I I LA 1 Li J® IS Illi i r? rI b Im! I Ol E i Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), studied law and philosophy, and was called to the bar in Budapest in 1912. He served as a cavalry officer in the war of 1914—18. From 1924 to 1933 he was foreign affairs editor of Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt in Vienna. He emigrated to England in 1933, and lectured for the Workers Educational Association and for the extra-mural departments of the universities of Oxford and London. He was joint editor of Christianity and the Social Revolution (1935), to which he contributed a chapter, “The Essence of Fascism.” His work in economic history was done in the United States, from 1940 to 1943 as resident scholar at Benning­ ton College, and from 1947 until his retirement in 1953, as Professor of Economics at Columbia University. From 1953 to 1958 he and Professor Conrad M. Arensberg were joint directors of a research project on the economic as­ pects of institutional growth. The first of Polanyi’s three principal works, The Great Transformation (1944), was concerned with the structure of nineteenth century capitalism and the enormity of its social consequences. His second book, Trade and Market in the Early Empires (1957), edited with Conrad M. Arens­ berg and Harry W. Pearson, created a theoretical frame­ work for the study of economies which were neither in­ dustrialized nor organized by market institutions. His last work, published posthumously — Dahomey and the Slave Trade (1966)—analyzed the internal economic organization of the eighteenth century West African kingdom, and the economic organization of its external trade in slaves with Europeans. George Dalton is Professor of Economics and Anthro­ pology at Northwestern University and a staff member of its Program of African Studies. He received his B.A. de­ gree from Indiana University, M.A. from Columbia Uni­ versity, and, in 1959, his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. In 1961—62 he spent fifteen months in West Africa, and is co-author of a volume on the Liberian economy, Growth without Development: An Economic Survey of Liberia (1966). With Paul Bohannan, he edited Markets in Africa (1962). He has published articles on economic anthropology, comparative economy, and eco­ nomic development, and has edited a volume of readings in economic anthropology, Tribal and Peasant Economies (1967). J b Z65XZ51X To Ilona Duczynska Polanyi Copyright © 1968 by George Dalton First published as a Beacon Paperback in 1971 by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc. All rights reserved Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association. International Standard Book Number: 0-8070—4793-7 Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada by Saunders of Toronto, Ltd. Copyright © The Hutchinson Publishing Group Ltd. 1969 First published as a Beacon Paperback in 1971 by arrangement with The Macmillan Company All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association International Standard Book Number: 0-8070-1535-0 Printed in the United States of America Contents Editor’s Note Introduction ix Part I. Economy and Society 1. Societies and Economic Systems (1944) 3 2. The Self-regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Land, Labor, and Money (1944) 26 3. Class Interest and Social Change (1944) 38 4. Our Obsolete Market Mentality (1947) 59 5. Aristotle Discovers the Economy (1957) 78 6. The Place of Economies in Societies (with C. M. Arensberg and H. W. Pearson, 1957) 116 7. The Economy as Instituted Process (1957) 139 8. The Semantics of Money-Uses (1957) 175 Part II. Primitive and Archaic Economies 9. Redistribution: The State Sphere in Eighteenth- Century Dahomey (1966) 207 10. Ports of Trade in Early Societies (1963) 238 11. Sortings and “Ounce Trade” in the West African Slave Trade (1964) 261 12. Archaic Economic Institutions: Cowrie Money (1966) 280 13. On the Comparative Treatment of Economic Institutions in Antiquity with Illustrations from Athens, Mycenae, and Alalakh (1960) 306 Index 335 I i ■' SO T zSL * ‘ir , -• Karl Polanyi, 1947 /V PRIMITIVE, ARCHAIC, AND MODERN ECONOMIES Essays of Karl Polanyi EDITED BY GEORGE DALTON /A ^-7> UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE <<5^5^. BEACON PRESS (t G- BOSTON % ,e/ Editor’s Note The essays in this volume originally appeared between 1944 and 1966 as chapters of four books and articles in four journals. The purpose of bringing them together is to make them easily accessible to students of economic anthropology, economic history, and comparative eco­ nomic systems along with an expository Introduction to Polanyi’s work. The appendices to Essays 6 and 8 are com­ piled from unpublished memoranda Polanyi distributed to his students. The essays are reprinted here with slight changes in punc­ tuation, and, in a few instances, deletion or substitution of a word to make the meaning clearer. There are also oc­ casional editorial insertions [in square brackets] to add an explanatory word, to comment on difficult matters, or to refer the reader to related writings. The place and date of original publication appear at the beginning of each essay. (The editor regrets his inability to track down the sources of several of the brief quotations Polanyi cites without reference.) Introduction'- BY GEORGE DALTON It is only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal.—marcel mauss Karl Polanyi was a warm, generous, and committed man whose enormous range of interests spanned all the social sciences and beyond.2 His was an original mind al­ though he never claimed excessive originality. In his lec­ tures at Columbia and in print he emphasized his indebted­ ness to Marx, Maine, Bucher, Weber, Thumwald, Pirenne, Menger, Malinowski, and others. His concept of “redistri­ bution” as an integrative mode of economic organization, and much that he said about money, external trade, market places, ports of trade, operational devices, and the birth and reform of industrial capitalism, was, I believe, original with him. His forceful presentation and keen insight made us aware of economies of record in ways different from the distinguished writers from whom he learned much. The qualities that made him a brilliant lecturer also made him a difficult writer. His passionate commitment and enormous learning drew large numbers of students to 1 This Introduction is an expanded and revised version of a paper given at the Annual Spring Meetings of the American Ethnological Society, 1965 [20]. I am grateful to Joseph S. Berliner, Paul Bohannan, Edward Budd, Robert Campbell, Helen Codere, J. R. T. Hughes, Walter Neale, and Ilona Polanyi for their critical comments. 2 Karl Polanyi died in April 1964. ix PRIMITIVE, ARCHAIC, AND MODERN ECONOMIES his lectures, several of whom made his research interests their own [13, 59, 65].3 But what was forceful, lucid, and articulate in the lecture hall sometimes became hyper­ bole and polemic in print. A friend sympathetic to his work describes Polanyi’s writing style as a stiletto set in the far end of a battering ram. Academics do not always like to be lectured at in print [79, 85]. Polanyi’s substance is also difficult. To discuss Ricardo’s England, Malinowski’s Trobriand Islands, and Hitler’s Ger­ many in the same book (The Great Transformation) is to demand much of the reader; but to expect the reader to follow him into Hammurabi’s Babylonia, Aristotle’s Greece, and eighteenth-century Dahomey (Trade and Market in the Early Empires) is to expect altogether too much. However, in the very range of economies he analyzes and draws from, lies one of his principal contributions: that a theory of economic anthropology becomes possible only when primitive and archaic economies are regarded as part of comparative economic systems. To understand what is special to the economies anthropologists deal with and what they share with all other economies requires com­ parative analysis of the kind Polanyi provides. In order for anthropologists to see what is analytically important in Tro- briands’ economy they must first understand the structure of industrial capitalism [15, 16]; to understand the special usage of pig-tusk and cowrie money, they must first understand the organization and usage of dollars and francs [19]. One reason why theory in economic anthropology remains underdeveloped is that anthropologists have not brought to the economic branch of their subject the same comparative grounding they bring to kinship, law, politics, and religion. 3 The numbers and citations in brackets refer to bibliographi­ cal references, listed at the end of this Introduction. X