Mary O'Sullivan, PhD

Project

The Fabric of Profit: European Textiles in Global Perspective, 1750–1850

The Fabric of Profit addresses the history of capitalism as its general theme with a focus on the history of European textiles during the revolutionary age from 1750 to 1850. The project is organized around two research “streams” that draw on a variety of primary sources to address distinct but complementary questions about the practices and discourses of profit. First, how were profits understood, pursued, and generated in economic practice? Second, how were profits constructed and contested in economic discourses about political economy? The project’s innovative character stems both from its profit-oriented analytical approach as well as from a methodology organized around global commodity chains. By structuring its macro-analysis around these chains, the project benefits from their well-known methodological advantages to situate the economic and social evolution of European textiles in the context of global history.

Recommended Reading

O’Sullivan, Mary. “Constructing a Big History of Inequality.” History Compass 20, no. 4 (2022): e12719. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12719.
–. “History as Heresy: Unlearning the Lessons of Economic Orthodoxy.” Economic History Review 75, no. 2 (2022): 297–335. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13117.
–. “Machines in the Hands of Capitalists: Power and Profit in Late Eighteenth-Century Cornish Copper Mines.” Past and Present 260, no. 1 (2023): 71–122. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac039.

Colloquium, 28.02.2017

The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capital

Many of us have strong views about it but they are as diverse as they are unequivocal. To some it is the fount of innovation; to others it spawns exploitation and inequality. When a concept is evoked by a cast of characters as various as Louis Blanc, Max Weber, the New York Stock Exchange, Joseph Goebbels, Ayn Rand and Michael Moore, its polemical character is hardly in doubt. Indeed, if we pay attention to how capitalism is used, it is clear that we cannot even agree on what it is: capitalism is a concept that seems as capricious and elusive as the world it evokes. It is little wonder then if capitalism draws fire as polemical and vague when, as in recent years, it attracts renewed interest in the history of economic life. Now, ranged against it, along with the usual catalogue of complaints, is an impressive body of historical evidence on private property, wage labour, commodification and capital, much of which seems to threaten the empirical foundations of conventional interpretations of capitalism. If ever there were a concept to eschew altogether in the human and social sciences, or to use only if purged of any substantive meaning, then it would seem to be capitalism.

In the first part of my colloquium, I will try to persuade you otherwise by claiming that there is considerable scientific potential of continued engagement with the concept of capitalism. I shall argue that such engagement holds out both conceptual and empirical promise but only insofar as it is critical. The theoretical and empirical shortcomings of conventional explanations of capitalism are indeed substantial and they make renewal an essential aspect of any research programme on capitalism. Capital seems like a worthy focus of such a programme; capital might exist without capitalism but it is difficult to imagine that capitalism could do without capital. Yet, oddly enough, capital has been rather neglected in the recent revival of academic interest in the history of capitalism and surely merits a little more attention.

An eminently sensible Swedish economist once explained that if "that unwholesome Irish stew called 'modern capitalism'" is to have any meaning it ought to be connected to the study of capital in "economic science". In the second part of my colloquium I will endeavour to make some sense of the sustained, though sporadic, efforts to develop a science of capital within the emerging discipline of economics. My objective in this regard is not to do justice in twenty minutes or so (!) to the manifold ways in which men, and the occasional woman, have written about the economics of capital through the ages. Instead I am interested in exploring the emergence of a canon of capital within the discipline of economics, rather than giving rein to my rather catholic tastes in economic thinkers. I will show that economists developed a rather specific meaning for capital from the late 18th century and assigned it an extremely prominent place in economic life. Yet, they dithered endlessly about the nature of capital, they obfuscated as much as they clarified about capital's economic roles, and they assumed as much as they explained about its rewards. The result, evident in successive "capital controversies" in the 19th and 20th centuries, was enormous contention and confusion within the economics discipline about the nature, the functions and the returns to capital. Indeed, it seems fair to say that the economic science of capital might itself be deemed an "unwholesome Irish stew".

Economists moved on from these controversies not by resolving the issues in dispute but by settling on what one prominent US economist rather disarmingly admitted were "parables of capital" and what crankier observers labelled a 'mythology' of capital. In the third part of my talk, I will turn to the history of economic life to explain the substantial and ironic impact these parables have had on how we understand capital's place within it. Broadly speaking, I would like to suggest that capital - its nature, its function and its rewards - has been written out of that history with devastating effect for any serious consideration of the role and rewards of capital in contemporary and past societies. Thomas Piketty tried to plug that void with massive amounts of historical data in his "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" but certain parables of capital still play a crucial role in his analysis. I will conclude by suggesting that economists have developed a science of capital that offers so little insight on the present and the past because of the dubious methods they have employed in constructing its foundational elements. And I will make a modest proposal for a more historical, rather than conjectural, approach to guiding economic thinking about capital, and what it might mean for capitalism, in a direction that might prove more satisfying to the intelligent woman.