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Silvia Federici ., The Acc umul ation of Labo r and th e Degr adation of Wo men:

Constructi ng "Dif ference" in the "T ransition to Capit alism " I demand whether all wars, bloodshed and misery came not upon the creation when one man endeavoured to be a lord over another? .. And whether this l11,isery shall not remove ... when all [he branches of mankind shall look upon the earth as one conunon treasury to all .

-Gerrard Winstanley, 77 .. New Lal. of RigllltoUSlles� 1649 To him she was a fragmented commodity whose feelings and choices were rarely considered: her head and her heart were separated from her hack and her hands and divided from her womb and vagina. Her back and muscle were pressed into field labor ... her hands were demanded to nurse and nurture the white man .... [H]er vagina, used for his sexual pleasure, was the gateway to the womb, which was his place of capital invesonent - the capital invesone nt being the sex-act and the resuJcing child the accumulated surplus ....

-Barbara Omolade,"Heart of Darkness," 1983 I Part One: Introduction Th e deve lopme nt of capitalism was not the only possible response to the crisis of feudal � owe r. Thr oughout Europe, vast con'WlUnalisric social movements and rebellions against e U daI.i sll1 had offered the promise of a new egalitarian society built on social equality �Il d coop eratio n. However, by 1525 their most powerful expression, the "Peasam War" H1 Ger many or, as Peter BlickJe called it, the "rev olution of the common man," was c ru sh ed. I A hundred thousand rebels were massacred in retaliation. Then, in 1535," New 61 I ,.,. ........ , ..... _ ..... ' . ... , ...... _ ... "', _ .. - - ... �. --_ ....... -, ............ . Jerusalem," the attempt made by the Anabaptists in the town of Munster to bring kingdom of Cod to earth, also ended in a bloodbath, first undermined presumably the patriarchal turn taken by its leaders who, by imposing polygamy, caused among their ranks to revolt.2 With these defeats, compounded by the spreads hunts and the effects of colonial expansion, the revolutionary process in Europe came an end. Military might was not sufficient, however, to avert the crisis of feudalism.

By the late Middle Ages the feudal economy was doomed, raced with an muJation crisis that nrctched for more than a century. We deduce its dimension some basic estimates indicating that between 1350 and 1500 a major shift occurred the power-relation between workers and masters. The real wage increased by prices declined by 33%, rents also declined, the length of the working-day decreased, a tendency appeared toward local self-sufficiency) Evidence of a chronic disaccum ula­ tion trend in this period is also found in the pessimism of the contemporary m"rchaJ,..' and landowners, and the measures which the European states adopted to protect kets, suppress competition and force people to \vork at the conditions imposed. As entries in the registers of the feudal manors recorded, "the work [was] not worth breakfast" (Dobb 1963: 54). The feudal economy could not reproduce itself, nor a capitalist society have "evolved" from it, for self-sufficiency and the new high-wa ge regime allowed for the "wealth of the people," but "excluded the possibil.ity of ro •• i ...

L istic wealth" (Marx 1909,Vol.l: 789).

It was in response to this crisis tl13t the European ru�ng class launched the global ofren­ sive that in the course of at least three centuries was to change the history of the plane� 1ay­ ing the foundations of a capitalist world-system, in the relendess attempt to appropriate sources of wealth, expand irs economic basis, and bring new workers under its command.

A5 we know,'·conquest. enslavement, robbery, murder. in brief force" were the piJ..

lars of this process (ibid.: 785). Thus, the concept of a "transition to capitalism" is in ways a fiction. British historians, in the 1940s and 1950s, used it to define a period roughly from 1450 to 1650 -in which feudalism in Europe was breaking down no new social-economic system was yet in place, though elements of a capitalist were taking shape.4 The concept of "transition," then, helps us to think of a pn'lo'ng� process of change and of societies in which capitalist accumulation coexisted with ical formations nOt yet predominantly capitalistic. The term, however. suggests a ual, linear historical development, whereas the period it names was among the est and most discontinuous in world history -one that saw apocalyptic transl'orm"tie," and which historians can only describe in the harshest terms: the Iron Age (Kamen), Age of Plunder (Hoskins), and the Age of the Whip (Stone). "Transition," then, evoke the changes that paved the way to the advent of capitalism and the forces shaped them. In this volume, therefore, I use the term primarily in a temporal sense.

while I refer to the social processes that characterized the "feudal reaction" and the • opment of capitalist relations with the Marxian concept of "primitive accumulation.

though I agree with its critics that we must rethink Marx's interpretation of it.S Marx introduced the concept of"prim.itive accumulation" at the end of Volwne I to describe the social and economic restrucmring that the European ruling dati initiated in response to its accumulation crisis, and to establish (in polem.ics with AcbJIl Smith)6 that: (i) capitalism could nOt have developed without a prior concentration of car 62 iW and labo r; and that (ii) the divorcing of the workers from �e I.".eans of produ�on. not abstin ence of the rich. is the source of capitalist wealth. Prmunve accul11ulaoon. then, til: u sefu l concept, for it connects the "feudal reaction" with the development of a capi­ � [ econom y. and it identifies the historical and logical conditions fO,r the develop �ent of ' capitalist system, "primitive" ("originary') indicating a precondiron for the eXIstence the h ciii .. 7 (capitalist relations as mue as a spe c event 111 time. o Marx. however, analyzed primitive accumulation almost exclusively from the ",point of the waged industrial proletariat: the protagonist, in his view, of the revo lu­ V�l1a ry pro cess of h.is time and the foundation for the future conullunist sociccy. Thus, o hi s aCCOUllt, primitive accumulation consi.sts essentially in the expropriation of the ;�nd from the European peasantry and the formation of the "free," independem worker, although he acknowledged that: The discov ery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslave­ mem and emombmem in mines of the aboriginal population, [of America], the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Mrica into a preserve for the commercial hum­ ing of black skins, are ... the chief moments of prinutive accumula­ oon ... (Marx J909,VoJ. I: 823).

Marx a1,0 recognized that "[aJ great deal of capital, which today appears in the United Scates without any certificate of birth, was yesterday in England the capitalised blood of children" (ibid.: 82� 30). By contrast, we do not find in his work any men­ tion of the prof ound transformations that capitalism introduced in the reproduction oflabor-power and the social position of women. Nor does Marx's analysis of primi­ ti ve accu mulation mention the "Creat Witch-Hunr"of the 16th and 17th centuries, although this state-sponsored terror campaign was cemral to the defeat of the European peasantry, facilitating its expulsion from the lands it once held in common.

In tllis chapter and those that follow, I discuss these developm ents, especially with ref erence to Europe, arguing that:

I. The expropriation of European workers from their means of subsis­ tence, and the enslave ment of Native Americans and Mricans to the nunes and plantations of the "New World," were not the only means by which a world proletariat was fonned and "accumulated ." II .

This process required the transf ormation of the body into a work­ machine, and the subjugation of women to the reprod uction of the work-force . Most of all, it required the de'truction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extennination of the "wit ches." III. Prinut ive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and conce ntration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also all ('(CU­ mulatiol/ of dijJ erellccs atld divisions wit/,in the working class, whereby hier- 63 archies built upon gender, as weU as "r.ilce" and age, became constitu­ tive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat. IV. We cannot, therefore, identify capitalist accumulation with the liber­ ation of the worker, female or male, as many Marxists (among others) have done, or see the advent of capitalism as a moment of historical progress. On the contrary. capitalism has created more brutal and insiclious forms of enslavement, as it has planted into the body of the proletariat deep divisions that have served to intensify and conceal exploitation. It is in great part because of these imposed divisions­ especially those between women and men -that capitalist accumu­ lation continues to devastate life in every corner of the planet.

I Capitalist Accumulation and the Accumulation of Labor in Europe Capital, Marx wrote, comes on the face of the eanh dripping blood and dirt from head to toe (1909, Vol. I: 834) and, indeed, when we look at the beginning of capitalist devd­ O P l11cnt, we have the impression of being in an immense concentration camp. In the "New World" we have the subjugation of the aboriginaJ populations to the regimes rl the mita and cuatt}ehifS under which multitudes of people were consumed to bring sil­ vcr and mercury to the surface in the mines of Huancavelica and Potosi. In Eastera Europe, we have a "second serfdom," tying to the land a population oerumers who hacl never previously been enserfed.9 In Western Europe. we have the Enclosures, the Witch-.

Hunt, the branding, whipping, and incarceration of vagabonds and beggars in newly COB­ structed work-houses and correction houses, models for the furure prison system. Oa the horizon, we have the rise of the slave trade, while on the seas, ships are already traJIIooo porting indentured servants and convicts from Europe to America.

What we deduce from this scenario is that force was the main lever, the main eCG-' nomic power in the process of primitive accumulationlO because capitalist develop required an inunense leap in the wealth appropriated by the European ruling class the number of workers brought under its conmland. ln other words, primitive acc lation consisted in an inunense accumulation oflabor-power-"dead labor"in the fo of stolen goods, and "living labor" in the form of human beings made available exploitation -realized on a scale never before matched in the course of history.

Significantly, the tendency of the capitalist class, during the first three centuri es its existence, was to impose slavery and other forms of coerced labor as the domi work relation, a tendency limited only by tlle workers' resistance and the danger of exhaustion of the work-force.

This was true nOt only in the American colonies, where, by the 16th cen economies based on coerced labor were forming, but in Europe as well. Later, I e inc the importance of slave-labor and the plantation system in capitalist accumula ti Here I want to stress that in Europe, too, in the 15th century, slavery, never compler abolished, was revitalized . I I 64 As reported by the Italian historian Salvatore Bono, to whom we owe the most ·ve study of slavery in Ic:UY there were numerous slaves in the Mediterranean areas ,,){tellS] • .

the t 6th and 17th centuries, and their numbers grew after the Battle of Lepanto (1571) ,11 calated the hostilities against the Muslim world. Bono calculates that 1110re than -- .

. . 000 slave s lived in Naples and 25,000 1T1 the Napolitan kingdom as a whole (one per 10, fthe population) and simiJar figures apply [Q other Italian towns and to southern ceriC o · .

frallce. In Italy, a system of public slavery developed whereby thousands of kidnapped forei gne rs - the ancestors of today's . undocumented imnugrant work.ers -. � ere 111 Joyed by ciry goverrunents for public works, or were farmed out to private cltlzens :\lh � el11pl oyed them in agriculture. Many were destined for the oars,an importam source fsuch employment being the Vatican aeet (Bono 1999: 1r8). a Slave ry is "that form [of exploitation] towards which the master always strives" (Dockes 1982: 2). Europe was no exception. This must b� emphasized to dispel the assul11ption ofa special connection between slavery and Afnca.12 But III Europe slavery remained a limited phenomenon, as the material conditions for it did not exist, although (he employ ers' desires for it must have been quite strong if it tOok until the 18m century before slavery was outlawed in England.The attempt to bring back serfdom failed as weU, except in the East, where population scarcity gave landlords the upper hand.13 In the West its restoration was prevented by peasant resistance culminating in the "German Peasant War." A broad organizational effort spreading over three countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and joining workers from every field (f anners. Ininers, artisans, IIlciuding the best German and Austrian artists),14 tills "revolution of the conmlon l11an" \v.l5 a watershed in European history. Like the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, it shook the powerful to the core, merging in their consciousness with the Anabaptists akeover of Munster. which confirmed their fears that an international conspiracy was underway to overthrow their power. IS After itS def eat, which occurred in the same year as the conquest of Peru, and which was conunemorated by Albrecht Durer with the "Monument to the Vanquished Peasants" (Thea 1998: 65; 134-35), the revenge was mer­ ciless. "Thousands of corpses laid on the ground from Thuringia to Abace, in the fields, in t11e woods, in the ditches of a thousand dismantled, burned castles," "murdered, tor­ tured, impaled, martyred" (ibid.: 153, 146). But the clock could not be turned back. In \';Inous parts of Germany and the other territories that had been at the cemer of the "war. " Customa ry rights and even forms of territorial government were preserved .16 This was an exceptio n. Where workers' resistance to re-enserfinent could not be brok en. the response was the expropriation of the peasantry from its land and the intro­ duction offorced wage-labor. Workers attempting to hire themselves out independently Or leave their employers were punished with incarceration and even with death, in the case of recidivism. A "free" wage labor-market did not develop in Europe until tlle 18m cen tury , and even then. contractual wage-work was obtained only at the price of an intense :;:O we and by a linuted set ofl.boren, mostly male and adult. Nevertheless, the fact that Very and serfdom could not be rescored meant that the labor crisis that had character­ � .d the late Middle Ages continued in Europe into the 170b century , aggrnvated by the �ct that the drive to maxim ize the exploitation of labor put in jeopardy tile reproduc­ tio n of the work-force. Tlus contradiction -wh.ich still characterizes capitalist develop­ Il 1ent1 7 _ exploded most dramatically in tlle American colonies, where work, disease, 6S liB .. ............................... , ............... , ... .. -�-':J. ��-�-�- .... -� .... � ....... .

Peasatlt "'ifurling tilt bmmer o!"Frudo",. " and disciplinary punislunents destroyed two thirds of the native American population ill the decades inunediately after me Conquest. IS It was also at the core of me slave trade and the exploitation of slave labor. Millions of Mricans died because of the tortu ro ..

living conwtions to which they were subjected during the Middle Passage and on the plantations. Never in Europe did the exploitation of the work-force reach such genoci­ dal proportions, except under the Nazi regime. Even so, there too, in the 16th and 1'" centuries,land privatization and the commodification of social relations (the response lords and merchants to their economic crisis) caused widespread poverty, mortalicy , and an intense resistance that threatened to sh.ipwreck the emerging capitalist economy. '[his, I argue, is the historical context in wh.ich the history of women and reproduction in the transition from feudalism to capitalism must be placed; for the changes which the advefll of capitalism introduced in the social position of women -especially at the proletariaJl level, whether in Europe or America -were primarily dictated by the search for n� sources of lahar as well as new fonns of regimentation and division of the work-fo rce.

66 A/brrda o.1n'f, MO,,\VMENT 1U nm VA NQU ISHED PEASAlvrs. (1526). TI,is pi(­ ,/lrt, rrprcst'tlfillg " pras tllU et'll,rom!d Oil a (0/­ Imiol l ofob jecrs jrom his d(li/y fife, is Ilighly /lllI bigIl OUS. It am suggest 'hnl the prtlSllrltS lI'l'rt betmyed or ,/wI 'hey ,hcmsdlltS s/Jould be tn.'nlt'c/ (IS tmitors. Aaord;"gly, it I/(IS been jnter­ preted either (IS" Stltire of tile rebel pellSlIIlts or as 1/ hOl/mge to their momi slrellgth. JtY1ll1t we JmoUl 11,,·,1, (ertt li",y is ,II", Darer WdS pro­ fO lll/dty pertIUbed by tile evell'S oj 1525, ill/d, /IS /1 (otlVil/ced Lu,henllJ, must IwlJtJolloulf!d Lu,her ill his (ollde ,,,,ltIlioll oj ri,e revolt.

I • 67 In support of this statement, I trace the main developments that shaped the of capitalism in Europe -land privatization and the Price Revolution -to argue that ther was sufficient to produce a self-su staining process of prolec arianization. I then eXamin e in broad oudines the policies which the capitalist class introduced to discipline. reproduce.

and e.xpa �d the Europea .n proletariat. �e�nning with the. attack it launched on wom en .

resuJong 111 the construcnon of a new patnarchal order, wluch I define as the "patriarch y the wage." Lasdy. I look at the production of racial and sexual hierarchies in the colOnies, asking to what extent they could fonn a terrain of confrontation or solidarity betw een indigenous, African, and European women and between women and men.

I Land Privatization in Europe. the Produ ction of Scarci ty .

and the Separation of Produ ction fro:rn. Reproduction From the beginning of capitalism, the inuniseration of the working class began with war and land privatization. This was an international phenomenon. By the mid-16th cen­ tury European merchants had exprop riated much of the land of the Canary Islands and turned them into sugar plantations. The most massive process of land privatization and.

enclosure occurred in the Americas where, by the turn of the 17th centu ry, one-third of the communal indigenous land had been appropriated by the Spaniards under the sys­ tem of the etlcomieuda . Loss ofland \VaS also one of the consequences of slave-raiding in Af rica, which deprived many COl1ullunities of the best among their youth.

In Europe land privatization began in the late-15th century, simultaneous1y with colonial expan sion. It took different forms: the evictions of tenants, rent increases, and increased state taxation. leading to debt and d,e sale of land. I define all these forms ..

laud expro priation because, even when force was not used, the loss ofland occurred against the inctividual's or the cOl1ununity's will and undermined their capacity for subsistence.

Two forms ofland expropriation must be mentioned: war -whose character changed in this period, being used as a me.ms to transform territorial and economic arrangements - and religious reform.

"[B] efore 1494 warfare in Europe had mainly consisted of rninor wars charac ..

terized by brief and irregular campaigns" (Cunningham and GreU 2000: 95).These oft ...

took place in the summer to give the peasants, who formed the bulk of the armies, the time to sow their crops; armies confronted each other for long periods of time with-­ out much action. But by the 161h century wars became more frequent and a new rype of warfare appeared, in part because of technological innovation but l1losdy because the European states began to turn to territorial conquest to resolve their economic crisis and wealthy financiers invested in it. Military campaigns became much longer.

grew tenfold, and they became permanent and professionalized.19 Mercenaries well hired who had no attachment to the local population; and the goal of warfare bec .....

the elimination of the enemy, so that war left in its wake deserted viUages, fields ered with corpses, faJnines, and epidemics, as in Albrecht Durer's uThe Four H'lfS,ern'''' of the Apocalypse" (1498).20This phenomenon. whose traumatic impact on the ulation is reflected in numerous artistic representations, changed the agricultural scape of Europe.

68 jtu/ ues Callol, THE HORRORS OF WA R (1633). ElIgmllitl R' n,e tIIl." lulIIged by mjfjl(/ry llull,orilia IvcreIor",e, soldiers lumed robbers. Dismissed soldiers were n large pm! oj tlte IIrl,gabotlds lwd in:gg(1fS lllllt crowded the rollds oj 17'''· mllury Europe.

Many tenure contracts were also annulled when the Church's lands were confis­ cated in the course of the Protestant Reformation, which began with a massive land­ grab by the upper class. In France, a corrunon hunger for the Church's land at first united the lower and higher classes in the Protesta nt movemem, but when the land was auc­ tioned, starting in 1563, the artisans and day-laborers, who had demanded the exprop ri­ ation of the Church "with a passion born of bitterness and hope," and had mobilized with the promise that they too would receive their share, were betrayed in their expec­ tations (Le Roy Ladurie 1974: 173-76} .A1so the peasants, who had become Protestant to free themselves from the tithes, were deceived. When they stood by their rights,declar­ ing that "the Gospel promises land freedom and enfranchisement," they were savagely attac ked as fomenters of sedition (ibid.: 192).21 In England as well, much land changed hand s in the name of religious reform. W. G. Hoskin has describe it as "the greatest trans­ fe re nce of land in English history since the Norman Conquest" or, more succinctly, as "The Great Plunder."22 In England, however, land privatization was mostly accomplished throu gh the "Enclosures," a phenomenon that has become so associated with the expro­ �ri �tio n of workers from their"c ol11mon wealth" that, in our time, it is used by anti-cap­ It al ist activ ists as a signifier for every attack on social entitlements.23 h In the 16th centu ry, "enclosure" was a technical term, indicting a set of strategies t h e.Eng iish lords and rich farmers used to eliminate conununaJ land property and expand t elr hol dings.24 It mostly referred to tile abolition of the open-field system, an arrange­ ; ent by whic h villagers owned non-contiguous so-ips of land in a non-hedged field.

h nclo sing also included the fencing off of the conunons and the pulling down of the ' ack s f o pOor cottagers who had no land but could survive because they had access to 69 I r\. ........ UIIIU .....

H.., •• vI .&.0 ..... ... .." ... ... - ...., ... � .... _w ... ..... ... , ., v ... ... . .

customary rights.25 Large tracts of land were also enclosed to create deer parks, entire villages were cast down, to be laid [0 pasture.

Though the Enclosures continued into the 18th century (Neeson 1993), before the Ref ormation, more than two thousand rural conununities were destroy ed this way (Fryde 1996: 185). So severe was the extinction of rural villages that in and again in 1548 the Crown called for an investiga tion. But despite the appointm ent several royal conunissions, little was done to stop the trend. What began, instead, was ill intense struggle, climaxing in numerous uprisings, accompanied by a long debate on the merits and demerits of land privatization which is still continuing today, revitaliz ed by the World Bank' s assault on the last planetary commons.

Briefly put, the argu ment proposed by "modernizers," from all political perspec­ tives, is that the enclosures boosted agricultural efficiency, and the dislocations they pro­ duced were well compensated by a significant increase in agricultural productivity. It is claimed that the land was depleted and, if it had remained in the hands of the poor , it would have ceased to produce (anticipating Garret Hardin's "tragedy of the COJ:ll­ mons"),26 while its takeover by the rich allowed it to rest. Coupled with agricultural innovation, the argument goes, the enclosures made the land more productive, leading to the expansion of the food supply. From tlus viewpoint, any praise for cOl lununal land tenure is disnussed as "nostalgia for the past," the assumption being that agricultural com.

l11unalism is backward and inefficient, and tllat those who def end it are guilty of an undue attachment to tradition.27 But these arguments do not hold. Land privatization and the conmlercializatiOD of agriculture did not increase the food supply available to the common people, though more food was made available for the market and for export. For workers they inaugu­ rated two centuries of starvation. in the same way as today, even in the most fertile areal of Africa,Asia, and Latin America, malnutrition is rampant due to tile destruction of com­ munal land-tenure and the "export or perish" policy imposed by the World Bank' s suuc­ tural adjusonent programs. Nor did the introduction of new agricultural techniques ia England compensate for this loss. On the contrary, the development of agra rian capital­ ism "worked hand in glove" with the impoverislunent of the rural population (Lis aDd Soly 1979: 102). A testimony to the misery produced by land privatization is the fact that, barely a century alier the emergence of agrarian capitalism, sixty European toWDl had instituted some form of social assistance or were moving in this direction, vagabondage had become an international problem (ibid.: 87). Population growth have been a contributing factor; but its importance has been overstated, and should circumscribed in time. By the last part of the 16th centu ry, almost everywhere in Eurol�.

the population was stagnating or declilung, but this time workers did not derive any efit from the change.

There are also misconceptions about the effectiveness of the open-field system agriculture. Neo-liberal historians have described it as wasteful, but even a suppor ter land privatization like Jean De Vries recognizes that the conununal use ofa",cic • .ilnJdl fields had many advantages. It protected the peasants from harvest failure, due to the ety of strips to which a fa mily had access; it also allowed for a manageable W()fk -schec.-:

ule (since each strip required attention at a different time); and it encouraged a cratic way of life, built on self-gove rnment and self-reliance, since all decisions - 70 Rumlf etut.AI1 the festiVllis, gnmcs, nud gnth erings of the peasallt co mmutlity lIJere 1,e1d 011 tile {OIl/IIIOtU. 16th.autllry engr,willg by Dtmie1 Hopfer.

to plam or harvest, when to drain the fens, how many animals to allow on the conunons - were taken by peasant assemblie s.28 The same considerations apply to the "cOllUll ons." Disparaged in 16th cenrury liter­ ature as a SOurc e oflazmess and disorder, the corrunons \.vcre essential to the reproduction of ma ny small fanners or cottars who survived only because they had access to meadows in � hich to keep cows, or woods in which to gather timber, wild berries and herbs, or quar­ nes , fish- ponds , and open spaces in which to meet. Beside encouraging collective decision­ Illakin g and work cooperation. the conunons were the material foundation upon which I'

they convened, exchanged news, took advice, and where a women's viewpoint on c muna! events, autonomous from that of men, could form (Clark 1968: 51).

This web of cooperative relations, which R. D.T awney has referred to as the "pri nl..

itive cOl1unullism It of the feudal village. crumbled when the open-field system was abo]..

ished and me communal lands were fenced off (Tawney 1967). Not only did cooPera.., rion in agricultural lahor die when land was privatized and individual labor Contracta replaced collective ones; economic differences among the rural population deepened, II the number of poor squatters incre3sed who had nothing left but a cot and a cow, and no choice but to go with "bended knee and cap in hand" to beg for a job (Seccornbe 1992). Social cohesion broke down;30 families disintegrated, the youth left the villag e to join the increasing number of vagabonds or itinerant workers -soon to become the social problem of the age - while the elderly were left behind to fend for themsel ....

Part icularly disadvantaged were older women who, no longer supported by their chiJ.,.

dren, feU onto the poor rolls or survived by borrowing, petty theft, and delayed payments.

The outcome was a peasantry polarized not only by the deepening economic inequal­ ities, bue by a web of hatred and resenOTIents that is well -documenced in the records f:L the witch-hunt, which show that quarrels relating to requests for help, the trespassing f:L animals, or unpaid rents were in the background of many accusations)1 The enclosures also undermined the economic situation of the anisans . In the same way in which multinational corporations take advantage of the peasants expropn.

ated from their lands by the World Bank to construct "free export zones" where com­ modities are produced at the lowest cost, so, in the 16th and 17th centuries, merchant capitalists took advantage of the cheap labor-force that had been made available in the rural areas to break the power of the urban guilds and destroy the artisans' independ­ ence. This was especially the case in the textile industry that \vas reorganized as a runJ.

cottage industry, and on the basis of the "putting out" system, the ancestor of toda y's "infomlal economy," also built on the labor of women and children.32 But textile work­ ers were not the only ones whose labor was cheapened. As soon as they lost access to land, all workers were plunged intO a dependence unknown in medieval times, as their landless condition gave employers the power to cut their pay and lengthen the worki ....

day . In Protest ant areas this happened under the guise of religi ous reform, which dou­ bled the work-year by elim inating the saints' days.

Not surprisi ngly, with land exprop riation came a change in the workers' attinxle towards ule wage. WIllie in the Middle Ages wages could be viewed as an instrUme nt

to an end wages began to be viewed as instruments of enslavement (Hill 1975: 18111).» Such was ule hatred Ulat workers felt for waged labor that Gerrard Winstan le y .

the leader of the Diggers, declared that it that it did not make any difference whethet one lived under the enemy or under one's brother, if one worked fora wage.This exp .

the grow th, in the wake of the enclosures (using the term in a broad sense to include .

fo rms of land privatizatio n), of the number of "vagabonds" and "masterless" men, whO pref erred to take to the road and to risk ensJavemem or death - as prescribed by cbt "bloody" legisJation passed against them -rather than CO work for a wage.34 It explains the strenuous struggle which peasants made to defend their land from exp priation, no matter how meager its size.

72 In Engla nd, anti-enclosure struggles began in the late 15th century and continued rough out the 16th and 17th, when levelling the enclosing h �dges be� me "the most th on specie s of social protest" and dlC symbol of class co nfl ict (Manrung 1988: 311). COIiUll . . . . •• . ,closure nets often turned IIno mass upnslIlgs. The most notonous was Kerr s Ano- e, . .

.

Reb ellio n, named after its leader, Robert Kerr, that took place In Norf olk In 1549 : Tlus O Smali nocturnal affair. At its peak, the rebels I1Ulnbered 16,000, had an artillery, was n defeat ed a gove rnment army of12,OOO, and even captured Norwi�h. at ,the time the sec- ld larg est cicy in England.J5 They also drafted a progcam chac, If realized, would have �:le cked the advance of agrarian capit.ilism and elil1l.inated all vestiges of feudal power 1 the country. It consisted oftwency-nine demands that Kett, a fa rmer and tanner, pre­ :nte d to [he Lord Protector. The first was that "from henceforth no man shall enclose any more ." Other articles demanded that rencs shouJd be reduced to the rates that had rewed sixty-five years before, chac "all freeholders and copy holders may cake the prof ­ its of all commons, " and that "all bond-men may be made free, for god made all free with hi s precio us blood sheddying" (Fleccher 1973: 142-44). These demands were puc inco practice. Throughout Norfolk, enclosing hedges were upromed, and only when another govenun enc army attacked them were the rebels stopped. Thirty-five hundred were slain III the massacre that foUowed. Hundreds more were wounded. Ken and his brodler William were hanged outside Norwich's walls. Anti-enclosure struggles continued, however, through the Jacobean period with a noticeable increase in the presence of women.36 During the reign of James I, about ten percent of enclosure riots included women among the rebels. Some were all female protes cs. In 1607, for instance, thirty-seven women, led by a "Captain Dorothy," attacked coal nuners working on what women claimed to be the village conunons in Thorpe Moor (Yorkshire) . Forty women went to "cast down the fences and hedges" of an enclo­ sure in Wa ddingham (Lincolnshire) in 1608; and in 1609, on a manor of Du nchurch (Warwi ckshire) "fifteen women, including wives, widows, spinsters, Ulunarried daugh­ ters, and servants, rook it upon themselves to assemble at lught to dig up the hedges and level the ditches" (ibid.: 97). Again,atY ork in May 1624, women destroyed an enclosure and went to prison for it - they were said to have "enjoyed tobacco and ale after their fe at" (Fraser 1984: 225-26) . Then, in 1641, a crowd chac broke inco an enclosed fen ac Buckden consiseed mainly of women aided by boys (ibid.). And dlese were juse a few Insta nces of a confr ontation in wluch women holding pitchforks and scythes resisted the fe ncin g of the land or the drailung of the fens when their livelihood was threatened.

This Strong female presence has been attributed to the belief that women were above the law, being "covered" legally by theif husbands. Even men, we are told, dressed like WOlllen to pull up the fences. But this explanation should not be taken toO far. For the � OVer nme nt Soon eliminated this privilege, and started arresting and imprisOlung women Involv ed in anti-enclosure riots.37 Moreover, we should not assume that women had no stake of thei r Own in the resistance to land expropriation. The opposite was the case.

As with the commutation, women were dlOse who suffered most when the land ;as lost and the village conunuluty feU apart. Part of the reason is that it was far more dif­ t CU lt for them to become vagabonds or m.igrant workers, for a nomadic life exposed them 10 Ill a le ViOle nce, especially at a time when nusogyny was escalating. Wo men were also ess In obi le on account of pregnancies and the caring of children, a fact overlooked by 73 _____ __ -. _0 scholars who consider the flight from servirude (through migration and other Cornu nomadism) the paradigmatic forms of struggle. Nor could women become soldien pay, though some joined amlies as cooks, washers, prostitutes. and wives;38 but by the century this option too vanished, as armies were further regimented and the crow ds women that used to follow them were expelled fiom the battlefields (Kriedte 1983:

Wo men were also more negatively impacted by the enclosures because as SOo n land was privatized and monetary relations began to dominate economic life, they foUOd it more difficult than men to support themselves, being increasingly confined to repro..

ductive labor at the very time when this work was being completely devalued. As will see, this phenomenon, which has accompanied the shift from a subsistence to money-econo my, in every phase of capitalist development. can be attributed to se" enl.

fa ctors. It is clear. however, that the commer cialization of economic life provided material conditions for it.

With the demise of the subsistence economy that had prevailed in p"'oc api tali.

Europe, the unity of production and reproduction which has been typical of all based on production-f or-use came to an end, as these activities became the carriers fe rent social relations and were sexually differentiated. In the new monetary ",!,"",e,"1111 74 Enlil/ed "Wolt/al (Ind KtlnlltS," Ihis picwre by Hmrs Sebtdd &II(lIt/ (c. 15)0) shows Iht 1m;" of wa",tn Ilml ustd 10 Jo llow Iht ann its ttJnl 10 Iht oottftjitld.

IWtllru, i"d"ding ,vivcs arid proslil14ltS, look cart oj Iht rcprodllCt;otl oj Iht so/­ diers. Notire the woman lve(lri,�� (I '1II4221iIJ� device. rodu crion-for-market was de6ned as a value-creati ng activity, wh �re� the �production P [th e worker began [0 be considered as valueless from an econonuc vlewpomt and even o ased to be considered as work. Reproductive work continued to he paid -though at ce lowest rates _ when perfonned for the master class or outside the home. Bm the the no mic importance of the reprod uction aflabar-power carried ou[ in the home, and e co fun ction in the accumulation of capital became invisible, being mystified as a natural us cion and labelled "women's lahor." In addi tion, women were excluded from many ''''''' ged occup ations and, when they worked for a wage. they earned a pittance compared ,,� o the aver age male wage.

r These hiscoric changes - that peaked in the 19th cemury with the creation of the f ull-t ime housewif e - redefined women's position in society and in relation to men. The sexual division oflabor that emerged from it not only fixed women to reproductive work, but incre ased their dependence on men, enabling the state and employers to use the male wage as a means to conunand women's labor. In this way, the separation of conunodity p roduction from the reproduction of labor-power also made possible the devel opment of a speci fically capitalist use of the wage and of the markets as means for the accumu­ I>tion of unpaid labor. Most importantly, the separation of production from reproduction created a class of proletarian women who were as dispossessed as men but, unlike their male relatives, III a society that was becoming increasingly monetarized, had almost no access to wages, thus being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic dependence, and invis­ ibiliry as workers.

As we will see, the devaluation and feminization of reproductive labor was a dis­ aster also for male workers, for the devaluation of reproductive labor inevitably devalued ItS prod uct: labor-power. But there is no doubt that in the "transition from feudalism to capitalism" women suffered a unique process of social degradation that was fundamen­ tal to the accumulation of capital and has remained SO ever since.

Also in view of these developme nts, we cannot say, then, that the separation of the worker from the land and the advent of a money-economy realized the struggle which Ihe medieval serfS had fought to free themselves from bondage. It was not the worke" - male or female - who were liberated by land privatiza tion. What \vas "liberated" was capit al, as rhe land was now "free" to function as a meallS of accumulation and exploita­ bon, rather than as a means of subsistence. Liberated were the landlords, who now could Unload Onto the workers most of the COSt of their reproduction, giving them access to some means of subsistence only when directly employed.When work would not be avail­ a ble Or would not be sufficiently profitable, as in times of cOl1unercial or agricultural cri­ SIS, Worke rs, instead, could be laid off and left [0 starve.

The separatio n of workers from their means of subsistence and their new depend­ �: On nlOnet ary relations also meant that the real \vage could now be cut and women's I r cou ld be further devalued with respect to men's through monetary manipulation.

t IS nOt "d fl a COlllel ence, then, that as soon as land began to be privatized, the prices of Oodstuffi, Which for two centuries had stagnated, began [0 rise.39 7S I J'"u .. I.. ... " ..... . ..... .. Vl< vI ""' ..... vv . .......... ..... ... �I ........... ..... .. V, ........ ... '" I The Price Revolution and the Pauperization of the European Working Class This "inflationary" phenomenon, which due to irs devastating social consequen ces has been named the Price Revolution (Ramsey 1971), was attributed by contemporari es and later econolnists (e,g., Adam Smith) CO the arrival of gold and silver from America, "POu r_ ing into Europe [through Spain) in a manmloth stream" (Hamilton 1965: vu). But it ....

been noted that prices had been rising before these metals started circulating through the European markets.40 Moreover, il1 themse.lves, gold and silver are not capital, and could have been put to other uses, e.g., to make jewelry or golden cupolas or to embr oider clothes. If they functioned as price-regulating devices, capable of turning even wheat into a precious conunodity, this \vas because they were planted into a develo ping capitalist world, in which a growing percentage of the population -one-third in England (LasIett 19 71: 53) -had no access to land and had to buy the food that they had once produ ced, and because the ruling class had learned to use the magical power of money CO cut labor costs. In other words, prices rose because of the development of a national and interna-.

tional market-system encouraging the export-import of agriculwral produces, and because merchanes hoarded goods to sell them later at a higher price. In September 1565.

in Antwerp. "while the poor were literally starving in the streets," a warehouse collapsed under the weight of [he grain packed in i[ (Hackett Fischer 1996: 88).

It was under these circumstances that the arrivaJ of the American treasure trilt"' gered a massive redistribution of wealth and a new prolec arianization process.4t Riq prices ruined the small farmers, who had to give up their land to buy grain or bread when the harvests could not feed their families, and created a class of capitalist entre­ preneurs, who accumulated forrunes by investing in agriculture and money-lending, .

a time when having money was for many people a matter of life or death.42 The Price Revolution aJso triggered a historic coUapse in the real wage compa ­ rable to that which has occurred in our time throughout Mrica,Asia, and Latin America.

in the countries "structurally adjusted" by the World Bank and the Inter natiollll Monerary Fund. By 1600. real wages in Spain had lost thirry percent of their purcluf.

ing power with respect to what [hey had been in 1511 (Hamilton 1965: 280). and the collapse was just as sharp in other countries. While the price of food went up eigbt times, wages increased only by chree times (Hackett Fischer 1996: 74). This was not the work of the invisible hand of the market, but the product of a scate policy that pre­ vented laborers from organiz ing, while giving merchants the maximum freedom .

regard to the pricing and movement of goods. Predictably, withjn a few decades, the real wage lost two-thirds of its purchasing power, as shown by the changes that intel'"' vened in the daily wages of an English carpenter. expressed in kilograms of � between [he 14ili and 18ili century (SlicherVan Bath 1963: 327):

76 YEARS 1351-14 00 1401-1 450 1451 -1500 KJLOGRAMS OF GRAIN 121. 8 15 5.1 143.5 15 00- 1550 12 2.4 15 51-16 00 83.0 1601-1 650 48.3 ·16 51-17 00 74.1 17 01-17 50 94.6 1751-18 00 79.6 It took cencuries for wages in Europe to return to the level they had reached in he lace Middle Ages. Thing< deteriorated to the point that, in England, by 1550, male t '''11 S had to work forty weeks to earn the same income that, at the beginning aCme art! .... ce ncur y. they had been able to obtaln in fifteen weeks. In France. [see graph, next page] wag es dropp ed by sixty percent between 1470 and 1570 (Hackett Fischer 1996: 78).43 The wage colJapse was especially disastrous for women, In the 14th centur y, they had rece ived ha.1f the pay of a man for the same cask; hut by the Bud-1 6th century they were receiving only one-thir d of the reduced male wage, and could no longer support them­ selves by wage-work, neither in agriculture nor in manufa cturing, a fa ct undoubtedly res ponsible for the massive spread of prostitution in this period.44 What followed was the absolute impoverislune nt of the European working class, a phenomenon so wide­ spread and general that, by 1550 and long after, workers in Europe were ref erred to as si mply "the poor ." Evidence for this dramatic impoverishment is the change that occurred in the worke rs' diets. Meat disappeared from their tables, except for a few scraps oflard, and so did beer and wine, salt and olive oil (Braude! 1973: 127ff; Le Roy Ladurie 1974). From me 16th to the 18th centuries, the workers' diets consisted essentially of bread, the main expense in their budget. Tills was a historic setback (whatever we may think of dietary norms) compared to the abundance of meat that had typified the late Middle Ages. Peter Kriedte writes that at that tiIne, the "annual meat consumption had reached the figure of 100 kilos per person, an incredible quantity even by today's standards. Up to the 19th century tlus figure declined to less than twenty kilos" (Kriedte 1983: 52). Braudel too speaks of the end or'carnivorous Europe," summoning as a witness the Swabian Heinrich MuUer who, in 1550, commented that, ... in the past they ate difTerencly at the peasant's house. Then, there was meat and food in profusion every day; tables at village fairs and fe asts sank under their load. Today, evetything has truly changed. For some years, in fact, what a calamitous time, what high prices! And the fo od of the most comfortably ofT peasants is almost worse than that of day -labourers and valets previously" (BraudelI973: 130).

. Not only did meat disappear, but food shortages became conunon, aggravated in tunes of harv est failure, when the scanty grain reserves sent the price of grain sky-high, C o nde mni ng city dwellers to starvation (Braudel 1966, Vol. I: 328). This is what occurred In the f: .

15 anun e years of tile 1540. and 1550., and again in the decades of the 1580. and . 90s , wlu ch were some of the worst in the history of the European proletariat, coincid- Ing . h \Vl[ widespread unrest and a record number of witch-trials. But malnutrition was 77 120 lOCI 80 60 40 20 o 120 lOCI 80 60 40 20 o lOCI 80 60 20 o Price Revolution IIl1d the Fait cifthe Reid IMI$, 1480- 1640. TIle Prict Revol",io n lri� gered n historic (ol/tlPSt i,. tIlt! rftll Wlige. With;" II few dfmdes, rile rt.'tll Imgt lost two_ thirds of its pl4rclms;,rg POUltr. nil.' real UNlgt' did not rrtum 10 tht fevtl it Iwd reache d n.

the 151h century mlti/ the 19th ctntury (Plltips-Broll'" mId Hopkj,ls, 1981).

Wase Index (W l-7S-10C1) Wase Index (14S1- 7S-10C1) Wase Index (14S1- 7S-10C1) 1440 1460 1480 ISOCI IS20 lS40 lS60 1S80 1600 1620 1640 78 "nIC soolll copu�que"ces of the Price Revolu tioll lire revellied by tllese cilllrrs, uAlidl it/dimtf, respeaively. tile rise i" tile pri(� of gmj" i" ElIgll lPld be,weerr 1490 mId 1650, th� (orl· cO/llitalll rise iPl prices lItld property crima iPl Essex (Englmld) between 1566 mId t 602, mId the popul tltioll decli"e mell$ured iPl milliopu {PI GertlllltlY, Amt,;tI, llilly mId SJkli" btWltfPl '500 and 1750 (Hfl{kett Fischer, 1996). 1200 1000 800 :i 600 1 400 200 o mMn IMIIII price of.,.., (14)>-99-100). compwtd .rich ) l.yew rncwq avencc 14�0 147� I�OO 1�2� I��O 1S7� 1600 162� 17� I�O Il� 16�0 900 800 700 600 :� I I .� J 200 100 --- - --- .........

o ������������� 1�66 1�71 1576 1"1 1"6 1�91 1�96 1601 18 16 .

14 12 10 8 6 4 1 0 -- -- - ... - --- -- - - -- --- --- -- - -- ---. :-.. ---::: -----� -_ ._---- --- Germany ond Austria - ----- llIly ---- Spain �O l� o 1 500 1 600 16�0 1700 17� 79 rampam also in normal times, so that food acquired a high symbolic value as a mark er rank. The desire for it among the poor reached epic proportions, inspiring dreams Pantagruelian orgies, like those described by Rabelais in his Gargatltua and "01""' .....

(1 552), and causing nighttnarish obsessions, such as the conviction (spread among eastern Italian fanners) that witches roamed the countryside at night to feed upon catde (Mazzali 1988: 73).

Indeed, the Europe that was preparing to become a Promethean W'lrIC1-rno ...

presumably taking humankind to new technological and cultural heights, was a where people never had enough to eat. Food became an obj ect of such intense d� that it was believed that the poor sold their souls to the devil to get their hands on it.

Europe was also a place where, in rimes of bad harvests, country-f olk fed upon wild roots, or the barks of trees, and multitudes roved the countryside weeping and ing."so hungry d"t d,ey would devour the beans in the fields" (Le Roy Ladurie 1974) ; or they invaded the cities to benefit from grain rustributions or to attack the houses granaries of the rich who, in turn, rushed to get anns and shut the cicy gates to keep the starving out (Heller 1986: 56-63).

That the transition to capitalism inaugurated a long period of starvation for work­ ers in Europe - which plausibly ended because of the economic expansion pn:>d'o",d by colonization - is also demonstrated by the fact that, while in the 14th and 1 Sth cen­ hlries, the proletarian struggle had centered around the demand for "Iibercy" and work, by the 16th and 17th, it was mostly spurred by hunger, raking the form of on bakeries and granaries, and of riots against the export oflocal crops.45 The au'th"ri­ ties described those who participated in these attacks as "good fo r nothing" or' .. n.on', .. " ....

"humble people," but most were craftsmen, living, by this time, from hand to mouth.

It was the women who usually initiated and led the food revolts. Six of the one food riots in 17th-cenmry France studied by Ives-Marie Berce were made up sively of women. In the others the female presence was so conspicuous that Beree them "women' s riots."46 Commenting on this phenomenon, with reference to 'O·"-'.

a poor woman went weeping through the streets of the poor quarter, holding the of her son who had died of hunger" (Kamen 1971: 364). The same occurred MontpelJjer in 1645, when women took to the streets "[0 protect their children starvation" (ibid.: 356). In France, women besieged the bakeries when they becam e vinced [hat grain was to be embezzled, or found out that the rich had bought the bread and the remaining was lighter or more expensive. Crowds of poor women then gather at the bakers' stalls. demanding bread and charging the bake" with .

[heir supplies. Riots broke out also in the squares where grain markets were held, along the routes taken by the ca.rts Witll the corn to be exported, and "at the river where ... boatmen could be seen loading [he sacks." On these occasions the 80 lIbush ed the carts ... with pitchfo rks an d sticks ... the men carrying away the sacks, the :'omell gathering as much grain as they could in their skirts" (Berce: 1990: 171-73).

The struggle for food was fought aJso by other means, such as poaching, stealing fI 111 one 's neighbors' fields or homes, and assaults on the houses of the rich. In Treyes "' 152 3 rum or had it that the poor had put the houses of the rich on fire, preparing to \It • -d e them (HeUer 1986: 55-S6) .At Malines, in d,e Low Countries, d,e houses ofspec­ utv ..

lat 0rs were marked by angry peasants with blood (Hackett Fischer 1996: 88). Not sur- U risi ngly. "f ood crimes" loom large in the disciplinary procedures of the 16[h and 17th � cnt urie s. Exemplary is the recurrence of the theme of the "diabol ical banquet" in the wit ch- trials. suggesting that feasting on roasted mutton, white bread, and wine was now con sidered 3 diabolic act in the case of me "conunon people." But me main weapons avai lable co the poor in their struggle for survival were their own famished bodies, as in tlll les of famine hordes of vag abonds and beggars surrounded the better off, half-dead of hung er and disease, grabbing their arms, exposing their wounds co them and, forcing them to live in a state of constant fear at the prospect of both contamination and revolt.

" You cannot walk down a street or stop in a square - a Venetian man wrote in the mid- 16th century -without multitudes surrounding you co beg for charity: you see hunger Fa mily oj VClg abo"ds.

E" gmvi"g Uy Lmts VCI" L

81 written on their f-aces, their eyes like gemless rings, the wretchedness of their bodie s skins shaped only by bones" (ibid.: 88 ).A century later, in Florence, the scene was the same. "fI][ was impossible to hear Mass," one G. Balducci complained. in Apri l "so much was one importuned during the service by wretched people naked and ered with sores" (Braudel I 966,Vol. 1l: 734-3 5).'7 I The State Intervention in the Reproduction of Labor: POOr Relief, and the Crirni naliZation of the Working Class The struggle for fo od was nOt the only front in the battle against the spread of capit al­ ist relations. Everywhere masses of people resisted the destruction of their former ways of existence, fighting against land privatization, the abolition of customary rights, the imposition of new taXes, wage-dependence. and the continuous presence of anrues ill their neighborhoods, which was so hated that people rushed to close the gates of thei r towns to prevent soldiers from setding among them.

In France, one thousand "emotions" (uprisings) occurred between the 1530a and 1670s, many involving entire provinces and requiring the intervention oftr oops (Goubert 1986: 205). England, Italy, and Spain present a similar picture,.8 indicae­ ing that the pre-capitalist world of the villa ge, which Marx dismissed under the rubric of"rural idiocy,"could produce as high a level of struggle as any the indus­ trial proletariat has waged.

In the Middle Ages, migration, vagabondage, and the rise of "crimes against pmpo erey" were part of the resistance to impo verishment and dispossession; these pheno tnelll now took on massive proportions. Everywhere -if we give credit to the complaints oftbe contemporary authorities -vagabonds were swanning. changing cities, crossing sleeping in the haystacks or crowding at the gates of towns - a vast humanity in",l",,..

iI a diaspora of its own, that for decades escaped the authorities' control. Six th,'w ....

vagabonds were reported in Ve nke alone in 1545. "In Spain vagrants cluttered the stopping at every town" (Braudel,Vol. 11: 740).'9 Starting with England, always a niD,n .. ".

these matters. the state passed new, far harsher anti-vagabond laws prescribing ensl .,1etl1l

crime rates also esca1ated, in such proportions that we can assume that a massive tion and reappropriation of the stolen conununal wealth was undenvay.50 To day. these aspects of the transition to capitalism may seem (for Europe at thing.; of the past or - as Marx put it in the Gnmdrisse (1973: 459 ) - "historical dirioos" of capitalist development. to be overcome by more marure forms ofcal)itaJisln .JIII the essential similarity between these phenomena and the social consequences of the phase of globa lization that we are witnessing tells us othenvise. Pauperization, and the escalation ofucril11e"are Structural elements of capitalist accumulation as talism must strip the work-force from its means of reproduction to impose its own 82 That in the industrializing regions of Europe, by me 19th century, the most extreme forms of proleta rian misery and rebellion had disappeared is not a proof against this claim. Proletarian misery and rebellions did not come to an end; they only lesse ned to the degree that the super-exploitation of workers had been expo ned.

through the instirutionaHzation of slavery, at first, and later through the contillUing expansion of colonial domination. As for the "transition" period. this remained in Europe a time of intense social c onflict, providing the stage for a set of state initiatives that,judging from their effects, had thre e main objectives: (a) to create a more disciplined work-force; (b) to diffuse social pro test; and (c) to fix workers to the jobs forced upon them. Let us look at them in turn.

In pursuit of social discipline, an attack was launched ag

(I ,In the years between 1601 and 1606 (Underdown 1985: 47-48). Peter Burke t 97�), 111 hi s work on the subject. has spoken of it as a campaign against "popular cul­ �r e. But we can see that what was at stake was the desocializatiol1 or decollectivization � the reprodu ction of the work-force, as well as the attempt to impose a more produc­ p V e Us e of leis ure time. This process, in EngJand. re ached its climax with the COining to o W er of the Puritans in the aftermath of the Civil War (1642-49), when the fear of 83 1- ------ -. --- -- --- sociaJ indiscipline prompted the banning of all proleca rian gatherings and m"rryrr.

ak inoo But the "moral reformation" was equally incense in non-Protescant areas where, in same period, religious processions were replacing the dancing and singing that had held in and out of the churches. Even the individual's relation with God was priV2tiz "" in Protesta nt areas, with the institution of a direct relationsh ip between the ,"'livid. ... and the divin.ity; in the Catholic areas, with the introduction of individual cO.lll ess ;, .... !

The church itself, as a conIDlU nity center, ceased to host any social activity other thaa those addressed '0 d,e cult. A5 a result, the physical enclosure operated by land zarion and the hedging of the commons was amplified by a process of social encloSIU\!.

the reprodu ction of workers shifting from the openfield to the home, from the rnunity to the family, from the public space (the conunon, the church) to the �"' .. e .•• Secondly, in the decades between 1530 and 1560, a system of public aSSistance introduced in at least sixty European towns, both by initi.1ove of the local ITI'lIlicif'aliri". az'" by direct intervention of the central state. 52 I ts precise goals are still debated. While of the literature on the topic sees the introduction of public assistance as a response to humanitarian crisis that jeopardized social control, in his 11"Iassive study of coerced wuur, 'l1li French Marxist scholar Yann Moulier Boucang insists that its primary objective W3S Great Fixation" of the proletariat, that is, the attempt to prevent the flight oflabor.53 In any event, the introduction of public assistance was a turning point in the relation between workers and capital and the definition of the function of the state.

was the first recognition of the IltlJusraiuability of a capitalist system ruling ex,clu,iveiy­ by means of hunger and terror. It was also the first step in the reconstruction of the as the guarantor of the class relati on and as the chief supervisor of the reproduction disciplining of the work-force.

Antecedents for this function can be found in the 14th centur y, when faced the generalization of the anti-f eudal struggle, the state had emerged as the only capable of confronting a working class that was regionally unified, armed, and no confined in its demands to the political economy of the manor. In 1351, with the ing of the Statute of Laborers in England, which fixed the maximum wage. the had formally taken charge of the regulation and repres sion of labor, which the lords were no longer capable of guaranteeing. But it was with the introduction lic assistance that the State began to claim "ownership" of the work-force, and a talist "division of labor" was instituted within the ruling class, enabHng enlplo,!,on reHnquish any respo nsibility for the reprod uction of workers, in the certainty that state would intervene, either with the ca.rrot or with the stick, to address the ineyj, ...

crises. With this innovation, a leap occurred also in the management of social duction, resuJting in the introduction of demograph ic recording (census-taking, recording of mortality, natality, marriage rates) and the appHcation of accounti ng social relations. Exemplary is the work of the administrators of dle Bureau de in Lyon (France), who by the end of the 16th century had learned to c.lculate the ber of the poor, assess the amount offood needed by each child or adult, and keep of the deceased, to make sure that nobody could claim assistance in the name of:ll penon (Zemon Davis 1968: 244-46) _ Along with this new "social science." an international debate also deveJoped on administration of public assiscallce anticipating the contemporary debate on welfare.

84 ,]y cllOse unable to work,deseribed as me "deserving poor,"be supported, or should "able­ � ed"laborers unable to find ajob also be given help� And how much or how li�e shouJd d be given. so as not co be discouraged from looking for work? These questIons were l � al from the viewpoint of social discipline, as a key objective of public aid was to tie ':rk ers to their jobs. But, on these matters a consensus could rarely be reached. \ Willie humanist reformers like Juan Luis Vives5 4 and spokesmen for the wealthy bUrg hen recognized the economic and disciplinary benefits of a more liberal and cen­ualize d dispensa tion of charity (not exceeding cl,e distribution of bread, however), part of the clergy strenuously opposed the ban on individual donations. But, across differences of system s and opinions , assistance was administered with such stinginess thac it generated as much conflict as appeasemenc. Those assisted resemed the humiliating rituals imposed on theOl .like wearing the "mark of infamy" (previously reserved [or lepers and Jews), or (in Fran ce) participating in the annual processions of the poor, in which they had to parade sing ing hymns and holding candles; and they vehemently protested when the alms were n ot promp cly given or were inadequate to their needs. In response, in some French [Owns, gibbets were erected at the time of food distributions or when the poor were asked to work in exchange for me food they received (Zemon Davis, 1968: 249). In England, as cl,e 16th century progresse d, receipt of public aid -also for children and me elderly­ was made conditional on the incarceration of the recipients in "work-houses," where they became the experimenca1 subjects for a variety of work-schemes.55 Consequently, the attack on workers, that had begun with the enclosures and the Price Revolution, in the space of a century, led to the crimi"alizat;o fl of the uJOrki"g class, that is, the formation of a V2St proletariat either incarcerated in the newly constructed work-houses and correction­ houses, or seeking irs survival outside the law and living in open antagonism to the state - always one step away from the whip and the noose.

From the viewpoint of the formation of a laborious work-force, this was a deci­ sive failure, and the constant preoccupation with the question of social discipline in 161h and l7lb-century political circles indicates that the comemporary statesmen and entr epreneurs were keenly aware of it. Moreover, the social crisis that tills general state of rebeUiousness provoked was aggravated in the second haJf of the 16th century by a Ilew econon llc contraction, in great part caused by the dramatic population decline that occurred in Spanish America after the Conquest. and the shrinking of the colo­ m al econo mies.

I Popula tion Decline. Economic Crisis. and the DiSC iplining of Women Wit hin less than century from the landing of Columbus on the American continent, the �olo ni.zer s' dream of an infinite supply of labor (echoing the explorers' estimate of an infin ite numb er of trees" in the forests of the Americas) was dashed.

h. Euro peans had brought death to America. Estimates of the population collapse : lC� affected the region in the wake of the colonial invasion vary. Sue scholars almost (l �l lllll� usly liken irs effects to an "American Holocaust." According to David Stal1l1ard 2), In the century after the Conquest, the population declined by 75 million across as South America, representing 95% of its inhabirnnts (1992: 268-305). Tim is also the mate of Andre Cunder Frank who writes that "within little more than a century .

Indian population declined by ninety percent and even ninety-five percent in M,exi cail Peru, and some other regions" (1978: 43). In Mexico, the population feU "from 11 lion in 1519 to 6.5 nullion in 1565 to about 2.5 nUllion in 1600" (Wallerstein 1 By 1580 "disease ... assisted by SpaJush brutality, had killed off or driven away 1110st people of the Antilles and the lowlands of New Spain, Peru and dle Caribbean li�t o."'1 (Crosby: 1972:38), and it would soon wipe out many more in Brazil. The clergy «u0II:I&.ll ized this "holocaust" as God's pun.ishment for the Indial1s"'bestial" behavior \ "" liIJiaQ" 1986: 138); but its economic consequences were nOt ignored. In addition, by the population began to decline also in western Europe. and continued to do so into the century. reaching a peak in Germany where one third of the population was lost. 56 With the exception of the Black Death (1345-1348), this was a population without precedents, and statistics, as awful as they are, tell only a part of the story .

struck at "the poor." lt was nOt the rich, for the most part, who perished when the pb'IUeI or the smallpox swept the tOwns, but craftsme n, day-laborers and vagabonds (]{, .... .. I 1972: 32-33) . They died in such numbers that their bodies paved the streets, .nd authorities denounced the existence of a conspiracy, instigating the population to fo r the malefactors. But the population decline was also blamed on low natality rates the reluctance of the poor to reproduce themselves. To what extent this charge .• -.

J'-.

ti6ed is difficult to tell, since demographic recording, before the 17th century, \vas uneven. But we know that by the end of the 16th century the age of marriage was inc:

...... 11 ing in all social classes, and that, in the same period, the number of abandoned c ru�dI _ 1 - a new phenomenon - started to grow. We also have the complaints of ministers from the pulpit charged thac the youth did not marry and procreate, in order not to more mouths into the world than they could feed.

The peak of the demographic and economic crisis were the decades of the and 16305. In Europe, as in the colonies, markets shrank, trade stopped, un,emplo,ym.

became widespread, and for a while there was the possibility that the developing talist economy might crash. For the integration between the colonial and Euro!oeM econonues had reached a point where the reciprocal impact of the crisis rapidly erated its course.This was the first international economic crisis. It was a "General as historians have caUed it (Kamen 1972: 307ff.; Hackett Fischer 1996: 91).

It is in this context that the question of tile relation between labor, popul.tio rl,".

the accumulation of wealth came to the foregr ound of politieal debate and strategy produce the first elements of a population policy and a "bio-power" regime.57 The ness of the concepts applied, often confusing "populousness" with "population," and brutality of the means by which the state began to punish any behavior obstructing ulation growth, should not deceive us in cllis respect. It is my contention that it was population crisis of the 16th and 17th centuries, not the end of fami ne in Europe in 18 1h (.s Foucault has argued) that turned reproduction and population growth into matter s,as well as primary objects of intellectual discourse.58t further argue that clle si6cation of the persecution or'witches," and the new disciplinary methods that the adopted in this period to regulate procreation and break women's control over duction, are also to be traced to tlus crisis. The evidence for this argument is circul mOtali 86 ;t1 and it should be recognized that other factors contributed to increase the determi­ t1 cion of the European power-structure to control more strictly women's reproductive ;ncci on.Amon g them, we must include the increasing privatization �f property a� d eco­ ont ic relations that (within the bourgeoisie) generated a new amaety concertung the (1 estio n of paternity and the conduct of women. Similarly, in the charge that witches sac­ q'�ced childre n to the devil - a key theme in the "great witch-hunt" of the 16th and 17th r�nru rie s - we can read nor only a preoccupation with population decline, but also the � at of the propertied classes with regard to their subordinates, particularly low-class \�men who, as servancs, beggars or healers, had many opportunities to enter theif employ­ e(1' ho uses and cause them harm. It C3.lmot be a pure coincidence, however, that at the very mome nt when population vn.s declini ng, and an ideology was forming that stressed the cent rality of labor in economic life. severe penalties were introduced in the legal codes of Eu rope to punish \VOmen guilty of reproductive crimes.

The concom.ital1t development of a population crisis, an expansionist population t heor y, and the introduction of policies promoting population g rowth is well-docu­ mente d. By the mid-16th century the idea that the number of citizens dctenllines a nation's wealth had become something of a social axiom. "In my view," wrote the French political dunker and demonologistJean Bodin,"one should never be afraid of having coo many subjects or too many citizens, for the strength of the conU1lOnwealth consists in men" (Commom",ai,,,, Book VI). The I talian economist Ciovalllu Botero (1533-1617) had a more sophisticated approach, recogn.ising the need for a balance be rween the number of people and the means of subsistence. Still, he declared that that "the greatness of a city" did not depend on its physical size or the circuit of irs walls, bm exclusively on the num­ ber of its residents. Henry IV's saying that "the strength and wealth of a king lie in the nwnber and opulence ofhis citizens" sums up the demographic thought of the age.

Concern with population growth is detectable also in the program of the Protestant Reform ation. Dismissing the traditional Christian exaltation of chastity, the Reformers valorized marriage. sexuality, and even women because of their reproductive capacity.

Woman is "needed to bring about the increase of the human race," Luther conceded, reflecting that "whatever their weaknesses, women possess one virtue that cancels them all: dley have a womb and they can give binh" (King 1991: 115).

uppon for population growdl clinuxed with the rise of Men:antilism which made the presence of a large population the key to the prosperity a.nd power of a nation.

Mercantilism has often been dismissed by mainstre3.ln economists as a crude system of tho ught because of its assumption that the wealth of nations is proportional to the quan­ tlty of labor ers and money available to them. The brutal means which the mercantilists appli ed in order to force people to work, in their hunger for labor, have contributed to the ir disr epute, as most econo miscs wish to maintain the illusion that capitalism fosters free­ :0 111 ra th er than coercion. It was a merc3.l1tilist class dlat invented the work-houses, hunted sb ow n vagabonds. "transported" criminals to the American colonies. and invested in the I ve trade, all the while asserting the "utility of poverty" and declaring "idleness" a social � agu e.

Thu s, it has nOt been recognized that in dle mercantilists' theory and practice we can� th� mOSt direct expression of the requiremenrs of primitive accumulation and the first -d::, ta liSt polic y explicitly addressing tlle problem of the reproduction of the work-force.

POlicy , as we have seen, had an "intensive" side consisting in the imposition of a total- 87 I .... -...

_ ...... .. -. _ .. __ .

itarian regime using every means to extract the maximum of work from every incliVlidu toi regardless of age and cOllclition. But it also had an "extensive one" consisting in the to expand the size of population, and thereby the size of the army and the work-force.

As Eli Hecksher noted, "an almost fanatical desire to increase popuJation pn""tiIe.d in all countries during the period when mercant ilism was at its height, in the later of the 17,h century" (Heckscher 1966: 158). Along with it, a new concept of hUIlI aQ beings also took hold, picturing them as just raw materials, workers and breeders for the state (Spengler 1965: 8). But even prior to the heyday of mercantile theory, in Fr.onc e and England the state adopted a set of pro-natalist measures that, combined with Public:

Relief, formed the embryo of a capitalist reproductive policy. Laws were passed that"..

a prem ium on marriage and penalized celibacy, modeled on those adopted by the Roman Empire for tills purpose. The family was given a new importance as the key insti­ tution providing for the transnussion of prop erty and the repr oduction of the work_ fo rce. Simultaneously, we have the beginning of demograpluc recording and the inter ..

vention of the state in the supervision of sexuality, procreation, and family life.

But the main initiative that the state cook to restore the desired population was the launching of a true war against women clearly aimed at breaking the w""" •• they had exercised over their bodies and reprod uction. As we will see later in this ume, tlus war was waged primarily through the witch-hunt that literally demonized fo rm of birth-control and non-procreative sexuality, while charging women with sacri­ ficing children to the devil. But it also relied on the redefi nition of what constitutes • repr oductive crime. Thus, starting in the mid-16th century. while Portuguese ships were returning from Af rica with their first human cargoes, all the European govel·nrn .. _ .

began to impose the severest penalties against contraception, abortion and infanticide.

This last practice had been treated with some leniency in the Middle Ages, at in the case of poor women; but now it was turned into a capital crime, and punishe4 1 more harshly than the majority of male crimes.

In sixteenth century Nuremberg, the penalty for maternal infanticide was drowning; in 1580, the year in wluch the severed heads of three women convicted of maternal infanticide were nailed to the scaffold fo r public contemplation, the penalry was changed to beheading (King 19 91: 10).60 New fomu of surveillance were also adopted to ensure that pregnant women not ternunate the,ir pregnancies. In France, a royal edict of1556 required women to ister every pregnancy, and sentenced to death those whose infants died before after a concealed delivery, whether or not proven guilty of any wrongd oing. .

statutes were passed in England and Scotland in 1624 and 1690. A system of spies also created to surveil unwed mothers and deprive them of any support. Even an unmarried pregnant woman was made illegal, for fe ar that she might escape the lic scrutiny; while those who befriended her were exposed to public criticism 1993: 51-52; Ozment 1983: 43).

As a consequence women began to be prosecuted in large numbers, and were executed for infanticide in 16th and 17[h-century Europe than for any other 88 cpt for wicchcr.lfc, a charge chac also centered 011 the killing of children and other e� cla cion s of reproductive norms. Significantly, in the case ofboch infanticide and wicch­ ��il the statutes lim.itillg women's legal responsi ?ility :vere lifted.Thus, women walked, the first time, into the courtrooms of Europe, III the lf own name as legal aduJts, under for rge of being witches and child murderers. Also the suspicion under which midwives (hale in tills period -leading to the entrance of the male doctor into the delivery room can enun ed more from the authorities' fears ofinfanricide than from any concern with -" the nud wives' alleged medical incompetence. With the marginalization of the midwife, the process began by which women lost the couc rol they had exercised over procreation, and were reduced to a passive role in hild deli very, while male doctors came to he seen as the true "givers of life" (as in the �che Jllica 1 drea ms of the Renaissance magicians). With this shift, a new medical practice also prevailed, one that in the case of a medical emergency prioritized the life of the fetus over that of the mother. This was in comrast to the customary birthing process which wolllen had controlled ; and indeed, for it to happen, the cOlTunu nicy of women that had gather ed around the bed of the fmure mother had to be first expelled from the delivery roO I11, and midwives had [0 be placed under the surveillance of the doctor, or had to he recruited to police women. In France and Germany, midwives had to become spies for the state, if they wanted [0 continue their practice. They were expected to report all new births, discover the fathers of children born out of wedlock, and eXaJnine the women suspected of having secredy given birth. They also had to examine suspected local women for any sign of lact ation when foundlings were discovered on the Church's steps (Wiesner 1933: 52).

The same cype of collaboration was demanded of relatives and neighbors. In Protestant countries and towns, neighbors were supposed to spy on women and report all relevant sexual details: if a woman received a man when her husband was away, or if she emered Il house with a man and shut the door behind her (Ozment 1983: 42-44). In Germany, (he pro-natalist crusade reached such a point that women were punished if they did not make enough of an effort during child-deli very or showed litcle enthusiasm for their off­ spring (R.ublack 1996: 92).

The Outcome of these policies that lasted for two centuries (women were still being execu ted in Europe for infanticide at the end of the 18th century) was the enslavement of WOm en to procreation. While in the Middle Ages women had been able to use vari­ ou s form s of contraceptives, and had exercised an undisputed control over the birthing p rocess, from now on their wombs became public territory, controlled by men aJld the StiI.[e, and procreatio n was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation.

In this sense, the destiny of West European women, in the period of primitive IlcCulllUla tion, was similar to that of female slaves in the American colonial plantations :ho, espe cially after the end of the slave-trade in 1807, were forced by their masters to E ec olll e bre eders of new workers. The comparison has obviously serious limits.

ur op ean Women were not openly delivered to sexual assaults -though proletarian ;omen coul d be raped with impun.ity and punished for it. Nor had they to sutTer the PgOfiny of seei ng their children taken away and sold on the auction block. The economic ro t d .

se n .

ef!v ed from the births imposed upon them was also far more concealed. In this s e, It is the condition of the enslaved woman that most explicitly reveals the truth 89 Alb",ht Durer, Tl-m BIRTH Of'Il-m V,RGIN (1502- 1503).

Child-birth Il-IIlS o,,� oj ,ht mai" rvnlts ill rite fift oj II ,VOl/IIIII Imd all ocalsio ll ill wi/jell jimmie rooperi lliotl lri· umphed, 90 1Ju� ltltUll4linizat;oll oj mediad pmt1ia is por­ In�d ill 'his E,t�lis', dtsigll pidllrillg tl/l m,<-{!d pmlling I,fer/wlt 11f:lller au-t"Y from tilt btd oj a sick mm/.TI,t �"mn dmounca ,.tr incompllftlct. l d the logic of capitalist accul11uJation . But despite the differences, in both cases, the � ,)la le body was turned into an instrument for the reproduction aflabar and the expan­e 1 of the work-force, treated as a natural breeding-machine. fUllctioning according [0 SIOI rhy thms outside of wOI �e�1 :5 control. .' . •. . This aspect of prmutlve accumulation IS absent 111 Marx s analysIs. Except for his ,narks in the Communist Manifesto on the use of women within the bourgeois family­ re pro ducer s of heirs guarameeillg the tr.lnsmission of family property -Marx never � ckJ1owledged that procreation couJd become a terrain of exploitu.1on and by the same token a terrain of resistance. He never imagined that women could refuse to reproduce, or U13t such a refusal could become part of class struggle. In the Crlllldrisse (1973: 100 ) he a rgued that capitalist development proceeds irrespective of population numbers because, by virtUe of the increasing productivity oflabor. the labor that capical exploits constantly duninishes in relation to "constant capical" (that is, the capical invested in machinery and othe r produ ction assets), with the consequent determination of a "surplus population." But tillS dynantic, which Marx defines as the "law of population typical of the capitalist mode of production" (Capital,Vol. 1: 689ff.), could only prevail if procreation were a purely biol ogical process, or an activity responding automatically to economic change, and if cap­ I tal iUld the state did not need to worry about "women going on strike against child mak­ mg."This, in fact� is what Marx assumed. He acknowledged that capitalist developmenc has been accompanied by an increase in population, of which he occasionally discussed the causes. But, like Adam Smith, he saw this increase as a "nacural effect" of economic development, and in Capital, VoLl, he repeatedly contrasted tile determination of a "sur­ plus population" with the population's "natural increase." Why procreation should be "a fact of nature" rather than a social, historically detennined activity, invested by diverse Interests and power relations, is a question Marx did not ask. Nor did he imagine that men and women aught have different interests with respect to child-making, an activity which he treated as a gender-neucral. undifferentiated process.

In reality, so far are procreation and population changes from being automatic or "natural" that, in all phases of capitalist development, the state has had to reSOT[ to reg­ ulation and coercion to expand or reduce the work-force. This was especially true at the rime of the capitalist take-off, when the muscles and bones of workers were the primary means of production. But even later -down to the presenc -the state has spared no efforts in its attempt to wrench from women's hands tile control over reproduction, and to deter mjne which children should be born, where, when, or in what numbers.

Conseq uently, women have often been forced to procreate against their will, and have txperie nced an alienation from their bodies, their"labor," and even their children, deeper than that experienced by any other workers (Martin 1987: 19-21). No one can describe In fac t the anguish and desperation suffered by a woman seeing her body turn against herself, as it must occur in the case of an unwanted pregnancy. This is particuJarly true to those situations in which out-of-wedlock pregnancies are penaHzed, and when hav­ Ing a chil d makes a woman vulnerable to social osrracism or even death.

91 I The Devaluation of Wozn en's Labor The crimi nalization of women's concrol over procreation is a phenomeno n wI."" •• importance cannOt be over emphasized, both from the viewpoint or its effects on wo rn. ... and its consequences for the capitalist organization of work. As is well do 'cum "ntod..1 through the Middle Ages women had possessed many means of contraception, Olostt, consisting of herbs wh.ich turned into potions and "pessaries" (suppositories) were USed to quicken a woman's period, provoke an abort ion, or create a conclition of sterili ty. ha E",, � H"bs: A History if COlltraceptioll ill the West (1997), the American historian Jolla Riddle has given us an extensive catalogue of the substances that were most used and the effects expected of them or most likely to occur.6t The criminalization of con � ception expropriated women from tllis knowledge that had been transmitted &om gen...

eration to generatio n,giving them some autOnomy with respect to child-birth. It appeaa tl lat, in some cases, tllis knowledge was not lost but was only driven underground; yet when birth control again made its appearance on the social scene, contraceptive metb..

ods were no longer of the type that women could use, but were specifically created for use by men. What demographic consequences followed from this shift is a question tha fo r the moment I will not pursue, though f refer to R..iddle's work for a discussion of tbis matter. Here I only want to stress that by denying women control over their bodies, the state deprived them of the most fundamental condition for physical and psychological integrity and degraded maternity to the status of forced labor, in adclition to confinin8 women to reproductive work in a way unknown in previous societies. Nevertheles s,forc­ ing women to procreate agajust their will or (as a fe mjnist song from the 1970. had iI) fo rcing them to" produce children for the state,"62 only in part defined women's tion in the new sexual clivision of labor. A complemen tary aspect was the definition women as non-workers, a process much studied by fem inist historians, which by the of the 17th century was nearly completed.

By this time women were losing ground even with respect to jobs that had their prerogatives, such as ale-brewing and midwifery, where their employment was jected to new restrictions. Proletarian women in particular found it clifficult to O bw.* 1 any job other than those carrying the lowest status: as domestic servants (the occu'pa tiol of a third of the female work-f orce), farm-hands, spinners, knitters, embroiderers, ers, wet nurses. As Merry Wiesner (among others) teUs us, the assumption was ground (in the law, in the tax records, in the ordinances of the guilds) that women not work outside the home, and shouJd engage in "production" only in order to their husbands. It \vas even argued that any work that women did at home was work" and was worthless even when done for the market (Wiesner 1993: 838).

a woman sewed some dothes it was "domestic work" or "housekeeping," even if clothes were not for the family, whereas when a man clid the same task it was ered "productive." Such was the devaluation of women's labor that city governmen ts the guilds to overlook the production that women (especially widows) djd in homes, because it was not real work, and because the women needed it not to fall public relief. Wiesner adds that women accepted this fiction and even apologized asking to work, pleading for it on account of their need to suppOrt themselves 92 11fr prosti(lltt mId lilt 501- J ,rt. Ojio. a (limp follower, I "nutiwtt peifor",td tilt ,fr y' - f im ctiOl l cif d wift for sol­J,m lIt,d other proleltlrim/J, lJusltitlg (lIld cookillgfor 'he , Sht sen�J ill "ddilion .'" (i) prol';Ji"�� sexmd scrviw. A prostitlltt ill"iti,�� II diem, "n,t 'IIImbltt oj prostitutes j,urclued imlllct/sely ill tilt tljtcrllwlh of tmlll privcftiz(llioll fwd ,lte (om­ mern'alizntiotl of (.grim/IUff wltich expelled mallY jJelUlftll wometl from the umd. 93 I .-----.. -- -- .. -.. -, -.-- -. -- .. ----, 84-85). Soon all female work, if done in the home, was defined as .. h.ousel(e"pin2 ..

.. .

even when done ouuide the home it was paid less chan men's work, and never fo r women to be able to live by it. Marriage was now seen as a woman's true Cd'"C', ...

women' s inability to support themselves was taken so much for granted, that when ill gle woman tried to settle in a village. she was driven away even if she earned a Combined with land dispossession . this loss of power with regard to wage em' ......

Incnt led co the massification of pro stitution. As Le Roy Ladurie reports, the gt'Owtb the number of prostitutes in France was visible everywhere:

From Avignon to Narbonne to Barcelona "sporting women" (femmes de debauche) stationed themselves at the gates of the cities, in streets of red­ light distric .... . and on the bridges ... [so that] by 1594 the "shameful traffic" was flourishing as never before (Le RoyLadurie 1974: 112-13).

The situation was similar in England and Spain, where, everyday, in the cities. women arriving from the countryside. and even the wives of craftsmen, rounded up faJrUly income with this work. A proclamation issued by the political authorities Madrid, in 1631 ,denoun ced the problem, complaining that many vagabond women now wandering among the ciey's streets, alleys, and taverns, enticing men CO sin with (Vigil 1986: 1 14-5). But no sooner had prostitution become the main form ofsuk,siste actl fo r a large female population than the institutional attitude towards it change,n��" in the late Middle Ages it had been officially accepted 2S a necessary evil, and pn>Sti' ......

had benefited from the high wage regime, in the 16m cencury. the situation was re�etII.U In a climate of intense misogyny. characterized by the advance of the Ref ormation and witch-hunting, prostitution was first subjected to new restrictions then crinunalizcd. Everywhere. between 1530 and 1560. town brothels were closed prosti tutes, especially street-walkers, were subjected co severe penalties: banishment, ging, and other cruel forms of chastise ment. Among them was uthe ducking stool" acabussade -ua piece of grim theatre," as Nickle R.oberts describes it - whereby tht tims were tied up, sometimes they were forced into a cage, and then were inunersed in rivers or ponds, till they almost drowned (Roberts 1992: 1 Meanwhile. in 16th-century France, the raping of a prostitute ceased to be a ", im" .6il I Madrid. as well, it was decided that female vagabonds and prostitutes should not be to stay and sleep in the streets and under the porticos of the town, and if caught be given a hundred lashes. and then should be banned from the city for six years in tion to having their heads and eyebrows shaved.

What can account for this drastic attack on female workers? And how does exclusion of women from the sphere of socially recognized work and monetary relate to the impositon of forced maternity upon them, and the contemporary cation of the witch-hum? Looking at these phenomena from the vantage point of the present, after four turies of capitalist disciplilljng of women, the answers may seem to impose Though womcn's waged work, housework, and (paid) sexual work are still studied oftcn in isolation from each other, we are now in a better position to see that the crimination that women have suffered in the waged work-force has been direcdy 94 their function as unpaid laborers in the home. We can thus connect the banning of lI�stiruti on and the expulsion of women from the organized workplace with the cre­ p 011 of the housewife and the reconstruction of the f.un.ily as the locus for the produc­ ;a.�11 ofl abo r-power. However, from a theoretical and a political viewpoint. the funda­tllen tal question is under what conditions such degradation was possible, and what social �orc es pro moced it or were complicitous with it.

The answer here is that an important factor in the devaluation of women's labor ,v;aS the campaign that craft workers mounted, starting in the late 15th century, to exc lud e female workers from their work-shops, presumably to prO[cct themselves fro nt the assaults of the capitalist merchants who were employing women at cheaper rate s. The craftsmen's efforts have left an abundant trail of evidence.64 Whether in ln iy, Fran ce, or Germany,journeymen petitioned the authorities nOt to allow women A prostitute brj,�� slIbjC'(ted to the lorlure of tht IJ(mbus.

sndt. "S/.e will bt subm ergtd 111 tht river sn,."d limes IIlI d II.e r, Ittlp riso"ed for lift . " 9S Uke the "battle for the breech es," the im{/ge oj tile domille ering tvife dlllllctlgillg rhe sexual Iliemrchy /l/ld be"r;,�,!

/11 • ., Imsb/ ll/d um olle oj rhefiulOrirc rargcrs oj 16tll mId 17tll-cctuury sori llllitfr(/tllre.

co compete with them, banned them from their ranks, went on strike when the hal was not observed, and even refused to work with men who worked with women. It appears that the craftsmen were also inter ested in lim iting women to domestic wad.

because, given their economic difficulties, "the prudent household management 011..

the part of a wife" was beconung for them an indispensable condition for avoidiJ:W] bankruptcy and for keeping an independent shop. Sigrid Brauner (the author of above citation) speaks of the importance accorded py the German artisans to social rule (Brauner 1995: 96-97). Women tried to resis< this onslaught, but -f.

with the intinudating tactics male workers used against them -failed. Those w dared to work out of the home, in a public space and for the market, were po as sexually aggressive shrews or even as "whores" and "witches" (Howell 19 182-83).65 Indeed, there is evidence that the wave of misogyny that by the late t century was mounting in the European cities -reflected in the male obsession the "battle for the breeches" and with the character of the disobedient wife, pic in the popular literature in the act of beating her husband or riding on Ius back.

emanated also from this (self -defeating) attempt to drive women from the workp and from the market.

On the other hand, it is clear that this attempt would not have succeede d if authorities had not cooperated with it. But they obviously saw that it was in their in est to do so. For, in addition to pacifying the rebellious journeymen, the displace ment .

women from the crafts provided the necessary basis for their fixation in reprodu labor and their utilization as low-waged workers in cottage industry.

96 Women:

The New Conll'nons and the Substitute for the Lost Land vas from tlus alliance between the crafts and the urban authorities, along with the con­ It' 'ng privatization of land, that a new sexual division of labor or, better, a new "sexual O�I • ..

l lt r3ct," in Carol ?ateman swords (1988), was forged, defimng women IT1 terms - C �o the rs, wives, daughters, widows -that hid their status as workers, while giving men � access to women's bodies, their labor, and the bodies and labor of their children.

Accord ing to tlus new social-sexual contract, proletarian women became for male rke rs the substitute for the land lost to the enclosures, their most basic means of repro­ \VO dueD on, and a conmlUnal good anyone couJd appropriate and use at wiU. Echoes of this "pri miti ve appropriation" can be hea� in tile concept Oftll� "conullon woman" �rras 1989) wluch in the 161h century qualified those who prostltuted themselves. But 111 the neW orga njzation of work every woman (other than those privatized by bourgeois mell) became a co mmullal good, for once women's activities were defined as non-work, women's labor began to appear as a natural resource, available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink.

Thjs was for women a historic defeat. With their expulsion [rom the crafts and the devalua tion of reproductive labor poverty became femiluzed, and to enforce men's "pri­ mary appropriation" of women's labor, a new patriarchal order \vas constructed, reduc­ II1g women to a double dependence: on employers and on men. The fact that unequal power relations between women and men existed even prior to the advent of capital­ ism, as did a discrinunating sexual division of labor, does not detract from this assess­ ment. For in pre-capitalist Europe women's subordination to men had been tempered by dIe fact that they had access to the coounons and other conununal assets, while in the new capitalist regime IVOllle" themselves became the com mons, as tlleir work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.

I The Patriarchy of the Wage Sign ifican t, in this context, are the changes that took place witlun the family which, in � is perio d, began co separate from the public sphere and acquire its modern con nota­ bons as the main center for the reproduction of the work-force.

. The counterpart of the market, the instrument for the privatization of social rela �on : and, above all, for the propagation of capitalist discipline and patriarchal rule, the an�y emerg es in the period of primitive accumulation also as the most important insti­ tubon for the appropriation and concealment of women's labor. We see this in particular when we look at the working-class family. This is a sub­ !e� t hat has been understudied. Previous discussions have privileged the family of prop­ fj lll ed m en, plau sibly because, at the time to which we are referring, it was the dominant eor�l a nd the model for parental and marital relations. There has also been more inter­s�e�l the fa�nily as a political institution than as a place of work. What has been empha­ of t h' the n, IS that in the new bourgeois family, the husband became the represe ntative e State, charg ed with disciplilung and supervising the "subordinate classes," a cate- 97 gory th3t for 16th 3nd 17th-century political theori.sts Oe3n Bodin, for example) inclu the man's wife and his children (Schochet 1975). Thus, the identification of the ( 3S 3 nucro-st3te or 3 nucro-church , and the demand by the authorities that single wort...

ers live under the roof and rule of a m3Ster. It is also pointed out that within the b0ur­geois family the woman lost much of her power, being generally excluded from the fana., ily business and confined co the supervision of the household.

But what is missing in tlus picture is a recogt ution that, while in the upper class.

W3S properly that gave the husband power over his wife and children, a similar pOwer w:

granted to working-class men over women by means of lWmell� exclusiolljrom tlte""\lt.

Exemplary of this trend was the family of the cottage workers in the purri ng-oat system. Far from shunning marriage and family-making, male cottage workers depended on it, for a wife could "help" them with the work they would do for the merch ants, while caring for their physical needs, and providing them with childr en, who from an early age could be employed at the loom or in some subsidiary occupation. Thus, eYQ in times of population decline. cottage workers apparently continued to multiply; their fa milies were so large that a contemporary 17th-century Austrian, looking at those liv.

ing in his village, described them 3S packed in their homes like sparrows on a rafter. Wba stands out in this type of arrangement is that though the wife worked side-by-side wiIh her husband, she too producing for the market, it was the husband who now received her wage. This was true also for other female workers once they married. In England ", married man .. _ was legally entitled to his wife's earnings" even when the job she did was nursing or breast-feeding. Thus, when a parish employed women to do this kind of job, the records "frequenuy hid (their) presence as workers" registering the payment made in the men's names. "Whether the payment was made to the husband or to the wife depended on the whim of the clerk" (Mendelson and Crawford 1998: 287).

This policy , making it impossible for women to have money of their own, created the material conditions for their subjection to men and the appropriation of their labor by male workers. It is in this sense that I speak of the patriarchy of 'he wage. We must also rethink the concept of "wage slavery." If it is true that male workers became only f0r­ mally free under the new wage-labor regime, the group of workers who, in the transi­ tion to capitalism, most approached the condition of slaves was working-class women.

At the same time - given the wretched conditions in which waged worked lived -the housework that women performed to reproduce their families was essarily limited. Married or not, proletarian women needed to earn some me,"''' ' which they did by holding multiple jobs. Housework, moreover, requires some ductive capital: furniture, utensils, clothing, money for fo od. But waged workers poorly, "slaving away by day and night" (as an artisan from Nuremberg denoun ce"· 15 24),ju st to stave otrhunger and feed their wives and children (Brauner 1995:

Most barely had a roof over their heads, living in huts where other families and mals also resided, and where hygiene (poorly observed even among the better was totally Jacking; their clothes were rags, their diet at best consisted of bread, and some vegetables. Thus, we do not find in this period, among the working the classic figure of the full-time housewife . It was only in the 19th centur y - response to the first intense cycle of struggle against industrial work - that ern family" centered on the full-time housewif e's unpaid reproductive labor waS 98 raliz ed in the workjng class, in England first and later in the United States. e Its development (foUowing the passage of Factory Acts limiting the employment of men and children in the factories) reflected the first long-term investtnent the capital­ �vo dass made in the reproduction of the work-force beyond its numerical expansion. It ist-as the resuJt of a tr.Ide-off . forged under me threat of insurrection . bccween the granting \'[ hi ghe r wages, capable of supporting a "non-working" wife, and a more intensive rate of Ox loiration. Marx spoke of it as a shift from "absolute" to "relative surplus," that is, a shift ;;:11 a cype of exploitation based upon the lengthening of the working day to a maximum nd the reduction of the wage to a min.imum, to a regime where higher wages and shoreer �o urs would be compensated with an increase in the productivity of work and the pace of pro ducti on. From the capitalist perspective, it was a social revolution, overriding a long­ hd d cOllu niollent co low wages. It resulted from a new deal between workers and employ­ ers , agai n founded on the exclusion of women from the wage -putting an end to their recr uitment in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. It was also the mark of a new cap italis t aff1uence, the product of two centuries of exploication of slave labor, soon to be boos ted by a new phase of colonial expansion.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, by contrast, despite an obsessive concern with the size of populati on and the number of "working poor," the actual invesollent in the reproduc­ Don of the work-force was extremely low. Consequently, the bulk of the reproductive labor done by proletarian women was not for their families, but for the families of their employ­ ers or for the market. One third of the female population, on average, in England, Spain, France. and Italy, worked as maids. Thus, in the prolecariat, tlle tendency was cowards the postponment of marriage and the disintegration of the f.unily (16'h-century English vil­ lages experienced a yearly turnover of fifty percent). Often the poor were even forbidden to marry, when it was feared that their children would fall on public relief, and when this actually happened, the children were taken away from them and farmed out to the parish to work. It is estimated that one tlurd or more of the population of rural Europe remained single; in the towns the rates were even higher, especially among women; in Cermany, forty percent were either "spinsters" or widows (Ozment 1983: 41-42).

Neverthele ss - though the housework done by proletarian women was reduced to a m.inim um, and proletarian women had always to work for the market -within the working-class conullunity of the transition period we already see the emergence of the sexu al divisio n of labor that was to become typical of the capitalist organization of work.

At its center was an increasing d.ifferentiation between male and female labor, as the tasks perf orme d by women and men became more diversified and, above all, became the car­ rie rs of differe nt social relations.

Impo verished and disempowered as they may be, male waged workers couJd still �nefit from their wives'labor and "...ages, or they could buy the services of prostitutes.

ft hrou gh out tlus first phase of proletarianization, it was the prostitute who often per­ � rrned for male workers the function of a wife, cooking and washing for them in addi­ ��n to serv ing them sexually. Moreover, the criminalization of prostitution , which pun­ ts ed th e WOma n but hardly tOuched her male customers, strengthelled male power. Any :�. Could now destroy a woman simply by declaring tl1at she was a prostitute, or by nll h eiz ing that she had given in to his sexual desires. Women would have to plead with len" not to take away their honor"(the only property left to them) (Cavallo and Cerutti 99 19 80: 346B). the assumption being th2t their lives were now in the hands of mCn (like feudal lords) could exercise over them a power of life and death.

The Taming of Women and the Red efinition of Femi ninity and Masculinit y: Women the Savages of Europe It is not surprising, then, in view of this deva luation of women's labor and social Status.

that the insubordination of women and the methods by which they could be "tam ed" were among the main themes in the literacure and social policy of the "tramitio n" (Underdown 1985a: 116-36).70W omen could not have been tot:illy devalued as wodt.

en and deprived of autonomy with respect to men without being subjected to an intet1le process of sodal degradati on; and indeed, throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, wOIl1 e Q lost ground in every area of social life.

A key area of change in this respect was the law, where in this period we aa observe a steady erosion of women's rights.71 One of the main rights that women to.

was the right to conduct economic activities alone, asfemme soles. In France, they kc the right to make contracts or [Q represent themselves in court, being declared lepl " imbeciles." I n Italy, they began to appear less frequently in the courts to denounce abuses perpetrated against them. In Germa ny, when a nuddle-class woman became a widow •• became customary to appoint a tutOr to manage her affairs. Gennan women were .., fo rb idden to live alone or with other women and, in the case of the poor, even with their own families, since it was expected that they would not be properly controlled. In sum.

together with econonuc and social devaluation, women experienced a process oftep infantili zation.

Wo men' s loss of social power was also expressed through a new sexual differena­ ation of space. In the Mediterranean countries women were expelled not only fita many waged jobs but also from the streets, where an unaccompanied woman risked beiDI sub jected to ridicule or sexual assault (Davis 1998). In England, too, ("a women's .,.,..

dise" in the eyes of some lcalian visitors) , the presence of women in public began to be frowned upon. English women were discouraged from sitting in front of their homes or staying near their windows; they were also instructed noc to spend time with fr iends (in tllis period the term "gossip" -female friend -began to acquire a paraging connotation). It was even reconunended that women should noc visit their ents too often after marriage.

How the new sexual division of labor reshaped male-female relations can be from the broad debate that was carried Out in the learned and popular literature on nature offemale virtues and vices, one of the main avenues for the ideological of gender relations in the transition to capitalism. Known from an early phase as ilIa des femmes," what transpires from this debate is a new sense of curiosity for the indicating that old norms were breaking down, and the public was beconling tlle basic elements of sexual politics were being reconstructed .Two trends within

rntly inferior to men - excessively emotional and lusty, unable to govern dlemselves­ and had to be placed under male connol. As with the condemnation of witchcraft, con­ sensus on tlus matter cut across religious and intellectual lines. From the pulpit or the writ­ [en page, humanistS, Protestant reformers, counter-reformation Catholics, all cooperated m the vilification of women, conscancly and obsessively.

Women were accused of being unreasonable, vain, wild, wasteful. Especially blamed was the female tongue, seen as an instrument ofinsuhordination. But the main female vil­ lain was the disobedient wife, who, together with the"scold,"the"witch," and the "whore" was the favorite target of dramatists, popular writers, and moralists. In this sense, Shake speare's 771e Tam;IIg if /Ile SI"Clv (1593) was the manifesto of the age. The punish­ ment of female insubordination to patriarchal authority was called for and celebrated in

101 It is no exaggeration to say that women were treated with the same hostility sense of estrang ement accorded "Indian savages" in the literature that developed on sub ject after the Conquest. The parallel is nOt casual. In both cases literary and CUI", ... , denigration \vas at the service of a pro ject of expro priation. As we will see, the nization of ule American indigenous people served to justify their enslavemen t an d plunder of their resources. In Europe, the attack waged on women justified the priation of their labor by men and the crim.inalization of their control over "' 1'10<11> 1:..' tion. Always. the price of resistance was extermination. None of the tactics aeplc'Ytod against European women and colonial subjects would have succeeded, had they not beea sustained by a campaign ofcerror.ln the case of European women it was the witch-h_ that played the main role in the construction of their new social filnction, and the d� dation of their social identity.

The defin.ition of women as demonic beings, and ule atrocious and huntil ia tiat practices to which so many of them were subjected left indelible marks in the coUectivt fe male psyche and in women's sense of possi bilities. From every viewpoint - � economically , cultura lly, politically -the witch-hunt was a turning poim in wo men ..

lives; it wa, the equivalent of the hiStoric defe.t to which Engel, alludes. in 11It Origin " the Family, Pri,"'tt Property .IId the St.te (1884). as the cau,e of the downfall of the matri- Frotllispim of T,-w PA RlJAMl1Vf OF WOME:" (1646 ). a work typical

nIJ,i-lvomrn satirt ,IWI Jomi· Ill lltJ English Ultmlllrt in llrt ptriod of tire Civil lM,,; 102 �HE """ Parliament of VV omen.

Witb tb. mcm. uwn by .b .... _'1 f.nalkd. Tolin' in mon:- Ea',.., Pompc, PriM, .nd ,,_ •. ""' ofp«b1 I' ..... ,.., ....... ,,",�.

",, �" """ o.� rIIft w....st : ..... a_ .., ...... ... !.r .... . --r .:.lll._(. ........ .. '- ... ..-:- "'.1 � ... ucdIII .... � v- rehal world. For the witch-hunt destroyed a whole world of female practices, colJecove " latio ns, and systems oflOlowledge that had been the foundation of women's power in ;re�ca pitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feu- dJli�ll· . . . . .

Out of this defeat a new model of fenunuuty emerged: the Ideal woman and wIfe _ passive, obediem, thrifty, of few words, always busy at work, and chaste. Tills change btg311 at the end of the 17th century, after women had been subjected for more dlan two cent uries to state terrorism. Once women were defeated, the image of fernininity con­ structe d in the "transition" was discarded as an unnecessary tool, and a new, tamed one took its place. While at dle time of the witch-hunt women had been portrayed as savage bein gs, mental.ly weak, unsatiably lusty, rebelliow, insubordinate, incapable of self-control.

by dle 18th century the canon has been reversed. Women were now depicted as passive, asex ual beings, more obedient. more moral than men, capable of exerting a positive moral utfl uence on them. Even their irrationality could now be valorized, as the Dutch philoso­ pher Pierre Bayle realized in his Dictiollaire Historique cl Critique (1740), in which he praised the power of the female "maternal instinct," arguing that dut it should be viewed as a truly providential device, ensuring that despite the disadvantages of childbinhing and childrais­ II1g, women do continue to reproduce.

I Colonization, Globalization, and Women While the response to the population crisis in Europe was the subjugation of women to r eproduction, in colonial America, where colonization destroyed ninety five percent of the aboriginal population, the response was the slave trade which delivered to the European ruling class an ulmlense quantity oflabor-power.

As early as the 16th century , approximately one million Mrican slaves and indige­ nous workers were producing surplus-value for Spain in colonial America, at a rate of exploitation far higher than that of workers in Europe, and contributing to seccors of the European economy that were developing in a capitalist direction (Blaut 1992a: 45-46).73 By 1600, Brazil alone exported twice the value in sugar of all the wool that England e xporte d in dle same year (ibid.: 42). The accumulation rate was so high in the Brazilian sU� r plamario ns that every two years they doubled their capacity. Gold and silver too pl.ye d a key role in the solution to the capitalist crisis. Cold imported from Brazil re­ acti vate d conunerce and industry in Europe (DeVries 1976: 20). More than 17,000 tOIlS we� imported by 1640, giving the capitalist class there an exceptional advantage in access to Wor kers. conunodities, and land (Blaut 1992a: 38-40). But the true wealdl was the I.b or acc umulated through the slave trade. which made possible a mode of production that coul d not be imposed in Europe. It is now established that the plantation system fueled the Industrial Revolution, as arg ued by Eric Williams, who noted that hardly a brick in Liverpool and Bristol was "o [ t c em ente d with Mrican blood (1944:61--63).But capitalism may not even have taken o .

W ith out Europe's "annexation of America," and the "blood and sweat" that for twO Centu .

� r rtes flowed to Europe from the plantations. This must be stressed, as it helps us a. 1ZC how essential slavery has been for the hiscory of capitalism, and why, periodi- 103 I ... .......... ...... -, _ .. __ ....... -., .... .

cally, but systematically, whenever the capitalist system is threatened by a majo r nmnic crisis, the capitalist class has to launch a process oC"pr-imitive accumulation ..

is, a process of large-scale colonization and enslavement, such as the one we � nessing at present (Bales 1999).

The plantation system was crucial for capitalist development not only beea of the illunense an-lOuO[ of surplus labor that was accumulated from it, but beca USe-:

set a model aflabar management, export-oriented production . economic imegrana.

and international division of labor that have since become paradigmatic for cap ital .

ist class relations.

With its inullcnse concentration of workers and its captive I3bor force uProoted from its homeland, unable to rely on local support, the plantation prefigured not """ the factory bue also the later use ofimnugration and globalization CO cut the COSt oflabar.

In particular, the plantation was a key step in the formation of an international divisiaa oflabor dm (through the production of "consumer goods") integrated the work oflhe slaves into the reproduction of the European work-force, while keeping enslaved ..

waged worke" geographically and socially divided.

The colonial production of sugar, tea, tobacco, rum,and cotton -the most impGli.

cant conmlodities, together with bread, in the production of labor-power in Europe _ did not take off on a large scale until afier the 1650., after slavery had been institu� alized and wages in Europe had begun to (modesdy) rise (Rowling 1987: 51,76, 85).11 must be mentioned here, however, because, when it did take off, two mechanisms wee introduced that significantly restructured the repro duction of labor internation ally.

one side, a global assembly line was created that cut the cost of the commodities necel-' sary to produce labor-power in Europe, and linked eru.laved and waged workers in that pre-figured capitalism's present use of Asian, African, and Latin American W(,rIo".

as providers of"cheap""consumer" goods (cheapened by death squads and military lence) for the uadvanced"capita1ist countries.

On the other side, the metropolitan wage became the vehicle by which me produced by enslaved workers went to the market, and the value of the products enslaved-labor was realized. In tllis way, as with female domestic work, the integrlltiiGI of enslaved labor into the production and reproduction of the metropolitan wc,rIc··101II was further established, and the wage was further redefined as an instrument ofaC(:uJl� lation, that is, as a lever for mobilizing not only the labor of the workers paid by it, also for the labor of a multitude of workers hidden by it, because of the umvaged ditions of their work.

Did worke" in Europe know that they were buying products resuJoing [re'm ....

labor and, if they did, did they ob ject to it?This is a question we would like to ask but it is one which I cannot answer. What is certain is that the history of tea, sugar , tobacco, and cotton is far more significant than we can deduce from the co'"trib U'llCI which these conullodities made, as raw materials or means of exchange in the mde, to the rise of the factory system. For what traveled with these "exports" was only the blood of the slaves but the seeds of a new science of exploitation, and a division of the work ing class by which \\f3ged-work, rather than providing an rive to slavery, \vas made to depend on it for its existence, as a means Qike 104 I lllp aid labor) for the expansion of the unpaid part of the waged . workin �-day.

So closely incegrated were the lives of the enslaved laborers 111 America and waged bOrers in Europe that in the Caribbean islands, where slaves were given plots of land r.. rev ision grounds") to cultivate for their own use, how much land was allotted to d'�Jl1 ' and how much time was given to them to cultivate it, varied in proportion to the rtc e of sugar on the world-marke[ (Morrissey 1989: 51-59) -plausibly determined � the dynamics of workers' wages and workers' struggle over reproduction. Y It would be a miscake, however, to conclude that the incegration of slave labor in the production of the European waged proletariat created a conullunity of imerests betwee n European workers and the metropolitan capitalists, presumably cemented by their COl1unon desire for cheap imported goods. In realiry, like the Conquest, the slave trade was an epochal misfortune for Eur ope an workers. As we have seen, s.Iavery (like the witch-hunt) was a major ground of experimentation for methods of labor-comrol that were later imported into Europe.

Sbvery also affected the European workers' wages and legal status; (or it cannot be a coin­ odence that only with the end o( slavery did wages in Europe decisively increase and did European workers gain the right to organize.

It is also hard to imagine that workers in Europe profited from the Conquest of America, at least in its initial phase. Let us remember that it was the imensity of the anti­ feudal struggle that instigated the lesser nobility and the merchants to seek colonial (xpansion, and that the conqu.istadors came from the ranks of the most-hated enemies af the European working class. It is also important [Q remember that the Conquest pro­ Vided the European ruling class with the silver and gold used to pay the mercenary annies mat defeated the urban and rural revolts; and that, in the same years when Arawaks, Aztecs, and Incas were being subjuga ted, workers in Europe were being driven from their homes, branded like animals, and burnt as witches.

We shouJd not assume, then, that the European proletariat \vas always an accom­ plice to the plunder of the Americas, though individual proletarians undoubtedly were.

The nobilicy expected so little cooperation from the "lower classes" that initially the Spaniards allowed only a few to embark. Only 8,000 Spaniards migrated legaIly to the Ameri cas in the entire 161h century, the clergy malting up 17% of [he lot (Hamilton 1965:

2 99;W illiams 1984: 38--40). Even later, people were forbidden from settling ovelleas inde­ pend endy, because i[ was feared that d,ey m.igh[ collabom[e with the local population.

For most proletarians, in the 17th and 18th cenUiries, access to the New World 'was thro ugh indentured servitude and "transportation," the punislullent which the authori­ ti es in Engla nd adopted to rid the country of convicts, political and religious dissidents, an d the vast population of vagabonds and beggall that was produced by the enclosures. �s Peter Lin ebaugh and Marcus Rediker point ou[ in 711< Mally-Headed Hydra (2000 ), t le col oni zers ' fear of unrestricted nugration was well-founded, given the wretched liv­ ,ntcondi tions [hat prevailed in Europe, and the appeal exercised by the reportS [hat cir­ �u te d ab out the New World, which pictured it as a wonder land where people lived p7e fmlll toil and tyranny, masters and greed, and where "myne" and "thyne" had no 6-;e , all dungs being held in conunon (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000; Brandon 1986:

. So Strong was the attr.lction exercised by the New World that the vision of a new IDS I ......... ......... ... _ ..... ...... -., .... ... .. ... .. .. ..... ..

society it provided apparently influenced the political thought of the Enlighterun, contributing to the emergence of a new concept of "Ii berry," taken to signify lessness. an idea previously unknown in European political theory (Brandon 1 23-28) . Not surpris ingly, some Europeans tried ro"lose thenlSelve s"in this utopia n where,as Linebaugh and Rediker powerfully put it, they couJd reconstruct the lost e rience of the conUTIOns (2000: 24). Some lived for years with Indian tribes despite restrictions placed on those who settled in the American colonies and the heavy p .

to be paid if caught. since escapees were treated like traitors and puc to death. This the fate of some young English settlers in Virginia who, having run away to live the Indians, on being caught were condemned by the colony'S councilmen to "burned, broken on the wheel. .. [and] hanged or shot to death" (Koning 1993: 6\ "Terror created boundaries:' Linebaugh and Rediker comment (2000: 34).Y et, as late 1699, the English still had a great difficulty persuading the people whom the India ns captivated to leave their Indian manner of living.

No argu ment, no entreaties, no tears [a contemporary reponed] ...

could persuade many of them to leave their Indian friends. On the other hand, Indian children have been carefully educated among the English, clothed and caught, yet there is not one inscance that any of these would remain, but returned to their own nations (Koning 1993: 60).

As for the European proletarians who signed themselves away inco inclerltw .... ; servitude or arrived in the New Wodd in consequence of a penal sentence, their lot nOt tOO different, at first, from that of the African slaves with whom they often W

side by side.Their hostility to their masters was equally intense, so that the planters them as a dangerous lot and, by the second half of the 17<1> centur y. began to limit use and introduced a legislation aimed at separating them from the Mricans. But only the end of the 18th century were racial boundaries irrevocably drawn (Moulier 19 98). Until then, the possibility of alliances between whites, blacks, and aboriginal pies. and the fear of such unity in the Euro pean ruling class' imagination, at home on the plantations, was constantly present. Shakespeare gave voice to it in TI,e (1612 ) where he pictured the conspiracy organized by Caliban. the narive rebel. son a witch, and by Trinculo and Stephano, the ocean-going European proletarians , gesring the possibility of a fatal alliance among the oppressed, and providing a counterpoint to Prospero's magic healing of me discord among the rulers.

In TI,e Tempest the conspiracy ends ignominiously, with the European pn,lell ll ans demonstrating to be nothing better than petty thieves and drunkards, and Caliban begging forgiveness from his colonial master. Thus, when the def eated rebels brought in front of Prospero and his former enelnies Sebastian and Antonio (noW onciled with him), they are met with derision and thoughts of ownership and 106 SEBASTIAN.

What things are these, my lord Antonio?

Will money buy them? ANTONIO. Very like; one of them is a plain fish, and, no doubt, marchernble.

PR OSP ERa. Mark but the badges of these men, my lords, Then say if they be true. This mis-shapen knave, His mother was a witch, and one so strong That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs, And deal in her conunand without her power.

These three have robbed me; and this demi-devil­ For he's a bastard one -had plotted with them To take my life. Two of these fellows you Must know and own. This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine. (Shakespeare, Act V, Scene I, lines 265-276) Offstage, however, the threat continued. "Both on Bermuda and Barbados white serv ants were discovered plotting with Mrican slaves, as thousands of convicts were being ship ped dJere in the 1650s from the British islands" (Rowling 1987: 57). In Virgi nia the peak in the alliance between black and white servants was Bacon's Rebellion of1675-76.

when African slaves and British indentured servants joined together to conspire against their masters .

It is fo r tlus reason that, starting in the 16405. the accumulation of an enslaved pro­ letariat in the Southern American colonies and the Caribbean was accompanied by the construction of racial hierarchies. thwarting the possibility of such combinations. Laws were passed depriving Mricans of previously granted civic rights, such as citizenship, the right CO bear arms, and the right to make depositions or seek redress in a tribunal for injuries suffered. The turning point was when slavery was made an hereditary condition, and the slave masters were given the right to beat and kill their slaves. In addition, mar­ riages between "blacks" and "whites" were forbidde n. Later, after the American War of Independence, white indentured servitude, deemed a vestige of British rule, was elinu­ nated. As a result, by the late 18th century , colonial America had moved from "a society with slaves to a slave society" (Moulier Boutang 1998: 189), and the possibility of soli­ darit y between Mricans and whites had been severely undermined. "White," in the colonies, became not just a badge of social and economic privilege "serving to designate those who until 1650 had been called 'Christians' and afterwards 'English' or 'free men'" (ibid .: 194), but a moral attribute, a means by which social hegemony was naturalized.

"Black" or " African," by contrast, became synonynlous with slave, so much so that free bl ac k peopl e - still a sizeable presence in early 17th-century America -were later fo rced to prove that they were free.

I Sex, Race and Class in the Colonies W, ex, Race, and Class in the Cololues o ul d Caliba n's conspiracy have had a diff erent outcome had its protagonists been � OIl 1�n ? Had the instigators been not Caliban but Ius mother, Sycorax, the powerful S genan witch that Shakespeare ludes in the play's background. and not Trillculo and t e ph ano but the sisters of the witches who, in the same years of the Conquest, were 107 being burned in Europe at the stake?

This question is a rhetorical one, but it serves to question the nature of the ual division of labor in the colonies, and of the bonds that could be established between European, indigenous, and African women by virtue of a COllmlon expe,ri.,...!

of sexual discrim ination.

In I, Till/ba, Black Witch of Salem (1992), Maryse Conde gives us an insigh, 'he kind of situation that could produce such bonding, by describing how Tirub a her new mistress, the Puritan Samuel Parris' young wife, gave each other suppOrt at against his murderous contempt for women.

An even more outstanding example comes from the Caribbean, where 'O'Y-c:l...1 English women "tr:msported" from Britain as convicts or indentured servants be,c..,,,, a significam part of the labor-gangs on the sugar estates. "Considered unfit for riage by propertied white males, and disqualified for domestic service," because insolence and riotous disposition, "landless white women were dismissed to """"1111 labor in plantations, public construction works, and the urban service sector. In these worlds they socialized intimately with the slave conmlUnity, and with enslaved black men." They established households and had children with ,hem (Beckles 1995 131- 32). They also cooperated as well as competed with female slaves in the market­ ing of produce or stolen goods.

But with the institutionalization of slavery, which was accompanied by a lesseo­ ing of the burden for white workers, and a decrease in the number of women arrivina fr om Europe as wives for the planters, the situation changed drastically. Regardless « their social origin, white women were upgraded, or married off within the ranks ofme white power structure, and whenever possible they became owners of slaves then1Selws, usually female ones, employed for domestic work (ibid.),7' Tills, however, was not an automatic process. Like sexism, racism had to be legit­ lated and enf orced. Among the most revealing prohibitions we must again count marriage and sexual relations between blacks and whites were forbidden, white wo, me" who married black slaves were condemned, and the children resulting from such riages were enslaved for life. Passed in Maryland and Virginia in the 1660s, these prove that a segregated, racist society was instituted from above, and that intimate tions between "blacks" and "whites" must have been very conlJTlon, indeed, if enslavement was deemed necessary to terminate them.

As iff oUowing the script laid out by the witch-hunt, the new laws oem"ru'''.

­ relation between white women and black men.When they were passed in the IO

71u� bratld ing of women by the Jn1f hlld jigllred promitlfnlfy jt, fflt £lIro pcat' ulitdHritli5, tI5 (/ symbol of lo(nl slIbju gnlioll. BII/ ill rt:tdily, the tnle devi/5 lvert flit wllitt 51m;e traders IItld plllll((/[io ll oll/ners wl,o (like the /llCII i" this piclllrej did 110/ hes­ iflJlt to frelll tile IWllletl ther CflSuwed like mttlt.

segregation along racial lines succeeded only in part, checked by m.igration, population decline, indigenous revolt, and the formation of a white urban proletariat with no prosp ect of economic advancement, and therefore prone to identify with mestizos and mulanos more than with the white upper-class. Thus, while in the plantation societies �f the Cari bbean the differences between European and Mricans increased with time, III the South American colonies a "re-composition" became possible, especially among l o w-c lass European, me5tiza, and Mrican women who, beside their precarious economic POS itio n, shared the disadvantages deriving from the double standard built into the law, wh o I Ie 1 made them vuJnerable to male abuse.

k Sig ns of this "recomposi tion" can be found in the records which the Inqu.isition h Cp t �n 18t1L century Mexico of the investiga tions it conducted to eradicate magical and e ren e beli efS {Behar 1987: 34-51).The task \v.s hopeless, and soon the Inqui sition lost ;� ere st in the project, convinced that popular magic was no longer a threat to the polit­ am order . But the testimon.ies it collected reveal the existence of multiple exchanges .. Ong Wom en in matters relating to magical cures and love remedies, creating in time 111�� W cultur al reality drawn from the encounter between the African, European and gen ous magi cal traditions. As Ruth Behar writes:

109 Indian women gave hummingbirds to Spanish healers (or use in sex­ual attracti on, mulatta women told mestiza women how [0 tame theif husbands, a loba sorceress introduced a coyota to the Devil.T his "pop­ ular" system of belief ran parallel to the system of belief of the Church, and it spread as quickly as Christianity did in the New Wodd, so that after a while it became impossible to distinguish in it what was "In dian" or "Spanish" or "Afric an" (ibid.).7 6 Assimilated in the eyes of the Inquisition as people "without reason," this varie­ gated female world which Ruth Behar describes is a telling example of the alliances that, across colonial and color lines, women could build, by virtue of their common expeq..

enee, and theiT interest in sharing the traditional knowledges and practices available to them to control theif reproduction and fight sexual discrimination.

Like discrimi nation on the basis of "race," this was more than a cul[Ural bagg;wa which the colonizers brought from Europe with their pikes and horses. No less _ the destruction of cODu nunaHsm, it was a strategy clictated by specific economic inter­ est and the need to create the preconclitions for a capitalist economy, and as such always ad justed to the task at hand.

In Mexico and Peru, where population decline recommended that female domestic labor in the home be incentivized, a new sexual hierarchy was introdu cell by the Spanish authorities that stripped indigenous women of their auto nomy, and gave their male kin more power over them. Under the new laws, married womeD.

became men's propert y, and were forced (against the traditional custom) to foUow their husbands CO their homes. A compadrazgo system was also created further limiting their rights, placing the authority over children in male hands. In adclition, to ensure thIt incligenous women reproduced the workers recruited to do mjla work in the mines.

the Spanish authorities legislated that no one could separate husband from wife, whida meant that women were forced to follow their husbands whether they wanted it not, even co areas known to be death camps, due to the pollution created by the ing (Cook Noble J 981 :205-6).77 The intervention of the French Jesuits in the clisciplining and training of Montagna,is- Naskapi, in mid-1 7th century Canada, provides a rev ealing example gender clifferences were accumulated. The story is told by the late anthropologist Leacock in her My'!'s of Male Dominance (1981), where she examines the diary of its protagonist s.This was Father Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary who, in M"C3U <,­ nial Cashion, had joined a French tracling post to Christianize the Inclians,and rurn into citizens of "New Frallce."The Montagnais-Naskapi were a nomadic Indian that had lived in great harmony, hunting and fishing in the eastern Labrndor Pe,,;"'''' But by the time of Le Jeune's arrival, their conununity was being undennined by presence oCEuropeans and the spread oCCur-trading, so that some men, eager to conunercial alliance with them, were amenable to letting the French dictate how should govern themselves (Leacock J 98 1: 396) .

As often happened when Europeans came in contact with native populations, the French were impressed by Momagnais-Naskapi generosity, lIO ense of cooperation and indifference to status, but they were scandalized by their �')a ck of mora Is;" they saw that the Naskapi had no conception o(private property.

of auth ority, of male superiori ty, and they even refused to pu�lish their children (Leac ock 1981: 34-38) .TheJe,uilS decided 10 change all Ihal, se[[lng oU[ to teach the dians the basic eiemcms of civilization, convinced that this was necessary to turn In d tI . .. th fi I h h" . h hePl into reliable era e panners. In us Spirit, ey IrsC raug 1t t em t at mal l IS t e I 'I er " that "in France women do not rule their husbands," and eha[ courting at 1113 ' nJg ltt. divorce at either partner' s �esire. and s�xual fr�edol1l (or both spouses, before O f aft er marria ge, had to be forbidden. Here JS a [cUing exchange Le Jeune had, on this score , with a Naskapi man: "I [old him it was not honorable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was present, was his son. He replied, 'Thou has no sense. You French people love only your chil­ dren; but we love all the children of our tribe.' I began to laugh see­ ing that he philosophized in horse and mule fashion" (ibid.: 50).

Backed by the Gov ernor of New France, the Jesuits succeeded in convincing the Naskapi to provide themselves with some chiefS, and bring "their" women to order.

Ty pically, one weapon they used \.vas to insinuate th:iIC women who were too independ­ ent and did not obey their husbands were creatures of the devil . When, angered by the men 's attempts to subdue them, the Naskapi women ran away, the Jesuits persuaded the men to chase after their spouses and threaten them with imprisonment:

"Such acts ofjustic e"- Lejeune proudly commented in one particu­ lar case -"cause no surprise in France, because it is usual there to pro­ ceed in that manner. But among dlese people ... where everyone consid­ ers himself from birth as fiee as the wild animals that roam in dleir great fo rests ... it is a marvel, or radler a miracle, to see a peremptory conunand obeyed, or any act of severity or justice performed" (ibid.: 54).

The Jesuits' greatest victory, however, was persuading the Naskapi to beat their child ren, believing that the "savages' " excessive fondness for their offipring \.vas the major O �lacl e to their Christianization. Le Jeune's diary records the first instance in which a girl was publicly beaten, while one of her relatives gave a chilling lecture to the bystanders on the historic significance of the event:"Thi, is the first punishment by beating (he said) W e mfl ict on anyone of our Nation ... .. (ibi d.: 54-55).

tha The Montagnais- Naskapi men owed their training in male supremacy to the fact th t the French wanced to instill in them the "instinct" for private property, to induce :01 to bec ome reliable partners in the fur trade. Very different was the situation on the � n� tio ns, where the sexual division oflabor was inunediately dictated by the planters' O qU lrel llencs for labor- power, and by the price of commodities produced by the slaves n Ih . e Illter national market.

Until Ole abolition of tile slave trade, as Barbam Bush and Marietta Morrissey have III documented, both women and men were subjected to the sam e degr ee of' expl()i" ,ti cm;""" planters found it more profitable to work and "consume" slaves to death than to en ,c o, u r. ... 1 their reproduction. Neither the sexual division oflabor nor sexual hierarchies were thus nounced. Mrican men had no say concern ing the destiny of their female companion s and kin; as for wom en, far from being given special consideration, they were expected to walk in the fields like men, especially when sugar and tobacco were in high demand, and they were subject to the same cruel punislunents, even when pregna nt (Bush 1990: 42-44).

Ironically then, it would seem that in slavery women "achieved" a rough equality with the men of their class (Momsen 1993). But their treatment was never the sante Wo men were given less to eat; unlike men, they were vulnerable to their masters' sex uai assaults; and more cruel punishment were inflicted on them, for in addition to the phys..

ical agony women had to bear the sexual huntiJiation al'\vays attached to them and the damage done, when pregnant, to the fetuses they carried.

A new page, moreover, opened after 1807. when the slave trade was abolished and the Caribbean and American plante", adopted a "slave breeding" policy. As Hilary Beckles points out, in relation to the island of Barbados, plantation owners had attemp ted to control the reproductive patterns offemale slaves since the 17th century, "[encourag.­ ing] them to have fewer or more children in any given span of time," depending on how much field labor was needed. But only when the supply of Mr ican slaves diminished did the regulation of women's sexual relations and reproductive patterns become more sys­ tematic and intense (Beckles 1989: 92).

In Europe, forcing women to procreate had led to the imposition of capital pun­ ishment for contracept ion. In the plan tations, where slaves were becoming a precious conunodi ty, the shift to a breeding policy made women more vulnerable to sexual assault.

though it led to some "ameliorations" of women's work conditions: a reduction of work­ hours, the building oflying-in-houses, the provision of midwives assisting the delivery.

an expansion of social rights (e.g .• of travel and assembly)(Beckles: 1989: 99-1 DO; Bum 1990: 135). But these changes could not reduce the damages inflicted on women by field-labor, nor the bitterness women experienced because of their lack offreedom.With the exception of Barbados, the planters' attempt to expand the work-force through "nat­ ural reprod uction" failed, and the birth rates on the plantations remained "abnormall y low" (Bush 136-37; Beckles 1989. ibid.).Whether this phenomenon was a result of out­ right resistance to the perpetuation of slav ery, or a consequence of the physical debili­ tation produced by the harsh conditions to which enslaved women were subjected, is still a matter of debate (Bush 1990: 14311). But. as Bush points out. there are good rea­ sons to believe that the main cause of the failure was the refusal of women to procreate.

fo r as soon as slavery was eradicated, even when their economic conditions in some respect deteriorated, the conmlU nities offreed slaves began to grow (Bush 1990).18 Wo men's refusaJs of victimization also reshaped the sexual division of labor , as occurred in Caribbean islands where enslaved women turned themselves into semi-free market vendors of the products they cultivated in the "provision grounds" (in Jamaica.

"polinks"). given by the plante", to the slaves so that they could to support themselV es.

The planters adopted tillS measure to save on the cost of repr oducing labor. But access to the "provision grounds" turned out to be advancageou for dle slaves as well; it gave 112 t h ell l more mobility, and the possibi lity to use the time allotted for their cwtivation for th er act ivities. Being able to pro duce small crops that couJd be eaten or sold boosted � lei r independence. Those most devoted to the success of the provision grounds were t \lO m en . who marketed the crops, re-appr opriating and repro ducing within the planta­ � o n syst em what had been one of their main occupations in Africa. As a result, by the Iud-18th century, enslaved women in the Caribbean had carved out for themselves a I la ce in the plantation economy, contributing to the expansion, if not the creation, of � le isJa nd's food market. They did so both as producers of much of the food consumed by the slaves and the white population, and also as hucksters and market vendors of the cro ps they cultivated, supplemented with goods taken from the master's shop, or exc hanged with other slaves, or given to them for sale by their maSters.

It was in this capacity that female slaves also came into contact with white prole­ tari an wom en, often former indentured servants, even after the latter had been removed front gang-labo r and emancipated. Their relationship at times couJd be hostile: proletar­ jan European women, who also survived mostly through the growing and marketing of rood crops, stole at times the products that slave women brought to the market, or attempted to im_pede their sales. But both groups of women also collaborated in build­ ing a vast network of buying and selling relations which evaded the laws passed by the colonial authorities, who periodically worried that these activities may place the slaves beyond their control.

Despite the legislation introduced to prevent them from selling or limiting the places in which they couJd do so, enslaved women continued to expand their market­ IIlg activities and the cuJtiv ation of their provision plots, which they came to view as their own so that, by the late 18th century, they were forming a proto-peasantry with practically a monopoly of island markets.Thus, according to some historians, even before �m:mcipation, slavery in the Caribbean had practically ended. FClnaJe slaves -against all odds -were a key force in tlus process, the ones who, with their determination, shaped the development of the slave community and of the islands' economies, despite dle authorities' ITI3ny attempts to linut their power.

Enslaved Caribbean women had also 3 decisive impact on the culture of the white po pulation, especially that of white women, through their activities as healers, seers, expert s in magical practices, and their "dom ination" of the kitchens, and bedrooms, of their maste" (Bush 1990) .

Not surpr isingly, they were seen as the heart of the slave conmlunit y.Visitors were impressed by their singing, their head-kerchiefS and dresses, and dleir extravagant man­ n�r of speaking which are now understood as a means of satiriz.ing their maSters. African and Creol e WOI1'len influenced the customs of poor female whites, whom a contempo­ rary portr ayed as behaving like Africans, walking with their children strapped on their lu ps, willie balancing trays with goods on their heads (Beckles 1989: 81). But their main a chi eve ment was the development of a poHtia of self-reliance, grounded in survival str ategies and female networks. These practices and the values attached to them, wluch � osaly n Te rborg Penn has identified as the essential tenets of comemporary African fem­ I nis lll, redefi ned the African COI1U1llIlUty of the diaspora (pp. 3-7) . They created not only t he foundations for 3 new female African identity, but also the foundations for a new 113 114 Above:

A fomily €if shIVes (ddt/iV.

Etlslalltd l4Iometl slmggled 10 (011· I;nue the act;vit;a they IlIId CIIrried Ot' it' Af rica, such lIS "'lIrkelillg lilt.

produce Ihey grcu" 1l1/,;(h erlllbled Iher" to beuer supperl lileir fomi.

lies alld lI(hieve some tllliot/omy.

(From BtlfiHmr BliSh, 1990.) &lolV:A festive �athering 011 tI We st 11Il1;t'" pfmlliU;o". Wotnell were the heart €if such glllheri" gs as they were tl,e heart oj the ttlSlaved (otlmumi,y, a"d Ihe staull chest dtjwders oj the cutll4re brough, from Ajrim. \ ieey comm.i tccd - against the capitalist attempt to impose scarcity and dependence � rrllc[U ra1 conditions oflife -to the re_appropriation and concentration in women's as ds of the fundamenta1 means of subsistence, starting from the land. the production of han . . al .. fk I d d .

r o od. and the mceT-g eneratlOn transnUSSlOn 0 now e ge an cooperat ion. I CapitalisIYl and the Sexual DiviSon of Labor As this h rief hiscofY of women and primitive aCClilTIuJation has shown, the construction o f II new patriarchal order, making of women the servants of the male work-f orce, was a maj or aspect of capitalist development.

On its basis a new sexual division oflabor could be enforced that differentiated not onl y the tasks that women and men should perform, but their experiences, their lives, th eir relatio n to capical and [0 other sectors of the working class. Thus, no less than the inte rnatio nal division oflabor, the sexual division oflabor was above all a power-rela tion, a divisi on within the work-force, while being an inUl1ense boost to capital accumulation .

Tills point must be emphasized, given the tendency to atuibuce the leap capicaJ­ ism brough t about in the productivity oflabor only to the specialization of work-tasks.

In reality, the advantages which the capitalist class derived from the differentiation between agricultural and industrial labor and within industrial labor itself - celebrated in Adam Smith's ode to pin-maJcing -pale when compared to those it derived from dle degradation of women's work and social position.

As I have argued, the power- difference between women and men and the con­ cealment of women's unpaid-labor under the cover of natural inferiorit y, have enabled capitalism to inunensely expand the "unpaid part of the working day,"a nd use the (male) wage to accumulate women's labor; in many cases, they have also served to deflect elass antagonism into an antagonism between men and women. Thus, primitive accumula­ tion has been above all an accumulation of diff erences, inequalities, hierarchies, divisions, which have alienated workers from each other and even from themselves.

As we have seen, male workers have often been complicitolls with this process, as they have tried to maintain their power with respect to apical by devaluing and disci­ plining women, children, and the populations d1e capitalist class has colonized . But the power that men have imposed on women by virtue of d1eir access to \vag e-Iabor and their reco gniz ed contribution to capitalist accumulation has been paid at the price of self -alien­ atio n, and d1e "primit ive disaccumulat ion" of their own individual and collective powers.

In dle next chapters I fu rther examine dlis disaccumulation process by discussing thr ee key aspects of transition from feudalism to capicaJism: dle constitution of the pro­ le � ria n body into a work-m achine, the persecution of women as witches, and the cre­ iltl on of" savages" and "cannibals" both in Europe and the New World.

liS I Endnotes 1. Peter Blickle objects to the concept of a "peasant war" because of the socia l position of this revol ution, which included many artisans, miners, and I n1t eU:eC1tuo1 among its ranks. The Peasant War combined ideological sophistication, exp",_ in the t\velve "articles" which the rebels put forward, and a powerful military urlQl .. . ization. The twelve "articles" included: the refusal of bondage, a reductio n of the tithes, a repeal of the poaching law's, an affirmation of the rights to gather WOod, les sening of labor services, a red uction of rents, an affirmation of the right s to ..:

the conunon, and an abolition of death taXes (Bickle 1985: 195-201). The <>«:ep. •• tional military prowess demonstrated by the rebels depended in part on the PIt'­ ticipation of prof essional soldiers in the revolt, including the Landsknechte -the fa mous Swizz soldiers who, at the time, were the elite mercenary troops in Europe,.

The Landsknechte headed the peasant armies, putting their military expertise.

their service and, in various occasions, refused to move against the rebels. In ODe case, they motivated their refusal by arguing that they too came from the peasa lllltyl and that they depended on the peasants for their sustenance in times of peace.Wbea it was clear that they could not be trusted, the German princes mobilized the troopI of the Swabian League, drawn from more remote regions, to break the � resi stance. On the history of the Landsknechte and their participation in the p� Wa r, see Reinhard Baumann, J Lallz;chellecchi (1994: 237-256).

2. The Anabaptists, politicaUy, represented a fusion of'the late medieval social me_.1 ments and the new anti-clerical movement sparked off by the Ref ormation.

the medieval heretics, they condemned economic individualism and greed supported a fo rm of Christian communalism. Their take-over of·Mun .. ,,, eiccUftIfl in the wake of the Peasa nt War, when unrest and urban insurrections spread Frankf urt to Cologne and other towns of Northern Germany. In 1531, the took control of the city of Munster, renamed it New Jerusalem. and under influence ofinuuigr.mt Dutch Anabaptists, installed in it a communaJ unver·nn'" based upon the sharing of goods. As Po-Chia Hsia writes, the records of jerusaJem were destroyed and its story has been told only by itS enemies.

shouJd not presume that events unfolded as narrated. According to the records, women had at first enjoyed a high degree of freedom in the town; instance, "they could divorce their unbelieving husbands and enter into new riages." Tltings changed with the decision by the reformed government to duce polygamy in 1534, which provoked an "active resistance" among presumably repressed with imprisonment and even executions (po-Chia 1988.: 58-59). Why this decision was taken is not clear. But the episode more investigation, given the divisive role that the crafts played in the ""ama li'.

with regard to wome n.We kn ow, in fact, that the craft campaigned in several tries to exclude women from the waged work-place, and nothing indicates they opposed the persecution of the witches.

3. For the rise of the real wage and the faU of prices in England, see Nort h Thomas (1973: 74). For Florentine wages, see Carlo M. Cipolla (1994:

116 4.

s.

6.

7.

8. the fall in the value of output in England see R. H. Britnel (1 993: 156-171). On the stagnation of agricultural production in a number of European countries, see B.H. SlicherV an Bath (1963: 160-170). Rodney Hilton argues that this period saw "a contraction of the rural and industrial economies ... probably felt in the first place by the ruling class .... Seigneurial revenues and industrial and conuncrcial profi ts began [Q fall .... Revolt in the towns disorganized industrial production and revolt in the countryside strengthened peasant resistance to the payment of rent.

Rent and profits thus dropped even further" (HiltOn 1985: 240-24 1).

On Maurice Dobb and the debate on the transition to capitalism, see Harvey J.

Kaye, The British Marxist Historia",. New York: St. Martin's Press, (1984), 23-69. Critics of Marx's concept or'pri.tlurive accumulation" include: SamirAmin (1974) and Maria Mies (1986).Whilc SamirAm.in focusses on Marx's Eurocentrism. Mies st.resses Marx's blindness to the exploitation of women.A different critique is fo und in Yann Moulier Bout.1ng (1998) who faults Marx for generating the impression that the objective of the ruling class in Europe was to free itself from an unwanted work-f orce. Moulier Boutang underlines that the opposite was the case: land expr opriation aimed to fix workers to their jobs, not to encourage mobility.

Capitalism -as MouJier Boutallg stresses -has always been primarily concerned with preventing rhe flight of labor (pp. 16-27).

As Michael Perelman points out. the term "primitive accumulation" was actually coined by Adam Smith and rejected by Marx. because of its ahistorical character in Sm ith's usage. "To underscore his distance from Smith, Marx prefixed the pejo­ rative 'so-called' to the title of the final part of the first volume of Capital. which he devoted to the study of primitive acculllulation. Marx, in essence, dismissed Smith's mythical 'previous' accumulation in order to call attention to the actual historical experience" (perlman 1985: 25-26).

On the relation between the historical and the logical dimension of "primitive accumu lation" and its implications for political movements today see: Massimo De Angelis, "Marx and Primitive Accumulation. The Continuous Character of Capital ·Enclosures· ... In Tile Commoner: www.conulloner. org.uk; Fredy Periman, The Colltj/lu i"g Appea l of Na tionalism. Detroit: Black and Red, 1985; and Mitchel Cohen, "Fredy Perlman: Out in Front of a Dozen Dead Oceans" (Unpublished manuscript, 1998).

For a des cription of the systems of the e"comienda. mita. and cateq uil see (among othe,,) Andre Gunder Frank (1978),45; SteveJ. Stern (1982);and Inga Clendinnen (1987).A s described by Gunder Frank. the eIlcomienda was "a system under which righ ts to the labor of the Indian conullunities were granted to Spanish landown­ ers." But in 1548. the Spaniards "began to replace the etlcomienda de sen/icio by the re par rjmjem o (called cacequil in Mexico and mita in Peru), which required the Indian conunuluty's chiefs to supply rhe Spanish juez repartidor (distributing judge) with a cert ain number of days of labor per month .... The Spanish official in turn dis­ trib uted this supply of labor to qualified enterprising labor contraccors who were sup pos ed co pay the laborers a certain minimum wage"(1 978: 45). On the efforts of the Spaniards to bind labor in Mexico and Peru in the course of the various 117 I ..... ...... .

stages of colonization, and the impact on it of the catastrophic collapse of the indigenous population, see again Gunder Frank (ibid.: 43-49).

9. For a discussion of the "second serfdom" see Inunanuel Wallerstein (1974) and Henry Kamen (1971). It is important here to stress chac the newly enserfed peas­ ana were now producing for the international grain market. In other words despite the seem ing backward character of the work-relation imposed upon thern:

under the new regime, they were an integral pare of a developing capitalist econ­omy and international capitalist division oflabar. 10.

13m echoing here Marx's statement in Cap ital,V ol.l:"F orce ... is in icselfan eco..

nomic power"(1 909: 824). Far less convincing is Marx's accompanying observa_ tion, according to which:"F orce is the midwif e of every old society pregnant with a new one" (ibid.). First, midwives bring life into the world, not destruction. This methaphor also suggests that capitalism "evolved" out of forces gestating in the bosom of the feudal world -an assumption which Marx himself refutes in his discussion of primitive accumulation. Comparing force to the generative powen of a midw ife also casts a benign veil over the process of capital accumulation, sug_ gesting necessity, inevitability, and ultimat ely, progress.

11. Slavery had never been abolished in Europe, surviving in pockets, mostly as female domestic slavery. But by the end of the 15m century slaves began to be imponed agai n, by the Portuguese, from Mrica. Attempts to impose slavery continued in England through the 16th cenrury, resulting (after the inrroduction of public relief) in the construction of work-houses and correction houses, which England pio­ neered in Europe.

12. See, on this point, Sanur Amin (1974).T o stress the existence of European slavery in the 16th and 17th centuries (and after) is also important because this fact has been often "forgotten" by European historians. According to Salvatore Bono, this self -induced oblivion was a product of the "Scramble for Mr ica," which was jus­ tified as a nussion aimed to ternunate slavery on the Af rican continent. Bono argues that Europe's elites could not admit to having employed slaves in Europe, the alleged cradle of democracy.

13. Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), 90-95; Peter Kriedte (1978), 69-70.

14. Paolo Thea (I 998} has powerfully reconstructed the history of the German artisu who sided with the peasants.

118 "During the Protestant Reformation some among the best 16th-centur y German artistS abandoned their laboratories to join the peasants in struggle ....

They drafted documents inspired by the principles of evangelic poverty, the com­ mon sharing of goods, and the redistribution of wealth. Sometimes ... they took anns in support of the cause.The endless list of those who, after the military defeaa of May- June 1525, met the rigors of the penal code, mercilessly applied by the winners against the vanquished, includes famous names. Among them are OorgJ Ratget quartered in Pforzheim (Stuttgart) , [Philipp] Dietman beheaded, and [Tilman] Riemenschneider mutilated -both in Wurzburg - [Matthi .. ] Grunewald chased from the court of Magollza where he worked. Holbein the Yo ung was so troubled by the events that he £led from Basel, a city that was torn apart by religious conflict." [My translation] Also in Switzerland,Au stria, and the Tyrol artists participated in me PeasantWar, including famous ones like Lucas Cranach (Cranach the old) as well as myriad lesser painters and engravers (ibid.: 7). Thea points out that the deeply felt partic­ ipation of the artists to the cause of the peasants is also demonstrated by the reval­ uation of rural themes depicting peasant life -dancing peasants, animals, and flora - in contemporary 16th-century German art (ibid .:12-15; 73,79,80). "The coun­ tryside had become animated ... [it] had acquired in the uprising a personality worth of being represe nted" (ibid.: 155). [My translati on].

15. It was through the prism of the Peasant War and Anabaptism that the European gove rnments, through the 16th and 17th centuries, interpreted and repressed every fo nn of social protest. The echoes of the Anabaptist revolution were felt in Elizabethan EngJand and in France, inspiring uOnost vigilance and severity with regard to any challenge to the constituted auchority." Anabaptist" became a cursed word, a sign of opprobrium and criminal intent, as "communist" was in the United States in the 19SOS, and "terrorist" is coday.

Enrl y 171h-amtu ry Centultl engnwitlg revili ng the Atltl/x'PlislS ' belief ill lilt:

(OtlltllUtlislj( sIJaritl.� of goods.

16. Village authority and privileges were maintained in the hinterland of some city­ states. In a number of territorial states, the peasants "continued to refuse dues, taxes, and labor services"; "they let me yell and give me nothing," complained the abbot ofSchussenried, referring to those working on his land (Buckle 1985: 172).

In Upper Swabia, though serfdom was not abolished, some of the main peasant 119 grievances relating to inheritance and marriage rights were accepted with the Tre acy of Menullingen of 1526. "On the Upper Rhine, too, some areas reached settlements that were positive for the peasants" (ibid. :172-1 74). In Switzerland, in Bern and Zurich, serfdom ,vas abolished. Improvements in the 1m of the "corn ..

mon man" were negotiated in Ty rol and Salzburg (ibid.: 176-179). But "the true child of the revol ution" ,vas the territorial assembly, instituted after 1525 in Upper Swabia, providing the foundation for a system of self-gove rrunent that remain ed in place till the 191h centur y. New territorial assemblies emerged after 1525 " [real­ izing] in a weakened form one of the demands of 1525: that the C0l1U1l011 man ought to be part of the territorial estates alongside the nobles, the clergy, and the towns." BlickJe concludes that "Wherever this cause won out, we cannOt say that there the lords crowned their military conquest with political victory, [as] the prince was still bound to the consent of the common man. Only later, during the fo rmation of the absolute state, did the prince succeed in fre eing himself from that consent" (Ibid.: 181-18 2).

17. Ref erring to the growing pauperization brought about across the world by capi­ talist development, the French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux, in Maidnu, Mea l alld MOlley (1981), has argued that this contradiction spells a fu ture crisis for capitalism: "In the end imperialism - as a means of repr oducing cheap labor power -is leading capitalism to a ma jor crisis, for even if there are still millions of people in the world ... not directly involved in capitalist employment ... how many are still capable owing to the social disruption, famine and wars it brings about, of producing their own subsistence and feeding their childr en?" (1981 :140).

18. The extent of the demographic caeastrophe caused by "the Columbian Exchange" is still debated. Estimates of the population decline in South and Central America, in the first post-ColuJnbian century, range widely, but contemporary scholarly opinion is almost unanimous in likening its effects to an American Holocaust.

Andre Gunder Frank writes that: "Within little more than a centur y, the Indian population declined by ninecy percent and even ninecy-five percent in Mexico, Peru, and some other regions" (1978: 43). Similar ly, Noble David Cook argues that: "Perhaps 9 miUion people resided within the linurs delineated by Peru's con­ temporary boundaries. The number ofilwbitants remaining a century after con­ tact was roughly a tenth of those that were there when the Europeans invaded the Andean world" (Cook 1981: 116).

19 .

On the changes in the nature of war in early modern Europe sec, Cunningham and Crell (2000 ),95-102; Kalmer (1998). Cunnin gham and Crell write tha,, "ln the 1490s a large army would have consiSted of20,OOO men, by the 1550. it would have been twice that. while towards the end of the Thirty Years War the leading European staces would have field annies of close to 150,000 men" (2000: 95).

20. Albrecht Diirer's engraving was not the only representation of the "Four Horsemen."We have also one by Lucas Cranach (1522) and by Mauheus Merian (16 30). Representations of battlefields, portraying slaughters of soldiers and civil­ ians, viUages in Dames, rows of hanging bodies, are too numerous to mention. War is possibly the main theme of 161b and 171h-century painting, leaking into every repre sentation, even those ostensibly devoted to sacred subjects.

120 I Mt.uhcus Mcriall, FOUR HORSEA fE..\J 01;11 .. 111 APOCAU'I'SE (16JO) ..

21.. This outcome reveals the two souls of the Ref ormation: a popular one and elitist one, which very soon split along opposite lines. While the conservative side of the Ref ormation stressed the virtues of work and wealch accumulation, the popular side demanded a society run by "godly love" equality, and conununal solidarity ..

On the class dimensions of the Ref ormation see Henry Heller (1986) and Po­ Chia Hsia (1988).

22. Hoskins (1976),121-123. In England the pre- Reformation Church had owned twenty-five CO thirty per cent of the country's real property. Of this land, Henry VIII sold sixty per cent (Hoskins 1976:121-123).Those who most gained from the confiscation and more eagerly enclosed the newly acquired lands were not the old nobility, nor those who depended on the commons for their keep, but the gentry and the "new men," especially the lawyers and the merchants, who were the face of greed in the peasants' imagination (Cornwall 1977: 22-28). It was against these "new men" that the peasants were prone to vent their anger .. A fine snapshot of the winners and losers in the great transfer of land produced by the English Reformation is Ta ble 15 in Kriedte (1983: 60), showing that twenty to twenty-five per cent of the land lost to the Church became the gentry's property.

Following are the most relevant columns ..

121 DISTRIBUTION OF LAND BY SOCIAL GROUPS IN ENGLAND AND WALES :

1.!U2* 1.62!!

Great owners 15-20 15-20 Gentry 25 45-50 Yeomen/freeholders 20 25-33 Church and Crown 25-33 5-10 [*excl. Wales] On the consequences of the Refonnation in England for land tenure, see Christopher Hill who writes:

"We need nOt idealjze the abbeys as leniem landlords co admit some truth contemporary allegations that the new purchasers shortened leases, racked and evicted tenancs .... 'Do ye not know; said John Palmer to a group of holders he was evicting, 'that the king's grace hath put down all houses of ... " .... � .. friars, and nuns, therefore now is the time come that we gentJemen will pull dotra the houses of such poor knaves as yet be?' " (Hill 1958: 41).

23. See Midnight Notes (1990); see also 71Ie Ecologist (1993); and the ongoing debate ..

the "enclosures" and the "commons" in 17,e Commo"er, especially n.2, (September 2001), and n.3., Oanuary 2002).

24. Primarily, "enclosure" meant "surrounding a piece of land with hedges, ditches,.

other barriers to the free passage of men and animals, the hedge being the mad:

of exclusive ownenhip and land occupation. Hence, by enclosure, collecti� use, usually accon1panied by some degree of communal land ownership, wouldl be,. abolished, superseded by individual ownership and separate occ upatio n"l v·:.II _11 1968: 1-2).There were a variety ways to abolish collective land use in the 15 d .....

16th centuries. The legal paths were (a) the purchase by one person of aU ments and their appurtenant common riglns;" (b) the issuing by [he King of a cial license to enclose, or the passage of an enclosure act by the Parliament; (c) agreement between the landlord and tenants, embodied in a Chancery d«:rec,;( 41 the making of partial enclosures of waste by the lords, under the provisions Statutes of Merton (1235) andWestminister (1285). Roger Manning notes, ever, that these "legal methods ... frequently concealed the use of force, tratla,;­ intimidation against the tenants" (Manning 1998: 25). E. D. Fryde, too, �ri, .. ; till "[p]rolonged harassmenc of tenancs combined WitJl threats of eviction s at slightest legal opportunity" and physical violence were used to bring about evictions "particularly during the disorder years 1450-85 [i.e., the War of Roses)" (Fryde 1996: 186). Thomas More's Utopia (1516) expressed the and desolation that these mass expulsions produced when he spoke of·h",n "'." had become so great devouren and so wild that "they eat up and swallow the men themselves ..... Sheep .. - he added -that "consume and destroy and whole fields. houses and cities." 25. In 771e /'lVelllioli if Capitalislll (2000), Michael Perelman has emphasized the canee of "customary rigllCS" (e.g .. hunting) noting how dley were often of vital 122 2 7.

28. 29.

3 0.

31 .

32. nificance. making the difference between survival and toeal destitution (pp.38ff.).

Garret Hardin's essay on the "tr agedy of the COnUl l01l5" (1968) was one of the mainstays in the ideologica1 campaign in support ofland privatization in the 1970s.

The ;'tragedy;' in Hardin's version. is the inevitability of Hobbesian egoism as a determi nant of human behavior. In his view, in a hypothetical common, each herdsman wants to l11ax.im.ize ills gain regardless of the implications of his action for the other herdsmen, so that "ruin is the destination CO which all men rush, each pu"uing his best incerest" (In Baden and Noonan, eds., 1998: 8-9).

The "modernization" defense of the enclosures has a long history. but it has received new energy from neo-Iiberalism. Its main advocate has been the World Bank, which has often demanded that gove nunents in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Ocean.ia privatize communal lands as a condition for receiving loans (World Bank I 989). A classic defense of the produ ctivity gains derived from enclosure is fo und in Harriett Bradley (1968, originally published in 1918 ). The more recent academic literature has caken a more even-handed "costs/gains" approach, exemplified by the works of G. E. Mingay (1997) and Robert S. Duplessis (1997: 6S-70} .The batde concerning the enclosures has now crossed the disciplinary boundaries and is being debated also among literary scholars. An example of disciplinary border-crossing is ftichard Burt and John Michael Archer, eds., Ellc/osu", Acts. Sexuality Property alld Cllltu", ill Early Moderll Ellglalld (1994) -especially the essays by James R. Siemon, "Landlord Not King: Agrarian Change and Imerarciculation;" and William C. Carroll, '''The Nursery of Beggary': Enclosur e,Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor- mart Period," Willianl C. Carroll has found that there was a lively defense of enclosures and cri­ tique of the cOl1unons in the Tudor period carried out by the spokesmen of the enclosing class. According co this discourse, the enclosures encouraged private enter­ prise, which in turn increased agricultural productivity. while the conUl1Ons were the "nurleries and recept:lcles of thieves, rogues and begga,," (CarroU 1994: 37-38).

DeVries (1976) , 42-43; Hoskins (1976), 11-12.

The commons were the sites of popular festivals and other collective activities, like sports,games, and meetings.When they were fenced off, the sociality that had char­ acterized the village conununity was severe ly undermined.Among the rituals that came to an end was "Rogation tide perambuJation," a yearly procession among the fields meant to bless the future crops, that was prevented by the hedging of the fields (Underdown 1985: 81).

On the breaking down of social cohesion see (among othe,,) David Underdown, Rtvel, Riot alld Rebellio ll: Popular Politics and Cul,u", ill Ellgland, 1603-1660 (1985), especially Chapter 3, which also describes the efforts made by the older nobility to distinguish itself from the IIouvtnux riches.

Kriedte (1983), 55; Briggs (1998), 289-3 16.

COttage industry was an extension of the manorial, rural industry, reorganized by the capitalist merchants to take advantage of the large pool of labor liberated by the enclosures. With tills move the merchants aimed to circumvent the high wages and power of the urban guilds. This is how the putting-out system was born - a sy stem by which the capitalist merchants distributed among rural families wool or COt ton to spin or weave, and often also the instruments of work, and then picked 123 up the finjshed product. The importance of the put-out system and cottage indus­ try for the development of Brit ish industry can be deduced from the fact that tht entire textile industry, the most important sector in the first phase of capitll ist development, was organjzed in this fashion. The cottage industry had cwo main advantages for employers: it prevented the danger of'combinations'; and it cheap­ ened the cost of labor, since its home-based organization provided the workers with free domestic services and the cooperation of their children and wives, who were treated as helpers and paid low "auxmary" wages.

33. Wage labor was so identified with slavery that the Levellers excluded waged work_ ers from the vote, not considering them sufficiently independent from theif employers to be able to cast a vote. "Why should a free person make oneself a slave?" asked The Fox, a character in Edmund Spenser's Mother Hubbard's Yair (1591). In turn Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers, declared that it did not make any diffe rence whether one lived under one's enemy or under one's brother if one worked for a wage (Hill 1975).

34. Herzog (1989), 45-52.The literature on vagabonds is vast. Among the most impor­ tant on this topic are A. Beier (1974) and B. Geremek's Poverty,A History (1994). 35. Fletcher (1973), 64-77; Cormvall (1977), 137-241; Beer (1982),82-139. At the beginning of the 16lh century many enclosure riots involved the lesser gentry who used the popular hatred for enclosures, engrossments, and emparkments to setde their feuds with their betters. But, after 1549,"the gentry's leadership in enclosure disputes dimjlljshed and small-holders or artisans and cottagers were more likely to take the initiative in heading agrarian protests" (Manning 1988: 312). Manning describes the typical victim of an enclosure riot as "the outSider." "Merchanrs attempting to buy their way into the landed gentry were particularly vulnerable to enclosure riots, as were farmers ofleases. New owners and farmers were the victims of enclosure rims in 24 of the 75 Star Chamber cases. A closely-related category consists of six absentee gendemen" (Manning 1988: 50).

36. Manning (1988),9&-97, 114-116, 281; Mendelson and Crawford (1998). 37. The increasing presence of women in anti-enclosure riots was influenced by a popular beljef that women were "lawless" and could level hedges with impunity (Mendelson and Crawford 1998: 386--387). But the Court of the Stat Chamber went out of irs way co disabuse people of this belief. In 1605, one year after James "s witchcraft law, it ruled that "if women offend in trespass, riot or otherwise, and an action is brought against them and their husbands, d,ey [the husbands] shall pay the fines and damages, notwithstilnding the trespass or the offense is committed widlOut the privity of the husbands" (Manning 1988: 98).

38. On this subject see, among others, Maria Mies (1986).

39. By 1600, real \vages in Spain had lost thirty percent of their purchasing power with respect to what they had been in 1511 (Hamilton 1965: 280). On the Price R.evolution, see in particular Earl J. Hanwcon' s now classic work, America" Treasure alld the Price Revolutioll ill Spaill, 1501-1650 (1965), which studies d,e impact of the America bullion on it; David Hackett Fischer TI,e Great Wave: Price RevolutiotlS alld the Rhythms oj History (1996),which studies price hikes from the Middle Ages 124 to the present - in particular Chapter 2 (pp. 66-113); and Peter Ramsey's edited volume, 71,e Price Revolution i" Sixteen,l, CelHury England (1 97 1).

40. Braude! (1966) ,VoI. 1,517 -524.

41. As Peter Kriedte (1983) sums up the economic developments of this period:

"The crisis sharpened the differentials in income and property. Pauperization and prole tarian ization were paralleled by an incr eased accumulation of wealth ....

Wo rk on Chippenham in Cambridgeshire has shown that the bad harvestS of [the late 16th and early 17th centuries] resulted in a decisive sh.ift. Between 1544 and 1712 the medium-sized farms all but disappeared. At the same time the propor­ tion of properties of 90 acres or more rose from 3% to 14%; households without land increased from 32"A. to 63%" (!Criedte 1983: 54-55). 42. Wallerstein (1974),83; Le R.oy Ladurie (1928-1 929). The growing interest of capitalist entrepreneurs for money-lending was perhaps the motivation behind the expulsion of the Jews from most cities and countries of Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries -Parma (1488), Milan (1489), Geneva (1490), Spain (1492), and Austria (1496). Expulsions and pogroms continued for a cemu ry. Until the tide was turned by R.udolph II in 1577, it was illegal for Jews to live in most of We stern Europe. As soon as money-lending became a lucrative business, this activity, previously declared unworthy of a Christian, was rehabilitated, as shown by this dialogue between a peasant and a wealthy burgher, written anonymously in Gennany around 1521: Peas ant:What brings me to you?Wh y,l would like to see how you spend your time.

Burgher: How should I spend my time? I sit here counting my mone y, can't you see?

Pea sant:T ell me, burgher, who gave you so much money that you spend all your time counting it?

Burgher: You want to know who gave me my money? I shall tell you. A peas­ ant comes knocking at my door and asks me to lend him ten or twenty gulden. I inquire of him whether he owns a pIm of good pasture land or a nice field for plowing. He says: 'Yes, burgher, 1 have a good meadow and a fine field, worth a hundred gulden the two of them.' I reply: 'Excelle nt! Pledge your meadow and your 6eJd as collateral, and if you will undertake to pay one gulden a year as inter­ est, you can have your loan of twenty gulden: Happy to hear the good news, the peasant replies: 'I gladly give you my pledge. "But I must tell you,' I rejoin, 'that if ever you fail to pay your interest on time, I will take possession of your land and make it my property.' And tlus does not worry the peasam, he proceeds to assign his pasture and field to me as his pledge. I lend him tile money and he pays inter­ est punctually for one year or two; then comes a bad harvest and soon he is behind in his payment. I confiscate his land, evict him and meadow and field are nune.

And I do this not only with peasants but with artisans as well. If a tradesman owns a good house I lend him a sum of money on it, and bef ore long the house belongs to me. In this way I acquire much property and weaJth, which is why I spend all my time counting my money.

lZS Peasanc:

And I thought only the Jews practiced usury! Now I hear that Christians do it, too.

Burgher: Usury? Who is talking about usury? Nobody here practices usury.

What the debtor pays is interest (G. Strauss: 110-111).

43. With reference to Germany, Peter Kriedte writes that:

"Recent research has shown that a build ing worker in Augsburg [in Bavari al was able adequately to maintain his wife and two chiJdren from his annual income during the 6"t three decades of the 16,h century. Thenceforth his �ving standard began to fall. Between 1566 and 1575 and from 1585 to the outbreak of d,e Thirty Years War ltis wages could no longer pay for the subsistence minimwn of his fam_ ily" (Kriedte 1983: 51-52). On d,e impoverishment of the Europen working class due to the enclosures and the Price Revolution see also C. Lis & H. Soly (1979), 72-79. As they write, in England "between 1500 and 1600 grain prices rose six­ fold, while wages rose threefold. Not surprisingly, workers and cottars were but 'house beggars' for Francis Bacon." In the same period, in France,the purchasing power of cottars and waged workers feU by forty five percent. "In New Castile ...

wage labour and poverty were considered synonymous." (ibid.:72-4).

44. On the growth of prostitution in the 16th century see, Nickie Roberts, Wlhores in History: Prostitution j" �sle", Society (1992).

45. Manning (1988); Fletcher (1973); Cornwall (1977); Beer (1982); Beree (1990); Lom bardini (1983). 46. Kamen (1971),Berce (1990), 169-179; Underdown (I 985).As David Underdown notes:

"The pronunent role played by female [food] riote" has often been noted. At Southampton in 1608 a group of women refused to wait while the corpor ation debated what to do about a ship being loaded with grain for London; they boarded it and seized the cargo. Women were thought to be the likely rioters in the inci­ dent in Weymouth in 1622, while at Dorchester in 1631 a group (some of them inmates of the workhouse) stopped a cart in the mistaken belief that it contained wheat; one of them complained of a local merchant who "did send away the best fruits of the land, as butter, cheese, wheat, etc., over the seas" (1985: 117). On women's presence in food riots, see also Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford (1998), who write that "women played a prominent role in grain riots [in England]." For instance, "[a]t Maldon in 1629 . crowd of over a hundred women and children boarded the ships to prevent grain from being slupped away."They were ted by a "Captain Ann Carter, later tried and hanged" for her leading role in the protest (ibid.: 385-86).

47. In a similar vein were the conunents of a physician in the Italian city of Bergamo, during d,e fanune of1630:

"The 10adUng and terror engendered by a maddened crowd of half dead peo­ ple who imporrune all comers in the streetS, in piazzas, in the churches, at street doors, so that life is incolerable. and in addition the foul stench rising from them as well as the constant spectale of the dying ... this cannot be believed by anyon e who has not experienced it" (quoted by Carlo M. CipoUa 1993: 129).

48. On 16th and 17th-century protest in Europe, see Henry Kamen, TIlt IratI Cel/tury 126 (19 72), in particular Chapter 10, "Popular Rebellion. 1550-1660" (pp. 331- 385).

As Kamen writes, "The crisis of 1595-7 was operative throughout Europe. with repercussions in England , France, Austria, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Probably never before in European history had SO many popular rebel­ lions coincided in time"(p. 336). There were rebellions in Naples in 1595, 1620, 1647 (ibid.: 334-35, 350, 361-63). In Spain, rebellions erupted in 1640 in Catalonia, in Grenada in 1648,in Cordova and Seville in 1652. For riots and rebellions in 16th and 17th.. cenrury England, see Cornwall (1977) ; Underdown (1985), and Manning (1 988) . On revolt in pain and Italy, see also Braudel (1976,Vol. 11),738-739.

49. On vagrancy in Europe, beside Beier and Geremek, see Braudel (1976),V ol. II, 739-743; Kamen (1972),3 90-394.

50. On the rise of pro percy crimes in the wake of me Price Revolution see the Charter on p.14'1 in this volume. See Richard J. Evans (1996) ,35; Kamen (1972),39 7-403; and Lis and Soly (1984). Lis and Soly write that ",tlhe available evidence suggests that the overall crime rate did indeed rise markedly in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, especially between 1590 and 1620" (p. 218). 51. In England, among the momen[5 of sociality and collective reproduction that were tenninated due to the loss of the open fields and the COnUllQI15 there were the processions that were held in the spring to bless the fields - which could no longer take place once the fields were fenced off-and the dances that were held around the Maypole on May First (Underdown 1985).

52. Lis and Soly (1979), 92. On [he instirution of Public Assistance, see Geremek's Po verty A HiS/ory (1994), Chapter 4: "The Reform of Charity" (pp. 142-177). 53. Ya nn Moulier Boutang, De L'tSclava ge au salariat (1998 ),291-293. I only partially agree with Moulier Boutang when he claims that Poor Relief was nOt so much a response to the misery produced by land expropriation and price inflation, but a measure intended to prevent the flight of workers and thereby create a local labor market (1 998}.As already mentioned, MouIier Boucang overemphasizes the degree of mobility available to the dispossessed proletariat as he does not con­ sider the different situation of women. Furthermore, he underplays the degree to which assistance was the result of a struggle - a struggle that cannOt be reduced to the flight of labor, but included assaults, the invasion of towns by masses of sca.rving rural people (a constant feature, in Inid-1 6th-cenrury France) and other fo rms of attack. It is not coincidence, in this context, that Norwich, the center of the Kett Rebellion became, shortly after its defeat, the center and the model of Poor Relief refon115. 54.

The Sp.nish human,i" Juan Luis Vives, who was knowledgeable about the poor relief systems of the Flanders and Spain, was one of the main supporters of pub­ lic charity. In his De Sub"."" ioll Pal/perum (1526) he argued that "secular author­ ity rather than the Church should be resp onsible for the aid [0 the poor" (Geremek 1994: 187). He also stressed [hat authorities should find work for the able-bodied, insisting that "tlle dissolute, the crooked, the thieving and the idle should be given the hardest work, and the most badly paid, in order that their example might serve as a deterrent to others" (ibid.).

55. The main work on the rise of work-house and correction houses is Dario Melossi 127 and Massimo Pavarini, 111t Priso" and tilt Factory: Origi,u oj tilt Penitatlliary System (1981).The authors point out that the main purpose of incarceration was to break the sense of identity and solidarity of the poor. See also Geremek (1994),206- 229. On the schemes concocted by EngJish proprietors to incarcerate the poor in their parishes, see Marx, Capita/Vol. 1 (1909: 793). For France, see Foucault, Madness and Civilizatiotl (1965), especially Chapter 2:"The Great Confinement" (pp. 38-64).

56. While Hackett Fischer connects the 17th century decline ofpoulation in Europ e co the social effects of the Price Revolution (pp. 91-92), Peter Kriedte presents a more complex picture, arguing that demographic decline was a combination of both Malthusian and socio-economic factors. The decline was, in his view, a response CO both the population increase of the early 16th century, on one side, and on the other to the landlords' appropriation of the larger portion of the agri­ cultural income (p. 63).

An imeresting observation which supports my arguments concerning the con­ nection between demographic decline and pro-natalist state policies is offered by Robert S. Duplessis (1997) who writes that the recovery afier the population cri­ sis of the 17th century was far swifter than that after the Black Death. It took a century for the population to scan growing again after the epidemic of1348, while in the 17th century the growth process was reactivated within less than half a cen­ tury (p. 143).This estimates would indicate the presence in 17"'-century Europe of a far higher naca1ity rate, possibly to be attributed to the fierce attack on any form of contraception.

57. "Bio-power"is the concept Foucault used in his History ofSexuality:An Iutrodud;on (1978) to describe the shift from an authoricarian form of governnlent to one more decentralized, centered on the "fostering of the power of life"in 19th-cen­ nlry Europe. "Bio-power" expresses the growing concern, at the state level, for the sanitary,seKUaI,and penal control of individual bodies,as well as population growth and population movements and their insertion into the economic realm.

According to this paradigm, the rise of bio-power went hand in hand with the rise of liberalism and marked the end of the juridical and monarchic state. 58. I make this distinction with the Canadian sociologist Bruce Curtis' discussion of the Foucauldian concept of "population" and "bio-power" in mind. Curtis con­ trasts the concept of "populousness," which was current in the 16th and 17 1h cen­ turies, with the notion of "population .. that became the basis of the modern sci­ ence of demography in the 19th century. He points out that "populousness" was an organic and hierarchi cal concept. When the mercantilists used it they were con­ cerned with the part of the social body that creates wealth, i.e., actual or poten­ tial laborers.The later concept of "population" is an atomistic one. "Population consists of so many undifferentiated atoms distributed through abstract space and time" -Curtis writes - "with its own laws and structures." I argue, however, that there is a continuity between these two notions, as in both the mercantilis t and liberal capitalist period, the notion of population has been functional to the reproduction of labor-power. 59. The heyday of Mercantilism was in the second half of the 17th century, its dOIll- 128 60. 61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67. ina nee in economic life being associated with the names of William Petty (1 623-1687) and Jean Bapti"e Colbert, the finance minister of Louis XIV.

However, the late 17th-century mercantilists only systematized or applied theories that had been developing since the 16th century. Jean Bodin in France and Giova nni Botero in Italy are considered proto-mercantilist economiscs. One oCthe first systematic formulations of mercantilist ecatlontic theory is found in Thomas Mun's ElIg'alld� 1'e", .. ", by Forraign Trade (1622).

For a discussion of the new legislation against infanticide see (among others) John Riddle (1997), 163-16 6; Merry Wiesner (1993), 52-53; and Mendelson and Crawf ord (19 98). who write that "[t1he crime of infanticide was one that single women were more likely to conmuc than any other group in society. A study of inf anticide in the early seventeenth century showed that of sixty mothers, fifty three were single, six were widows"(p. 149). Statistics also show that infanticide was pun­ ished even more frequcntly than witchcraft. Margaret King writcs that Nuremberg "exccuted fourteen women for that crime between 1578 and 1615 , but only one witch. The Parliament of Rauen from 1580s to 1606 prosecuted about as many cases of illf.mticide as witchc raft, but punished infanticide more severely. Calvinist Geneva shows a much higher rate of execution for infanticide that witchcraft; from 1590 to 1630, nine women of eleven charged were executed for inf anticide, com­ pared to only one of thirty suspects for witchcraft (p.10). These estimates are con­ finned by Merry Wiesner, who writes that "in Geneva, for example. 25 women out of 31 charged with infanticide during the period 1595 -1712 were executed, as compared with 19 out of122 charged with witchcraft (1993: 52). Women were executed for infanticide in Europe as late as the 18th century.

An interesting article on this topic is Robert Fletcher's "The Witches Pharmakopeia" (1896).

The reference is to an Italian feminiSt song from 1971 tided "Aborto eli Stato" (State Aborti on).

Margaret L. IGng, Womell oJ,"e Rellaissance (1991),78. For the closing of broth­ cIs in Germany sec Merry Wiesner, W1)rkillg W1mlcII ;/1 Rellai ssallce Germany (1986 ),194-209.

An cxtensive catalogue of the places and years in which women were cxpeUed fro m the crafts is found in David Herlihy, Wome", Family a"d Society ill Medieval Europe: Historica' Essays. Providence: Berghahan, 1978-1 99 1. See also Merry Wiesner (1986), 174-185.

Martha Howell (1986), Chapter 8,174-183. Howell writes:

"Comedies and satires of the period, for example, often portrayed market WOme n and trades women as shrews, with characterizations that not only ridiculed Or scolded them for taking on roles in market production but frequently even charged d,em with sexual aggressi on"(p.182).

In a thorough critique of 17th-century social contract theory, as formuJated by Th omas Hobbes and John Locke, Carol Pateman (1988) argues that the "social Cont ract" \-vas based on a more fundamental "sexual contract," which recognized m en's right CO appr opriate women's bodies and women's labor.

Ruth Mazo Karras (1996) writes that " 'Con unon woman' meant a woman avail- 129 able to all men; unlike 'collunon man' which denoted someone of humble ori­ gins and could be used in either a derogatory or a lauda cory sense, it cUd not con­ vey any meaning either of non-gentile behavior or of class sol.idarity"(p. 138).

68. For the family in the period of the "transition," sec Lawrence Stone (1977); and Andre Burguiere and Fran�ois Lebrull,"Priescs. Prince, and Family,"in Burgujere, et aI., A History of elle Family: 71/t [mpace of Modemiry (1996). Volume Two, 95ff.

69. On the character of t 7th-century patriarchalism and, in particular, the concept of patriarchal power in sociaJ contraCC theory, see again Pateman (1988); Zilla Eisenstein, TI,e Radical Future of Liberal Femj"ism (1981); andMargaret R..

SOllunerville, Sex a"d Subjecrio,,:Arritudes To Wome" [" Early Modem Society (1995).

Discussing the changes contract theory brought about in England. in the legal and philosophica1 attitude towards women, Sonmlerville argues that the contrac­ tarians supported the subordination of women to men as much as the patriar­ chalists, but justified it on different grounds. Being at least formally cOl1unitted to the principle or'natural equality," and "government by consent," in defense of male supremacy they invoked the theory of women's "narural inferiority," according to which women wouJd consent to their husbands' appropriation of their property and voting rights upon realizing their intrinsic weakness and necessary depend­ ence on men.

70. See Underdown (1985a), "The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcemem of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (1985),116-136; Mendelson and Crawford (1998),69-71. 71. On women's loss of rights in 16th and 17th-cenrury Europe, see (among others) Merry Wiesner (1993), who writes that:

"The spread of Roman law had a largely negative effect on women's civil legal status in the early modern period both because of the views of women which jurists chose to adopt from it and the stricter enforcement of existing laws to which it gave rise" (p.33).

72. Adding to the dramas and tracts also the court records of the period, Underdown concludes that "between 1560 and 1640 ... such records disclose an intense preoccupation with women who are a visible threat to the parriar­ chal system. Women scolding and brawling with their neighbors, single women refusing CO enter service, wives domineering or beating their husbands: all seem to surface more frequently than in the period inmlediately before or afterwards.

It will nor go unnnoticed [hat [his is also [he period when witchcraft accusa­ tions reach a peak" (1985a: 119).

73. lames Blaut (1992a)points out that within a few decades after 1492 "the rate of growth and change speeded up dramatically and Europe entered a period of rapid development." He writes:

130 "Colonial enterprise in the 16th century produced capital in a number of ways.

One was gold ands silver lnining. A second was plantation agricuJrure, principally in Brazil.A th.ird was trade with A.sia in spice, cloth and much more. A fouM ele­ ment was the profit returned to Euro pean houses from a variety of productive and commercial enterprises in theAmericas ... . A fifth \vas slaving. Accumulation from these sources was massive (p.38). 74.

Exemplary is the case of Bermuda, cited by Elaine Fomlan Crane (1990) . Crane writes that several white women in Bermuda were owners of slaves -usually other women -thanks to whose Jabor they were able to maintain a certain degree of economjc autonomy (pp. 231-258). 75. June Nash (1980) writes that "A significant change came in 1549 when racial ori­ gin became a fa ctor, along with legally sanctioned marital unions, in defining rights of succession.The new law stated that no I11ulatto (offipring of a black man and an Indian women), mestizo, person born out of wedlock was allowed to have Indians in encomienda .... Mestizo and illegitimate became almost synonymous" (p. 140).

76. A coyota was a part-mestiza and part-Indian woman. Ruth Behar (1987 ).45.

77. The most deadly ones were the mercury mines, like that in Huancavelica, in which thousands of workers died of slow poisoning amidst horrible sufferings. As David Noble Cook writes:

"Laborers in the Huanc avelica mine faced both inunediate and long term dan­ gers. Cave-ins. floods. and falls as a result of slipping shafts posed daily threats.

Intermediate health hazards were presented by a poor diet, inadequate ventilation in the underground challlbers, and a sharp temperature difference between the mi ne interiors and the rarefied Andean atmosphere .... Wo rkers who remained for long periods in the mines perhaps suffered the worst fate of all. Dust and fine par­ ticles were released into the air by the striking of the tools used to break the ore loose. Indians inhaled the dust, which contained four dangerous substances: mer­ cury vapors, arsenic, arsen.ic anhydride, and cinnabar. Long exposure ... resul ted in death. Known as mal de la ",i"a, or mine sickness, it was incurable when advanced.

In less severe cases the gums were ulcerated and eaten away ... (pp.205-6) .

78. Barbara Bush (1990) points out that. if they wamed to abort, slave women cer­ tainly knew how to. having had available to them the knowledge brought from Mr ica (p. 141 ).

131 Title page of A"drcas Vtsllli"s' DEi HUMANt CORPORIS FABR.1CA (Aldl"' , 1543). TI,e tri"",ph of the mnle, uppn c/Jus, IN'trinrclml order throug h tilt (lin" st;tIU;O" of Ihe IIeIV nlmlom;CilI tl,e(l(rt could "ot be mort complete , OJ the U.'(lmnn dissected (md dcl;vcrt.d to tilt: ,mbticgllZe, the llUtllor tells us IIIlJ t "in l Sfil'" Jem oJbci ng /ratlged /she/ hnd declnred "t1Seif prrgtUJlJ/," bUI '!fier it"US I ered tlml sht WlIS not, s/,t 14W hutI.'!. TI,e ftmalejigurt in the bilck (ptri"rps" prostitute or iJ midu1fr) 10uIM her eyts, possibly aslmmtd i" frolll of tlu' ob#"" ity of the senfe fwd ilS implicit viole,,!t.