Nature's Evil

It was not only shepherds and plough boys who had never heard of the division of labour; specialisation was also unknown to many others who worked professionally in the extraction business, even when their activities experienced impressive growth. The fishermen of Norway and New England didn’t build their ships or make their nets and barrels, but they had to repair all these things. Fishing was seasonal, and fishermen never forgot their agricultural work. English miners hacked coal, cleaned it and packed it in crates; they constructed new galleries, reinforced them and sorted out the ventilation; when necessary, they brought first aid and repaired the machines. In many mines the work was seasonal; when the groundwater rose the miners returned to their kitchen gardens and home trades. The only work that was divided was auxiliary; the coal diggers in the mines were as interchangeable as the sailors on a ship. The Industrial Revolution gave birth to hundreds of new trades – for example, in the smelting and forging of metals. But the work of a miner did not lend itself to much specialisation. Even when assisted by machines, it still required creative responses to changing situations. This is true to a large extent even today. Everything that involves direct contact with nature demands the creative work and undivided attention of a human being.

The division of labour secured the highest achievements of capitalism. Proto-industrialisation developed some primary divisions, but weavers and knitters were also milkmaids, housekeepers and gardeners. It was only in the 1840s that European proto-industries ceded their place to capital-intensive factories with actual division of labour – and the ‘spectre of communism’ has haunted Europe since then. But even professional traders specialised only on the lower rungs of their hierarchy: money changers, shopkeepers, peddlers were specialists, but bankers, merchants and industrialists were more likely to be all-rounders. Capitalism is founded on the division of labour, but capitalists paid it scant attention. We remember the early universalism of Jacob Fugger, but many followed in his footsteps. Braudel portrays the late eighteenth-century entrepreneur Antonio Greppi, who owned a bank in Milan, managed state monopolies in tobacco and salt in Lombardy, and delivered mercury via Vienna to the Spanish king. 13 In Moscow in the seventeenth century, ‘everybody traded’ – the tsar, the boyars, the military, ordinary townsfolk and even monks. Moreover, they traded in everything imaginable. The state tried to distribute shops in logical ‘trade rows’ that could be easily inspected; but, nevertheless, shops in the bakery row also sold milk, crockery and hay, and the butchery rows sold herring and linen. 14 The essence of capitalism is such that specialists are needed only in the minor roles, though these roles turn into mass professions; in the wholesale and financial markets, generalists usually win the fight. Contrary to Smith’s theory, those at the very bottom and the very top of the food chain of capitalism – the peasants and the miners, the entrepreneurs and the financiers – were not concerned with the division of labour into its elementary particles.

No division of labour occurred in subsistence farming; it came only with the market and, wrote Smith, depended on the volume of the market. Going further, Polanyi distinguished between three kinds of trade – local, national and long-distance; all three developed independently of one another. In the towns there were trades, and one such trade was trade itself; many towns, in reality, grew up around markets. But long-distance trade was concentrated in a few ports which followed their own path of development. The routes of distant and local trade intersected there, but the authorities kept them separate. Foreign merchants were not allowed to carry out retail; in exchange, the local rules did not apply to their wholesale trade. According to Polanyi’s formula, the town walls not only protected the local markets and warehouses from external threats but also defended the surrounding countryside from market commerce. Various parts of the Hanseatic League had more in common with each other than with their own people, and they ‘deliberately cut off the hinterland from trade’. They functioned as colonial enclaves in a foreign land; some of them, for example in Novgorod, were called ‘colonies’. The imperial cities that functioned as distribution hubs for long-distance trade – Venice, Amsterdam, Marseilles, St Petersburg – were structured differently. Facing the sea, they often had no walls. The port was defended from possible attacks from the sea, the workforce came from afar or was even driven there by force, but relations with the surrounding population were not so important. In the rural backwaters people continued to live from their smallholdings; as Polanyi put it, the trade maps of Europe in this period ‘leave blank the countryside’.