The First Capital: How Animal Domestication Laid the Groundwork for Capitalism

Before the factory and the steam engine, there was the pasture, the fence, and the first “owned” living being.

We’re often told that capitalism began in 18th-century England, in the mills of Manchester and the mines of Cornwall, with the invention of the steam engine and the rise of industrial wage labor. That story isn’t wrong - it’s just incomplete.

The real roots of capitalism run much deeper. They are older, bloodier, and quieter. They lie not in coal but in control. Not in iron, but in enclosure. And not in men - but in animals.

Herding as the First Economy
Long before factories, humans began practicing the logic that would later define capitalism: ownership, control, productivity, and profit extracted from living bodies. Herding was humanity’s first large-scale economic system, and domesticated animals were its first capital. They could reproduce (yielding profit), be traded (functioning as currency), and be counted (becoming the earliest forms of wealth and inheritance).

In fact, the word capitalism itself comes from the Latin caput, meaning “head” - as in head of cattle. Capital was, quite literally, a count of lives under human control.

“The ownership and control of animals taught humans how to own and control others - and how to justify it.”
- Jim Mason, An Unnatural Order

Domination, Control, and the Birth of Property
The shift from foraging to herding was not just a change in diet. It was a civilizational pivot. It introduced the concepts of private property, inherited wealth, patriarchal lineage, and territorial defense. Land was no longer shared; it was fenced. Beings were no longer respected; they were ranked. Life was no longer sacred; it was productive - or not.

“The domestication of animals was the template for every major hierarchy that followed - class, race, gender, empire.”
- David Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence

The Exploitation of Reproduction and Labor
Before humans extracted labor from other humans, they extracted it from animals. Oxen pulled plows. Cows produced milk. Hens laid eggs. Reproductive cycles were harnessed for productivity. Mothers were separated from young to maximize output.

In every sense, animal agriculture prefigured capitalist labor systems. The cow became a milk machine. The pig a meat factory. Life was reduced to yield per body. Sound familiar?

The Moral Training Ground
Perhaps more than any machinery, domestication installed a mindset. One of domination without empathy. Of beings turned into property. Of labor measured in pounds, gallons, and productivity.

Charles Patterson, in Eternal Treblinka, makes the haunting case that the mechanized slaughter of animals not only reflected but directly inspired later systems of human extermination. Not as metaphor—but as method.

From Killing Floor to Assembly Line
Henry Ford didn’t invent the assembly line in a vacuum. He credited the disassembly lines of the Chicago slaughterhouses as his model. Animal bodies strung up and butchered in motion inspired his vision for industrial car production. The mechanization of death became the blueprint for the mechanization of labor.

“I got the idea of the assembly line from a butcher shop in Chicago…”
—Henry Ford

The American Breeders and the Nazi Blueprint
It goes even deeper.

In 1903, the American Breeders Association (ABA) launched a Committee on Eugenics, dedicated to improving the “human stock.” Drawing on livestock breeding models, they pushed for sterilization, racial segregation, and the prevention of reproduction among the “unfit.” These ideas directly influenced Nazi Germany.

Hitler and his advisors praised American eugenic laws, borrowing from them when crafting the Nuremberg Laws. As historian Edwin Black documents in War Against the Weak, U.S. policies became the intellectual and bureaucratic scaffolding for the Holocaust.

What began with the selective breeding of animals became the ideological soil for genocide.

Henry Ford, Hitler’s Hero
And Ford? He wasn’t just a capitalist innovator - he was a vocal antisemite. His newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published The International Jew, which Hitler read and cited admiringly in Mein Kampf. In 1938, the Nazi regime awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, its highest civilian honor for a foreigner.

Capitalism’s most iconic figure was also one of fascism’s favorite Americans.

What This Means for Us
None of this is about drawing crude equivalences between different forms of suffering. It’s about recognizing the deep ideological continuities between how we treat animals and how we treat one another. The logic of exploitation, extraction, and enclosure didn’t begin with fossil fuels - it began with fencing in life and calling it wealth.

To transform our future, we must reckon with our past. And to do that, we must tell the whole story of capitalism - from the pasture to the factory, from the barn to the bank.

It’s time we asked not only when capitalism began, but who it began with.

Further Reading:

• Jim Mason, An Unnatural Order

• David Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence

• Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka

• Edwin Black, War Against the Weak

• Robert Lacey, Ford: The Man and the Machine

• John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”

• Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation

• Yuval Harari, Sapiens (on domestication and empire)