Das Kapital

Colonial plunder, the slave trade, national debt, and the systematic use of state power to concentrate wealth — these form the true origin story of industrial capital, as distinct from the merchant and usurer's capital that preceded it. Merchant and usurer's capital pre-dated capitalism by millennia. What converted these into industrial capital was the opening of the world market after 1492 and the violent extraction of wealth from the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The gold and silver of the Americas were looted, not traded. The slave trade delivered millions of Africans into forced labour across the plantations of the New World. The East India Company's conquest of Bengal, described by Marx in its particulars, combined political extortion with the systematic destruction of local industries. These were not market transactions. They were robberies on a civilisational scale. At home, the national debt became a mechanism of accumulation. The state borrowed from financiers at interest, then taxed the general population to service that debt — transferring wealth from workers and smallholders to the creditor class. Tax farming, protectionism, and colonial monopolies all served the same function: the forced concentration of money-wealth in the hands of the emerging capitalist class. Inside England, the factory system conducted its own primitive accumulation. Workhouse children — parish paupers — were 'apprenticed' to factory owners by local authorities and transported in batches to work in mills, often under conditions that Marx quotes contemporary witnesses comparing to slavery: day and night shifts in beds that never cooled between occupants, systematic overwork, malnutrition, and death. Industrial capitalism was not built by savers and innovators. It was built on blood and dirt, as Marx puts it — on colonial expropriation, enslaved labour, state-sponsored wealth transfer, and the exploitation of the most defenceless children England produced.