The origins of capitalism

A history of expropriation and climate crisis.

by Paola Imperatore

The growing social impoverishment, the widening gap between the super-rich and an increasingly large share of poor people, and wars across the world are leading many today to acknowledge that capitalist globalization has generated poverty and distress. Yet, the idea remains widespread that capitalism has brought – throughout its history – progress and abundance, rights and democracy.

It is said that where there was scarcity, capitalism created abundance. That where there was no access to water or energy, capitalism provided them. It is argued that capitalist development has advanced the sphere of rights and democracy along with it. It follows, in a world with a growing population and finite natural resources, that only capitalism can overcome the demographic trap thanks to its ability to increase productivity, that is, the amount of value produced from the same quantity of resources and time through technology. These dominant narratives help shape a story of the origins of capitalism as a necessary and progressive process. Capitalism would therefore be an overall positive system for humanity and even more efficient from an environmental perspective, capable of tackling and solving the greatest challenge of our time: the climate crisis.

For this reason, the neoliberal recipe is “proposed” worldwide through institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank so that different economic, social, and environmental systems can be structurally reformed and brought within the framework of the capitalist economy, ensuring development and prosperity. What we are experiencing today would therefore be nothing more than an unfortunate parenthesis, a moment of crisis in a system that overall works, has worked, and can work well.

Yet, if we reconstruct the origins of capitalism by retracing the most significant stages of its development, we inevitably encounter a history of expropriation and domination that intertwines environmental, patriarchal, and racial violence, demonstrating how the logic of capital has imposed itself by destroying forms of communal life far more advanced than is commonly believed, or rather, than official history leads us to believe.

Capitalism as a socio-ecological system: the world-ecology perspective

The capitalist regime must be considered as a social and ecological regime, as Jason Moore proposes with his concept of “world-ecology”. It is not possible to analyze the origins of capitalism and its development without taking into account how it has transformed socio-environmental relations. As the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, theorist of the world-system that inspired Moore, wrote, “the phenomena addressed are so closely intertwined that each compartment presupposes the others, each affects the others, each is incomprehensible without taking the others into account”.

By adopting this perspective, we can see

how capitalism, from primitive accumulation to the present day, has shaped nature and society according to its profit needs, building an economy against society and its possibilities of reproduction.

Enclosures and primitive accumulation: the birth of modern inequality

Reconstructing the origins of agrarian capitalism, that is, what we know as primitive accumulation, the sociologist and philosopher Silvia Federici highlights the social, environmental, and epistemic transformations brought about by the new social order, which finds its foundation in the emergence of enclosures. Enclosures, that is, the fencing of land and fields, led to the privatization of land that had previously been common, ending customary rights and separating workers (cultivators) from their means of production (land).

This transformation marked a significant turning point in society, giving rise to a class of landowners and a class of laborers expelled from the land, burdened with exorbitant rents and unsustainable taxation.

Where there had been land, food, and wood for all, agrarian capitalism introduced a new organization that created abundance for a few and scarcity for many. Federici also highlights – in her book “Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women” (2018) – the impact of this reorganization of social relations on women, who were marginalized from the public sphere in an attempt to confine them to the domestic one, as well as persecuted for their opposition to a process that deprived them of land and work.

It would be precisely those expelled from the land who would constitute the low-cost labor force – that mass of “hewers of wood” and “drawers of water” described by historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in the book “The Many-Headed Hydra. The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic” (2000) – that made the development of global trade possible. These workers were employed in producing timber for ships crossing the Atlantic, in creating arable land for plantations, in transporting and distributing water in cities and ports, and in supplying materials for construction and trade. This mass of poor people created by the privatization of land was immediately re-employed under terrible conditions within the production chain, also out of fear that the social distress generated by this new mass of unemployed people could turn into crime.

The development of global trade found in new maritime routes a possibility for expansion but had its core in the slave-based plantation economy. The emergence of the plantation marked a qualitative leap in the global development of capitalist forces, of which racism and the appropriation of nature were fundamental preconditions, as Karl Marx pointed out in “The Poverty of Philosophy”:

“Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, the colonies that have created world trade, and world trade is the condition of large-scale industry”.

The sociologist Razmig Keucheyan, in his book “Nature Is a Battlefield. Toward a Political Ecology” (2016), highlights how the slave plantation was the pivot of the evolution of global trade, where the relationship between master, slave, and nature was consolidated. Within the slave plantation, three dimensions intersect: the appropriation of nature by European powers; the free and forced appropriation of labor through the deportation and enslavement of people from the African continent; and the exploitation of the productive and reproductive labor of enslaved women, who performed a dual role as field workers and as mothers reproducing the labor force that sustained the plantation. Without the slave plantation economy, global trade would not have emerged. What is triumphantly narrated as the discovery of new routes and exchanges across the Atlantic was founded on the violent appropriation of nature and the bodies of racialized people. Once again, capitalism generated flows of money and prosperity for a few, and unprecedented, organized violence for many.

Industrial revolution and fossil capitalism

The transformation that most decisively shaped the world as we know it today is the industrial revolution, which “introduced into the global landscape the innovative factor of the factory system, machine technologies, and productive supply as a predominant aspect”. As is well known, the industrial revolution is closely linked to the emergence of the fossil economy, insofar as this massive capitalist expansion would not have been possible without the intensive use of fossil sources, particularly coal from the nineteenth century onward.

The scholar and activist Andreas Malm has studied the relationship between fossil energy and capitalist development, highlighting capital’s dependence on the systematic consumption of fossil sources, for which wars and genocides are cyclically carried out.

Colonial expansion, through more or less explicit and violent forms of war, is what allows capitalism to seize the energy it increasingly needs.

The emissions curve, which begins its steep rise precisely after the industrial revolution, as well as the genocide in Palestine discussed by Malm in his book “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth” (2025), are nothing but natural consequences of a system obsessively driven toward conquest and intensive exploitation.

Have we really gained well-being? The contemporary paradox

This is why narratives that depict capitalism as a system capable of “transforming what were once the luxuries of the elite into comforts so ordinary that even the humblest people no longer notice them” are questionable. Because, while it is true that we can choose among hundreds of smartphone models or receive a package in one day, it is equally true that we do not have the security of a roof over our heads, access to unpolluted water, or timely medical care. While it is true that some can travel in a Euro 6 SUV or choose among multiple airlines, it is also true that entire populations have been condemned to live without land, water, medicine, homes, hospitals, and schools.

This did not happen because of a flaw in the capitalist system. This is the capitalist system, and it has always been so. A system that abounds in what is superfluous and subtracts what is essential: land, water, space, time, relationships. Everything that, ultimately, allows individual and collective life to reproduce itself with dignity.