I'd be up for it
Imo repeating vol1 would be the best bet bc vol2 and vol3 are note-form Marx in places, basically un-edited and written before the publication of vol1.
Vol1 is also conveniently broken up into 10ish page chunks making for a much better book club experience.
I quite liked it, though I definitely agree on the some degree of brainwormy. It really does a good job of (if unintentionally) showing how fundamentally different eastern bloc economics were from the capitalist world
Ronald Hutton's books (esp. Triumph of the Moon) are good if you wanna avoid ahistoricalness
Yeah, from what ik generally it'd be the older animals, much older than we kill them today and very much restricted to events where a large group beyond the immediate owners gets to eat (e.g. chiefly feasts in the Scottish highlands; saints' feastdays in much of Europe or various sacrifices in Rome or Judah). The whole idea of breeding and raising exclusively to butcher comes with markets export of goods for consumption in the cities. There's also just more concern in general for the animal because you're relying on them for various other tasks (and just generally, its easier to deal with a contented animal than an angry one)
Saito in Karl Marx's Ecosocialism actually shows that Marx had thoughts on the 'modern', rapid, meat-focused, industrialised animal agriculture, as it was developing:
Marx’s excerpts from Lavergne’s Rural Economy of England, Scotland and Ireland (1855) are of interest. ... Marx notes that Lavergne is excited about the progress made by Bakewell sheep and discovers a proof of the superiority of English agriculture:
Bakewell. Earlier English sheep, as French now, not fit for the butcher, before 4 or 5 years. According to his system it may be fattened as early as one year old, and in every case has reached its full growth before the end of the 2nd year. By System of Selection. (19) (Bakewell—farmer of Dishley Grange.) (Reduced size of the sheep. Only so many bones as necessary for their existence) His sheep are called “new Leicesters.” “The breeder can now send 3 to market in the same space of time that it formerly took him to prepare one; and broader, rounder, greater development in those parts which give most flesh.… Almost all their weight is pure meat.”94
Lavergne is enthusiastic about the shortening of time necessary for the animals’ maturity thanks to Bakewell’s “system of selection,” which also increased the amount of meat.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, many of Bakewell’s “New Leicesters” were brought into Ireland and crossed with native sheep, creating new races, known as “Roscommon” and “Galway.”95 The original ecosystem in Ireland was transformed from the perspective of maximizing profits and ground rents, and this is exactly another example of ecological imperialism. Here the health and wealth of animals are not a primary concern, but what is important is their utility for capital. Notably, this type of progress did not impress Marx, and thus he wrote without hesitation in his private notebook: “Characterized by precocity, in entirety sickliness, want of bones, a lot of development of fat and flesh etc. All these are artificial products. Disgusting!”96
In the excerpts from Wilhelm Hamm’s Agricultural Tools and Machines in England (Die landwirthschaftlchen Geräthe und Maschinen Englands), one finds a similar remark by Marx. As a reaction to Hamm’s praise of intensive farming in England—Hamm translated Lavergne’s work into German—Marx calls “feeding in the stable” the “system of cell prison” and asks himself:
In these prisons animals are born and remain there until they are killed off. The question is whether or not this system connected to the breeding system that grows animals in an abnormal way by aborting bones in order to transform them to mere meat and a bulk of fat—whereas earlier (before 1848) animals remained active by staying in free air as much as possible—will ultimately result in serious deterioration of life force?97>
Friend your citation is to a book chapter which mentions the author's previous work on the industrious revolution...in the early modern (i.e. Ming) period. It does not say what you want it to say.
Large, centralised, powerful states inhibit the expansion of mercantile power. Historically (cf. Aglietta & Bai China's Development: Capitalism and Empire) the Chinese states would break up concentrations of merchant power.
Also to add to what Dolores said about Qing, I wanna point out that it (and Ming, etc) had superior famine relief and general peasant living standards. To quote Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts: "In Europe's Age of Reason [c.1700] the "starving masses" were French, Irish and Calabrian, not Chinese".
Capitalism's development is things going wrong. What we have today is the result of class struggle (paricularly around the mediterranean) ending in "common ruin of the contending classes"(Manifesto p.1) at best, triumph of the oppressing class at worst, repeatedly, for millennia. It is not a system that develops when a society is healthy or flourishing.
This whole idea that a Chinese Empire would engage in European style colonial policies is absurd, because we have historical examples of what Chinese expansion looks like; generally a slower (but still bad, brutal etc) encroching process with tribute taken as personal gifts for the emperor / court (here I am drawing primarily on Ye's The Colonisation and Settlement of Taiwan and Walker's The Conquest of Ainu Land). Native autonomy maintained often by military action from above against local officials. That the tribute is generally restricted to articles for use rather than exchange means "no boundless thirst for surplus labour will arise" (Kapital p.345), hence no boundless, rapacious growth. This sorta tribute (and de jure acknowledgement of Chinese supremacy) came from places as distant as Southeast Asia, East Africa and Hokkaido.
The two big waves of (again, still brutal, traumatic etc) migration of mainland Chinese to Taiwan during imperial era was during one of the medieval dynasty transitions, when the loser fled to Taiwan, and in the mid 1800s, when China was trying to prove that it was being a "real" empire and "civilizing" the area.
I'm still not sure. As @Dolores@hexbear.net says it likely had something to do with islamic conquest (not Ottoman though; the split occurred before then). It was against religious law for Sunni muslims to live outside of the House of Islam or to trade with the christians (this rule was of course violated), and their economic and administrative systems took very seperate courses from very early on. Sadly I havent done investigation into exactly what these differences were etc so cannot speak to them beyond generalities such as more centralisation. Deforestation is a strong possibility and definitely a factor, but without more research its hard to know how much
However, drawing on Jones' work on the collapse of Rome, its clear that this divergence between East and West predated the rise of Islam. The trade economy of the West was never as robust as the East, and when it lost imperial trade connections, it collapsed hard, much harder than the East.
In the Eastern empire existing admin anf economic structures were taken over and only slightly altered, existing groups, peasant or aristocrat, taxed. In the West otoh, Rome's settler-colonial policies saw mass settlement of retired soldiers with slaves (from conquests) for farm work. Slaves therefore featured more heavily in the western empire, and as the Western empire fell they rose slightly, to become protoserfs, whereas the remaining free farmers fell into protoserfdom.
These slave-owning small farmers were firmly tied to and dependent on Roman markets for many necessary commodities. As one example, some parts of the empire (e.g. Britain) native-made pottery disappears from the Archaeological record in favour of those imported. As a result, following the collapse, britons had to relearn the ability to make pots from the ground up.
Mostly going off of Jones' 2 volume work on the later empire. Slavery basically permeates every pore of Roman society, especially in production.
Mediterranean to start with. It's huge and relatively calm to sail on, so lotsa trade, meaning lots of practice (and profit) in improving those trading ships. Rome took this to new (horrific) heights; mass (slave) produced, standardised pottery from North Africa can be found across the entire empire, from Jerusalem to London. Rome's power (and wealth) was built on this slave labour (both in factories and in villas and in boats).
Rome's collapse slowed the marketization and decreased the scale, but on the whole by this point, such methods of transport and trade had reached the northern coast of Europe, which has a similarly large, but less calm sea. Traders here needed more navigatory techniques, and of course traders going all the way around Iberia, the sea route connecting these two seas, requires naval expertise.
Europe's polities are tiny and constantly fighting, in need of cash to pay armies (increasingly, mercenary armies). Merchants are hence supported, sponsered, etc. From here, see my points about the clock and navigatory technology above.
Trade. Specifically, trade overseas (sea transport is much faster than land transport to the point of qualitative difference) allowed by long-distance ships. This seems to have had dramatic effects from very early on centred around the Mediterranean (e.g. Bronze age, Hellenic world, Rome, etc for more detail see Broodbank's The Making of the Middle Sea). The secret to merchants' capital and hence merchants' power is found in ch5 of Kapital:
The form of circulation within which money is transformed into capital contradicts all the previously developed laws bearing on the nature of commodities, value, money and even circulation itself. What distinguishes this form from that of the simple circulation of commodities is the inverted order of succession of the two antithetical processes, sale and purchase. How can this purely formal distinction change the nature of these processes, as if by magic?
But that is not all. This inversion has no existence for two of the three persons who transact business together. As a capitalist, I buy commodities from A and sell them again to B... [A&B] step forth only as buyers or sellers of commodities. I myself confront them each time as a mere owner of either money or commodities, as a buyer or a seller, and what is more, in both sets of transactions I confront A only as a buyer and B only as a seller. I confront the one only as money, the other only as commodities, but neither of them as capital or a capitalist, or a representative of anything more than money or commodities, or of anything which might produce any effect beyond that produced by money or commodities.(258)
Even in the relatively even playing field of the Mediterranean, this creates the ability of one party, the capitalist, to hold an overwhelming advantage of knowledge of (closer to) the entire process of exchange, instead of one part. In addition, this creates impetus to find new sources of valuable materials (a source of relative surplus value) spurring expansion. These twin impulses help drive and enable early European expansion. The next key to super-imperialism lies in the medieval monasteries.
Moving quickly (for more detail; Landes The Invention of Time and parts of Crosby The Measure of Reality), medieval monks became very fixated on routine, schedule, fixed times unchanged by the movement of the sun, etc. This made them efficient workers, and it spread into the cities. This conception of time (time composed of homogenous, discrete units instead of heterogenous, continous movement) is a necessary precondition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production, but here we are interested in its relationship to the construction of the modern escapement clock (as opposed to e.g. water clocks, sun-dials, etc).
Modern clocks (basically the kind where time is measured by discrete intervals of sounds; the tick) arise from this conception of time, as a way to create clocks that are more consistent. At first, a main goal of such clocks was to regulate monastery life better; it spread to cities and burghers from there. At this point, we are at the pendulum clocks, and these serve well for use on land. However, the clock has applications for navigation.
In sea navigation you wanna know how far North/South you are (latitude) and how far East/West (longitude). Latitude is much easier to find to an accurate degree than longitude, so it was a major limiting factor in naval navigation. The pendulum clock allowed for much more accurate longitudinal readings, but pendulums do not work at sea. Even more complicated, smaller, mechanical clocks were needed, and they were created. This allowed Europe to reinforce its naval navigation advantage regarding trade.
From 1492 and even earlier, the ships developed through mass trade in the mediterranean saw Europe become a global middleman, buying (or stealing) goods in places where they were common and selling them in places where they were rarer. This was ultimately the source of European wealth and power, as they enjoyed a collective near monopoly on (direct) intercontinental trade, flow of information and military movement.
Europe's dependence on those ships gave it impetus to develop more intricate clocks and ships, and the wealth flowing into Europe gave it the means. As Europe shifted more towards exporting manufactured goods, this created impetus for methods to rapidly produce tons of shit. As manufacture turned into industry (meaning; as the machine was invented and the human turned into a mere motive power and machine-minder), a more controllable motive power was needed, and coincidentally existed in large quantities in the centre of manufacture (Britain).
The information gap also makes resistance, or even intention to resist more difficult:
The circulation of commodities differs from the direct exchange of products not only in form, but in its essence. We have only to consider the course of events. The weaver has undoubtedly exchanged his linen for a Bible, his own commodity for someone else's. But this phenomenon is only true for him. The Biblepusher, who prefers a warming drink to cold sheets, had no intention of exchanging linen for his Bible; the weaver did not know that wheat had been exchanged for his linen. B's commodity replaces that of A, but A and B do not mutually exchange their commodities...We see here, on the one hand, how the exchange of commodities breaks through all the individual and local limitations of the direct exchange of products, and develops the metabolic process of human labour. On the other hand, there develops a whole network of social connections of natural origin, entirely beyond the control of the human agents. (208)
...
Since money does not reveal what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into money. Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable. Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal.(229)
Conditions of production (e.g. extraordinarily brutal slavery, unprecendented ecocide, etc) are similarly in "the hidden abode of production on whose threshold there hangs the notice 'No admittance except on business'"(279-80), so for example while someone might reject trading furs for alcohol if they knew the alcohol was made with horrific slave labour, the conditions of international trade kept most knowledge in European hands. Without being aware of the conditions of oppression, without lines of communication, without immediate knowledge of the Europeans' goals, etc, co-ordinated defence against Europe is difficult.
Yeah there's four volumes:
Volume One published 1867 and revised three times before Marx's death. This is the one Marx expected people to read and is edited for readability, clarity, consistency, style, etc. This is the best book ever written by anyone ever.
Volumes two and three were published after Marx's death, by Engels. They are edited mostly from a single manuscript each iirc, both written before the publication of volume one. These ones are not ones Marx expected people to read, and it is barely edited at all (and not edited for readability, clarity, consistency, style, etc). These ones are alright, but barely readable in large sections even by nerds.
Volume four is the historical part where Marx details the history of the various schools of political economy, published after Engels' death by Kautsky
It is a very good demonstration of how to criticise political economists; unfortunately, as Marx learnt later in life, if you criticise the political economists hard enough (and the bourgeois gain enough political power) they will stop even trying to make sense and invent marginalism.