- Joined
- May 14, 2019
I don't remember the name of the scholar but there's a group called the new historians of capitalism that are ilke the 1619 Project, but with capitalism instead of America as their focus. This guy was one of them and he had an idea of "war capitalism" which was that early capitalism was very militaristic and dependent on coercive elements. A lot of forced trade (instead of free trade), plantation production, stuff like that. Both the Old South and the East India Company would be "war capitalism" in his case. He argued that war capitalism (markets for goods but coercion in production) was NECESSARY (this is where he was wrong) to develop industrial capitalism (wage labor), and in the United States we saw this play out with war capitalism creating industrial capitalism and then being eaten alive by it in the Civil War because industrial capitalism needed war capitalism to begin but not to survive. It had outlived its usefulness.
My point, which no one cared about though I thought it was significant, was that the North was every bit as "war capitalist" as the South, just directed overseas - and out of mind - instead of internally.
America makes a lot of sense when you start thinking of it as a land empire (the South) and a maritime empire (the North) shackled to each other. Although honestly, and like I'd mentioned, most of the Indian Wars of the later 1800s were the North's doing for the North's benefit.
I even looked up the Battle of the Little Bighorn once, statistics on the soldiers, and almost all of them were Yankees or foreigners.
