terroristic landgrab, which continued well into the
nineteenth century, succeeded in pushing swathes of people into abject
poverty just as they were separated from their homes and their means
of sustaining themselves. The state’s response to this newly
immiserated class is one that should be familiar to us today: it
dehumanized them, branded them thieves and vagabonds, punished them
with systemic oppression, and threw them in jail. Such punitive
measures were aimed at socializing the dispossessed into accepting the
disciplinary apparatus of capital and their new situation as the
laboring poor. The overt violence unleashed during the initial stages
of proletarization was followed by the softer powers of the state to
preserve this new economic hegemony: education, policing, and laws
inhibiting collective organization. As Marx reflected on the
disenfranchisement of the rural populace, “Thus were the
agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven
from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded,
and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the
discipline necessary for wage-labour.”
This is not to say that the social order displaced by the
revolution’s expansion of capitalist accumulation was some halcyon
age, the “Merrie England” mourned in Thomas
Gray’s _Elegy, _and of course many went happily from the
countryside to the new industrial centers in hopes of a better
standard of living and improved working conditions. Yet, the
institutional reforms dreamed up by the architects of William’s rise
to power brought new means of exploitation and expropriation, by which
the assets and rights of the common people were eroded and a massive
concentration of wealth at the top end of the scale enabled.
_MARK HACKETT is a freelance writer and researcher based in Glasgow,
Scotland. He holds a BA in Literature from University of Ulster and an
MA In Philosophy from University of Glasgow. You can contact him at
markhackett19 [at] outlook.com._
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