114 Chapter ThreeDozens of other refuges for entrepreneurs were scattered across
the face of Europe, thanks to its peculiarly fragmented political
geography.
Under these circumstances, command simply could not prevail
against the market as a way to marshal men and resources. As long as
no single political command structure could reach out to every corner
of Latin Christendom, and so acquire the capability of nipping
capitalist accumulation in the bud, the sovereignty of the market over
even the greatest ruler of the age remained an ultimate reality, how
ever muffled its actual exercise might be by the fact that states contin
ued to be managed on a day-to-day basis by persons who utterly
rejected and decried their involvement with moneylenders’ calcula
tions of profit and loss.
Philip II would have found it hard to believe, but in the long run
European states actually were strengthened by their involvement in
the fiscal web spun by international bankers and suppliers. First of all,
the tax base grew because the scale of production in Europe as a whole
tended to increase as private firms accumulated resources for large-
scale trade and industrial activity. Regional specialization developed
economies of scale running across political boundaries. Technolog
ical advance was hastened by the coexistence of multiple suppliers
and multiple purchasers. Loans from private sources to finance
extraordinary governmental expenditure, of the kind that supported
all of Philip Il s military campaigns, also enhanced the power of
the state over men and material, and this despite the fact that paying
off old debts was difficult, indeed impossible.
Paradoxically, the mix of managerial opposites—kings and ministers
struggling against and collaborating with bankers and merchant
suppliers—hurried along an ever deepening penetration of market
relationships into European society. Each increase in taxation brought
additional segments of Europe’s wealth into circulation, for states
spent all they received. Hence subsistence and strictly local economic
patterns were continually eroded by a combination of compulsion
(taxes) and attraction (cheaper or better goods, enlarged private in
come). War and the heavy costs of waging it accelerated the entire
process. Mobilization of men and materials through the market inched
its way ahead, and by degrees proved capable of integrating human
effort more efficiently than command had ever been able to do.
Perhaps the fundamental contrast between European experience in
the early modern centuries and that of Asia might be expressed by
saying that in Asia command mobilization reinforced and was in turn