Conclusions: On So-Called Primitive Accumulation

Abstract

The process of capital accumulation is a, if not the, principal motor of modern history and constitutes the central problem examined in this book. Yet capital accumulation, and its treatment here, poses a number of fundamental theoretical and therefore also empirical questions that remain largely unresolved. These questions fall into four related categories: (1) primitive, primary, and capitalist capital accumulation; (2) the unequal structure and relations of production, circulation, and realization in capital accumulation; (3) uneven transformation of capital accumulation through stages, cycles, and crises; and (4) unending class struggle in capital accumulation, through the state, war, and revolution. Insofar as one single and continuous process of capital accumulation has existed in this world for several centuries, this heuristic division of the problem into unequal structure, uneven process, and so on is necessarily arbitrary. The structural inequality and temporal unevenness of capital accumulation, on the other hand, are inherent to capitalism.

I have not answered all the questions that my readers will pose themselves at the end of this excessively long trip that I have imposed on them. But in history the perfect book, the book that never again shall be written, does not exist. On the contrary, history is an ever changing interrogation of the past, inasmuch as it must adapt itself to the necessities and sometimes the anxieties of the present. History offers itself as a means for the knowledge of man and not as an end in itself. I do not know what, in this context, the reader will be able to get out of a book like this one; everyone has his own way of dialoging with a book. As for me, this Mediterranean, magnificent and charged with the ages of the sixteenth century, today buried in the world of shadows, has made me pass over many paths, pursuing many problems that are problems of today, and not of yesterday or the day before …

—Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le Monde méditerranéen à l’Epoque de Philippe II