Historical process of market expansion through the transformation of social relations and the production of goods into commodities.
Commodification and the market
From its very foundations capitalism is a vast commodifying process. It begins with the conversion of land and agricultural labor into commodities, the end of the common lands and the development of agricultural productivity. From there on, the whole development and expansion of rising capitalism will take the form of a generalized commodification of existing social relations.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment".
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
The development of the market will have an "inward" dimension, as a generalized commodification of social relations, and another as the overseas expansion of the market. From the British invasions of the Río de la Plata to Commodore Perry forcing Japan to open up to trade, each enlargement of the world market will set in motion the commodification of relations in each place, sometimes starting practically from scratch.
During British expansion, in vast regions where not even a marginal market existed, as in much of Africa, the whole weight of the state was thrown into forcing the imposition of wage labor -necessary to create surplus value, which is the aim of capitalism- by means of taxes on communities that had to be paid in the colonizer's currency. The only way to obtain currency was to work on the new plantations created by the first colonization companies.
The extra-economic violence of the tax thus imposed the cycle of capitalist production and accumulation in the form of a forced commodification of labor, which until then had been a direct application of human skill and strength to nature, and now became labor power, a commodity exchanged for its equivalent in money before a buyer endowed with equal formal rights in the process of buying and selling.