6
The Debt Crisis in
Historical Perspective
PUBLIC DEBT AND INTERNATIONAL CREDIT AND THE
ORIGINS OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM: FROM THE
FIFTEENTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURIES
In the footsteps of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (Smith, 1776;
Ricardo, 1817), Karl Marx (Marx, 1867) spent considerable time
studying the creation of an international credit system and the role
of public debt in capitalist accumulation on a world scale. In the first
book of Capital, he devotes several pages of spirited analysis to the
subject.
In chapter 31 (Penguin edition), he particularly focuses on colonial
pillage, public debt and the international credit system as the sources
of primitive accumulation that made industrial capital prosper the
world over.
On the role of colonial pillage, it is worth quoting Capital.
Thankfully, Marx's analysis breaks with the Communist Manifesto's
presentation of capitalism as a civilising force in the periphery:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation,
enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous
population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and
plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for
the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which char
acterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production, (ch. 31,
p. 915)70