Older Than Capitalism, Factories Shaped World

Factories are ancient, older than capitalism. Imagine a weaver in Mesopotamia who hires workers, provides them with tools and raw material (the capital). This entrepreneur would be recognised by Karl Marx himself as a “capitalist” since he derives “surplus value” from selling the cloth. Yet no one would say that Mesopotamia was capitalist, even though there were 13,200 weavers in its main city, Ur. In 15th-century Florence, over a third of the workforce produced wool for wages. The wool would be imported from England or Spain, and then sold all over Italy, the Balkans and the Levant, but no one has ever argued that the industrial revolution started in Florence.