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307

Craft specialization, the reorganization ofproduction relations and state formation

THOMAS C. PATTERSON

Department of Anthropology, University of California

ABSTRACTSince the late 1970s, archaeologists have been concerned with theorigins and development of craft specialization in early civilizations.More recently, some have examined the organization of production,the identities of artisans, the use and consumption of the goods theyproduced, and the cultural and social meanings of those objects. Muchof this literature is rooted in the conceptual framework of societalevolutionism, which was formulated by eighteenth-century theorists,who were attempting to account for the rise of capitalist agriculturerather than the development of precapitalist forms of craft produc-tion. This article examines the premises of the conceptual frameworkas well as the political-economic and ideological context in whichsocietal evolutionism was formulated. It suggests that a theoreticalframework derived from Marx’s writings after 1857 provides insightsinto the organization of craft production and an alternative expla-nation of the role specialization played in the rise of civilization.

KEY WORDSclassical political economy ● craft specialization ● liberal social theory● Marxism ● production relations ● proto-industrialization ● societalevolution ● state formation

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 5(3): 307–337 DOI: 10.1177/1469605305057570

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308 Journal of Social Archaeology 5(3)

■ INTRODUCTION

What roles did craft production and specialization play in the origins ofcivilization? How were they related to the concomitant processes of socialdifferentiation, the increasing division of labor, the formation of villagecommunities and expanded exchange relations typically associated with thistransformation? These questions have long vexed archaeologists. Betweenthe mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, V. Gordon Childe (1936/1983, 1958:162–73) – theorist of socioeconomic development and life-long socialist –was the first archaeologist to attempt a sustained, socioeconomic analysisof the rise of civilization (Wailes, 1996). Childe’s thesis of uneven andcombined development was historically contingent and composed of threeelements: (1) agriculture facilitated surplus production over subsistenceneeds and underwrote both technical and social divisions of labor; (2) theruling classes in the Mesopotamian lowlands used part of this surplus tosupport full-time craft specialists, notably metalsmiths who relied on oresobtained from the periphery; and (3) since the initial costs on the periph-ery were underwritten by the lowland elites, development occurred on themargins of civilization without significant local investment, where ‘supplywas met by independent smiths-cum-traders hawking their wares frompetty chief to petty chief, and innovation was unfettered by bureaucraticcontrol’ (Wailes, 1996: 9). It is also noteworthy that Childe (1950/2004)discussed the development of craft specialization in the context of theUrban Revolution (the formation of precapitalist states) and posited asuccession of artisans from those attached to the ruling classes to indepen-dent, itinerant smiths.

In developing his thesis about the emergence of craft specialization,Childe, the Marxist, engaged the societal evolutionism of liberal theoristsfrom Adam Smith through Herbert Spencer to Émile Durkheim and incor-porated their arguments into his own (Patterson, 2003: 33–62). From thisperspective, Childe viewed the rise of full-time craft specialists as part ofincreasing social structural differentiation, the emerging interdependencyof food-producers and artisans and the growth of market exchange. Thedifferentiation of production tasks marked the simultaneous witheringaway of the self-sufficiency characteristic of neolithic (agro-pastoral)communities that produced a surplus and the formation of a new kind ofsociety characterized by a division of labor and the production of goods forexchange. The division of labor in the emerging society had three dimen-sions: (1) the distinctions that prevailed among those individuals whoproduced different goods for exchange; (2) the separation of direct pro-ducers from those who appropriated their goods and labor power –arguably the distinction between manual and mental labor; and (3) thesimultaneous separation of itinerant artisans from their natal communities




309Patterson Craft specialization

and formation of a domestic or household mode of production thatreflected their mode of subsistence. Thus, craft specialization was linkedwith production for exchange and with the activities of individuals – andpotentially, by extension, their families or households – who were removedat least spatially from the communities to which they belonged. The motordriving this emerging division of labor and ultimately the rise of urbansociety was a technical one, the development of the productive forces (i.e.the Neolithic Revolution).

From the late 1970s onward – as Cathy Costin (1991, 1998, 2001) and JohnClark (1995) have shown – a number of archaeologists following Childe’slead have clarified the issues, debated, and refined the notion of craft special-ization. These are some of the more informative and insightful conversationsthat have occurred in archaeology in the last 30 years – constructively criticalyet polite and respectful in tone. Some highlights include the distinction thatRobert Evans (1978) drew between part-time and full-time craft production;the distinction that Tim Earle (1981) and Elizabeth Brumfiel and Earle(1987) made between independent artisans and those attached to patrons;Joan Gero and Cristina Scattolin’s (2002: 169) observation that the opposi-tion posited between domestic and specialized production not only makesit impossible to compare the two but also relegates household divisions oflabor ‘to ongoing background work that varies only in uninteresting ways’;and Edward Harris’s (2002: 86) question of whether specialized productionwas intended for local consumption or export. In the last decade or so, atten-tion has shifted away from the origins and historical development of craftspecialization toward a series of closely related issues: the organization ofproduction in particular socioeconomic, political and cultural settings; thesocial and cultural identities of artisans; the use or consumption of the goodsthey produced; and even the cultural meanings attached to those goods.These have added significantly to our understanding of craft production andits place in ancient political economies (e.g. Costin, 2004; Schortman andUrban, 2004; Stein, 1998, Stein and Blackman, 1993).

What has made the conversations so productive is that the participantshave not limited their discussions solely to archaeological data nor claimed,for the most part, that archaeological evidence is superior to that derivedfrom historical or comparative ethnographic accounts. Instead, they haveexamined the interconnections of data and the practice of archaeology. Theparticipants have related both data and methods to their conceptualcategories, and they have examined the conceptual categories themselves.Nonetheless, nagging questions about the historical development of craftspecialization still remain, especially with regard to the dynamics thatoccurred during the transitional phase separating pre-state, neolithicvillages from the various forms of early state-based societies. For example,where and in what contexts did Childe’s wandering smiths acquire theirknowledge of metallurgy and practical skills in the first place?





There are several reasons for the persistence of questions about the riseof craft specialization. The absence of evidence that would confirm or invali-date claims is certainly one reason; however, it is useful to keep in mind thatChilde formulated his thesis nearly six decades ago when fewer data wereavailable. A more important reason, in my view, is that the language ofsocietal or cultural evolutionism makes it difficult to examine problems ofhistorical development that are of interest to archaeologists. This resultsfrom a set of built-in assumptions about exchange, community, the rural-urban divide, distinctions between manual and mental labor, and evenspecialization itself. The assumptions are a product of the foundational socialtheories we use and of the sociopolitical and ideological contexts in whichthey were developed. In the pages that follow, I want to examine this webof often implicit assumptions that underpin the conceptual categories we useto explain craft specialization and what theorists, both eighteenth-centuryand modern, have said about the organization of production during the earlystages of capitalism, when social life and production were still largely ruralin Western Europe (a region where sociohistorical and economic develop-ment is probably better documented than any of the places or periods typi-cally discussed by archaeologists). I would then like to consider how and inwhat ways Karl Marx broke with the foundational theories of the mid-nine-teenth century. Finally, I would to offer one possible construction, based onwhat Marx wrote after 1857, regarding the interconnections of craft special-ization, changing property relations, and the rise of states, including theprecapitalist tributary states of interest to archaeologists.

■ SOCIETAL EVOLUTIONISM: ITS POLITICAL-ECONOMICAND IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS

Societal evolutionism arose in the same contexts that facilitated thedevelopment of liberalism and classical political economy. The ideas andsentiments of liberalism and mercantilism have been intimately linked sincethe seventeenth century. These include laissez-faire (the danger of stateintervention), individualism (the needs of the individual constitute the basicunit of economic policy), utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham’s ‘the greatesthappiness of the greatest number’), the centrality of commerce or exchange(as the primary building block of community and as a means of obtainingwealth and power), and notions about greedy individuals competing forscarce resources as well as economic rationality (Heckscher, 1955: 469). Theideas and sentiments have in turn had a profound shaping effect on boththe conceptual frameworks and languages of economic analysis that AdamSmith, the French Physiocrats and others developed in the eighteenthcentury (e.g. Magnusson, 1994; Meek, 1962). Smith (1776/1976, vol. 1:





17–18), for example, argued that modern society began with the advent ofproduction for exchange in the market and provided three reasons whypeople engage in market exchange: interdependence increases productiv-ity; exchange is a natural human propensity; and greed has become a centralfeature of human nature in commercial society (Gudeman, 2001: 82). Thisweb of assumptions also influenced the naturalistic, evolutionary perspec-tive on human history that various French and Scottish Enlightenmentwriters, including Smith, formulated from the middle to the end of theeighteenth century (Meek, 1976; Patterson, 1997; Trigger, 1998: 30–41).1 Thisdiscourse was not limited to participants from a single national state orcontinent. In slightly different words, the conceptual elements as well as therhetorical styles of liberalism, political economy and evolutionism havebeen intertwined for more than two centuries. Today, these interconnec-tions are too often unacknowledged or summarily dismissed as trivial,unimportant, or of antiquarian interest. However, they are importantprecisely because they affect the way we think about evidence, draw infer-ences and present arguments.

The political-economic context in which liberalism, classical politicaleconomy, and societal evolutionism were formulated occurred severalcenturies after the dissolution of feudalism in Western Europe.2 In thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Americas3 were increasinglyenmeshed in commercial relations, the merchant associations from thesovereign states of Western Europe argued with increasing vigor that theyshould not be encumbered with the taxes and tariffs imposed by feudallords. In their view, commerce and the expansion of the market should beunencumbered since it was the source of wealth and power. Here, the senti-ments of the trading companies often coincided with those of would-beabsolutist monarchs who wished to appropriate the revenues obtained bythe nobility in order to use them for their own purposes, most notably tostrengthen their own positions internally and with respect to the monarchsof other national states. The policies advocated and supported by both themerchants and monarchs promoted manufactured exports, low wages,cheap raw material imports and favorable balances of trade (surpluses) thatwould yield a net inflow of gold or silver. This was the ideological andconceptual language of mercantilism. It is important to note that commod-ity production and wage labor, two defining elements of the capitalist modeof production, were already realities in the largely rural societies of WesternEurope.

Other worldviews, besides that of the merchants, were voiced from the1690s onward.4 The most notable, for our purpose here, was that of anemerging class of agrarian capitalists – farmers and husbandmen whoproduced foodstuffs and raw materials, such as wool or hides, for local,regional and national markets. They emphasized the importance of agri-culture for restructuring and developing the national economy. Their





perspectives were championed by John Locke, the French Physiocrats andAdam Smith, among others who argued with different emphases that agri-culture and husbandry were a source of wealth. The circumstances in whichtheir perspectives were voiced varied according to place and time. Forexample, when John Locke wrote in the 1690s, landlords controlled 70–75percent of all cultivable land in England, and the landlord/tenant/laborerstructure that facilitated investment in and the development of rural capi-talism was already in place (Brenner, 1976/1985: 48–9; Tribe, 1981: 35–100;Wood, 1984: 31–71). By contrast, throughout the eighteenth century, 75percent of the French population was composed of peasants who held‘45–50 percent of [the] cultivable land, often in the form of scattered openfields’ (McNally, 1993: 11; Brenner, 1976/1985: 61). Neverthless, many of theFrench peasants were impoverished tenants burdened with high rents, lowproductivity, low prices on foodstuffs and restrictions on the export of agri-cultural products; they struggled to be self-sufficient in this still largely ruralsociety (Jones, 1988: 1–30; Nikin, 1975: 84). In the 1760s, the French Physio-crats argued that the development of large-scale capitalist agriculture,which was quite limited at the time, was both part of the natural economicorder (a process guided by natural law) and a means for catching up withEngland;5 they also believed that mercantilist policies, which favoredcommerce and manufacturing, distorted or corrupted the unfolding of thenatural economic order (Meek, 1962). Adam Smith, the Scottish moralphilosopher whose Wealth of Nations (1776) would later become a foun-dational text of classical political economy, wrote at a time (the third-quarter of the eighteenth century) when a majority of the inhabitants ofScotland, especially in the highlands and the islands, still preferred hunting,fishing, littoral harvesting and subsistence agriculture to wage labor(Whatley, 1997: 9–17). Like Locke and the Physiocrats, Smith ‘consideredagriculture to be the most productive economic sector, whose developmentwas essential to balanced economic growth’ (McNally, 1988: 210). He wasalso critical of the merchants and manufacturers whose interests he saw asfrequently opposed to those of the public; he argued that, because of theirconnection with agriculture, the agrarian capitalists, unlike the merchantsand manufacturers, had a real interest in their country of residence and noparticular reason to obstruct the natural course of economic development(McNally, 1988: 209–10, 220–5, 263).

For our purposes, four points are noteworthy. First, the Physiocrats, Smith,and other advocates for agrarian capitalism were among the earliest andmost influential social theorists to deploy societal evolutionist arguments;they maintained that human society had progressed through a steadilyunfolding sequence of stages, each of which was based on a different modeof subsistence: food-gathering and hunting; pastoralism, agriculture andcommerce (Meek, 1976). As Neal Wood (1984: 51) observed, the motorsdriving this natural progression variously involved ‘[a] small primitive





population, movable property, landed property, use production, populationincrease and concentration, barter and money, property differentials, depen-dent labor, exchange production, social conflict, and the eventual emergenceof the state’. Second, both the evolutionist scaffolding of human historyproposed by the early theorists of agrarian capitalism and the language oftheir rhetorical arguments about development influenced contemporarywriters, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James Steuart, who did not necess-arily share either their worldview or their political allegiances. Third, thetheorists of agrarian capitalism already assumed that merchants were a forceof progress who extended commerce, and that the market:

. . . intensified competition between the hitherto protected crafts of thedifferent towns [and] . . . ultimately forced the break-up of the complex,unified crafts into the component parts. The rise of manufacture on the ruinsof the crafts thus brought about a new form of specialization, constituted byseparated units carrying out simplified ‘detail’ production and a new mode ofco-operation based on the manufactory in which merchants controlled thesemi-skilled labour processes. (Brenner, 1989: 278)

Fourth, the evolutionist/developmentalist discourse came into being at atime when national societies of Western Europe were still largely rural butwhen the rural communities that constituted them and the precapitalistproperty relations that maintained those communities had largely beendissolved. Communities of producers and exploiters whose membersformerly had direct access to the means of production and produced forsubsistence were replaced by economically autonomous landlords, tenantsand wage workers who produced commodities for exchange and securedportions if not all of their subsistence needs in the market; in a phrase,community-level property relations and production were replaced by onesthat operated at the level of households or domestic units.

Evolutionist arguments about the interconnections of surplus foodproduction, specialization and exchange have had profound effects inarchaeology and anthropology. One legacy is that they were the centerpieceof Childe’s (1936/1983: 116) thesis that agriculture facilitated the produc-tion of surpluses which were used to underwrite the activities of craftspecialists who did not engage in food production. They were acceptedimplicitly by writers who are usually portrayed as avowedly anti-evolu-tionists, e.g. Franz Boas (1920/1940: 285) who wrote that ‘a surplus of foodsupply is liable to bring about an increase of population and an increase ofleisure, which gives opportunity for occupations that are not absolutelynecessary for the needs of everyday life’ (quoted by Clark, 1995: 289).

A second legacy of the evolutionist arguments has been the creation andreification of a set of beliefs concerning the significance of the dichotomybetween city dwellers and their neighbors in the surrounding countryside.However, as we have seen, the chasm separating town and countryside,





which has played so prominently in archaeological theories, was less clearor pronounced for eighteenth-century writers, like Smith, than it is for thoseof us writing in the twenty-first century. Intense processes of urbanizationoccurred after the end of the Second World War, and half to two-thirds ormore of the total populations of countries, like the USA or Peru that werepredominantly rural not so long ago, now reside in towns or cities. Theseprocesses have not only obscured or obliterated conditions that prevailedas recently as 20 or 30 years ago, but also diminished our understanding andeven our ability to appreciate them and their significance.

A third legacy of the linkages between mercantilism, liberalism andevolutionism (both in and beyond the academy) is the positive valuationplaced on the urban way of life. Esteem is typically granted to commerce,industry and city life, while agriculture, animal husbandry and the cultureof rural laborers is denigrated or held in disdain. Another aspect of thislegacy is that rural industry was simultaneously more highly regarded thanagriculture and held in less esteem than urban industry. This resonates withpositive valuation placed on mental rather than physical or manual labor.Phrased differently, towns and cities have been seen as centers of innova-tion whose new ideas and goods are subsequently adopted by their ruralneighbors (Redfield, 1942/1962). Empirically, much of the manufacturingthat occurred in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe seems tohave taken place in the countryside. This requires us to consider, at leastfor a moment, the organization of rural production and industries and theirrelations to the town-country divide that was forming at the time.

■ PRODUCTION RELATIONS AND THE TOWN-COUNTRYDIVIDE

It is worth reiterating that the theorists of agrarian capitalism wrote at atime (1) when ‘land constituted the principal base of economic productiv-ity’ (Fox-Genovese, 1976: 219) and (2) when the operation of the marketwas widening from ‘more or less separate and isolated corners of theeconomy, or in individual spheres of activity like international trade . . . [to]the whole area of the economy and the whole range of economic activities’(Meek, 1962: 371). Their explanations typically involved the production ofcommodities, i.e. items that were produced for exchange in the marketrather than for use or consumption by the individuals who produced them.The commodities derived from agriculture and husbandry were foodstuffsand secondary products, like hides or wool, that could be either consumedby the individuals who purchased them or further transformed into othercommodities, like shoes or fabrics. Two issues are important. First, was thepurpose of exchange to make a profit (i.e. merchant capital)? Second, who





controlled production? In medieval Europe, merchants were mainlyconcerned with controlling access to markets and to the items that wereproduced rather than influencing how production units (households, work-shops, or even whole communities) were organized or how workers actuallyproduced the goods (Hilton, 1992: 18).

In a discussion of the historical development of the division of labor inagriculture, Smith (1776/1976, vol. 1: 7–9) noted the existence of a paradox.On the one hand, he suggested that the separation of the different branchesof labor in subsistence agriculture and stock-raising was much less developedor clear cut than it was in industry; in his words, ‘the nature of [subsistence]agriculture, indeed, does not admit of so many subdivisions of labour, nor socomplete a separation of one business from another, as manufactures’(Smith, 1776/1976, vol. 1: 9). He concluded that the lack of specializationprevented agriculture and stock-raising from developing as rapidly asindustry. On the other hand, he remarked that ‘in every improved society,the farmer is generally nothing but a farmer; the manufacturer, nothing buta manufacturer’ (Smith, 1776/1976, vol. 1: 9, emphasis added). In thisimproved (developed) society, the division of labor is sharply defined. In thisdevelopmental stage, the activities of the farmer and the manufacturer wereclearly demarcated, and the two types of specialists were inextricably linkedto one another by exchange. In historical-developmental terms, Smith wasarguing that farming became a more specialized activity than it had beenpreviously after or in conjunction with the emergence of a division of laborand exchange (i.e. commodity production). The picture of subsistencefarming that emerges from Smith’s discussion of the division of labor is onemarked by seasonality. The high demand for agricultural labor at harvesttimes alternated with periods when the demand for labor was lower andwhen other material needs could be produced by members of the householdand be used or shared with kinfolk and neighbors. Thus, the householdsengaged in subsistence agriculture did not limit themselves exclusively toagricultural production, because their members also produced handicraftsand the other necessities of everyday life (Duby, 1968: 153–5).6 Each indi-vidual ‘engage[d] in a variety of tasks, and [there was] no significant dispar-ity between mental and physical labor’ (Diamond, 2004: 23).

In the late 1970s, Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm(1977/1981) took a related but slightly different tack in Industrializationbefore Industrialization. They attempted to theorize the rural roots of indus-trial production during the transformation from feudalism to capitalism inWestern and Central Europe. Earlier, Smith (1776/1976, vol. 1: 429–31) hadremarked that European export industries developed in two distinct ways:as the ‘offspring of foreign commerce’, when merchants imitated foreigncrafts using imported raw materials, like mulberry trees and silkworms, andas the ‘offspring of agriculture’, when household manufactures based onlocally available raw materials were refined. The implication of Smith’s





remarks, from the perspective of Kriedte and his associates, was that at leastsome of the early industry in Europe, besides mining and iron work, tookplace in the countryside rather than in urban areas as well as contexts wherefeudal social relations were in decline and capitalist ones had not yet crys-tallized. They referred to this phase as ‘proto-industrialization’. In theirview, rural industries developed in those parts of the countryside wherethere was already a socially differentiated peasantry; where at least somepeasant families could not support themselves on the amount and qualityof land available to them even if they could intensify production; wherethere was an elastic labor supply (seasonal unemployment); and where thepowers of local lords or village communities had weakened to the pointwhere earlier forms of socioeconomic cohesion and homogeneity could notbe maintained. The new social relations driving socioeconomic develop-ment in these rural regions were capitalist ones based on commodityproduction, market exchange and wage labor; they were not based on the‘laws of the family economy [which had] functioned as the engine of proto-industrial growth’ (Kriedte et al., 1977/1981: 136).7

Kriedte and his associates pointed out that proto-industrialization inrural areas had a number of consequences. It promoted the developmentof skilled artisans. In those industries where the ‘putting-out system’prevailed, notably textiles, merchants came to be more closely connectedwith production than their predecessors had been.8 It underwrote theformation of symbiotic relations between agriculture and industry and thecreation of networks of local, regional and national markets. It alsowitnessed the emergence of a group of individuals: merchants, middlemenand artisans, who, with an infusion of capital, would become agents of indus-trialization. At the same time, proto-industrialization, which they saw asgeared to quantitative changes in production rather than qualitativechanges in the mode of production, generated a series of contradictions thatbecame particularly evident during harvest seasons when high demands forlabor outside the factory conflicted with production schedules and priori-ties of the factory. There were other difficulties as well, particularly with a‘putting-out system’, in which merchants or middlemen provided rawmaterials, like cotton, to households for spinning or weaving. It was diffi-cult to supervise the work, to control the quality of the thread, to preventpilferage of the raw materials, or to coordinate the activities of the spinnerswith the needs of the weavers. These and other contradictions, notably theone between the growth dynamics of the family economy and the overallsystem forged by proto-industrialization, were resolved, at least temporar-ily, through mechanization and the centralization of production in factorieslocated increasingly in towns and cities (Kriedte et al., 1977/1981: 136–42).This unleashed a new set of contradictions.

In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, proto-industrialization and early industrialization witnessed growing concerns





about work and factory discipline that involved increased supervision, regu-larization of work schedules and standardization of the workday(Thompson, 1967/1991). From the owner’s perspective, it was important toincrease his control over his employees’ schedules, activities, intelligenceand skills in ways that increased the efficiency of production.9 From theworkers’ perspective, it was essential to maintain their own schedules inorder to deal with subsistence and the production of use values outside thefactory. Time and work discipline increasingly became arenas of conflictbetween factory owners and workers. The struggles that ensued involvedboth arson and the increasing use of brick and stone in factory construc-tion (Russell Handsman, 1990, personal communication). In New England,it also involved new forms of discourse. In the early nineteenth century,factory owners used the rhetoric of republicanism to emphasize their sharedcommunity of interests with their employees. A few decades later, the sameowners dropped this pretense and began to employ arguments and rhetori-cal forms based on liberalism, which emphasized supply and demand,contracts and obligations to stockholders (Siskind, 1991; Wilentz, 1984).

■ MARX’S ALTERNATIVES

Karl Marx launched his critique of classical political economy in the early1840s (Oakley, 1984–5). He drew inspiration from a number of writers,notably Adam Smith and the Physiocrats; however, he also acknowledgedimportant intellectual debts to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg W.F. Hegeland the French socialists. He simultaneously built on their writings,critiqued them and ultimately elaborated an original synthesis that incor-porated and combined elements of their views with his own (Patterson,2003: 7–32). While there were important continuities in Marx’s writings,there were also points where he did not choose between alternative expla-nations as well as where he simply changed his mind. During the process,as historian Robert Brenner (1989: 272) observed, Marx developed two ulti-mately incompatible theories of the transition from feudalism to capital-ism. His observation clarifies a lot. For our purposes, it is noteworthy,because the role of craft specialization and production is conceptualizeddifferently in the two theories. More broadly, the existence of the twotheories accounts has fueled a debate about whether or not Marx was asocietal evolutionist, the answer to which depends, of course, on whichtheory contemporary authors prefer to emphasize and on which one theychoose to downplay or ignore altogether.

Marx’s earlier, societal evolutionary account of the transition from feudal-ism to capitalism appeared in works that were written in the 1840s, notablyThe Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology and The Communist





Manifesto, the latter two written with Frederick Engels (Marx, 1847/1963;Marx and Engels, 1844–5/1974, 1848/1998). In this theory of transition, Marxsaw the structural differentiation of roles within the labor process – cooper-ation within the production unit and the increasing distinction betweenmental and manual labor – as the motor driving the evolution of class andproperty relations. This motor was set in motion by the growth of trade andcompetition. As Brenner (1989: 282) noted, this theory depends heavily onAdam Smith’s theory of history. He writes that

The central explanatory notion at the core of this theory is the self-developing division of labour. The division of labour directly expressesthe level of development of the productive forces; it evolves in response tothe expanding market; and it determines, in turn, the social relations of classand property. The theory’s basic image of transition from feudal tocapitalism encompasses the maturation of the development of bourgeoissociety, nourished by constantly-growing world trade, within the womb of theold feudal society. (Brenner, 1989: 272)

Marx’s later theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism appearedin works written after 1857, especially the Grundrisse, Capital, The Ethno-logical Notebooks and the drafts of correspondence with Vera Zasulich(Marx, 1857–8/1973, 1863–7/1977, 1880–2/1974, 1881/1983). Here, heprovided an alternative to the societal evolutionism of the Enlightenmenttheorists of agrarian capitalism as well as of his own earlier work. Hefocused on the historicity of the individual and of social relations ratherthan the unfolding of some potential inherent in groups or in a humannature that could reduce largely or exclusively to its biological or psycho-logical dimensions. This involved a shift away from a ‘natural law’ to adialectical and historical conception of human nature. Thus, the distinctivefeatures of humankind – creative intelligence realized through and mani-fested in labor, sociality, language, culture, the production of use-values(items that satisfy human needs) and the creation of new needs – wereneither timeless nor persistent but rather were constituted, reproduced andtransformed in particular sociohistorical contexts. In his view, human indi-viduals were social beings and human sociality was simultaneouslycommunal in character as well as socially and historically determined.Moreover, the division of labor and the production of use-values wereenduring features of human society from its inception rather than ones thatemerged at a particular stage in its development as Smith and others hadsuggested.

Marx (1857–8/1973: 83–100) began his analysis of how societies producedthe material conditions for their own reproduction not with exchange,supply and demand, or the allocation of scarce resources (the starting pointsfor classical political economists), but rather with production itself. He wasquite emphatic about this point and wrote that:





. . . production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are [not] identical,but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity.Production . . . predominates not only over itself . . . but over the othermoments as well. The process always returns production to begin anew. Thatexchange and consumption cannot be predominant is self-evident. Likewise,distribution as distribution of products [cannot predominate]; while asdistribution of the agents of production[,] it is itself a moment of production.A definite production thus determines a definite consumption, distributionand exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments.Admittedly, in its one-sided form, production is itself determined by theother moments. (Marx, 1857–8/1973: 99, original italics)

The centerpiece of his later formulation of the transition was the conceptof the mode of production, which Marx conceived

. . . as a system of social-property relations which make possible, and therebystructure, societal reproduction – in particular, the maintenance of society’sindividual families and constituent social classes. The model of the transitionfrom feudalism to capitalism arising on the basis of this mode of productionidea starts from conflictual reproduction, on the one hand, of a class ofpeasant producers who possess (have direct, non-market access to) theirmeans of subsistence, and, on the other hand, of a class of lordly rulers andexploiters, who reproduce themselves by means of extracting surplus fromthe peasant producers through extra-economic compulsion. (Brenner, 1989:272, original italics)

In the late 1850s, Marx (1857–8/1973: 471–514, 1859/1970: 21) mentioned orbriefly discussed seven modes of production: primitive communism,ancient, Asiatic, Germanic, Slavonic, feudal and capitalist. While he neverdiscussed the transition from feudalism to capitalism in detail, let alone thetransitions from one non- or precapitalist mode of production to another,it is clear, as historian Eric Hobsbawm (1964: 36) noted, that the successionof modes of production listed in Marx’s preface to A Contribution to theCritique of Political Economy was neither a chronological succession nor astatement about the ‘evolution’ of one mode of production into another butrather a commentary on steps away from the original kinship-basedcommunity – that is, steps in the historical development of privateproperty.10 These historical developments proceeded along three or fourpathways that led in different directions, and each mode of productionpresumably had its own characteristic ‘laws of motion’. Thus, Marx arguedthat not all historically specific societies formed in the same way or passedthrough the same succession of modes of production. Furthermore, heviewed the different modes of production described in the Grundrisse asdifferentially or variably resistant to change. In sum, there was no under-lying teleological principle that necessarily drove sociohistorical develop-ment in a particular direction, as Smith and others implied.

In the first chapter of Capital, Marx (1863–7/1977: 125–77) argued that





the development of the capitalist mode of production could be grasped byunderstanding the significance of commodities, i.e. items produced by laborfor sale (exchange) in the market. Every commodity, in this view, has use-value and exchange-value. The fact that a commodity has use-value meansthat it satisfies the needs of those who purchase it. The fact that a commod-ity has exchange-value is a statement about its equivalence with othercommodities, e.g. a woven shirt is equal to two pairs of sandals, five poundsof potatoes, or $10. For Marx, what created the exchange relations were notthe physical properties of the commodities themselves but rather thehistorically specific social relations that underwrote this particular form ofcirculation. In his view, the distinctive features of capitalist societies were(1) that commodities were produced primarily to make profits throughmarket exchange rather than for immediate use, (2) that human laborpower – the capacity to work – was a commodity exchanged in the samemanner as other commodities, (3) that the means of production wereprivately owned by capitalists who employed workers to produce commodi-ties which would then be sold and (4) that increasingly all of the use-valuesconsumed by the members of the society were becoming commodities, e.g.air is now sold for a profit.

Marx was aware that there were state-based societies in which commod-ity production was not well developed and market exchange had not pene-trated into all corners of everyday life. What distinguished them fromcapitalist societies and from one another were the forms of social propertyrelations and production as well as the specific forms in which goods orlabor power were appropriated from the direct producers by the membersof non-producing class(es), e.g. through extra-economic means such ascoercion, taxes, laws, or rent or the exploitation of various categories ofunfree labor and wageworkers (Marx, 1863–7/1977: 927). When the non-producing classes and the state institutions that sustained them were ableto intervene directly in the organization of the subsistence economy andreproduction of the community, they were often able to extract surplus –i.e. tribute – regularly and to specify what goods will be produced andservices provided. In those instances where the local communities retainedgreater control over their means of production and the labor power of theirmembers, the non-producing classes and state institutions were frequentlyunable to specify consistently when or what products or services would beextracted from the subject populations (Gailey and Patterson, 1988: 79).

Marx was also aware of the debates engendered by ethnographicdescriptions, if not the accounts themselves, regarding the existence ofcommunal societies that lacked social-class structures. He wrote brieflyabout primitive communism at various points in his career (e.g. Marx,1857–8/1973: 471–514, 1880–2/1974, 1881/1983; Marx and Engels,1844–5/1974: 42–68). The most distinctive features of these societies weretypically (1) the collective ownership of the primary means of production;





(2) everyone engaged in a variety of tasks, some involving physical laborand others mental activity; and (3) the absence of exploitation where themembers of one group permanently appropriated the labor power or goodsproduced by the members of other groups that occupied different places inthe total system of production. Eleanor Leacock (1982: 159) has argued thatthe absence of exploitation, in the sense just described, results from theunity of the production process and the direct participation of all adults inthe production, distribution, circulation, and consumption of the goods thatare produced. This meant that each individual was dependent on the groupas a whole rather than on its constituent households or domestic units. Italso meant that there were no structural differences between producers andnon-producers; such a distinction would exist only from the perspective ofa single labor process and would disappear when that process is viewed inthe context of other activities where the direct producer in one cyclebecomes a consumer in another.11

Historical and ethnographic accounts show that the interconnections ofproduction, distribution, exchange and consumption vary in significant waysfrom one communal society to another (Testart, 1986, 1987). For instance,among the San of the Kalahari, the right to distribute game belongs to theindividual who made the arrow that first struck the animal; among thePintubi and Tiwi of Australia, the elders of the community traditionally holdthat right; among the Eskimos of the Arctic, it belongs to the hunter whofirst sighted the animal. Moreover, historical and ethnographic accountswritten from the eighteenth century to the present report that these kin-organized communities often had quite elaborate divisions of labor basedon age, gender, status, or life experience. Different individuals workingepisodically or seasonally produced diverse arrays of goods, or use values,for the members of the community and beyond. The activities performedrange from healing to woodcarving. In a phrase, these accounts indicate thatcraft specialization and production do exist, to some extent, in primitivecommunal societies, regardless of whether their subsistence economies arerooted in agriculture, stock-raising, or some combination of foraging,hunting and fishing.

Let us briefly consider some of the contrasts between Marx’s lateralternative and the perspective formulated by the advocates of agrariancapitalism. First, some degree of craft production and specialization basedon age, gender and experience already existed in primitive communalsocieties where everyone had access to the means of production. Second,the social property relations that existed in the precapitalist tributary states(civilizations) studied by archaeologists allowed both the producers and theexploiting classes direct access to the means of production; this freed bothfrom the need to produce for exchange. Third, there were societies in whichmarket exchange was not well developed. Fourth, while Marx worked outthe ‘laws of motion’ that drove capitalist development, he only hinted at





the laws of motion which underpinned the formation of societies manifest-ing the feudal, ancient, or Asiatic modes of production. The hints heprovided, however, suggest that the underlying dynamics differed from onemode of production to another (e.g. Brenner, 1986). Fifth, it is clear fromthe archaeological and historical record that production for exchange co-existed with subsistence production, which included non-food items, inmany but not all precapitalist states. This raises a number of questions. Forexample, under what sociohistorically constituted and contingent circum-stances did social property relations develop which facilitated the expan-sion of commodity production, the market and specialization? What werethose social property relations? How are they related to the developmentof the divide between town and countryside, urban and rural? How andunder what circumstances were artisans removed from community-basedproduction? How and under what circumstances did households becomesignificant production units? Such questions focus attention not only on therelations of production but also on the ways in which these relations werereproduced or transformed.

■ WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ARCHAEOLOGISTS?

In some instances, archaeological and historical evidence rules out certaintheory-laden interpretations. For example, it is doubtful that aliensconstructed the Nazca Lines of coastal Peru as landing strips for their space-ships, or that the site of Tiwanaku on the shores of Lake Titicaca in Boliviawas built 10,000 years ago. In other instances, the evidence can sustain twoor more theoretically-informed interpretations. For example, while Smithand Marx relied on much of the same evidence to construct alternativetheories of the development of capitalism, they placed different emphaseson the data they used and connected them in different ways. While somemay view this as an interpretive dilemma, I am not arguing, as a radical rela-tivist might, that one theory is as good as another, for I happen to believethat some theories provide better answers or signposts for action thanothers. I also believe that knowledge is created in dialogues that ultimatelyinvolve close examinations and interrogations of the interconnections oftheory, practice and evidence.

For the theorists of capitalism discussed above, the transition from theproduction and circulation of use-values to commodity production andmarket exchange was still taking place; however, the social relations ofcommodity production were already dominant and driving socioeconomicdevelopment when they wrote. They were, in a sense, describing what theeconomy would become in the future. Fortunately, we have archaeologicalevidence as well as historical and ethnographic accounts from other partsof the world that document processes of development. These data afford





an opportunity to consider other circumstances in which transformationand transition did or did not occur and new social property relations wereor were not forged. They allow us to go beyond statements that communityproduction was replaced initially by domestic production which was subse-quently superseded sequentially by workshops and factories, that produc-tion shifted from rural to urban settings because of the unfolding of somenatural process, or that socioeconomic development has always been aconsequence of unequal exchange. These accounts also indicate that adiversity of societal types and historical circumstances were involved in thetransformative or transitional phases of interest to archaeologists andhistorians. Let us consider briefly two cases.

Case 1: Aztec Mexico

What follows derives from Frederic Hicks’s (1987) analysis of the earlysteps toward a market-integrated economy in central Mexico during theearly fifteenth century. These steps took place when the Aztec state sub-ordinated neighboring city-states in the region and appropriated both laborand large landholdings from its new domains. In the process, they alteredexisting social property relations, thereby creating new conditions forchange. As Hicks (1987: 91–2) points out, an economy integrated by marketexchange requires:

(1) a series of full-time specialists of many kinds, who do not produce foodstaples; (2) a steady, reliable clientele for those specialists; (3) a steady,reliable supply of basic food staples and other necessities – fuel, clothing,household utensils – which will always be available on the market; and (4) amarket network to bring these elements together effectively andcontinuously.

Before the conquest, the Valley of Mexico was dotted with city-states, eachwith its own city, dependent hinterland, and market. Hicks (1987: 94) writesthat the markets ‘were frequented by everyone’ from the polity; ‘they wereplaces where commoners could acquire household items and exchangesurpluses [and] . . . places to which specialized long-distance merchantsbrought luxury and other exotic goods’.

Aztec state practices usually allowed local rulers to retain their positionsand to continue receiving tribute from their subjects. However, after eachconquest, the Aztec rulers also seized agricultural lands, most of which theykept for themselves and some of which they distributed to favored nobles.

In all cases, the commoners were organized into communities (calpulli) towork these lands and give service in the royal or noble households . . . Tofacilitate the collection of tribute [including the harvests from these fields],tribute collections centers were set up [but they] . . . were not necessarilylocated in the head-towns that were the seats of the local rulers. (Hicks1987: 95)





These practices had three immediate effects. First, the nobility had no localpower bases, since their landholdings were scattered and worked by themembers of communities with diverse local origins and loyalties; as a result,their well-being was dependent on that of the Aztec state. Second, the localmarkets were broken up. Third, this underwrote the growing importance ofthe market in the Aztec capital, which the ruler divided among his noblesin the late fifteenth century; this provided the nobles with ‘a tribute in kindfrom the sellers on the market’ (Hicks 1987: 94, 96).

Skilled artisans – smiths, woodcarvers, feather workers, painters, and lapi-daries to name only a few – were commoners who were brought by theAztec state from their natal communities to the capital in order to ply theircrafts full-time in the city. They were installed along with other practitionersof their craft in wards (calpulli), which were also corporate landholdinggroups. The state not only brought them by coercion to the city but alsodetermined whether they would produce items for the palace, the treasury,or the market. Many (most) of the artisans were attached to the palace,while others worked through the market. Their clientele consisted of pettybureaucrats, ritual specialists, military professionals and merchants whotrafficked in raw materials and luxury goods, as well as other artisans. Whilethe artisan wards undoubtedly grew some of their food in garden plots, theirmembers likely acquired many subsistence items as well as raw materialsfor their work through the market. Most of the food items found in themarket of the Aztec capital were probably grown on the large estates seizedearlier and made their way to the market as tribute to one or another noblehousehold. The estates were the economic base of a market system thateffectively by-passed the local rulers subordinated by the Aztecs and theirallies (Hicks, 1986: 53, 1987: 97–101, 1999: 413–16).

Case 2: The intersection of state and communal economies in the Inca state

Market exchange was not well developed in the Inca state. Thus, Inca Peruprovides, for our purposes, a marked and significant contrast with AztecMexico. Many Andean scholars were aware of the contrast by the 1960s, ifnot earlier. The Andean case provides a counter example to often repeatedclaims that the rise of craft specialization and the development of marketsare interconnected. In this instance, the rise of merchant capital along thenorthern frontier of the empire was an aspect of Inca state formation.Commerce in the frontier area was the prerogative of certain client statesin the empire, where merchants from those polities, notably Chincha,bartered with a socially differentiated group of ‘merchant Indians’ fromfrontier societies during the early stages of their encapsulation and incor-poration into the imperial state. The Chincha merchants acquired objects forconspicuous consumption, e.g. emeralds, rather than subsistence. That these





merchants sold emeralds to the local leaders of the local rulers of Incasuggests that at least some of their transactions were not controlled directlyby either the Incas or the local rulers of Chincha (Patterson, 1987). In thisinstance, merchant capital (buying cheap and selling dear) was instigated orsustained by the imperial state. The merchants did not alter existing socialproperty relations (relations of production); the changes that occurred wereaffected by the Inca state which would appropriate both land and labor fromcommunities that became enmeshed in its tributary relations.

The broad outlines of the social property relations the Inca state and itsrulers attempted to set in place are well known. The Inca state, its cult, andthe royal families appropriated lands and labor from local communities towork them; the workers came from the local communities and were pro-visioned by the Incas while they fulfilled their labor obligations. The statealso removed some young girls (acllas) and men (yanas) from their commu-nities of origin; both remained physically and structurally separated fromthose communities for the remainder of their lives. A second category ofmen (camayos) were full-time craft specialists, e.g. weavers of fine cloth andsilversmiths to name two, who produced goods for the state; some of themresided and worked in their natal communities, while others did not. Boththeir status and speciality seem to have been hereditary (e.g. Costin, 2004;Ebert and Patterson, forthcoming; Murra, 1980).

The question is: How did the Inca policies and practices impinge on thelocal communities they enveloped? In the Huarochirí region of centralPeru, for example, everyday life continued as usual, even though some menmay have consumed more maize beer and meat outside their householdsas they did in nearby Jauja (Hastorf, 1991: 150–1). Agricultural lands thatwere not appropriated by the Incas were owned by corporate bilateralkindreds (ayllus), even though they were held by individual households,which constituted an important unit of consumption but not the only one.Pastures for llamas and alpacas were also shared by the members of theayllu and contested occasionally with the members of other ayllus. Labor-intensive tasks, like the repair of irrigation systems or housebuilding, werecarried out by the community as a whole with the immediate beneficiariesproviding food and entertainment. Surplus foodstuffs and goods producedby the various households constituting an ayllu were also pooled andshared. The members of certain ayllus and households, which presumablyalso belonged to an ayllu, were renowned as silversmiths, potters, ordancers, who

. . . seem to have practiced their particular skills on a part-time or seasonalbasis – after planting or harvesting, before the rainy season in the case ofpotters, or when dancers were required for ceremonies or other occasions.Their artisan activities were grafted onto food production; the goods theyproduced or the services they performed benefited the entire community.(Patterson, 1992: 99)





It appears that local Andean communities retained significant control oversubsistence production and the production of use-values even during theperiod of Inca rule. The state economy, which appropriated land and laborpower, was grafted onto those of the subject communities. The imperialstate did not alter social property relations within the communities; itstribute demands were placed on the community rather than individualhouseholds. The communities were not dissolved into a number of inde-pendent, autonomous households. In a phrase, the practices and policies ofthe Incas did not lead to the formation of a peasantry; efforts to do soduring the Colonial Period were resisted strenuously, often with force.Moreover, the fact that the local communities retained control of theproduction, circulation, distribution and consumption of its goods meantthat merchants were unable to detach exchange from their production andto create an autonomous circulation sphere, which is a necessary conditionfor the emergence and continued viability of merchant capitalists. The self-sufficient economies of the local communities inhibited the development oflocal mass markets for inexpensive goods.

■ DISCUSSION

State formation, which involves the simultaneous dissolution of kin-communal societies and the crystallization of class structures and state insti-tutions, creates conditions in which social property relations and craftproduction are typically reorganized. In these new circumstances, part of thetraditional work that underwrote the consumption and reproduction of kincommunities is now subsumed by the state. It is transformed into labor, theproducts of which are drained off to support dominant classes and the state.This reorganization involves labor processes, technical divisions of labor, thespatial organization and even consumption. For instance, in Aztec Mexico,the domestic production in communities that pursued intensive agriculturewas reorganized and a portion of the surplus foodstuffs was appropriated astribute by the state. The women in these tributary communities who hadpreviously cooked stews now prepared tortillas, which could be carried easilyto workplaces in the fields, and they also spent less time spinning andweaving, even though the demand for clothing remained constant. Clothingand other necessities they no longer produced were acquired in one of thelocal or regional markets (Brumfiel, 1991). In the Andes, the Inca stateappropriated land and labor service which had differential effects on produc-tion and social reproduction in the various local communities under its rule;it also restricted the use of certain goods and reorganized the consumptionof certain foodstuffs at the local level. In sum, the organization of work isdistorted and transformed in the process of state formation. This forces us





to consider how state-based societies organized the production, distribution,circulation and consumption of goods. It compels us to examine how theorganization of tributary communities in which the production of goods,knowledge, and human beings took place was itself distorted and trans-formed and reproduced under new circumstances.

A related issue involves the origins of the kinds of goods or servicesdemanded by the state and its associated ruling classes and where struc-turally they intervene in the production relations to extract them. In thecase of Inca Peru, the state intervened in the distribution of land, laborpower, and the goods produced by subject communities; it required anadministrative organization of census takers and tax collectors to ensurethat tribute was received from communities spread over a vast landscape.In Aztec Mexico, the state and its ruling class appropriated land, laborpower and established markets that were ultimately controlled by thenobility. In this case, part of the tribute was acquired from commerce, whichrequired a slightly different kind of administration – one that wasconcerned with controlling trade routes and the markets where goods werebartered or sold; as a result, the Aztec state which intervened at the momentof production itself was also more concerned with the circulation of goodsthan were the Incas (Thapar, 1981: 410–11). Both cases stand in markedcontrast to early modern England and France, where merchants wereattempting to rest control of the markets from local lords.

The exchange activities of tributary states based on commerce andmerchant capital must be distinguished from the exchange relations thatexist among kin-organized communities, where surplus raw materials andgoods are transferred from one to another. These intercommunity exchangerelations are unintegrated and unintegrating, since they do not produce thegoods, conditions, or social relations that communally organized societiesneed to sustain and reproduce themselves. They allow the members ofdifferent communities to engage their opposites without abandoning theirplaces in their own societies. Those states whose revenues were derivedfrom controlling trade or taxing merchants often flourished on the marginsof states that extracted tribute in the form of labor and goods from theirsubjects; the Maghreb and Egypt provide an example of this relationship(Amin, 1978: 12–23). These mercantile states resembled islands based onmerchant capital, money and petty commodity production for the marketin a vast sea of subsistence production – i.e. the production of use-valuesfor consumption by the community members. Since only a small portion ofsocial production was geared to the market, merchant capital could developonly to the extent that there was an active commodity sector.

Traditions of continual technological and scientific innovation are notcharacteristic of precapitalist state-based societies. Their internal logics andlaws of motion are based on the appropriation of labor power and goodsfrom direct producers and on the reproduction of the conditions, social





relations and practices that facilitate continued exploitation. Thus, in tribu-tary states, the means of production – tools, processes, technical knowledgeand labor power – reside with the members of the subject communities.Since artisans and producers are members of communities that exertvarying degrees of control over the means of production and theirconditions of work, the states and their associated classes strive to protectand reproduce those institutions that provide them with the labor powerand knowledge of the direct producers (Brenner, 1986: 48–9).

In these circumstances, artisans are typically engaged in the productionof use-values rather than commodities for the market. Consequently, thereis no economic imperative to increase the efficiency of artisan productionthrough increased specialization or technical innovation. This does notmean that the technologies of early civilizations were simple or that newobjects or processes were never invented. Those Andean weavers who wovedouble-cloths that resembled much more easily produced tapestries seem-ingly took great delight in displaying their skills, and the metalworkers andjewelers of the area had discovered processes of alloying and producingpure metals that were known nowhere else. However, it does suggest thatartisans were not compelled to use observations made under one set ofconditions to establish scientific and technological principles which couldbe generalized and applied in other circumstances or technical processes.For example, Andean peoples under Inca rule used tweezers to removefacial hair; however, they did not generalize the principle of the lever andapply it to mechanically identical operations – such as using tongs to movecrucibles of molten metal.

At the juridical level, patent law is poorly developed in early tributarystates, even though commercial law, involving contracts and usury, was welldeveloped in regions, like Assyria. Since the state provided little protectionto the rights of communities claiming ownership of technical processes andknowledge, these were the ‘trade secrets and lore’ of the community thatwere passed from one generation of artisans to the next. The absence ofpatent law suggests that possession of such esoteric knowledge still residedin the kin-organized communities encapsulated by these precapitalist states.Patent law, protecting rights of ownership to scientific and technologicalknowledge, is well-developed in societies based on the production ofcommodities, like the city-states of northern Italy during the Renaissance.Patronage of intellectual creation in the arts and sciences by the state and/orby members of the ruling class is also common in societies where artisanshave been separated from the subsistence production of their natal com-munities (Antal, 1947; Berger, 1972; Davis, 1983; Wallace-Hadrill, 1990).

Traditions of continuous scientific and technological innovation are anessential feature of societies manifesting the industrial capitalist mode ofproduction. Continuous innovation reflects a tradition in which scientificprinciples derived from observations made in one set of conditions or





practices are generalized and extended to new applications and circum-stances; it is also a tradition in which knowledge is cumulative and techno-logical progress can be discerned (Zilsel, 1942, 1945/1957). These traditionsunderwrite the production of commodities for competitive markets, theincreased productivity of artisans and machines, changes in the organiccomposition of labor, the creation of new commodities and markets and theaccumulation of capital. The tendency toward greater efficiency and percapita output also involves cost-cutting through specialization, innovation,and the accumulation of the capital necessary for investment in new waysof producing commodities. It too is a motor of economic growth anddevelopment in industrial capitalist societies but not in precapitalist tribu-tary states (Brenner, 1986: 24). Such scientific and technological traditionsare found in state-based societies, where artisans are increasingly removedfrom their natal communities and forced to sell their skills, knowledge andproducts in a labor market.

Robert Brenner (1986: 51) maintains that ‘modern economic growthrequires the break-up of pre-capitalist property relations characterized bythe producers’ possession and the exploiters’ surplus extraction by extra-economic coercion’. He sees this break-up as the unintended consequenceof the relations of reproduction of individual actors and the conflicts thatexist between classes. He argues that such transformations are most likelyto occur in those precapitalist societies in which the direct producerspossess the means of production individually and that state and its associ-ated classes extract goods and labor power directly from the individualproduction units rather than from the community as a whole. He concludesthat capitalist economic development of this sort has not occurred veryoften in human history.

■ CONCLUDING REMARKS

In sum, the theory of societal evolutionism has a shared heritage withmercantilism and liberalism; it was developed in France, Scotland andEngland at a time when those societies were still largely rural. It was elab-orated initially by theorists of agrarian capitalism who advocated thedevelopment of commercial agriculture and stock-raising as well as expan-sion of the domestic markets for those goods. In their view, this would bothcreate wealth and increase the division of labor. While keen observers ofhow production relations were being reorganized, they were less concernedwith the particulars involved in the development of capitalist manufacturesand industry.

Contemporary proponents of societal evolutionism share a vocabulary,a set of assumptions, and a form of argumentation that derive from a





particular socioeconomic and ideological context, one that was specificallyconcerned with the rise of agrarian capitalism. Here, I have argued that theframework of analytical categories, assumptions and rhetorical forms inher-ited from this discourse makes it difficult to examine the development ofcraft and industrial production in the kinds of precapitalist societies typi-cally studied by archaeologists. I suggest rethinking analytical categories,which are so broadly conceived that they miss fundamental differences andobscure essential features of the precapitalist societies we study. As AnnePyburn (2004: xi) recently remarked in a quite different context, ‘thereasoning of cultural [societal] evolutionary explanations predeterminesand drastically limits what we can know about the past’. I agree with hersentiments.

I have tried to show that historians, social theorists and other scholarsbesides archaeologists are concerned with questions about the processesinvolved in the rise of civilization, the origins of states and the appearanceof specialization. The problems are the same, only the kinds of data and themethods they use to interrogate them differ. It is beneficial, I believe, tobegin to look at their arguments more closely, to incorporate them into ourdiscussions and to insert ourselves into theirs. I have also argued that it isimportant to look at the social theoretical frameworks we use to explainthe past in order to see more clearly the relative advantages and limitations.In this article, I attempted to develop in a preliminary manner a frameworkrooted in Marxist social thought that would allow us to look at questionsabout craft specialization, the reorganization of production relations andstate formation from a different vantage point.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was prepared and presented at a pre-congressmeeting of the International Congress of Anthropological and EthnologicalSciences on ‘Artisanal Production throughout the Ages in Africa, Asia, Europe, andthe Americas’, organized by June Nash, Jane Schneider and John Clark, 20–23 July,1993 in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. This much revised version hasprofited over the years from the work, constructive criticism and thoughtfulcomments of Wendy Ashmore, Elizabeth Brumfiel, Edward Calnek, Cathy Costin,Tim Earle, John Gledhill, Christina Halperin, Russell Handsman, Frederic Hicks,Lynn Meskell, Robert Paynter, Karen Spalding and, more recently, the observationsof three anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 In the eighteenth century, sociocultural evolutionism was based on a notion ofdevelopment, i.e. ‘change was normal and resulted in general betterment’(Trigger, 1998: 30). As William Outhwaite (1994: 59) noted, this ‘unfoldingmodel’ of evolution differed from some subsequent versions that





‘emphasize[d] the Darwinian theme of the adaptations of systems to theirenvironments’.

2 During the transition from feudalism to capitalism, feudal lords – who, inpractice if not in theory, supported the ideal of a self-sufficient naturaleconomy – were pitted against serfs, peasants and artisans, on the one hand,and merchant capitalists who sought increasing control of local and regionalmarkets, on the other. Marx (1863–7/1977: 877–95) outlined the dialectics ofclass struggle in England during the transition. The serfs succeeded in breakingthe bonds of servitude by the end of the fourteenth century, becoming a classof free peasant proprietors. The lesser feudal lords no longer able toappropriate goods and services from their former serfs dissolved by the end ofthe fifteenth century, and their former retainers, who never had direct access tothe means of production and who lacked the ability to appropriate surplusfrom the direct producers, were recast as a proletariat. In the sixteenth century,the great feudal lords used coercion, laws and taxes to expropriate theresources they held in common and to force the peasants, formerly inpossession of their means of subsistence and production, into growingdependence on the market and on production for exchange. This wasaccompanied by social differentiation in the rural communities, thesimultaneous appearance of capitalist farmers who produced for the marketand a rural proletariat whose members lacked the means of subsistence andwere forced to hire themselves out as agricultural laborers.

3 The ‘discovery’ of the Americas, its peoples, and the wealth of its resourcesplayed a fundamental role in the development of the discourse that yieldedliberalism, political economy and evolutionism. In what is viewed as one of thefoundational documents of liberal social thought, Second Treatise onGovernment, John Locke (1690/1980: 29, 58) moved quickly from a biblicalaccount of human history rooted in Genesis to a developmental accountrooted in human nature and the world, when he interpreted the availableethnographic literature to indicate that ‘in the beginning all the world wasAmerica’ (§49) and that ‘the kings of the Indians in America . . . [are] still apattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe’ (§108). The individuals who wroteand used this literature typically had axes to grind and, as many scholars havenoted, their writings had important intellectual and political consequences (e.g.Meek, 1976).

4 Other worldviews were clearly articulated by the latter half of the eighteenthcentury. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a critic of the commercialculture crystallizing in France, gave voice both to the sentiments of the urban,middling classes composed of artisans, small shopkeepers, and the like whosestandards of living had been declining steadily for several generations and tothe political ideal of popular sovereignty (Löwy and Sayre, 2001; Wood, 1988).Thomas Malthus’s views on the interrelations of food supply, population,child-bearing and poverty and support for the Corn Laws gave solace to thelanded gentry who were the primary beneficiaries of this protective tariff onimported grains (Rubin, 1929/1979: 291–300). The Encyclopedia of DenisDiderot and Jean d’Alembert with its emphasis on scientific and technologicalprogress, on the one hand, and on rationality and progressive social thought,on the other, gave hope to the largely urban, educated middle classes of the





day. Spokesmen or apologists for industrial capitalism – like Jeremy Bentham,Jean-Baptiste Say, or David Ricardo, for example – began to articulate theirviews in the first-quarter of the nineteenth century (McNally, 1988: 266; Tribe,1978: 110–61, 1981: 101–20). Critics of industrialization and the impoverishmentof wage workers – such as Henri Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, or CharlesFourier – began to offer alternative perspectives in the 1820s and 1830s.

5 The Physiocrats, as Ronald Meek (1962: 24) notes, recognized that ‘theprevalence of small-scale, capital-starved, subsistence farming’ hindered thefurther development of agriculture.

6 Whether these ‘family farm’ production units were capitalist or precapitalistdepends not on the form of the work their members performed or whether ornot they were involved with wider socioeconomic structures but rather on thenature of their involvement with those structures. By contrast, AlexanderChayanov (1924/1986), who focused on the organization and nature of peasantproduction processes, viewed peasant family farms as autonomous,transhistorical economic units that were independent of those wider structures.He placed a great deal of emphasis on the relations between family size andproductivity and, hence, on the demographic aspects of domestic production.Numerous writers have pointed out that Chayanov did not adequatelytheorize the transformation from precapitalist to capitalist forms of productionand involvements in wider structures (e.g. Kriedte et al., 1977/1981: 42–3, 235).

7 The weaknesses of the ‘proto-industrialization thesis’, according to critics, were(1) that its concentration on an organizational form of production obscuredboth the diversity and complexity of the form itself as well as the socialproperty relations that underwrote domestic and workshop industries in thecountryside and (2) that its emphasis on an essentially linear and stageistmodel of economic development concealed the dynamics underlying theformation of pre-factory industry in rural areas (Berg et al., 1983).

8 Putting-out systems are forms of sub-contracting in which owners ormiddlemen distributed raw materials to workers for manufacture in theirhomes or even in factories. The workers typically employed family membersand friends in the production process. An example of the former involved thedistribution of raw cotton to spinners who produced thread; the thread wasthen collected and given to weavers to produce woven fabrics. An example ofthe latter occurred in early cotton mills, where ‘skilled spinners were put incharge of machinery and engaged their own help, usually child assistants fromamong their families and acquaintances. Foremen sometimes added to theirdirect supervisory function the practice of taking a few machines on their ownaccount and hiring labor to operate them’ (Braverman, 1974: 61).

9 Charles Babbage (1835/1963), an early theorist of capitalist manufacture,observed that it was men rather than machines that produced profits. Thus,unlike many of his contemporaries who were concerned with machines, hefocused on the organization of the workplace. He advocated technicaldivisions of labor (specialization) and segmenting the labor process, so that nosingle individual had to possess all of the skills required to complete theproduction of a particular commodity.

10 The fact that Marx never fully developed a theory of transition or fullydescribed the modes of production he mentioned, except for the capitalism,





generated an enormous literature, especially from the 1970s onward, partly inresponse to of Eric Hobsbawm’s (1964) introduction to Marx’s comments onprecapitalist forms and partly as an elaboration of what both wrote aboutthem.

11 This contrasts with some advocates of the ‘domestic economy’, who build onChayanov or Marshall Sahlins’s (1972) discussion of the domestic mode ofproduction and who tend to view the household rather than the community asthe primary economic unit.

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THOMAS C. PAT TERSON is Distinguished Professor and Chair ofAnthropology, University of California, Riverside. Besides his works on thehistory of anthropology and archaeology, his books include Marx’s Ghost:Conversations with Archaeologists and Foundations of Social Archaeology:Selected Writings of V. Gordon Childe (edited with Charles E. Orser, Jr.).[email: [email protected]]




Documents

2005. Patterson. Craft Specialization, The Reorganization of Production Relations and State Formation