Money and American gold drove Europe’s shift to market accumulation

Evidence

Arising in the city-states of Renaissance Italy and spreading to northern Europe was an inexorably expanding market economy, intensifying medieval tendencies toward capitalist relations of production and capitalist modes of economic behavior. As trade quickened throughout western Europe, stimulated by the European discovery and exploitation of the Americas, production for subsistence began to be replaced by more specialized production for the market. The spreading use of money provided not only a uniform medium of exchange but also a reliable store of value, facilitating open-ended accumulation. Inflation generated by the growth of population and the flood of American gold accelerated the transition from traditional economic modes to rationally maximizing modes of economic organization. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 277

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The American-gold-fed monetary transition chimes with the capitalism-as-metabolic-rupture strand; ties mercantilist wealth extraction to the same commodification Merchant elsewhere links to the death of nature.
• XREF: connects to: American economic weight is forcing transformation of Europe’s material base

Broader Connections

• American economic weight is forcing transformation of Europe’s material base #expands (0.85)