Google says it’s origins can be traced back that far. OP probably just counted that. What we call capitalism really started kinda alongside the industrial revolution late 17-1800s.
I suppose you can try and pin this on the Dutch. But the economic practices of aggregating ownership around a legal business entity and organizing production towards the maximization of profit were quickly adopted by English shipping magnets from their Dutch peers.
If you think of the first corporation as the start of capitalism the Dutch East India company started in 1602, so that would be 17th century Netherlands, not 16th century England. In any case, I think the obvious choice for a date is 18th century England (together with the Industrial Revolution). Of course, you can trace the origins back much earlier even to antiquity, but capitalism the idea to organise most economic activity around capital is in my understanding more recent.
capitalism the idea to organise most economic activity around capital is in my understanding more recent
That’s a very literalist definition.
More broadly, capitalism is a system of private for-profit renting of capital for the purpose of using excess revenue to reinvest in new capital stock.
The main distinction between modern capitalism and traditional feudalism being that reinvestment aspect (feudal lords historically did a poor job of generating surplus or reinvesting in capital stocks). And the distinction between capitalism and socialism being private ownership versus public ownership of capital.
But all three were functionally “organized around capital”. Feudalist capital was just overwhelmingly real estate based, while the Dutch/English/French capitalists were more interested in industrial machinery (ships, mills, etc).
People usually treat as starting simultaneously with the industrial era. A better date range puts it earlier:
That’s an important and. Situating coal’s epoch-making capacities within class and
colonial relations predating steampower’s dominance yields an alternative periodization.
British-led industrialization unfolded through the linked processes of agricultural revolu-
tion at home and abroad – providing the labor-power for industry by expelling labor
from domestic agriculture and, in the case of the West Indian sugar colonies, channeling
capital surpluses into industrial development (Brenner 1976; Blackburn 1998). The possi-
bilities for the ‘prodigious development of the productive forces’ flowed through the
relations of power, capital and nature forged in early capitalism.
[…]
The erasure of capitalism’s early-modern origins, and its extraordinary reshaping of global
natures long before the steam engine, is therefore significant in our work to develop an
effective radical politics around global warming … and far more than global warming
alone! Ask any historian and she will tell you: how one periodizes history powerfully
shapes the interpretation of events, and one’s choice of strategic relations. Start the clock
in 1784, with James Watt’s rotary steam engine (Crutzen 2002a), and we have a very differ-
ent view of history – and a very different view of modernity – than we do if we begin with
the English and Dutch agricultural revolutions, with Columbus and the conquest of the
Americas, with the first signs of an epochal transition in landscape transformation after 1450.
Not to undermine the argument, but capitalism did not start in 16th century England.
Google says it’s origins can be traced back that far. OP probably just counted that. What we call capitalism really started kinda alongside the industrial revolution late 17-1800s.
I suppose you can try and pin this on the Dutch. But the economic practices of aggregating ownership around a legal business entity and organizing production towards the maximization of profit were quickly adopted by English shipping magnets from their Dutch peers.
If you think of the first corporation as the start of capitalism the Dutch East India company started in 1602, so that would be 17th century Netherlands, not 16th century England. In any case, I think the obvious choice for a date is 18th century England (together with the Industrial Revolution). Of course, you can trace the origins back much earlier even to antiquity, but capitalism the idea to organise most economic activity around capital is in my understanding more recent.
That’s a very literalist definition.
More broadly, capitalism is a system of private for-profit renting of capital for the purpose of using excess revenue to reinvest in new capital stock.
The main distinction between modern capitalism and traditional feudalism being that reinvestment aspect (feudal lords historically did a poor job of generating surplus or reinvesting in capital stocks). And the distinction between capitalism and socialism being private ownership versus public ownership of capital.
But all three were functionally “organized around capital”. Feudalist capital was just overwhelmingly real estate based, while the Dutch/English/French capitalists were more interested in industrial machinery (ships, mills, etc).
“Magnates”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/magnate-vs-magnet-usage-difference
People usually treat as starting simultaneously with the industrial era. A better date range puts it earlier:
(middle of the 15th century)