LIAS Lecture Richard Drayton: How Europe's early capitalists promoted colonialism

2025-01-15 The history of humankind is inextricably linked to the way in which collective life is organised in spaces. In his LIAS Lecture "Capitalism and Empire: The European Hinterland and its Oceanic Empires", Richard Drayton, LIAS alumnus and Professor of Imperial and Global History at King's College London, emphasised that the modern world can only be understood by analysing the connections between places and the interactions between internal and external dynamics. His considerations focus particularly on the question of where capitalism originated and how it developed.

©Fotos: Julia Knop
©Fotos: Julia Knop
©Fotos: Julia Knop

‘Among historians,’ says Drayton, ‘there are two approaches to explaining capitalism. An inward view examines the transformations in individual societies, such as England's transition to capitalism through investments in the late Middle Ages. By contrast, an outward view focuses on how empires restructured the world through global interdependence.’ Often, both perspectives are combined to shed light on the interplay between internal and external factors. 

Influential theories such as Max Weber's cultural explanation of the rise of capitalism or Eric Williams' arguments on internally generated factors locate central developments in Europe. However, Drayton shows that these processes required more extensive networks and connections beyond European borders.

German cities as the hinterland of early colonial trade

Even before 1500, Europe was integrated into global trade and production systems. Germany and France played a key role in this. The German Fugger mines, for example, were a central supplier of silver and copper, which was indirectly promoted by the slave and sugar industry in the New World. Cities like Nuremberg became important trading centres for sugar and minerals. At the same time, trade flourished in the Baltic Sea region, where Hanseatic cities such as Stralsund traded in salt, furs and Asian textiles. Connections with Eastern Europe and the Islamic world created markets for enslaved people from Europe's hinterland, for instance.

Technologies and institutions that later became central to capitalism were already developing in the Middle Ages. Italian trading cities such as Genoa and Venice drove the slave trade around the Black Sea and established modern banking, accounting and letters of credit. The North-West European macroregion – a hinge region between Atlantic and Continental areas – was also crucial. Places like Antwerp connected southern Germany, France and the Atlantic system.

‘Long-distance trade after 1500 fundamentally changed the inner geography of Europe,’ concluded Richard Drayton. The dynamic centres of capital accumulation shifted from Central Europe to the Atlantic periphery. France, Great Britain and their colonies became the engine of European expansion, with low-wage countries like Germany remaining important suppliers. This realignment brought both growth and a provincialisation of formerly central regions such as the East.

Drayton's analysis shows that capitalism did not arise in isolation but is rooted in a complex web of local and global processes. Europe's rise was the result of long, often brutal ties between hinterlands and oceanic empires – a history of trade, conquest and transformation.