Robert C. H. Sweeny

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Robert C. H. Sweeny | What Difference Does a Mode Make? A Comparison of Two Seventeenth-Century Colonies: Canada and Newfoundland | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

What Difference Does a Mode Make? A Comparison of Two Seventeenth-Century Colonies: Canada and Newfoundland

IN 1608 and 1610, Europeans established two new societies in the Americas: Canada and Newfoundland. Canada became the French colony of settlement in the Saint Lawrence Valley, in what is present-day Quebec, and Newfoundland developed into an English fishing station (Figure I). Outside of present-day Canada, neither of these colonies is well known.¹ Yet they share a peculiar historical significance: Canada was the world's last feudal society, whereas Newfoundland was the world's first capitalist society. How did this initial difference in modes of production influence the nature of class struggle?

Figure I

Canada and Newfoundland in the seventeenth century. Drawn by Rebecca L. Wrenn.

Mode of production here means the internal, but never complete or comprehensive, coherency of a social order that people living in dynamic relations of production and reproduction construct through their interaction with nature.² There were many feudal modes of production, just as there are a remarkable variety of capitalist ones; the fundamental difference between these two broad analytic categories lies in how dominant social groups appropriate surpluses created by working people in their transformation of nature. In a feudal society, the dominant social relation of production is the indirect appropriation, through extra-economic means, of household surpluses created by peasant and craft families. In a capitalist society, the dominant social relation of production is the direct appropriation, within the sphere of production itself, of surplus value created by wage labor.

It is in terms of these structural tensions, between peasant and lord or worker and capitalist, that historians have generally understood class struggle. Modes of production, however, are not historically significant just because of these systemic contradictions. Feudalism and capitalism affect family formation, social differentiation, and, therefore, gender relations in differing ways. The historically specific forms of appropriation within each of these colonies were shaped by changes in patriarchal structures of authority. Further, this complex interaction between social and gender relations developed on the basis of differing politically and culturally sanctioned approaches to nature. In short modes of production are important, but they are not suprahuman agents of causality. They are products of the choices people make.

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