From Feudalism to Capitalism | Part III

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 Europe, which had collapsed with the fall of Rome, had caught up to and passed that of China and Islam.

Immanuel Wallerstein, American sociologist and historian, picks up where Pirenne leaves off.  In his 1974 The Modern World-System, vol. I., he argues that the city-based, medieval merchant class was able to take the next leap from profit by unequal exchange to actual production for profit as a result of the exploitation of the New World in the 16thC century.  Colonization, slave labor, and the plundering of natural resources in the Americas were the source of that primitive accumulation necessary to fund and sustain a capitalist mode of production.  Wallerstein and his followers go farther, of course, to talk about a world-system of core, semi-peripheral and peripheral countries, and the rise and fall of hegemons within that system, from the Italian city-states in the 15thC, to the Dutch in the 16th and 17thC, to the British in the 18th and 19thC, and finally to the Americans today.  But the explanations of the Pirenne-Wallerstein camp are at least partially in line with Marx in so far as they see the origins of capitalism in the growth of trade and the fact of primitive accumulation.  

What Pirenne fails to see is the universal phenomenon of medieval merchants buying their way into the nobility within a few generations and the equally conservative move of medieval handicraft and trade workers forming guilds to prevent the rise of “free” labor.  Both represent a retreat into the feudal mindset.  Wallerstein, for his part, can’t tell us how or why the merchant class, long accustomed to buying in cheap markets and selling in dear ones, suddenly embraced an intermediary stage of production and worker exploitation.  The leap to capitalism, without acknowledging the separation of the peasant from the land, or showing how a free labor force was created, or how the merchant class morphed into a capitalist exploiter class, becomes a leap of faith, an “accident” in Wallerstein’s own words. 

Between Pirenne in the 1920s and Wallerstein and his disciples in the 1970s and after, there appeared a study of the transition that contradicted the merchant-trade-town-and-colony point of view.  Maurice Dobb, British economist and communist activist, published Studies in the Development of Capitalism in 1946 and followed it up with several articles opposing the followers of Pirenne in the 50s.  He locates capitalism’s prime cause in a rash of internal conflicts and events in the second half of the 14thC: the flight of serfs to the city, multiple waves of peasant revolts, and the devastation of the rural workforce from plague.  

Though the ruling class managed to crush every one of the revolts, the threat remained.  Something had to give.  Serfdom was rapidly replaced by a tenant workforce that paid rent in kind to the lord of the manor.  In some cases, Dobb points out, nobles leased their land to better-off yeoman farmers who in turn began hiring their own wage labor by the early 1400s.  But it would be nearly two centuries before the capitalist mode of production would emerge, and Dobb sees no evolution of productive forces in the interval – just a jump from primitive to advanced modes of production in the late 1500s.  As in Wallerstein’s case, we’re asked to take a leap of faith from one historical circumstance to a distinctly different one.

But Dobb gains a powerful advocate in the 70s in the person of Robert Brenner, an American Marxist historian.  His influential 1976 article, Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, focuses solely on lords leasing estates to farmers who employ wage labor, and thus set up a class conflict between agricultural exploiters (lords and farm managers) and agricultural producers.  For him and his circle of followers (including, most recently and most stridently, Ellen Wood in The Origin of Capitalism), the transition happens first and foremost in the countryside and in England, in a politically correct Marxist conflict between classes (famously labeled “extra-economic coercion”), rather than as a result of growing trade in towns and cities across Europe.  They label the Wallerstein camp “neo-Smithian,” since the trade-and-town advocates appear to them to argue capitalism as a natural outgrowth of feudalism, not the consequence of a violent dialectical process.  By the 1980s, the controversy had grown so hot, and the advocates on both sides so many, that 400 pages of opposing historical opinions were compiled and published in 1985, under the title “The Brenner Debate.”