Religion, War, and Capitalism

Hell on Earth’s ten main and seven appendix episodes, each running around an hour in length, begin by retelling the backstory of the Protestant Reformation. The fragmentation of Christianity, which Martin Luther provoked a century prior to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, provided a combustible element of religious discord which would fuel the conflict to come. Christman and Wade clearly see a kindred spirit in Luther, whose constant and ferocious pamphleteering exhibited the “heart of a poster,” someone “born for the [internet] forums” centuries too early.

Following in Luther’s footsteps, others took advantage of the printing press to prosecute their own political-religious causes, yielding some of “the best insults of all time.” Dueling polemics flew off the printer, with titles that left no doubt as to their purpose, for instance: “True, Steadfast, Well-Grounded, Christian and Sincere Reply to the Shameless, Calphurnic Book of Infamy and Lies by the Godless Accursed, Execrable Defamer, Evil-Working Barabbas, Also Whore-Addicted Holophernes of Braunschweig, Who Calls Himself Duke Heinrich the Younger.”

The subsequent two episodes of Hell on Earth see the hosts covering the political and economic history of the centuries prior to the outbreak of the war. The familiar touchstones of late medieval European history are briefly summarized, like the Black Death, the structure of feudalism, the configuration of the Holy Roman Empire, and the fortunes of the Habsburg dynasty. The vast expanse of topics that the hosts touch on in such a short period of time necessarily leaves many subjects only cursorily addressed. Listeners not steeped in the history of late medieval Europe might have to reach for a medieval history textbook to understand certain things, like the importance of cadet branches in dynastic succession or the Avignon Papacy, which are referenced but never explained.

The next five episodes are the core of the miniseries, digging into the history of the Thirty Years’ War proper. Here we encounter the colorful cast of characters who influence the course of events: among others, the ineffectual Protestant “Winter King” Frederick V of the Palatinate, the occultist, orb-pondering Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and the indecisive but hard-partying John George I of Saxony. What begins as a struggle for power between Protestants and Catholics within the Holy Roman Empire gradually balloons into a less well-defined and more territorially expansive conflict as the years pass.

Undisciplined mercenaries, the entry into the war by foreign powers such as France and Sweden, and an unstable system of alliances explode the sectarian religious nature of the conflict and transform it into a more chaotic and deadly maelstrom. There are several points throughout the Thirty Years’ War when peace could have broken out, but various parties to the conflict instead decide to pursue maximalist aims, prolonging the suffering of Europe. Armies move “like locusts stripping the land,” raping and pillaging the towns and villages of central Europe until the eventual cessation of hostilities in 1648.

Unexpectedly for a miniseries supposedly dedicated to the Thirty Years’ War, the last two main episodes cover English history from the Tudor period to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Undoubtedly, there are many parallels in England’s history of this period and the Thirty Years’ War: civil and international war, religious conflict, controversies over succession, and many other elements besides. However, the rationale for inclusion is never precisely spelled out, leaving the listener to wonder why the series has shifted in coverage both geographically and temporally. Seven appendix episodes follow the ten main episodes, departing from the historical narrative to cover topics such as everyday life under the Thirty Years’ War and forms of early modern European mysticism.

Historical Inspirations

Hell on Earth is an engaging romp through the history of the Thirty Years’ War, but how does its claim about capitalism fare? For a miniseries that advertises itself as explaining the “birth of capitalism,” Hell on Earth’s discussion of capitalism is notably sparse. It is not even clear what the hosts mean by “capitalism,” as the term is never explicitly defined. The listener must infer the meaning of this oft-contested term from the passing mentions it receives in association with a variety of historical phenomena: for instance, the corporate structure of Dutch mercantile enterprises, the double-entry bookkeeping of Italian city-state finance, the military leader Albrecht von Wallenstein’s management of his estates, and the organization of the English New Model Army.

The architecture of the miniseries, as well as some content in the episodes themselves, suggests that the hosts might adhere to a kind of Weberian notion of capitalism emerging as a result of the Protestant Reformation. Other language used hints that the hosts conceive of the origins of capitalism similar to Maurice Dobb, as a new social order arising from the wreckage of a feudal system which collapsed under the weight of its own internal crises.

Another possibility is suggested by the inclusion of the two episodes on England, which end the miniseries’ historical narrative. Since the Thirty Years’ War is not conventionally seen as midwifing the birth of capitalism, perhaps the hosts were attempting to rescue their promise of explaining capitalism’s origins by shoehorning in the history of a country where it is widely supposed to have first appeared.

There are some nods in these final episodes to historical phenomena which accompanied capitalism’s creation in England, such as enclosures or the creation of a distinctive banking system. Perhaps these inclusions were inspired by Ellen Wood’s account of capitalism’s emergence, which is listed in the bibliography on which the miniseries’ creators were drawing. However, even in these two episodes, capitalism’s origin is only cursorily mentioned rather than rigorously elaborated.

The hosts’ attitude toward all these competing theoretical notions of capitalism may be gleaned from an answer to a couple listeners’ questions in the final appendix episode. Asked by the listeners to explain whether they adhere more to the ideas of Robert Brenner or Immanuel Wallerstein — who generated the most influential Marxist accounts, usually considered to be mutually incompatible, of capitalism’s emergence — the creators answer that their respective theories essentially represent two aspects of the same essential process.

That response may not satisfy partisans of either side of this historiographical controversy, but it does make clear that the show’s creators prioritize narrative color over theoretical clarity. The diverse ways in which the hosts use “capitalism” throughout the miniseries seem to suggest that they are using the term more as a synonym for “modernity” rather than to stake out any particular theoretical conception of capitalism itself.

A Fraught Transition

While Hell on Earth may be primarily intended as an entertainment product, the analytical issue it raises about capitalism does deserve to be taken seriously. Could there possibly be any substantive connections to be found between the Thirty Years’ War and the birth of capitalism? This seems unlikely, as both of the most influential Marxist theories of capitalism’s emergence mentioned earlier, those of Brenner and Wallerstein, locate the origins of capitalism in an age prior to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. The former theory sees capitalist social-property relations as a product of class conflict between English lords and peasants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whereas the latter identifies the increase in global trade during the sixteenth-century age of discovery as producing capitalism.

The widespread devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, on the other hand, seems to have had an almost purely negative economic effect. Economically speaking, it would be difficult to disagree with C. V. Wedgwood’s famous epitaph for the Thirty Years’ War as the “outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.” The more lively historiographical debate on the economic aspects of the Thirty Years’ War concerns whether the European economy was declining in the seventeenth century as a cause or consequence of the war, with opinion falling into either an “earlier decline” or “disastrous war” camp.

One long-running controversy that could have had bearing on the question of the relation between the Thirty Years’ War and capitalism was the debate over the notion of the “general crisis” of the European economy in the seventeenth century. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm launched the debate with a pair of articles in 1954 attempting to explore the process of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the subsequent British Industrial Revolution. Hobsbawm entertained in the initial article that the crisis may have been merely the result of the Thirty Years’ War, before ruling out that possibility in a follow-up article.

Whether because of Hobsbawm’s judgment or otherwise, study of the seventeenth-century crisis and the Thirty Years’ War have produced two distinct bodies of literature, the latter centering concerns of German history and the former ignoring them, with only rare attempts to put the two discourses in dialogue with each other. Because more persuasive accounts of the transition to capitalism have emerged in the time since the “general crisis” debate’s beginning, writing on the crisis has drifted far from Hobsbawm’s original concerns about capitalist transition. The latest major work on the crisis, for instance, emphasizes the role of climate change in the economic misfortunes of the seventeenth century. Thus, this “debate without end” about the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century continues, but unfortunately — with a few exceptions — has provided little insight about the economic implications of the Thirty Years’ War.

Today’s Hells

It seems that, contrary to the premise of Hell on Earth, the Thirty Years’ War and the origins of capitalism have little to do with each other. The war may have produced or at least influenced the development of many things — the absolutist state and the maintenance of European standing armies being perhaps the most plausible developments on this score. However, the war’s economic impact was overwhelmingly, in a word, destruction. It certainly did not play any creative role in midwifing a new capitalist mode of production, whatever the war’s other impacts. Therefore, it can be said that Hell on Earth succeeds as an introduction to the history of the Thirty Years’ War, but fails to make any defensible analytical statement about the war’s relation to capitalism.

Why, then, did the show’s creators feel moved to revisit this miserable event in European history? At the outset the hosts stressed the similarities of the age of the Thirty Years’ War to the present. At first glance, this seems dubious: our age is not one defined by political action born of religious zealotry, mercenary armies rampaging through the countryside, nor baroque feuds over dynastic succession. However, those on the political left who were dispirited by the defeat of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, which Chapo Trap House fervently championed, might see some similarities between now and then. The horror at political events being determined by the arcane, internecine power struggles of elites indifferent if not outright hostile to the plight of the masses is a sentiment that may feel distressingly familiar to many.