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  From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part IIII To make their case, the “rustic economism” camp, as Brennerites are sometimes called, must ignore not only the role of trade and towns and commodity production in and for urban markets, but also the flight of peasants to the cities.  More striking still, they fail to account for three profound European-wide forces that accelerated the transition to capitalism from the 16th to the 18thC – namely the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.  About those three factors, more later. Moreover, what both of these rival theories (Dobb-Brenner and Pirenne-Wallerstein) ignore is the development of forces of production under feudalism that eventually made a capitalist mode of production possible.  Chris Harman, a champion of the role of “productive forces” in the birth of capitalism, and a critic of both of the other camps, points out in “From Feudalism to Capitalism,” a long 1989 article in International Socialism, Marx’s a...

From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part III The first to weigh in on the subject after Marx was a non-Marxist, the Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne.  In his 1927 study, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, he sees the preconditions for capitalism taking shape between the 11th and the 14thC.  International trade, which had been suspended in the years of Islamic control over the Mediterranean, revived as the Muslim population retreated from southern Europe and the Levant with each advance of the Crusades.  That in turn spurred the rise of a merchant class and the growth of most of the major European cities – cities located at the strategic transportation crossroads of major rivers and outlets to the sea.  Nuremberg, Berlin, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Bruges, Ghent and Hamburg were all medieval creations, and even London, Paris, and Milan saw significant growth in the 11th, 12th and 13thC.   By 1450, Pirenne points out, the economy of Europ...