The industrial capitalist did not grow as slowly as the farmer. Some small guild masters and artisans did work their way up, but that snail's pace could not meet the demands of the new world market opened by the discoveries of the late fifteenth century. The Middle Ages had left two older forms of capital, the usurer's and the merchant's, and both were stuck. In the country the feudal order blocked them, and in the towns the guilds did, until feudal society dissolved and the peasantry was driven off the land. The new manufactures then settled in sea-ports and other places beyond the guilds' reach, and the corporate towns fought them. Marx's next move is to show where the money came from. Gold and silver found in America, the enslavement of its people and their burial in mines, the looting of the East Indies and the hunting of Africans were, he says, the rosy dawn of capitalist production. Commercial wars between the European nations followed, with the globe as their stage. By the end of the seventeenth century England had joined the colonies, the national debt, modern taxes and protection into one system. All of it used the power of the state, and force, Marx says, is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.
The colonial record is the first proof. In the Dutch East Indies, trained men-stealers seized young people and held them in the secret dungeons of Celebes until the slave-ships came. In 1641 the Dutch bribed the Portuguese governor of Malacca to let them in, then murdered him rather than pay the £21,875 they had promised. Banjuwangi, a province of Java, fell from over 80,000 people in 1750 to 18,000 in 1811. The English East India Company fared no better. Its officials held the monopolies of salt, opium and much internal trade, fixed the prices and plundered at will. One opium contract sold from Sullivan to Binn for £40,000 and the same day for £60,000. In 1769 and 1770 the English bought up all the rice and refused to sell it again except at fabulous prices, and a famine followed. In New England the Puritans set a bounty on every Indian scalp, £40 in 1703 and £100 in 1720. The treasure taken this way floated home and became capital. By 1648 Holland held nearly all the East Indian trade, and Marx adds that its own people were more overworked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than any in Europe.
At home the same state power worked through money. The national debt, Marx says, turns barren money into capital as if by a wand, because the lenders give nothing away: their loan becomes bonds that work just like cash. It also bred annuitants, financiers, joint-stock companies and the stock-exchange gambler. The Bank of England, founded in 1694, began by lending its money to the Government at 8%, and Parliament let it coin the same capital into banknotes and lend it again to the public. Debt needed taxes to pay the interest, and heavier taxes needed new loans, so that overtaxation became a principle. Protection did the same job for industry by manufacturing manufacturers, and England forcibly rooted out the Irish woollen manufacture. International credit hid the sources further. Holland, left behind in industry, lent huge sums to England between 1701 and 1776, and Marx says that capital which appears in the United States without a birth certificate was yesterday, in England, the capitalised blood of children.
Industry itself was born the same way. The factories, like the royal navy, were recruited by press-gang. When water-driven mills rose in the valleys of Lancashire, the owners wanted small, nimble fingers, and thousands of children aged seven to thirteen or fourteen were sent north from parish workhouses. John Fielden reports that they were flogged, fettered and starved, and some were driven to suicide. When profits still left the owners hungry, they ran night shifts, and the day set climbed into the beds the night set had just left, so that, as Lancashire tradition went, the beds never got cold. Liverpool grew fat on the slave trade, sending out 15 ships in 1730 and 132 in 1792. The veiled slavery of wage workers in Europe, Marx adds, needed slavery pure and simple in the new world as its pedestal. If money comes into the world with a blood-stain on one cheek, he ends, then capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
