Dobb on the transition fromfeudalism to capitalism
Robert Brenner*
After some three decades Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946)continues to be a starting point for discussion of European economic development. Itdoes so because it remains a powerful statement of the proposition that the problem ofeconomic development must be approached historically, that any theory of economicdevelopment must be constructed in historically specific terms. Dobb thus follows Marxin rejecting any attempt to grasp economic transformations in terms of what might becalled transhistorical economic laws based for example on the postulates of orthodoxeconomic theory. It is the burden of his position that economic development, the growthof labour productivity and of per capita output, must be comprehended in terms of thelimits and possibilities opened up by historically developed systems of social-productiverelations specific to a given epoch, that the key therefore to the rise of new patterns ofeconomic evolution is to be found in the emergence of new social relations of production.
The Marxist idea of the mode of production thus provides the point of departure forDobb's analysis. It is perhaps his central contribution that through developing the modeof production conception in relation to the long-term trends of the European feudaleconomy, he is able to begin to lay bare its inherent developmental tendencies or 'lawsof motion'. Dobb argues that the formative impact of feudal surplus extraction relationscharacterised by extra-economic compulsion by feudal lords, in relationship to thepotentialities and limits of its peasant forces of production, determined a distinctivepattern of economic evolution. In this way, he provides a basis in both method andhistorical analysis for surpassing the unilineal view of development, hitherto widespreadamong Marxists, in which the transition to capitalism is conceived as the gestation of anembryonic self-developing mode of production, alongside and external to a feudalagricultural mode—an approach characteristically bound up with techno-functionalistpremises. In this classic conception, a trading bourgeoisie develops within the intersticesof an essentially immobile feudal agrarian society on the foundations of technicallydynamic productive forces. The needs of new, self-propelling productive forces impelthe construction of new, more suitable (capitalist) class relations, and bring about thedestruction of outmoded (feudal) ones. In contrast, Dobb is able in the first place toprovide a powerful critique of the notion that economic development took place throughthe progressive and dissolving effects of trade and merchant capital upon feudal social-productive relations, originating from outside it, by showing the way in which classrelations themselves structured a distinctively feudal and non-capitalist development of
• Department of History, Univeraity of California, Los Angeles.
the peasant and also artisan productive forces, even in connection with the growth ofexchange. Secondly, Dobb is able to offer on this ground the essential elements of atheory of feudal economic development, and especially of feudal crisis of production—tobegin to understand feudalism in terms of its own internal contradictions and conflicts,not excluding but incorporating the growth of trade.
On the other hand, to provide a theory of feudal economic development and crisis, asDobb does, is not in itself to render a full account of the transition to capitalism. Thefeudal crisis—rooted in declining agricultural productivity and the population drop-offwhich was its ultimate result—posed a powerful threat to feudal class relations, thedominance of the feudal lords. But it could not in itself determine a subsequent evolution.It remains therefore to explain the responses to crisis—the different evolutions of feudalclass relations and class conflict through which feudal surplus extraction relations wereeither maintained in something like their original form, restructured in order to pre-serve the hegemony of the feudal ruling class, or gave way to new social-productiverelations. Paradoxically, Dobb does not analyse the development out of feudal crisis interms of the internal contradictions and class conflicts which he himself delineated:most especially between the development of petty peasant production and feudalsurplus extraction relations, between peasants and lords. It would appear to be the logicof Dobb's argument to account for the transition by means of explaining how pettyproduction was 'freed' from feudal fetters and how it evolved toward capitalism. In thisway, we could understand, in the first place, the dissolution of the feudal social systemof production, where production could and did remain governed by the consumptionneeds of the ruling lordly affinities, as well as the (conflicting) subsistence needs of thepeasant families (even in connection with the growth of exchange), because both lordsand peasants retained direct (non-market) access to the means of their survival (the lordsthrough their landed estates and access by force to the peasants' subsistence, thepeasants through their subsistence plots). Correlatively, we could comprehend theemergence of a capitalist system in which the direct producers are obliged to producefor the market, to systematically cheapen their products in order to compete, and toaccumulate capital on the basis of wage labour and growing investment in the means ofproduction, or go out of business—precisely because they have been divorced fromproperty in their means of subsistence (as well as direct, extra-economic controls overlabour power). Such an account would appear to require first an analysis of the mannerin which the fetters imposed on petty production by feudal surplus extraction via extraeconomic compulsion were broken. It would further require a discussion of the way inwhich the petty producers were separated from (possession of) their means of subsistence.By bringing out the conflictual processes, the class conflicts, behind these transformations,the decline of feudalism and the rise of 'generalised commodity production' based onfree wage labour which characterises capitalist production might begin to be system-atically interpreted.
Yet, in the end, Dobb tends to fall back toward the older conception of direct transitionvia the rise of the bourgeoisie, external to feudalism. He ends up by explaining not onlythe rise of capitalism but also the overthrow of feudalism by the emergence of a new classof industrial and agricultural capitalists alongside the still feudal order during the earlymodern period. Dobb argues this way in the first place, despite his own tendency toequate feudalism with serfdom and the overwhelming evidence that serfdom was deadwell before 1500 in England (the area he is studying) at a point at which capitalistsocial-productive relations were in the earliest stages of development. If serfdom equals
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feudalism, how did capitalism determine its downfall and furthermore what sort ofsociety took its place? Dobb leaves the entire question of the decline of serfdom and itsimplications for subsequent development curiously unanswered, or at best ambiguouslytreated.
On the other hand, Dobb offers little argument to demonstrate the maintenance offeudal class relations, presumably in altered form, in the long period between the fall ofserfdom and the anti-feudal revolution of 1640. Once the lords had lost their power tocontrol the peasants' mobility and to impose arbitrary exactions upon them, in whatway did they preserve feudal relations of surplus extraction ? Dobb sees the new bourgeoisclass as 'growing out of production itself: a class of free petty producers, peasants andartisans, gives rise, within the interstices of a still-feudal society, to a class of agriculturaland industrial capitalists which establishes its hegemony in the bourgeois revolution. Inthis context, Dobb gives the impression that the process of differentiation out of pettyproduction, especially among the peasantry, is more straightforward than it is. Corre-latively, he understates the pivotal role played by English landlords in short-circuitingand undercutting small peasant production, so as to provide the conditions for capitalistdevelopment by their commercial tenants. A powerful transformation of the countrysidein a capitalist direction appears to have taken place in late medieval and early modernEngland in connection with the landlord class. The question which Dobb must answer,therefore, is how rural social relations fettered agrarian economic development in thisera so as to provoke the movement toward bourgeois revolution; and indeed, where oneis to locate a rural feudal class, especially a ruling one, in 1640.
Feudalism and tradeIt is obvious that economic development historically has taken place largely throughthe growth of the division of labour in connection with the development of trade.Given the 'original' existence of roughly self contained divisions of labour at thelevel of the family, or the community, or more or less localised and isolated societies(even large ones), it is unlikely that the world division of labour by region and pro-ductive task, encompassing all products, especially the means of subsistence, could haveoccurred in any other way. (For it seems there was little possibility of accomplishing thesame result through some sort of politically operated coordinated development of thedivision of labour, which seems to be the only alternative.) Nevertheless, to say this isnot at all the same thing as saying that the development of commerce has been responsiblefor economic development. For if the growth of the division of labour by region and byproductive task was inconceivable apart from the development of trade, this processdepended, in turn, upon the growth of the productivity of labour. But rising productivityis premised upon a development of the social forces of production—and this develop-ment of the social productive forces could not be directly determined by trade, becauseit was itself structured by class relations not directly changeable in terms of commercialgrowth.
Dobb develops the foregoing argument with respect to feudal society by showing howthe economic effects of trade and of merchant capital were themselves shaped by feudalclass relations. His discussion, constructed to a large extent on the basis of Marx'sanalysis in Capital (especially vol. I l l , ch. XX), has provided the indispensable foun-dation for much of the most important subsequent work on the impact of trade on non-capitalist societies (see, e.g., Anderson, 1974; Laclau, 1971; Genovese, 1961). Those
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who have linked the emergence of capitalism more or less directly with the growth ofthe market have generally dealt with class relationships in two ways: either explicitly orimplicitly, they have seen them as subject to transformation in accordance with theneeds of the developing productive forces and/or they have reduced them to contractualrelationships of exchange. Thus, with regard to feudalism, the exponents of this approach,both Marxist and non-Marxist, have tended to argue that with the development of trade(determined autonomously, 'from the outside'), the growth of new needs would inducethe landlords to attempt to increase output and thus to rationalise their estates. Thiswould ultimately lead to the replacement of serf labour by more efficient forms ofproduction using free labour—free tenantry and ultimately wage labour. Correlatively,they have argued that this process took place through the commutation of labour servicefor money rents (see, e.g., Sweezy, 1950, pp. 44-45). Dobb's reply was straightforward.Why should the lords free the serfs as a method of increasing rent ? Why not simply usethe available controls over the peasantry in order to extract larger rents in whateverform (money, kind, or labour) ? Moreover, Dobb said, the mere fact of commutationcould in no way be taken to express the transformation away from serf toward freelabour precisely because it involved merely an exchange of equivalents, a change in theform of payment. The peasants simply paid their rent in a different manner, but theirsocial relationship to the lord, the strength of the lord's domination, was in no waynecessarily reduced (Dobb, 1946, pp. 38ff).
Thus, Dobb drew the fundamental conclusion: 'In past discussions of the decline offeudalism, the assumption that production for the market necessarily implies productionon the basis of wage labour seems too often to have slipped into the argument unawares'(Dobb, 1946, p. 42). In other words, it has been implicitly assumed that with the riseof trade, feudal productive units begin to act like and become essentially capitalistproductive units, so that improvement is to be expected and the emergence of free labourand wage labour is merely a formality, a matter of time. But this is to ignore the preciselynon-capitalist character of feudal social-property relations. The development of com-merce may well induce a tendency within the ruling class to try to increase surplus: yet,precisely because under feudalism free labour does not prevail since the direct producersare merged with their means of production (peasant possession) and subject to the directdomination of the lords, surplus maximisation will tend to take place through methodsof squeezing the direct producers, rather than through increasing their productivity.Thus, to the extent that forms of co-operative labour were achievable on the demesne,there was little possibility of making them the basis for real advances in the productivityof labour. For the serf labourers had little reason to work carefully with advancedimplements and techniques, since they had direct access to their means of subsistenceand worked for the lord only because they were forced to do so. At the same time, onthe peasants' own plots co-operative labour was difficult to develop. Peasants who wishedto accumulate in response to rising trading opportunities had difficulties in collectingland and labour in the face of feudal restrictions on land and labour mobility. At thesame time, there was a strong tendency on the part of the peasantry as a whole to try tohold onto their plots as the basis of their survival and thus to refuse to sell them to ruralaccumulators unless they had to. The peasants tended to direct their production toensuring all their immediate subsistence needs (marketing only surpluses), and thisnaturally set up a strong barrier to commercial specialisation and ultimately to thetransformation of production—a barrier which was reinforced by peasant communitieswhich tended to regulate production so as to maintain and protect the subsistence pro-
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ducers. Finally, even if technical advances were implemented on some units, giving thema productive advantage on the market, such advances did not need to be adopted byall producers throughout the system. This was because the lords and peasants were notcapitalists, but had direct access to their means of subsistence; so they did not have toproduce competitively on the market in order to survive. In sum, because the very structureof the system tended to make squeezing a profitable method of increasing surplus and tomake increases in labour productivity a difficult road to this end, and because in anycase a failure to maximise profits did not determine the failure and supercession of thesystem's functioning units, the rise of production for the market tended to intensifyfeudal social-productive relations, but did not directly dissolve them. As Marx concluded,trade 'facilitates the production of surplus designed for exchange, in order to increasethe enjoyments, or the wealth of the producers (here meant are owners of the products)':yet, at the same time, exchange was 'incapable by itself of promoting and explaining thetransition from one mode to another' (Marx, 1894, pp. 325-327).
The roots of feudal crisisDobb's refusal to view trade as an 'external' source of dynamism within a feudal societyconceived as essentially static leads him directly to an analysis of the feudal 'laws ofmotion' in terms of the extraction of a surplus from a servile class of peasant producerswith direct access to their means of subsistence through the exertion of force by a feudalnobility. Dobb understands feudal class relations as tending to fetter and undermine thepeasant social-productive forces on which they are constructed. Thus, a long-termtendency to productivity and ultimately population crisis arose, he argued, from the'inefficiency of feudalism as a mode of production, coupled with the growing needs ofthe ruling class for revenue' (Dobb, 1946, p. 42). Since the publication of Dobb's work,major advances in the historiography of the European agrarian economy make it possibleto offer additional support for his thesis (see Duby, 1968; Duby, 1974; Postan, 1966; and,for the best recent Marxist synthesis, Anderson, 1974A).
Thus, it is clear that medieval agriculture, especially basic food production, facedtechnical problems which were built into the organisation of production on the basis ofsmall peasant plots, in which capital investment was difficult. In particular, fundamentaldifficulties in animal production meant a lack of fertiliser as well as ploughing potential,which led to the debilitating requirements that much of the land be left idle every yearas fallow and that a good proportion of it be used as pasture or waste to support animals.The tendency in this situation to respond to productivity difficulties by extending arablecultivation into land formerly reserved for animals only exacerbated a trend towarddeclining yields (Postan, 1966). To break out of this vicious cycle, given the historicallydeveloped technology, would have required a total break with the old system: inparticular, the installation of 'alternate' or 'convertible' husbandry, which meant theabolition of the pasture/arable separation—the laying down of the merged fields forseveral years at a time with artificial soil-enhancing crops which simultaneously couldprovide fodder for supporting animals, then the ploughing up of these fields for severalyears of arable production. These were the basic elements of what would later constitutethe agricultural revolution. It needs to to be emphasised that these revolutionary tech-niques were available through much of the medieval period, and were actually appliedin a few places. But since they required the consolidation of holdings, the introduction of
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high quality labour, as well as major capital investments and the use of co-operativelyorganised labour, they were exceedingly difficult to implement, given in the first placeproduction by small peasants and secondly the structure of feudal relations of surplusextraction. As already noted, attempts to implement such advances by the peasantswould run up against feudal restrictions upon the movement of peasant labour andupon the transfer of peasant land, as wel] as the reluctance of the peasant possessorsthemselves to part with their land and their concern to use it above all to ensure directlytheir subsistence (rather than to specialise). These problems were sharply exacerbated,moreover, by the direct removal of a large part of the potentially accumulable surplusfrom the peasant producers by the feudal lords in the form of feudal rent. On the otherhand, the lords themselves tended not to reinvest their surpluses in production becauseof the difficulties of organising any sort of technically advanced production on the de-mesnes due to the system of forced labour. The long-term result was a failure to innovate,leading to a tendency toward exhaustion of the means of production, especially soilexhaustion, and ultimately of the labour force itself. (See Brenner, 1976, and sourcescited there.)
Because, as emphasised, the lords' surplus extraction relations with the peasants madeit so difficult for them to increase their income by increasing the productivity of labour,they were largely obliged to do so by means of intensified surplus-extracting pressureon the direct producers—and, since the latter was obviously of limited efficacy, byextending the area of land and number of men at their disposal. Given, then, theexistence of a landlord class whose members had to equip themselves militarily merelyto make sure of their surplus vis-a-ois the direct producers, as well as the long-termtrend toward declining productivity, there was an immanent tendency to expansionwhich expressed itself in the great colonisation movement which characterised themedieval economy, and especially in chronic warfare. Just as force was a condition ofthe existence of the feudal ruling class vis-i-vis the peasantry, warfare became the basisof their continuing survival and development (Duby, 1974; Anderson, 1974A).
War, of course, depended upon amassing men, who in turn had to be fed and equippedwith weapons. Moreover, to attract and make coherent a military following, the lord'shousehold had to become a focus of lavish display and conspicuous consumption. Inconsequence, an increasing part of peasant labour was directed toward production tosupport military men and the artisans who produced their weaponry and luxury goods.This was a turn toward unproductive labour, which was intensified by the increasingmilitary needs which grew out of the escalation in size and complexity of armies builtinto the warfare system. In Dobb's words, 'While exaction and pillage diminished pro-ductive powers, the demand that the producers were required to meet were augmented'(Dobb, 1946, p. 45). In this context, trade grew up to facilitate the development of acircuit of production involving the exchange of peasant-produced food extracted by land-lords for artisan-produced military or luxury goods; it therefore tended only to speed upthe tendency to a crisis in productivity. Thus, insofar as feudal class relations can be saidto have dominated the medieval European economy, they generated their own long-termdevelopmental tendencies toward retrogression. These were only intensified by thecirculation of goods whose production grew up largely in response to internallygenerated feudal needs. By the 14th century, through almost all of Europe, the exhaus-tion of productive forces had become manifest in the halt in the upward climb ofpopulation, in a long series of trans-European harvest failures and famines, and ultimatelya significant demographic fall-off which was aggravated by the plagues (Postan, 1966).
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The fall of serfdomThe late medieval crisis of production and population posed in the sharpest terms thecontradictions built into the development of peasant productive forces governed byfeudal class relations. By reducing the number of peasants, it directly threatenedseigneurial incomes. Even more critically, by opening up masses of untenanted land,it threatened landlord control over peasants and therefore the class relations of serfdomitself. In this situation, unless the landlords went on the offensive to ensure their rentsthrough force, the peasants might be able to take advantage of the plethora of land andscarcity of labour in order to achieve the abolition of the extra-economic controls ofserfdom on their mobility so as to bargain for a reduction of rents; to win the end ofarbitrary exactions (fixed payments); and perhaps even to gain their own property inthe land.
Dobb poses the problem of the medieval crisis in the foregoing terms. Yet he does notdraw the logical conclusion: on the one hand, that what was at stake were the funda-mental surplus extraction relations which underpinned the ruling class's dominance;on the other hand, that in the last analysis, the resolution of the crisis through the re-strengthening in one form or another of feudal class relations or their dissolution wouldbe decided in terms of the class conflict between lords and peasants, the forms of theirclass power and their relative strength.
At first, Dobb actually appears to be saying that it was the feudal crisis itself whichdetermined the fall of serfdom. He argues that feudalism's inability to develop the pro-ductive forces in the face of the landlords' growing need for revenue 'was primarilyresponsible for [feudalism's] decline; since this need for additional revenue promotedan increase in the pressure on the producer to a point where this pressure becameliterally unendurable' (Dobb, 1946, p. 42). The 'pressure to obtain a larger surplus'was 'disastrous, since in the end it led to an exhaustion, or actual disappearance of thelabour-force by which the system was nourished' (Dobb, 1946, p. 43). In these formu-lations the crisis appears to be dictating its own solution: the supercession of a productivesystem which can no longer develop the productive forces. Yet this hardly seemsreasonable. For the mere collapse of population could not determine the replacement ofthe feudal system by different, more productive class relations. Indeed, disastrous man-power losses would bring the ratio of men to land back down into close alignment (giventhe existing productive forces), thereby opening the way to a repetition of the old destruc-tive cycle—if feudal relations remained intact or were strengthened. This appears to bewhat occurred in Eastern Europe: here the upshot of the late medieval economic crisiswas a strengthening of class relations through the rise of serfdom, which merely set inmotion a whole new epoch of retrogressive development. Correlatively, in France whereentrenched peasant possessors were increasingly subjected to the centralised surplusextraction of the absolutist state, the ultimate outcome was a new 'general crisis' of theeconomy in the 17th century.
Dobb does appear, at another point, to shift away from the foregoing position byplacing at the centre of his analysis of feudal decline the seigneurial reaction whichdeveloped to a greater or lesser extent, with more or less success, through most of Europein response to the threat posed to the system by the productivity-population crisis(Dobb, 1946, pp. 50ff.). Dobb asks what were the different conditions which couldexplain the ability of the lords in some regions to reinforce the system of feudal rentexaction by directly controlling the peasants, whereas in others they were unable toprevent the supercession of serfdom by the rise of contractual relations between lord and
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peasant, or even the rise of peasant property ? He reasonably suggests that attention inthis regard should be focused especially on the military resources of the nobility, thestrength and character of the medieval state (especially 'the extent to which the royalpower exerted its influence to strengthen seigneurial authority or welcomed the oppor-tunity to weaken the position of rival sections of the nobility'), and finally the sources ofstrength of peasant resistance itself. Surprisingly, however, Dobb ends up by denying thefruitfulness of this line of inquiry. 'But while they may have been contributory, politicalfactors of this kind can hardly be regarded as sufficient to account for the differences inthe course of events in various parts of Europe . . . All the indications suggest that indeciding the outcome economic factors must have exercised the outstanding influence' (Dobb,1946, p. 53, emphasis added).
It is difficult to know what to make of Dobb's counter-position here of 'economic' to'political', when what appears to be at issue are decisive class struggles determining themaintenance of feudal class relations or their transformation. For was not the essence offeudalism, as Dobb defines it, the encasement of economic-productive activities within adetermining structure of extra-economic relations of surplus extraction directly byforce? It is of course true that the financial situation of the landlords must have been asignificant determinant of their ability to launch a seigneurial reaction against thepeasantry. But, in turn, the lords' economic potential vis-a-vis the peasantry, their in-come, was hardly separable from their ability to control and exploit serf labour, i.e. theirclass power-—yet, of course this was exactly what was at issue. It is therefore especiallypuzzling that Dobb's conclusion concerning the economic factors responsible for deter-mining different outcomes of the seigneurial reaction is that: 'the fundamental con-sideration must have been the abundance or scarcity, the cheapness or dearness of hiredlabour, in determining whether or not the lord was willing to commute labour services'(Dobb, 1946, p. 54). Dobb here quite reasonably asserts that the lords would have beenmore likely to commute labour services for money rents if there was plenty of cheaplabour available. For in this case, by commuting they could, on the one hand, extract,in the form of money or kind, rents from the customary tenants of the same value (hours'worth) as what they had formerly received from them in direct labour services on thedemesne. On the other hand, they could now receive an additional surplus by turningover the demesne to cultivation on the basis of the cheap and easily exploitable wagelabour. (Analogous considerations would govern the lords' decision to commute in orderto lease the demesne.) Yet such reasoning seems very much beside the point. As noted,Dobb himself makes it exceedingly clear that commutation (which merely involved achange in the form of feudal rent, with no corresponding alteration in landlord-peasantrelations of domination and servitude) could in no way be equated with peasantemancipation. Yet, of course, it was precisely peasant emancipation, indeed the entiresystem of surplus extraction, which was at stake in the late medieval crisis of feudalism.Given the scarcity of labour and thus the pressure toward high wages (and low rents)which prevailed in the later medieval period, the lords naturally did not want to com-mute, but rather to intensify, demesne cultivation on the basis of serf labour. Thequestion was whether or not they could enforce this preference against a peasantrywhich undoubtedly preferred not merely temporary commutation, but freedom fromseigneurial controls and arbitrary exactions, and full property in the land.
Dobb's ultimate 'economic' argument that the availability and cost of hired labourdetermined the evolution out of die late medieval feudal crisis carries with it theimplication that the lords were able to dictate the outcome according to their needs—
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deciding to tighten up vis-A-vis the peasants where labour was scarce, the opposite whereit was plentiful. Adopting such a perspective, however, would make it essentially impos-sible to understand how serfdom could ever have been overcome. For it is difficult toconceive of any circumstances in this period when lords would voluntarily have given upserfdom, that is the option and right to keep the peasants on their land, as well as to makearbitrary exactions, even if they did not always choose to use them. At the same time, thefact is that the attempt to maintain or increase controls over the peasantry was a wide-spread response of the landlords to feudal crisis throughout Europe, precisely becauselabour had everywhere become scarce. Yet the results were exceedingly various. In EasternEurope, controls over the peasants were strengthened. In much of Western Europe, asignificant section of the peasantry not only got freedom, but won virtual freehold rightsto much of the land (although they were, in general, correspondingly re-subjected to are-organised aristocracy through the construction of the absolutist state) (cf. Anderson,1974B). In England, serfdom collapsed,! yet the landlords maintained control over theland. To account for the foregoing divergences would require an account of the differ-ential evolutions of lord-peasant class relations which lay behind the differential out-comes of class conflict in the different European regions. Thus, to bring to fruitionDobb's conceptual approach would seem to necessitate the sort of enquiry which Dobbbegan, but did not carry through, in his foreshortened discussion of the seigneurialreaction: into the sources of class solidarity and power of the peasantry, especially intheir village communities, and of the lords, especially in their military organisation andabove all their state.
It is, indeed, in its relationship with the evolution of the fundamental lord-peasantclass rel ations, and the outcome of lord-peasant class conflict, that the pivotal questionof the impact of commercial-industrial development, of the growth of towns, uponfeudal society—its 'dissolving effect'—must be assessed (Dobb, 1946, p. 70 and ff.).In the first place, the development of the towns was not 'external' to feudal society. Thecharacter of town production was largely shaped by the system of needs given by thefeudal class organisation of production: on the one hand, the demand for weaponry andluxury goods production, arising out of lord-peasant and intra-lord relations; on theother hand, the lack of demand for agricultural means of production and for means ofconsumption for the peasant labour force, stemming from the inability of the lords orpeasants to invest in agricultural production and the connected inability of the peasantsto hold onto much of the surplus. Furthermore, the general potential of urban develop-ment was strictly limited by the feudal character of agricultural production, which, byrestricting the possibilities for increases in agricultural productivity, restricted the sizeof the towns. Beyond a certain point, therefore, urban commercial-industrial develop-ment was predicated upon the transformation of feudal class relations to make possibleagricultural advance. Since, as noted, trade in itself could not directly dissolve feudalclass relations, such a dissolving effect was possible only indirectly as a result of the impactof the social productive relations through which urban commercial-industrial
f At certain points Dobb does not seem to want to admit this. He comments that 'the century of scarcelabour and of dear labour' after 1350 witnessed 'attempts to reimpose the old obligations' (i.e. labourservices), whereai there began 'a renewed tendency to commutation in the middle of the 15th century,when the gaps in the population had been sufficiently filled for some fall in wages'—as if the social relationsbetween lord and peasant remained essentially unaltered through this period (and beyond), and only theform of paymentj had changed (money vs. labour). The implication is that serfdom—in its essential contentif not in form—continued into the early modern period. Thus Dobb quotes Lipson approvingly to the effectthat 'Personal serfdom survived the decay of economic serfdom' (Dobb, 1946, pp. 57, 65).
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development took place. The manner and degree in which urban social productiverelations were, in fact, antagonistic to the maintenance of feudal relations in thecountryside is what needs to be analysed.
In this regard, it is naturally quite significant that feudal industrial production grewup in an urban setting and did not take place via serf labour (if industry had developedon the basis of manorial serfs, or town artisanal slaves, its implications for the develop-ment of the feudal order would certainly have been quite different). Because urban pro-duction was organised largely on the basis of artisanal production and property (freeproducers with the means of production, but without direct access to the means of sub-sistence), the towns have been presumed to be, almost by definition, subversive offeudalism: on the one hand, by providing a haven for runaway peasants, thus under-mining serfdom indirectly; on the other hand, by nourishing social classes which wouldnecessarily in the course of their development range themselves against the dominationof the feudal classes. Yet neither of these destructive mechanisms can be assumed, fortheir operation was actually dependent upon the existence of very specific patterns ofurban social-productive development.
In the first place, a large number of medieval towns were originally established andcontrolled by the nobility to meet their needs. On this basis, they can hardly be assumedto have offered the peasants their freedom (see, e.g. Duby, 1974, Hibbert, 1953; Hilton,1966, pp. 188ff.; Jones, 1966, pp. 402-407). It is true that in many cases the townsdid win corporate status or de facto independence, often after struggles against thenobility. Even so, to the extent that urban production was dominated by the directartisan producers, the real economic opportunities (and therefore the real openings tothe peasant) would have tended to be correspondingly limited, especially as an effect ofguild restrictions on entry into industrial pursuits. Then again, where urban socialdevelopment, especially urban social conflict, issued in the predominance of the merchantpatriciates and their rule over production, the towns did tend to welcome rural migrantsas a source of cheap labour for putting out, or even for urban manufactories. A pattern ofurban corrosion of rural feudal controls does, indeed, appear to have obtained in thehinterlands of the great medieval manufacturing centres of Flanders and Italy. Theseurban conglomerations were able to capture and concentrate the demand for manu-factures of vast areas of feudal Europe, and thus to offer massive productive opportunitiesfor rural migrants. Yet, even on the basis of these important cases, it is not clear that itcan be concluded that the development of medieval cities was able to determine thesupercession of feudal class structure, in this way making possible further agriculturaland thereby urban development. Thus, even in Flanders and Italy, it does not seem asif the rural areas which witnessed the decline of feudal restrictions under the force of themagnet of urban growth were large enough to make possible an economic break-through. They could not adequately supply the urban areas with which they wereassociated. As a result, the Flemish and Italian towns appear to have had to continueto depend on agricultural imports from relatively distant regions which were still feudal.In sum, since urban industrial centres do not appear to have been able to sufficientlycorrode the feudal class structure of agriculture through their attractive force on thepeasant populations, their growth appears to have remained, in the last analysis, subjectto its limitations (see, e.g. Jones, 1966; Nicholas, 1971; Nicholas, 1976).
On the other hand, as Dobb points out, the urban merchants who might have bene-fitted indirectly from the weakening of feudal controls were unlikely to directly opposethe feudal order: indeed, the feudal aristocracy constituted their major clientele.
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Following Marx's analysis (Marx, 1894, pp. 329-331), Dobb shows that the surplusaccruing to the merchants from trade under feudalism arose from the disparity in therelative use values of given products in different areas, which made it possible formerchants to profit by taking advantage of the resulting differences in relative prices.This potential for profit-making was inherently unstable, since there was a tendency forother traders to enter the field to take advantage of the price disparity and eventuallyto abolish it. In response, the merchants would move to protect their trading profits bytrying to control the trade by extra-economic means. This inevitably meant turning tothe support of politically powerful elements for grants of monopoly—which requiredforging an alliance with the feudal ruling class and its state. Merchant profits, in the longrun, tended to become politically based. Thus, far from subverting the feudal order, themerchants very often became its bulwark (Dobb, 1946, pp. 87-90). Indeed, it is difficultto find urban patriciates who directly confronted the feudal class structure, let aloneallied with rebelling peasants, especially in the later medieval period of feudal crisis.
In contrast, the urban artisanate appears to have been led to oppose the feudal regime,for precisely the reasons the merchants supported it. They opposed the merchant-noblealliance in order to break the merchant patriciates' political control over the towns,which was generally accompanied by merchant monopolies of trade and limitation onthe direct producers' organised power in the guilds. On the other hand, the artisans'concern to control the labour supply could lead them away from directly supportingpeasant demands for freedom, since peasant freedom would have meant peasant entryinto the urban labour force. Thus, an artisan-peasant alliance against the feudal ordercannot be assumed to have prevailed, despite their common interest in opposing thedominant classes. Indeed, there is some reason to suspect that the really significantexamples of artisan-peasant alliance occurred only after the fall of serfdom (see Brenner,1976): especially in those places where the aristocracy had reconstructed its power(against a stubbornly entrenched peasantry) on the basis of the absolutist state. Theclassic case is, of course, the French Revolution. To be sure, the dissolving effect of thetowns remains an open question (cf. Anderson, 1974A; Merrington, 1975). Nevertheless,whatever the extent of the artisan-peasant alliance, or of the urban opportunities forpeasant flight, their significance is to be found, as Dobb made clear, in their impact uponthe fundamental class conflicts in the countryside, which determined the divergentoutcomes of late medieval seigneurial reaction.
The Bourgeois RevolutionFor Dobb, the decisive breakthrough in the transition from feudalism to capitalismoccurred in the English Revolution of 1640, the Bourgeois Revolution. It is in this con-text that Dobb argues, first of all, for the continuing predominance of feudal classrelations in England through the early modern period, and the rule of the feudalaristocracy up to 1640. At the same time, he says, this period was highlighted by theemergence of a new class of industrial and agricultural capitalists from the ranks of thedirect producers. In the end, the parasitic fetters imposed by feudalism and the absolutiststate upon the development of capitalist production were the underlying cause of thebourgeois revolution, which during the 1640s established the socio-political basis forrelatively untrammelled economic development.
This classical interpretation is, however, difficult to square with Dobb's generalframework for feudal development. In an article he published later (1962), that frame-
132 R. Brenner
work is presented perhaps even more sharply and succinctly than in Studies. Thus:
The basic social relation [of feudalism] rested on die extraction of the surplus product of [die]petty mode of production by die feudal ruling class—an exploitation relationship diat was buttressedby various meuiods of 'extra-economic compulsion' . . . It follows immediately from uiis diat diebasic conflict must have been between die direct producers and dieir feudal overlords who madeexactions . . . by dint of feudal right and feudal power. This conflict, when it broke into openantagonism expressed itself in peasant revolt. . . This was die crucial class struggle under feudalism,and not any direct clash of urban bourgeois elements (traders) widi feudal lords . . . it is uponthis revolt among the petty producers diat we must fix our attention in seeking to explain die dissolutionand decline of feudal exploitation (p. 285).
Now, Dobb initially defined feudalism as 'virtually identical with what we generallymean by serfdom: an obligation laid on the producers by force . . . to fulfill certaineconomic demands of an overlord' (Dobb, 1946, p. 35). In this respect feudalism wasdead by the 15th century, as peasant resistance and flight, especially in the wake of thelater medieval population decline, had brought about the general collapse of the lords'rights to tallage the peasantry at will, to extract labour services, and to control peasantmobility, marriage, and land transfers (cf. Hilton, 1969). To clarify his conception ofbourgeois development external to and against feudalism, Dobb is thus required toexplain in what sense England was still feudal in the period leading up to 1640—in whatway there was maintained a ruling class which based itself on surplus extraction byextra-economic compulsion from a class of petty producers.f
This problem may be insurmountable, at least from Dobb's perspective, when it isfurther understood that beginning from the period of later medieval feudal crisis, fromthe 15th century onward, England experienced continuous, if slow, development ofcapitalist social-productive relations in the countryside under the aegis of the greater landedclasses.X Thus, in England, the landlords were unable to respond to feudal crisis by
f Dobb's interpretation appears to be strongly ambivalent, if not self-contradictory, as other writers haveremarked (see Sweezy, pp. 46—52; Takahashi, 1952, pp. 83—86). Dobb says at one point that'the disinte-gration of the feudal mode of production had already reached an advanced stage before the capitalistmode of production had developed, and this disintegration did not proceed in any close association withthe growth of the new mode of production' (Dobb, 1946, p. 20). Such a statement at least raises questionsas to the sort of social order and state which were overturned in the bourgeois revolution. Dobb, further-more, offers in various places a great deal of discussion of the specific complex processes of social andeconomic development in a capitalist direction which took place in early modern England, and whichmade themselves felt in particular through all layers of rural society. Nevertheless, he does not, in my view,integrate his highly nuanced analyses of these processes with his general view of the bourgeois revolutionagainst feudalism in 1640 (in my opinion, because they do not easily mesh). In any case, Dobb's bourgeoisrevolution thesis is presented rather schematically, so that certain class-economic developments which hecontends prepared the way for political conflict are not always easy to grasp, and indeed, on occasion,seem to be dealt with by Dobb in different (and more convincing) ways elsewhere in the book in a differentcontext (see, e.g., 'the really revolutionary way' to capitalist development).
£ Dobb's arguments that basically feudal relationships were maintained on the land through most of theearly modern period are not strong (Dobb, 1946, pp. 20-21, 65-66). Contra Dobb, there is, in fact, littleevidence of the maintenance of villeinage in the period (Hilton, 1969, pp. 55—57). Furthermore, the con-tinuing formal existence of copyhold tenure is not, as Dobb appears to think, a sign of the maintenance offeudal relationships between lord and peasant in this period; for by this time the social and economiccontent of copyhold had evolved fundamentally. Copyholders were either essentially freeholders or ineffect holders of terminable economic leases (Tawney, 1912, esp. pp. 309-310; Kerridge, 1969, pp. 37-40).Similarly, the restrictions in law on labour mobility which originated in feudal times and continued inforce into the early modern period cannot be taken as proof of the continuity of feudal relationships, asDobb asserts. As Dobb himself points out in a different context, these laws merely reflected a desire toensure a labour supply and to keep down wages on the part of rural employer! who were by this time forthe most part capitalists (Dobb, 1946, pp. 231-234). These legal restrictions were maintained even into the18th century. In Tawney's famous words, quoted by Dobb, in the 16th century, 'Villeinage ceases, thePoor Law begins'.
Transition from feudalism to capitalism 133
re-installing serfdom, as did the aristocrats of East Elbian Europe. Nor was there adevelopment such as took place in France, where feudalism could perhaps be said tohave continued in an altered form through the early modern period (Anderson, 1974B).There, not only freedom, but to a significant degree landed property, had been conqueredby the peasantry at various points during the medieval period. Nevertheless, againstthese peasant gains, the French aristocracy, coming out of feudal crisis, was able to makeuse of a rebuilt system of surplus extraction based on extra-economic compulsion,especially through the construction of the absolutist state. Through the absolutist statethe peasants' surplus was directly and forcefully extracted, especially by taxation,largely for the benefit of the aristocracy. In contrast to both the French and EasternEuropean aristocracies, however, the lords in England responded to the peasants'successes of the late medieval period by shortcircuiting the peasants' drive for full landedproperty, by consolidating and extending their own control over the land, providing theconditions for the introduction of agricultural capitalism on their estates (Tawney,1912).
The lords' initial response to population collapse was an attempt to increase arbitraryexactions and to control the peasants. But this was unsuccessful, and, with the collapseof serfdom, the English lords had little choice but to enter into new forms of relationshipwith their tenants characterised by contract. Indeed, the peasants' success in freeingthemselves from landlord controls had allowed them to take advantage of the very highratio between land and labour from the later 14th century to establish low rents; andthey even began to claim that their rents (dues) were permanently fixed. Had they beenable to win this demand the ensuing inflation might have made them essentially ownersof the land (as it did in much of France). However, the landlords not only retained theirproperty, but moved to increase it: in the long run, they maintained hold of theiralready substantial demesnes; they took over lands left empty in the late medievalpopulation decline; they eliminated customary tenants who had not established heritablerights to land; they got rid of small, inefficient leaseholders. These steps were necessaryto make sure they could adjust rents in accord with market demand (Hilton, 1969).
At first, with the rise in the price of labour which followed the failure to imposecontrols on labour mobility in response to population decline, the lords' best optionappears to have been to convert to labour-saving sheep farming. Thus, perhaps the firstmajor step toward capitalist social productive relations took place in the 15th century,through the enclosure of the demesnes and vacant peasant plots, for the purposes ofturning from arable to pasture production—a process which often took place throughthe leasing of the land to a large commercial tenant, usually recruited from the ranks ofthe upper peasantry. With the growth of population from the late 15th century, as wellas the continuing development of textile production for both the foreign and homemarkets, the growing demand for food and declining wage costs determined a reversetendency back to arable production. Arable production could not, however, developthrough the old feudal social-productive relations—the lords could not reinserf thepeasants—but through the gradual construction of large farms on the basis of bringingin large commercial tenants. This process did not take place smoothly or directly, forthe peasants would not easily relinquish their lands. Indeed, peasant revolt assumedserious proportions in the first half of the 16th century. Still, it did not succeed in stem-ming the tide. By 1640, the English landlords as a whole, led by the aristocracy, presidedover and benefitted from the three-tiered system of social relations which has beenclassically identified with capitalist agriculture (see Stone, 1965, for aristocratic success
134 R. Brenner
with rationalisation and improvement). The system of landlord and capitalist tenanthelped make possible economies of scale by the use of new techniques requiring capitalinvestment and co-operation on the basis of wage labour. Indeed, it seems clear now thatthe processes associated with the 'agricultural revolution' were under way from the later16th century. In this context, the contradiction between landed aristocracy and capitalistdevelopment is by no means necessary (for the foregoing, see Brenner, 1976, and thesources cited there).
Now, Dobb's view that English landlords, as well as their merchant allies, tended toblock the development of capitalism, led him to posit the 'birth of a capitalist class fromthe ranks of production itself as indispensable to economic advance in the early modernperiod. Thus, developing a suggestion of Marx, he argues for the predominance in earlymodern England of 'the really revolutionary way' to capitalist development, in whichthe decisive steps toward capitalist social-productive relations are taken by artisan andfarmer petty owners, who hire wage labour and bring in new techniques, thus them-selves becoming capitalists (rather than by merchants and landlords entering productionand transforming it in a capitalist direction). It was thus, for Dobb, the artisans andyeomen now-become-capitalists who made the bourgeois revolution against landlordsand merchants who stood against development! (Dobb, 1946, pp. 123ff).
Now it is unquestionably true that large yeoman farmers, emerging from the ranks ofmedieval freeholders and successful customary tenants, led the way in the developmentof capitalism in early modern England, cultivating on a large scale, with improvedtechniques, on the basis of wage labour. In part, they did so by taking over on lease thelarge consolidated farms which had been built up by the landlords. In part, they did soby building up their own farms through purchase (or lease) from their neighbours. Italso seems undeniable that some artisan small masters were ultimately among the leadersin the development of capitalist industry, transforming the methods of production andhiring workers at a wage. Yet the question is: what significance should these processesbe given in relationship to the transition to capitalism and bourgeois revolution?
Underlying Dobb's analysis at this point, there appears to be the assumption thatpeasant production, once freed from the controls of serfdom, will evolve more or lessautomatically in the direction of capitalism. Under the impact of the market, largerpetty producers will accumulate surpluses; their size will give them technical advantagesover smaller plots; they will ultimately out-compete the smaller units on the market.The outcome is a bit-by-bit takeover by the larger producers from the smaller ones, theelevation of the larger producers into the ranks of rural capitalists and the depressionof the smaller ones into the ranks of the wage labourers. In short, the rise and adoptionof new technologies appears to determine the transformation of the class structure frompetty production to capitalism in the countryside, as a result of the economies of scaleenjoyed by the larger producers (as well, of course, as the economic advantages builtinto their superior financial positions) (Dobb, 1946, p. 125). Nevertheless, to assumesuch a progression is to beg the central question. For it is to assume that there alreadyexist social-productive relations in which the petty producers are deprived of the meansof subsistence, so that they must sell on the market and thus productively compete inorder to survive. It is only with the establishment of such an economic system that it is
t Sec Dobb's thesis that 'the kind of transition to which Marx was referring["the really revolutionaryway" from petty production to capitalism] was already in process in England in the second half of thesixteenth century; and . . . by the accession of Charles I certain significant changes in the mode of pro-duction had already taken place: a circumstance peculiarly relevant to political events in seventeenthcentury England, which bear all the marks of the classic bourgeois revolution' (Dobb, 1946, p. 123).
Transition from feudalism to capitalism 135
reasonable to expect that, with the development of exchange, the producers will pushto cheapen their products, that they will accumulate on the basis of wage labour andinvestment in improved techniques, and that the classical process of social differentiationwill therefore ensue. It is precisely the emergence of such a system which therefore needsto be explained.
Thus, in the first place, to the extent that there exist peasant producers who are alsopetty owners producing their own subsistence on their own property, there is no neces-sary or direct tendency to accumulation and differentiation (such as exists undercapitalism). Petty peasant producers, even relatively large ones, can and did orient theirproduction simply to the maintenance of their productive units (see Marx, 1867,pp. 766-770; Marx, 1894, pp. 804-807; Chayanov, 1966). They might produce andmarket a surplus, but they could still orient these processes to subsistence and to greaterconsumption, in other words to simple reproduction rather than any drive toward en-larged reproduction. Secondly, the society of peasant proprietor subsistence producers,where it actually exists, can provide a formidable barrier to those peasants who do wishto accumulate property and means of production. If they maintain enough land andresources, the mass of peasants cannot easily be forced to sell out. Indeed, they mayaccept a serious depression in the level of their subsistence in order to retain their holdings.At the same time, community controls over production may render accumulation ofproperty past a certain point economically useless, because it cannot provide the basisfor technical changes, due to the community's insistence on traditional techniques boundup with the village-wide subsistence economy (Bloch, 1931).
In fact, in France, through much of the later medieval and early modern period, thecountryside was largely dominated by peasants who were effective owners. This owner-ship had been secured by peasant resistance at various points in the medieval period,sometimes quite early on (see, e.g. Fossier, 1968; Fourquin, 1964). Much of this peasantrywas able to hold onto the land throughout the entire epoch, even in the face of a rapidlygrowing market. They were undoubtedly more successful in doing so during the 15thcentury than later on, despite the significant development of trade at this time. This wasbecause the thinning out of population following the demographic collapse of the 14thcentury had left them with relatively large plots, and thus with much more secure sub-sistence bases. On the other hand, even where they eventually did lose their land to ruralaccumulators in the early modern period, the main underlying mechanisms do notappear to have been directly economic—i.e. market competition by economicallysuperior producers—but 'extra-economic': population growth leading to subdivisionwhich pushed their plots below the size necessary to produce subsistence; the weight oftaxation which made their plots inadequate for re-productionj (Jacquart, 1974; SaintJacob, 1961).
In contrast, it appears that in England peasant producers were less able to resist thedirect processes of rural accumulation through economic competition. This was becausethey had been unable to establish their proprietorship over much of the land. As meretenants, the small peasant producers often did not have assured rights in their means ofsubsistence; they were indeed subject to supercession by more efficient large producers,
f The tendency to sub-division of holdings among peasants had the effect in the long term of makingeasier the undermining of peasant proprietorship, but this did not necessarily mean a direct transition totypically capitalist production relations. Rather, rural accumulators were encouraged to forego improve-ment and the reorganisation of the labour process, and to farm using the mass of cheap rural labour powerwhich arose from the remaining surrounding mini-holdings, whose possessors required wage work to makeends meet (Jacquart, 1974; see also below, p. 138).
136 R. Brenner
their lands taken in by landlords who re-leased it to commercial tenants. Withoutproperty in their means of subsistence the peasants did experience a significant tendencyto differentiation directly under the impact of the market. But what therefore mustbe explained is precisely the processes which lay behind this original separation of thepeasants from the means of their reproduction, which made them vulnerable to productivecompetition; it cannot be assumed. This is the question of the 'so-called primitiveaccumulation', and of the class conflicts which lay behind it.f
If the freeing of petty production from the fetters of serfdom cannot directly determinea subsequent evolution to capitalism, it may also be doubted if the landlords andmerchants constituted as powerful a barrier to this transition as Dobb appears to argue.Thus, while asserting the central economic role of the independent peasantry andartisanate, Dobb seems to be contending that where landlords and merchants controlledthe conditions of production, they would try to 'deteriorate the condition of the directproducers . . . and absorb their surplus labour on the basis of the old mode of production'(Dobb, 1946, p. 123, quoting Marx), rather than transform the social and technicalcharacter of production in a capitalist direction. The landlord would tend to try toincrease his income simply by squeezing his peasant tenants, taking advantage of theirdemand for land to increase rents by directly depressing their level of subsistence, ratherthan attempting to profit by facilitating their farming on a larger scale on an improvedbasis (using wage labour). Correlatively, the merchant putter out would tend to attemptto increase his profits by cutting payments to the direct producers, by increasing theprice of their raw materials supplies and cutting the payments to them for their products(or, if he owned the means of production, their wage). In both instances, therefore, thelandlord and merchant would constitute mere parasites on petty production, squeezingout its surplus. This would prevent the petty producers from developing productionand ultimately transforming themselves into capitalists. It was only where petty pro-ducers had full access to the means of production and their surplus, where they were fullindependent owner operators, that they could have the potential to bring in new tech-niques, ultimately requiring co-operative production, and thus to become capitalistemployers of wage labour in the process of transforming the nature of production.
It is doubtful, however, if distinct paths of development (or non-development) canin this way be so directly associated with these two distinct types of owners (owner-operator yeomen and artisans versus landlords with tenants and merchants with domesticproducers). Rather, it seems that the economic evolution associated with both types wasdetermined by the broader socio-economic environment in which they were to be found,bound up in turn with the overall structure of class relations. It needs to be remembered,first of all, that by the 16th century the landlords had been largely deprived of thoseextra-economic controls, characteristic of serfdom, which would naturally have led themto squeeze their tenants on the basis of the old methods of production. On the other hand,yeoman farmers who had access to a cheap labour force or were confronted with a heavydemand for land (for example, from a mass of small peasants) might as readily choose toincrease their income through 'labour squeezing' techniques as would landlords; farming
t Dobb does not, of course, neglect the 'so-called primitive accumulation of capital', nor the role of thelandlords in this process, in creating the social conditions for economic development. He also provides anextended discussion of the problem of the differentiation of the peasantry and the mechanisms whereby ittakes place (Dobb, 1946, pp. 124-126, and especially 225-226, 250-254). However, these analyses appearlargely in the context of an excellent account of the 'Growth of the proletariat' (ch. 6) and are not linkedback to the problem of transition, and of the bourgeois revolution (in ch. 4 on "The rise of industrialcapital').
Transition from feudalism to capitalism 137
on the basis of labour-intensive methods or renting out their land at high rates. Similarly,master artisans with some accumulated capital would be perhaps as likely as merchantsto employ their funds to extend putting out operations rather than invest in advancedmeans of production using fixed capital, if payments to labour were low—and especiallyif they could enmesh the direct producers in positions of debt/dependence so as to beable to assume monopoly positions toward them (vis-d-vis raw material supplies andproduct marketing).| In either case, it is not easy to see why the response of the yeomanor artisan would differ substantially from that of the landlord or merchant. What wouldappear to be determinant for all of them would be the broader economic conditions inwhich they were operating. All might equally choose labour squeezing methods so longas, and to the extent that, these were more profitable than introducing improvements.
Thus, as Dobb himself points out, all through the early modern period, ready accessto cheap labour throughout the countryside encouraged industrial entrepreneurs of alltypes to stick to labour squeezing methods—domestic putting out in industry. Thetransition to the factory system and the introduction of radical new techniques had toawait the industrial revolution of the 18th century. Large numbers of rural producers ofvarious types wished to take up industrial work as a by-employment, especially in theoff-season, particularly to ensure their subsistence and their ability to hold onto theirplots (Thirsk, 1961; Mendels, 1972). Since these producers had secured at least part oftheir subsistence through agriculture, they did not have to receive their full subsistencefrom their industrial work. Consequently, they could and did sell their labour powervery cheaply, below its cost of reproduction. Naturally, organisers of production wouldtry to take advantage of this source of labour power so long as this was possible (Dobb,1946, pp. 230-231). It was only when the costs involved in expanding rural putting outbegan to rise—as a result of the geographic spread of the rural industry, because of theloss of raw materials stolen by the domestic producers, and because of the difficulties indisciplining the labour force—that putters-out began to turn to factory production.This transition appears to have come about on a large scale only with the enormousbuild-up of demand which emanated from the new world in the latter part of the 18thcentury, and put intolerable pressures on the old domestic mode. It was of courseimmensely speeded up by the rapid availability of new inventions which allowed fordramatic cutting of costs (Landes, 1969, pp. 53-60).
Correlatively, there may have been some tendency to use rural wage pressures anddemand for land, during the early modern period, to profit via squeezing rather thanagricultural innovation—although we perhaps do not yet know enough about thecharacter of the rural labour force to fully evaluate this. Still, as noted, this tendencywas not necessarily less prevalent among accumulating owner-operator yeomen thanamong the landlords. In any case, the advantages to be gained from improvement inthis period must have been quite large, substantially outweighing those to be gainedmerely from squeezing. For a major theme of the recent economic historiography of theperiod is the transformation of agricultural production which took place (see, e.g.
•f Dobb is certainly right to argue that those merchants who had established trading monopolies, especiallyif guaranteed by the state, would tend to leave production as it was, since they could now assure themselvesof profits from the sphere of exchange alone. As Dobb emphasises, the great overseas merchants of thechartered companies were quite conservative on both political and economic matters in this period: theywere not, it seems, innovators in production and tended to be royalists or neutrals in the revolution from1640 (see Brenner, 1973). Still, as Dobb also points out, since most of the internal trade was controlled bymerchants who were not overseas traders and had no monopolies, these factors cannot be assumed to haveplayed the determining role in structuring the development of industry (Dobb, 1946, pp. 126-127 and ff.).
138 R. Brenner
Kerridge, 1967; Jones, 1967; Thirsk, 1967). Innovations were made on both farmsowned by yeomen and farms owned by landlords and cultivated by large tenants. Therelevant point of course, in the present context, is not only that tendencies towardimprovement seem to have operated on the farms of both yeoman farmers and landlords,but that these were not by any means necessarily antagonistic classes. Yeoman farmersoften took over the landlords' large farms and entered into a co-operative relationshipthat was advantageous to both parties, and which resulted in agricultural advance. Thusthe landlord could get a larger and more secure rent from a yeoman capitalist tenantfarming for the market on the basis of improved techniques than from small tenants whowere basically subsistence producers. On the other hand, the yeoman capitalist farmercould not be induced to take over as a tenant unless he was guaranteed a good part of thereturns to any investment he would make; and during the early modern period newforms of leasehold were developed to make sure of this. Indeed, it was so much to thelandlords' advantage to have capitalist farmers on their land that they often took oversome of the important capital improvements, such as enclosure or the construction ofbuildings, in order to ensure the success of the farm and thus the rent (in this case, ofcourse, the landlord could add to his rent an additional return from this capital invest-ment) (Kerridge, 1969, p. 46; Jones, 1965).
In sum, it is difficult to locate a predominant landed feudal class in England in 1640,so that it is difficult to find at that point powerful class-structured constraints to capitalistdevelopment in the English countryside. Indeed, what appears to have distinguishedthe English economy from those on the continent in the early modern period is thegrowing connection of all the powerful agrarian elements with capitalist development.In England, as noted, the lords could not profit from re-enserfing the peasants, as wasdone in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, neither English lords nor yeoman farmerscould look to the profitable adoption of the rent-squeezing methods that were generallytaken up by these groups in France in this period vis-i-vis their tenants and wagelabourers, apparently because they did not have access to the mass of semi-peasants/semi-proletarians which populated the French countryside. In France, the relativesuccess of the peasantry in gaining hold of the land during the medieval period led tothe subdivisions of holding consequent upon demographic growth from the late 15thcentury and pushed much of the rural population below subsistence during the earlymodern period. In the face of the heavy demand for land and for work at a wage fromthe sub-subsistence peasantry, French landowners and capitalist tenants naturally foundit profitable either to rent their lands at high rates or to hire cheap labour on the basisof labour-intensive techniques (Brenner, 1976, pp. 74-75, n. I l l ; Dobb, 1946, pp.239-240). In contrast, the English landlords and tenant farmers (as well as yeomenowner-operators) were led to attempt to profit through improvement on the basis ofwage labour—and to a large degree they succeeded. The rise of improving Englishfarming on a capitalist basis tended to dissolve the ancient antagonism between industrialand agricultural development which had been built into feudal-peasant class relations,with its barriers to the growth of agricultural productivity. Indeed, it fuelled industrialdevelopment through cheaper food and rising rural demand.
Capitalism in early modern England thus grew up, to a large degree, within a land-lord structure—a structure which had been formed out of the fall of serfdom and thegradual undermining of peasant possession of the land. It seems therefore neithernecessary nor correct to follow Dobb in viewing capitalism as growing up alongside,external to, or in contradiction with a still feudal landed structure in pre-revolutionary
Transition from feudalism to capitalism 139
Englandf (sec, e.g. Dobb, 1946, pp. 20-21). For the same reason, more analysis isrequired than Dobb supplies to explain in what sense the monarchical state remainedfeudal. J For there is little in England of the massive state support—via church, court,and army offices—of a crisis-ridden aristocracy such as developed in later medieval andearly modern France, nor of the emergence of a system of taxation of the peasantry tofinance the overarching absolutist apparatus. Indeed, it is in light of the widespreadconnection with capitalism throughout all levels of the landlord class, made possible bythe shortcircuiting of peasant property, that we can perhaps begin to understand thesuccess of the English aristocracy in overcoming economic crisis in the early modernperiod, and similarly the failure of the monarchy's absolutist offensive, bound up with itsinability to develop a sufficient financial base, especially on the land (taxing peasants).Broad sections of the landlord class backed Parliament in both 1640 and 1642: the anti-feudal tendencies of this class were perhaps not the least important factor in determiningthe long-term success of revolution in 17th-century England, in the face of quiteopposite tendencies in much of the continent during the same period.
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the Twelfth Century, London, Weidenfeld and NicolsonFossier, R. 1968. La Terre et les hommes en Picardie jusqu' a la fin du XHIe siicle, Louvain-Paris,
NauwalertsFourquin, G. 1964. Les Campagnes de la region Parisienne a la fin du mqyen age, Paris, PUFGenovese, E. 1961. The Political Economy of Slavery, New York, Vintage (1967)Hibbert, A. B. 1953. The origins of the medieval town patriciate, Past and Present, no. 3Hilton, R. H. 1966. A Medieval Society, London, WileyHilton, R. H. 1969. The Decline of Serfdom, London, MacmillanJacquart, J. 1974. Sociiti et vie rurale das le sud de la region parisienne du milieux du XVIe siicle au milieu
du XVIIe siicle, Paris, Armand Colin
t Dobb himself comments that 'By the time of the civil war . . . investment of capital in land-purchase,and to a lesser extent actual capitalist farming, had already progressed sufficiently to leave little change inthe agrarian regime that the improving landlord or progressive fanner urgently desired' (Dobb, 1946,pp. 171-172).
X This is not to say that a 'bourgeois revolution' interpretation is necessarily ruled out. The anti-capitalist effects of Caroline fiscal policies (e.g. industrial monopolies, prerogative taxes), the monarchy'salliance with the leading strata of city financiers and monopoly merchants, and the close connexion withthe church hierarchy might perhaps be viewed from such a vantage point. But a full working out of such aview, which would have to focus, it would seem, around an analysis of the absolutist state, has yet to besatisfactorily presented.
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