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This chapter sets out the stakes of the book's argument, situating the English East India Company with respect to some of the larger processes of transition and change in the early modern period and the dawn of modernity in the nineteenth century. The issues addressed are large-scale macro-historical outcomes, such as economic development in the West, underdevelopment in Asia, growth in state capacity, the development of economic theory, and the emergence of new organizational forms. All are linked to and intertwine with the story of the English East India Company. In addition, these developments have at times been indirectly linked to the Industrial Revolution, which the chapter also briefly touches upon.

We here explore the gradual emasculation of the household as the basic unit of provisioning during the four evolutionary phases of capitalism. This economic history reveals a gradual redefinition of the purpose of the household from the center of entrepreneurial initiative to a besieged and insecure provider of inconvenient and unwanted labor to managerial capitalism whose central imperative is to reduce labor costs in the service of greater net returns to owners of capital. This evolutionary pathway will reveal the household to be an increasingly precarious and politically vexing participant in global capitalism.

This chapter focuses on the era of the merchants, the time of what is variously called merchant capitalism or mercantilism, a new and expanding world in which markets—and money—were strongly emergent. The mercantilist era lasted for 300 years, from about the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth. The chapter considers various developments that were reflected in the economic attitudes and policies in the age of the merchants, including the proliferation of trade, the rise of the merchant class, the voyages of discovery to America and the Far East, and the appearance and consolidation of the authority of the modern state. It also discusses the close association between the merchant interest and the national state. Finally, it examines policies such as state intervention on behalf of industry, tariff protection, a policy on the balance of payments, and the emergence of the great modern corporation.

This chapter examines the ideas emerging at the end of the mercantilist era in France that served and celebrated agriculture, the diversely productive farms, rather than merchants and manufacturers. As mercantilist era came to a close, a combination of economic, political and intellectual forces set France ideologically apart from the rest of Europe. Merchant capitalism, an artisan class, and factory establishments had also appeared in France. Paris had become a city of merchants and their suppliers and workmen. Agriculture in France was more than an occupation; it was a way of life. The chapter considers the emergence of a group who called themselves Physiocrats or Les Économistes in France during the period in question, focusing on their views regarding the concepts of natural law and the produit net, mercantilism, class structure, and price determination.

Chapter 3, “Capitalist Social Orders,” defines a capitalist society as a social order structured by a capitalist mode of production in which all of production is reorganized so as to produce goods to sell to strangers on markets for profit.

This chapter attempts to define the characteristics of a transitioning maritime labour system. It discusses the living conditions and working environment for ordinary sailors in Finland and abroad, and provides examples of cruel maritime discipline, which, in parts, can be analogous to features of slavery. Kaukiainen responds to this discussion with an investigation on how far this cruelty contributed to desertion rates, and documents the previous shifts in power between masters and sailors over periods of history. The chapter concludes with the argument that there was a significant change in traditional power systems within maritime Finland during the early modern period, and suggests that this shift can be understood as an integral part of the emergence of merchant capitalism.