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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Capitalism is a very specific system whereby a capitalist class is able to take the reigns of state power and direct that towards capital formation/development. Just because the conditions for capitalism to develop were in place doesn't mean it would ever happen; China had the "conditions for capitalism" for like a thousand years but it never developed because the imperial houses kept control of the state and did not allow any would be capitalists to direct state policy. The "board of directors" for CHOAM, the massive merchant guild, are just the Padishah Emperor and the Landsraad (the nobles). There is no separate capitalist class, no merchants that are not in control of the nobles directly. No reason to think that capitalism would develop in the Dune universe when it hasn't for literally 10,000 years since the establishment of the empire based around spice production. Dune takes place around 10,193 A.G., which is After Guild aka 10k years after the establishment of the Spacing Guild which requires spice melange to navigate the void of space, so this economic system has been in place for ten thousand years without capitalism developing. Don't see why it would just randomly appear one day given the structure of the world.
Do you have any reading on this?
So for China specifically, probably the best place to start is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. I don't agree with all the conclusions of that monograph but it's a great first foray into the questions and concerns of this kind of longue durée history. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi makes this argument I've identified above, that the Chinese state was strong enough to stop capital from taking over and that the way capitalism formed in the West is actually rather odd; this is a wonderful book but it requires quite a bit of context, and you might even be better off starting with his more broad account of the rise of capitalism called The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, which (despite its name) covers around 500 years from the formation of capitalism in Renaissance Italy up to the modern era. Fernand Braudel's three part Capitalism and Civilisation, from which Arrighi draws a lot of his ideas, is phenomenal but very long and again requires even more familiarity with the historical period.
If you just want a quick summary of all the above, distilled into something quite short but still well done, I'd recommend The Origins of Capitalism and the 'Rise of the West' by Eric Mielants. It's not specifically focused on China, but it does cover the "capitalism requires the state" bit and why capitalism happens in Western Europe and not anywhere else.