Conceptualizing Medieval Capitalism: A Reply to Geoffrey Hodgson

Geoffrey Hodgson argues in Conceptualizing Capitalism that capitalism as an economic system does not and cannot emerge until the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. In developing his argument, Hodgson develops six conditions that he argues constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions of capitalism and holds that the mass increase in various states’ GDPs at the dawn of the nineteenth century evidences the emergence of societies that possess all practices and institutions he outlines in his six conditions. However, I argue that Hodgson’s conditions are also satisfied by states before his proposed origin point of capitalism, namely, the late medieval northern Italian city-states. I defend this interpretation by first outlining the cores of each condition and then examining the Italian cities against them. I conclude by arguing that it is technology rather than capitalism which more adequately explains the increase in GDP that Hodgson notes, and that the tension I identify may be resolved either by adding industrialization as a seventh condition, or abandoning the view that capitalism did not emerge until the late eighteenth–early nineteenth centuries.