History is rarely as simple as it appears. Things develop that are not always apparent from the circumstances of any given time. In the Renaissance, the fast-paced nature of our capitalist society was not remotely present. Businesses were generally unable to transcend their location, let alone their country. In the 16th and 17th centuries, a gradual shift occurred as nationalism gained strength and markets expanded. Explaining this shift is an interest to many social scientists, not just historians. My position is that the invention of the printing press revolutionized the way people did business by allowing them to operate more efficiently, and by expanding their trade parameters. This will be shown by examining the impacts on business by the printing press, the evolution of market economies after its invention, and the institutionalization of what I call print geography.
Sociologist Max Weber believed modern capitalism resulted from the Protestant work ethic; that by submitting to the divine will of God through devotional work, prosperity became a spiritual measure of one’s worthiness1. He believed its dissemination through Europe aspired people to work harder, seek more land, and spark innovation- all necessary hallmarks for the transformation of capitalism at the time. Yet there was another force that disseminated through Europe before the Protestant Reformation: the printing press, invented around 1450 by Johannes Gutenberg. Historians generally agree that the invention of the movable type was the most important invention during the Renaissance2. Its mass reproduction allowed humanists and other scholars to widely distribute their ideas to large segments of the population. While it is widely agreed that it revolutionized communication and the spread of knowledge3, the idea that printing created modern capitalism is largely absent from the historical literature. This could be because the birth of capitalism is more of a sociological or economic issue, yet the events leading to it are historical in nature, making it important to interpret in the context of history. At the very least, the issue can be observed from the full context of the social sciences, involving all these disciplines, including geography, which I will touch on in a bit.
Historians, economists, and sociologists are generally unconcerned with whether the printing press’ predating of the Protestant Revolution was the prime mover of Weber’s shift in consciousness; rather, the main debate is over whether the Protestant Revolution would have been as robust without it. Jared Rubin, an economist, found a strong connection between locations that had printing presses and those that were friendly to the Reformation4. Martin Luther, the primary writer of the Reformation, was the most popular writer of his time, suggesting that if the printing press had not been invented, his ideas would not have reached as wide an audience. Other historians believe the Reformation was inevitable due to the shortcomings of the Catholic Church; that whether or not the printing press had been invented, reformist ideas would have spread through northern Europe, however slowly. Yet Luther himself claimed in 1522: “I did nothing; the Word did everything”5. Was he referring to the word of God or his own? Either way, he must have seen the power this invention had in spreading his message. I am inclined to agree with Rubin and Luther that the Reformation would not have been as widespread without the printing press, though I also agree with conventional historians that it would have happened anyway, just at a slower pace.
My argument is that the printing press would have created modern capitalism despite the Reformation and Weber’s thesis. An increase in business education; improved efficiency for cities, banks, and accountants; the rapid spread of knowledge it provided; and a social institution which I call print geography, were all products of the printing press that increased profit margins during and after the Renaissance. Geography and exploration, in turn, opened the door for many capitalist developments, such as the increased trade of exotic goods, resource exploitation, slave labor, and colonization (with the intent to claim property). The printing press also created new opportunities in advertising and increased efficiency for capitalists. My intent is to challenge what Max Weber thought of as the primary motivating force behind modern capitalism; that it wasn't primarily the Protestant Ethic that generated a drive for material wealth, but the printing press that made it easier to accumulate.
First, we must define modern capitalism, for people have had capitalist ambitions since the dawn of civilization, and it is not clear where a line can be drawn between its mercantile origins and its modern form. Weber defined modern capitalism as formal, calculative rationality6, supported by a framework of markets, systems of credit, investment opportunities, and financial institutions. Such a transformation during the Renaissance would have led to the development of nation-states that were intimately tied with economic development, expedited by the exploration of new continents at the time. "The great expeditions and acquisitions of land were, in general, undertaken by... Conquistadors, entrepreneurs, captains, adventurers, and merchants who combined the military with the commercial"7. Commercial traffic in transfers and bills of exchange were needed to regulate expanding national territories that were facilitated by a growing number of banks. Modern capitalism embodied all these elements, consolidating them into national mandates of economic supremacy.
These new exchanges would have required prolific amounts of paperwork as bureaucracies evolved to facilitate international trade. This would not have been possible without the growing number of printing presses, particularly in European ports that had ready access to transportation across the Atlantic Ocean. One of the few economists to have written about the connection between printing and business, Jeremiah Dittmar found that between 1500 and 1600, cities with printing presses grew at least 60 percent faster than cities without them8, reflecting a broader trend based on improvements in business practice and education that the printing press established. Print media improved skills, knowledge, and innovative practices that were valuable in commerce, especially when it came to numeracy, education, and the adoption of double-entry bookkeeping9. "Commercial arithmetics were the first printed mathematics textbooks and were designed for students preparing for careers in business"10. The rise of printed books reduced the cost of obtaining information for businesses, providing “…tables that simplified that calculation of interest on loans, tariffs, and transport costs"11. Portugal was the first European state to significantly expand its territory via exploration. Gaspar Nicolas, who wrote the first Portuguese book of arithmetic for commerce, stated in 1517 that he was printing his book because it was entirely necessary for the state to do transactions with the merchants of faraway places like India, Persia, and Ethiopia12. Commercial institutions also required paperwork in the form of accounting and legal documentation13, strengthening the connection between print and commerce.
Another way in which the printing press expanded business was by allowing for the evolution of print advertising, where ads could be produced en masse for distribution to many people. Though this did not appear to have fully developed until the 18th century, the earliest records of print advertising date all the way back to the 1470s, when William Caxton wrote the first advertisement in the English language14. The idea of gaining exposure to a product through print advertising would have gathered strength from that moment on. Perhaps more relevant to Renaissance printing is the greater exposure that merchants had following its invention, particularly for artisans. “Printed publicity, skillfully exploited by new academies, expanded markets- not only for art works, but also for books about artists and their works"15. A primary example of this was The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine Academy’s Homage on his Death in 156416, demonstrating one way that printed books drew audiences to an artist’s works.
The quick spread of information offered by the printing press was yet another way capitalists took advantage of the new technology. In market economies, those who receive news the fastest are usually the first to profit more from the buying or selling of shares. According to Oldest.org17, the oldest newspapers in history date from the early 17th century, which were mostly German and Dutch. It may be no coincidence that the Dutch had the first stock market, considering how much faster information could become available to them by printing. Put simply, printing allowed news to travel faster, making trade in stocks more appealing, thus creating a novel opportunity for capitalists to increase wealth. The speed of information would also have benefited small businesses, who would have been better able make adjustments based on news coming from distant places.
The most significant contribution of printing to capitalism came in the form of maps. To my knowledge there is not an established academic term for this, so I have used print geography to explain the interaction. The idea framing this is that national boundaries were facilitated by market economies that wanted to expand by using colonialism, thus beginning the age of globalization. Globalization is notorious for benefiting capitalists in many ways; virtually all the concepts used to describe modern capitalism are shaped by it. Maps and printing were especially valuable when it came to communicating the findings of explorers in the New World, where resources were so abundant that the mass distribution of information about them could most efficiently be relayed by the printing press.
Amerigo Vespucci, the first explorer who knew he had found a new continent, spread the news of his discovery through the printing press18. Gradually through the 15th & 16th centuries, Ptolemy’s Geography, which had stood as the primary source of navigation for centuries, became supplanted by a succession of newer, more accurate atlases that reflected a true model of the globe19 by incorporating Vespucci’s continents. In cartographer Diego Ribeiro's Padron Real20, the first detail of the New World was printed on a map that was secretly distributed to Spanish ships. The Spanish used his maps to gain a significant advantage over other European states in expanding their territory during the 16th century. As the century wore on, other states, especially the Dutch, would come to see the value of maps in expanding territory overseas. Printed news maps had the effect of fueling nationalist solidarity and sparking participation in global trade and domestic investment projects21.
This nationalist solidarity, in addition to the strengthening of vernacular languages that printing commanded, created a related institute called print capitalism, coined by Benedict Anderson in 1983. "Print capitalism was a form of business enterprise that not only shaped and circulated culture, but a part of capitalist production…He (Anderson) introduced the idea… To show how a specific form of capitalist enterprise supported the development of national languages and communication within them"22. Print capitalism and print geography are mirror institutions fueled by nationalist solidarity, which had the effect of creating enormous incentives for states to nationalize their markets.
No state was more fertile for these developments than the Dutch, where map publication and distribution was part of its preeminent rise as the one of the first capitalist nations23, leading them to build the first stock market in order to galvanize far-reaching enterprises. The advantage of having maps was that they combined a wealth of information from navigational and military sources, including natural resources, boundaries, ethnographies, and human settlements24. Land became a commodity that was delineated, bought, sold, or exchanged for its productive value. Sutton25 stresses how the modern state and capitalist economies were woven together by bureaucratic institutions that needed documents to regulate trade, record information about it, and report it. Maps were part of the printed paperwork needed to operationalize the new system. Combined with print capitalism, maps provided a rich source of information by which small businesses could expand into large partnerships and corporations.
Some side effects of the geographical aspect of printing also helped businesses and capitalists, particularly when it came to trade in exotic goods, acquiring resources, and slave labor. There was enormous competition to claim land in the New World because states knew how important it was to reap the benefits of it by getting there first. Colonization became a key contributor to the economic expansion of 16th century empires, lending further value to maps and their distribution by the printing press. This is what makes print geography so compelling- that without it, the coordination needed to introduce something as economically transformative as the Atlantic slave trade would not have been possible.
The printing press created a new system of capital whereby businesses and traders benefited from evolving bureaucratic institutions. The production of maps, financial records, advertisements, and reports were all accelerated by this technology, adding individual pieces to the puzzle that became modern capitalism. The predating of the Reformation and the Protestant Ethic by the printing press meant that the source of these developments was technological and not spiritual. Even if the Reformation had occurred without the printing press, it would have happened at a much slower pace, making the acceleration of each of these developments slower in return, effectively blunting any accumulated wealth for capitalists.
My argument is important because I believe we are seeing a similar shift in production after the rise of the Internet. Profits are soaring for capitalists even more, who benefit from high-speed trading, faster communication, and more globalized networks. There may have even been an intermediate second phase in the 19th century, with the advent of electricity and the Industrial Revolution along with it. Globalization seems to have now entered a third phase, where the fruits of the printing press and electricity are being joined by the computer.
It is important to look at the social impacts that revolutionary technology like this has on the world. Weber was right in one regard; that as society becomes more rational, we become more alienated inside our “iron cages”, paradoxically constraining the spirit as it praises hard work, prosperity, and individualism. Nothing appears more rational to me than the advancement of technologies that propagated the capitalist system. I believe this is the greatest impact the Renaissance had on today’s world, and that is why I chose to research it.
Bibliography
Primary sources:
Caxton, William. Sarum Ordinal. London, England, 1476-1477.
Florentine Academy. The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine Academy's Homage on His Death in 1564. Florence, Italy, 1564.
Gaspar, Nicolas. Tratado da Pratica d’Arismetica. Lisbon, Portugal, 1517.
Ribeiro, Diego. Padrón Real. Spain, 1527.
Secondary Sources:
Appelrouth, Scott, and Laura Desfor Edles. Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory, 3rd edition. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2016.
Brotton, Jerry. The Renaissance: a very short introduction. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Calhoun, Craig. “The Importance of Imagined Communities-and Benedict Anderson.” Debats Journal on Culture, Power and Society 1 (2016): 11-16.
Dittmar, Jeremiah. “Information technology and economic change: The impact of the printing press”. Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, no. 3 (2010): 1133-1172.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe, volumes I and II. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Kocka, Jürgen. Capitalism: a short history. Translated by Jeremiah Riemer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
“Oldest Newspapers in the World.” Oldest.org. Accessed November 13, 2021. https://www.oldest.org/artliterature/newspapers/
Rubin, Jared. “Printing and Protestants: Reforming the Economics of the Reformation”. European Economics: Political Economy and Public Economics (2011). Accessed November 13, 2021. https://ssrn.com/abstract=1742523
Sutton, Elizabeth. Capitalism and cartography in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
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