Où et quand le capitalisme est-il né ? Conceptualisations et jeux d'échelle chez Robert Brenner, Immanuel Wallerstein et André Gunder Frank

According to what is a common reading of Marx, the fully-fledged conditions of capitalism combine a particular relation of production (represented by wage-labour) and a particular state of the factors of production (arising from the industrial revolution). Such a configuration brought about the birth of capitalism in England in the second half of the eighteenth century. The need to account for certain phenomena such as the persistence of under-development in the countries of Africa or in south America in the 1970s or, by contrast, the rapid development of Asian economies from the 1990s onwards have led certain historians, sociologists and economists to reappraise the history of capitalism by way of an enlargement of the temporal and geographical perspective. Drawing on the notion of “world-economy” put forward by Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein has consequently located the birth of capitalism in the establishment, at the beginning of the 16th century, of a space of unequal production and exchange, polarized between center and periphery, encompassing the whole of Europe and its dependencies. Enlarging on this model, André Gunder Frank has shown that it is possible to trace back to antiquity the existence of a system of accumulation, the historical centre of which had almost always been Asia.