Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Europe’s early modern period lasted from approximately 1450 to 1700. Centralized monarchies emerged as older feudal bonds dissolved. The Italian and Northern Renaissances took place alongside the Scientific Revolution. The Protestant Reformation gave rise to new Christian denominations and the Catholic Counter-Reformation as well as a series of religious wars in central and western Europe. European nation-states began to colonize the non-Western world as they created global empires, and a series of witch hunts took place across Europe and colonies around the globe.

New technologies, such as Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press (circa 1440), promoted the growth of these developments. Demonological tracts, for instance, could be widely disseminated, spreading the intellectual foundations for witch-hunting. Scientific and philosophical works likewise became more accessible, popular, and influential, as did writings of religious reformers. Many of these works were used to justify the oppression of women and people of color.

Heretical movements flourished in the late Middle Ages, but the Roman Catholic Church successfully persecuted many of these groups. Alternatively, the German monk Martin Luther escaped burning as a heretic when he split from the Church thanks to the support and protection of the German princes who converted to Lutheranism for both religious and political reasons. They embraced Protestantism in opposition to the Holy Roman Emperors, staunch Catholics, whom the princes feared would encroach on their long-standing independence. Though the Catholic Church launched a movement to reform some of the abuses that prompted the Reformation, such as clerical corruption, it came too late. The Reformation was an unstoppable force. Indeed, Protestants used new printing technology in the 1500s so that their ideas swept through Europe and took hold rapidly.

The Reformation created deep fissures in some regions of Europe, such as France, England, and Germany. Religious wars erupted in each of these areas. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), for example, broke out over the Holy Roman Empire’s refusal to recognize Calvinism as a religious option for the nearly autonomous German princes and their subjects. This war consumed most of central Europe and left the German population devastated. The socioeconomic stresses of warfare and other crises, like droughts and crop failures, contributed to witch hunts all over Europe, in both Protestant and Catholic areas.

Europe underwent an intellectual and cultural revival during the Reformation. Renaissance thought encouraged learning as much about the natural world as possible and inspired first exploration and then colonization of the world beyond Europe, in what is known as the “Age of Encounters.” This cultural and intellectual movement, however, was not the only cause of imperialism. Capitalism’s predecessor, mercantilist economic theory, also encouraged empire building and colonialism. States exercised significant control over capital, trade, and markets under mercantilism. Mercantilists held that there was a finite amount of global wealth. States had to maximize their exports to flourish and required a steady supply of precious metals to support the new money economy. If nations had limited access to these raw materials, they must look for it externally. Indeed, the Spanish imported great quantities of silver and gold from their South American colonies to Europe. According to mercantilist theory, a large population is necessary to maintain an output of goods, and colonies should serve as markets for a kingdom’s exports. Mercantilism therefore facilitated colonial exploitation of land, resources, and conquered peoples around the globe. Capitalism, on the other hand, not only promotes private ownership of capital and limited state intervention in markets, but also benefits from colonial exploitation. Capitalism replaced mercantilism as the predominant European economic theory by the 1700s. Both theories, however, are profit driven.

Another explanation for capitalism’s genesis is religious change. Sociologist Max Weber put forth the theory of the Protestant work ethic in the early 20th century. He suggests the Reformation fundamentally transformed the way many Europeans thought about work, especially in areas that were heavily Calvinist. The Catholic faith holds that good works are necessary for salvation while Protestantism contends that hard work is a sign of God’s grace. This new, Protestant-inflected work ethic therefore emphasized hard labor and simplicity. The predestined were obliged to serve God through their labor, and were likewise obliged to multiply the resources with which God has blessed them. This Protestant work ethic, Weber argues, produced capitalism.

The early modern age was one of tremendous, scaffolded internal change and external development for European nations. These changes collectively produced the modern world, which is dominated by capitalist enterprise, and which must cope with the legacies of colonialism.