VIII. Economics and History
History, according to Karl Marx, is economics in action–the contest,
among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, materials, and
economic power. Political forms, religious institutions, cultural creations,
are all rooted in economic realities. So the Industrial Revolution brought
with it democracy, feminism, birth control, socialism, the decline of
religion, the loosening of morals, the liberation of literature from
dependence upon aristocratic patronage, the replacement of romanticism by
realism in fiction–and the economic interpretation of history. The
outstanding personalities in these movements were effects, not causes;
Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector would never have been heard of had not
the Greeks sought commercial control of the Dardanelles; economic
ambition, not the face of Helen “fairer than the evening air clad in the
beauty of a thousand stars,” launched a thousand ships on Ilium; those
subtle Greeks knew how to cover naked economic truth with the fig leaf of
a phrase.
Unquestionably the economic interpretation illuminates much history.
The money of the Delian Confederacy built the Parthenon; the treasury of
Cleopatra’s [Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt (r. 51-49, 48-30 B.C.)] Egypt
revitalized the exhausted Italy of Augustus, gave Virgil [Virgil (70-19
B.C.)] an annuity and Horace [Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus; 65-8
B.C.)] a farm. The Crusades, like the wars of Rome with Persia, were
attempts of the West to capture trade routes to the East; the discovery of
America was a result of the failure of the Crusades. The banking house of
the Medici financed the Florentine Renaissance; the trade and industry of
Nuremberg made Dürer [Dürer, Albrecht (1471-1528)] possible. The
French Revolution came not because Voltaire wrote brilliant satires and
Rousseau sentimental romances, but because the middle classes had risen
to economic leadership, needed legislative freedom for their enterprise and
trade, and itched for social acceptance and political power.
