In the 18th century, the British East India Company used its monopoly trading rights to extract wealth from Indian producers, forcing them to sell textiles at low prices while using military power and legal privileges to suppress local competition. According to Sekine’s Marxian interpretation, what theoretical concept best explains this behavior of merchant capital?单项选择题

The limits of merchant capital are explained by primitive accumulation — the Company’s actions were part of a violent break from feudal relations, laying the foundation for capitalist industrialization.

As merchant capital cannot produce surplus-value from within and is bound by specific forms of use-value, it must ensure it widens its profitability with extra-economic means, as in the colonial behavior described above.

Merchant capital cannot produce surplus value from within. It does not entail the dual freedom of labor and thus cannot extract surplus-value from workers (intra-economic means). It must hence make use of legal contracts to ensure a profit from pre-determined interest rates.

Merchant capital is the most developed of the three forms of capital under the doctrine of circulation. Although it does not need to extract a profit through extra-economic means, it does so to ensure its power over colonial territories.