Capitalist Political Economy

Capitalist Political Economy in Poor Things is not treated as an abstract system separate from ordinary life: it is traced through who owns property, who must work, who performs care, and who is permitted to define freedom. Harry Astley explains how industrial wealth and political institutions can depend on poverty and coercion even while describing themselves as beneficial or liberating. Bella Baxter’s resistance to his cynicism, and her later work in medicine and public health, bring the argument down to the conditions of bodies, families, and patients.

Property, Labor, and the Production of Poverty

Astley’s account begins with the distribution of work and its rewards. In his description of prosperous households, children are taught that lying, stealing, and idleness are vices, yet their education prepares them for a society in which powerful people use laws to deprive the poor of homes and livelihoods. Meanwhile, unearned incomes grow through financial speculation, and those who own the most property may work the least. The contrast makes moral instruction look less like a neutral lesson in virtue than a way of fitting people to an unequal system: conduct condemned in the poor can be rewarded or institutionalized when practiced by the wealthy.

Astley also connects industrial growth to the Napoleonic Wars. He argues that heavier taxes, imposed chiefly on the poor, financed supplies of uniforms, boots, guns, and ships. Factory expansion and new machinery then allowed women and children to provide cheap labor while many able-bodied men served abroad. The resulting profits supported further investment in transport, warships, and empire. In this account, military demand does not merely interrupt economic life; it helps build industrial capacity and directs the benefits of production upward.

The end of war, in Astley’s telling, exposed the system’s dependence on a vulnerable workforce. Unemployment and hunger became so severe that the government feared revolution. Robert Owen proposed that businesses earning more than five per cent should use their excess profits to improve workers’ food, housing, and schooling rather than undercut competitors. Astley sets this proposal against Malthusian arguments that better provision for the poor would cause population growth. He describes the opposite policy as a grim form of social management: poverty, hunger, and disease weaken those who might revolt, while infant mortality reduces their numbers. The claim that the system works is presented as a bitter indictment, not an endorsement.

Astley’s account of the institutions surrounding industry extends beyond the workplace. Barracks, police forces, and large jails stand alongside poorhouses where children are separated from parents and spouses from one another. Their deliberately harsh conditions, he says, can drive people to spend their last money on gin or die outdoors rather than enter. The institutions that maintain order thus appear as part of the same political economy as factories and property: they manage the consequences of deprivation while protecting the existing distribution of wealth.

Empire, Markets, and the Meaning of Freedom

Astley challenges the idea that national expansion is a general public benefit. He describes large nations as products of successful plunder and argues that histories written by conquerors recast the conquered as beneficiaries of their own dispossession. His example of Henry VIII’s seizure of monastic lands links private enrichment to the loss of institutions that had provided hospitals, schools, and shelter. The story of economic and national progress, in this reading, is shaped by who gets to write it and who inherits the gains.

His history of British slavery likewise contests patriotic accounts of freedom. He traces the British slave trade to the actions of John Hawkins in 1562 and notes that Parliament made the trade a criminal offence in 1811. He then distinguishes the end of slavery from the end of exploitation: industrial employers could hire workers for only the days or weeks they needed them, leaving them free to beg work from another master when dismissed. A labor market may therefore offer formal freedom while preserving the employer’s power to lower wages whenever many people compete desperately for work.

Astley applies the same scrutiny to commercial freedom abroad. He describes British policy as the freedom to buy as cheaply and sell as dearly as possible, backed by military power. In India, British merchants first displaced French competitors in the sale of Indian cloth; after British factories began producing cheaper machine-made textiles, Britain sought Indian cotton and wool while restricting the market for Indian cloth. Astley invokes a governor’s report that the plains of Dacca were strewn with the bones of weavers. The image connects imperial trade to the destruction of local livelihoods: the language of exchange conceals a market reshaped by force.

Gender, Care, and Bodily Autonomy

The novel also treats gender relations as part of economic organization. Astley compares wealthy wives to dependants whose motherhood and sexuality are managed for the convenience of husbands. In the households he describes, servants care for children after childbirth, while women are expected to stand above breastfeeding and sexual pleasure even as they remain legally and socially subordinate. He places this privileged confinement beside the exhausting labor of women in Lancashire weaving sheds. The circumstances differ, but neither the leisure of wealthy women nor the hardship of working women amounts to full control over their lives.

Education helps reproduce these divisions. Astley contrasts poor children, who may learn begging, lying, and stealing as means of survival, with children taught a moral code that condemns such acts. He argues that the latter are then schooled to admire historical conquerors, while laws and property arrangements continue to dispossess the poor. Bella rejects Astley’s division of people into the innocent, the half-baked optimists, and the cynics who recognize life as painful. Her insistence that there must be another kind of person marks a disagreement about whether seeing injustice requires accepting cynicism as the only honest response.

Bella’s own medical work offers a practical counterpoint. When she returns from abroad, Godwin Baxter establishes a small veterinary clinic that treats sick animals without charge. Bella serves as receptionist and assistant, learns to stitch wounds, and becomes a capable clinician. Baxter presents her skill as evidence against excluding women from intricate medical work, while the clinic makes care available outside ordinary commercial exchange. Later, Baxter proposes that Bella train through nursing and hospital work before medical college, and argues that professionals should begin with manual labor. Bella wants to help girls, mothers, and prostitutes and to teach effective contraception. The plan links professional training to the needs of people whose care and health are often neglected.

After qualifying as a doctor under the name Victoria McCandless, she opens the charitable Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic with Baxter’s money and a small staff of local women whom she trains. Her practice of sending trained employees onward, so they can help neighbors or learn from other doctors, treats knowledge as something to circulate rather than hoard. She also continues clinical work during pregnancy and returns soon after giving birth, explicitly connecting her own circumstances to those of poor patients who cannot afford prolonged rest. Her later argument against horizontalism challenges medical practice when it makes patients passive and treats childbirth as a disease; she advocates squatting birth positions and wider public knowledge of nursing and medicine. These proposals make health inseparable from housing, working conditions, education, and patients’ power to understand their own bodies.

Reform, Intimacy, and Political Conflict

Astley outlines several competing responses to the unequal order. Socialists seek election and legislation to tax surplus wealth and provide productive work, food, housing, education, and health care. He doubts that parliamentary institutions, which he depicts as an alliance of powerful interests, will allow elected socialists to carry out that program without defeating or absorbing them. Communists, as he describes them, instead organize across classes and await a financial crisis in which they can take power temporarily, provide for everyone’s needs, and then disband government. Violent anarchists reject political rulers and propose workers’ control of what they produce, while peaceful anarchists seek change through nonviolence, giving away money, and living by work or voluntary gifts. Astley recommends the latter to Bella, but his account does not establish that any one strategy has resolved the problem he describes.

Economic criticism also reaches into sexual relationships. Bella challenges the medical inspection of sex workers by arguing that clients, rather than the women, should be examined; when told that clients would refuse and that France had too few doctors, she proposes training the women to examine them. Her intervention questions a system that places the burden of disease control on the more vulnerable party. Later, Victoria McCandless’s A Loving Economy draws condemnation from clergy for its birth-control proposals and displeases some birth-control advocates by criticizing commercial contraceptives as unhealthy. She argues that commercial products can distract from affectionate touch, and refuses to separate sexual pleasure from ordinary forms of tenderness. In this account, intimacy is not merely private: commercial habits and social teaching shape how people experience it.

The response to Victoria’s work reveals the limits of reform within established institutions. Public attacks on A Loving Economy helped fuel a campaign against her clinic. At her trial, the Scottish jury returned a verdict of not proven: she was neither struck off the medical register nor declared guiltless. By 1920, the clinic’s managing committee had changed; its members yielded to hostile publicity, dismissed her, and transferred the institution to Oakbank Hospital. Having spent her savings on the book’s printing, distribution, and advertising, she retained 18 Park Circus and continued the clinic on a much smaller scale in its basement. The change from charitable institution to reduced basement practice gives material form to the conflict between a public-health ideal and the forces able to withdraw its institutional support.