The Return of Merchant Capitalism

To understand the economic character, transnational politics, and labor regime characteristic of contemporary globalization, it is useful to revisit the concept of “merchant capitalism,” a form of market exchange that dominated trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then as now, commodities proved crucial to world commerce, merchants held the whip hand over manufacturers, while workers found their remuneration and working conditions subject to competitive pressures that often debased their status. The transnational retailers who today dominate so many global supply chains therefore play many of the same roles as did the antebellum merchants of New York and Liverpool who favored free trade and formed an alliance with those who deployed unfree labor to grow the cotton and other commodities upon which the trading system of their day was built.