1

The Eastern Origins of Capitalism? Unpublished Review Essay of

Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, How the West came to Rule:
The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto, 2015), by Spencer Dimmock
(November, 2015)
Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nianciolu have produced a remarkably ambitious book on
the dynamics of pre-modern global socio-political and economic change which aims to
account for how western Europe and North America (the West) came to dominate the globe
politically and economically.1 At the heart of this transformation, they argue, was the
emergence and development of capitalism in north-western Europe, notably in England, in
the early modern period. Having said this, their main motivation has been to combat what
they view as an unwarranted and pervasive Eurocentric bias by historians and historical
sociologists in their analyses of the history of modernity. By treating the history of modern
capitalist society as a linear development, internal to Europe, the technological, intellectual
and economic contribution of the rest of the world to this achievement, notably that of the
Middle-East and Asia (the East), has been left out. They argue that this is not only flawed
history, but it leads to an orientalist perspective which reinforces a stereotype of the East as
perennially backward, incapable of change, and requiring the civilizing touch of the West to
bring it up to the latters universal standard of modernity. So the books main purpose is to
decentre or provincialize Europe in analyses of the development of modernity (read
capitalism), and to provide a counter history to the conception of modernity as developed in
the confines of Europe, subsequently spreading through its colonies and through military and
commercial pressures to the rest of the world. The authors wish to highlight the fact that
much of the East was more advanced economically, politically and culturally than the West
before the emergence of capitalism and, moreover, to argue that the emergence of capitalism
in north-western Europe was decisively dependent upon these progressive developments
elsewhere.
The authors address a range of theoretical perspectives World Systems Theory,
Political Marxism and Post-Colonialism and conclude that each in their own way are
Eurocentric by centring on Europe as either the harbinger or core of capitalist modernity.
Their preferred method-cum-theory, which they argue goes beyond those they have
addressed, and genuinely incorporates the pre-capitalist East in the origin of capitalist
modernity, is Uneven and Combined Development, ultimately derived from Leon Trotskys
explanation for the Russian Revolution of 1917. Applying this theory they view the origins of
capitalism in north-western Europe (England and the Netherlands) in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries primarily from a geopolitical or internationalist, intersocietal, perspective.
For them, these origins were a value-added process generated by many societies interacting
within and between different parts of the globe. All of these societies exhibited different or
uneven levels of socio-political and economic development, and as a result of their
interaction they combined to produce new social formations. It is this geopolitical
interaction which provides the dialectic for change. As a result of the interaction less
developed societies can benefit from privileges of backwardness which enable them to skip
centuries of development by drawing on or assimilating the best aspects of more advanced
societies which then drives them forward. More advanced societies face the penalties of
progressiveness, a result of their entrenched obligations and impulses etc., which holds them
back. So, by applying this theory, the authors aim to demonstrate
1 Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical
Origins of Capitalism, London 2015.

2
...how the asynchronic simultaneity of a plurality of existing societies (unevenness)
came to interact in ways that generated further substantive sociological differences
(geopolitical combinations), in turn leading to sharp divergences in their
developmental trajectories. This is in fact a hallmark of any inter-societal system: they
are generatively differentiating through the very interactive plurality of their units.2
The authors resist tying down a specific definition of capitalism, and instead wish to view it,
quoting Marx, as encompassing historically specific configurations of social relations and
processes, not as a singular social relation or a singular process. So,
we argue that capitalism is best understood as a set of configurations, assemblages, or
bundles of social relations and processes oriented around the systematic reproduction
of the capital relation, but not reducible either historically or logically to that
relation alone. By placing an emphasis on such configurations and assemblages, we
also seek to highlight how the reproduction and competitive accumulation of capital
through the exploitation of wage-labour presupposes a wide assortment of
differentiated social relations that make this reproduction and accumulation
possible...We argue that an analysis of the making of capitalism should thus be one
that seeks to disclose ever more complex webs, assemblages and bundles of social
relations that feed into the origins and reproduction of capitalism as a mode of
production.3
In other words, for the authors, the exploitation of wage-labour is central to capitalist origins,
development and reproduction, but capitalism cannot develop without the incorporation of
other bundles of social relations, whether slavery, serf or tribute-based, or all of these
together. By making all of these social relations co-constitutive of capitalism from its
beginnings, the authors aim to ensure that the atrocities and racism associated with them,
particularly in the New World from the seventeenth century, and in the East in the eighteenth
century and thereafter, are viewed as necessary to capitalism, and not external to the social
relations of capitalism as such.
The authors desire to develop a theory that organically embraces both sociological
and geopolitical factors in a unified conception of social historical development deserves
attention and encouragement.4 And their attempts to combat crude Eurocentrism and their
stress on the importance of extra-economic force in the history of capitalism and capitalist
accumulation (with all of its implications for the way we view capitalism) deserve praise.
Within this approach, Uneven and Combined Development also has merits in drawing
attention to the complex ways in which societies interact and develop, and has the potential to
encourage historians of single countries and polities to rethink the nature of historical change
within them. However, the authors explanation of the emergence and development of
capitalism in north-western Europe, notably in England, through the theory of Uneven and
Combined Development, has little to recommend it when confronted with the historical
evidence. And the authors critique of Political Marxism (more specifically the work of
Robert Brenner on the transition from feudalism to capitalism), which they use as their main
platform from which to articulate their own perspective, is misleading and often
contradictory. I will leave the critique of this work within the perspective of international
relations (from which it is derived) in more capable hands. For the sake of brevity, I focus
2 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 250.
3 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 8-9.
4 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 253.

3
here on the authors critique of the latter, and on their analysis of the origin and development
of capitalism in England.
Political Marxism and Social-Property Relations
Political Marxism takes seriously Marxs emphasis in his later critique of classical political
economy on the specificity of modes of production, that there are fundamental distinctions
between historical societies or systems of social relations whether based on slave, feudal or
capitalist modes of production. Moreover, these distinct structures of social relations give rise
to specific strategies for the reproduction of these relations. As a starting point, the essential
difference between feudalism/absolutism and capitalism, for example, is the mode in which
surplus labour is extracted from the producer. In Marxs words:
The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct
producers, determines the relationship of rulers to ruledit is always the direct
relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers a
relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the
methods of labour and thereby its social productivity which reveals the innermost
secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of
the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short the corresponding specific forms
of the state.5
This mode takes fundamentally but not only political or extra-economic forms in
feudalism/absolutism, and fundamentally but not only economic forms in capitalism.
Because in an established feudal/absolutist society peasants possess the vast majority of the
land, and are able to derive their subsistence from that land without becoming overly
dependent upon the market for their inputs through wages or trade income, the surplus from
their production can only be sufficiently extracted from them by political force or its threat.
In an established capitalist society landless wage-workers are compelled not so much by
political forces but by market forces to give up their surplus to capitalist entrepreneurs,
because having lost possession of their own means of subsistence and production, they are
forced to depend on those capitalists for work, and therefore for their reproduction.
Nevertheless, that is not to say the capitalist mode of surplus extraction would survive
without substantial political enforcement, or indeed that this loss of possession was the
result of market forces. Nor is it to say that these modes are the only ones that can be found
within a particular society, or that all societies sharing the same mode within a specific
historical context are identical.
It is important to recognize that, while the surplus-extraction relationship is central to
a specific mode of production, the social relations of that mode of production are not reduced
to the singular relationship between lord and peasant, or capitalist entrepreneur and landless
wage-labour. What Robert Brenner terms social-property relations, rather than simply
social relations, encompasses a three-way dialectical relationship between the direct
producers and nature (raw materials, ecology), the vertical exploitative social relation
between the direct producer and the appropriator of the producers surplus, and also the
horizontal social relation within the main classes. The horizontal social relation from
Brenners perspective is at least as important as the vertical, and much turns on its meaning
and implications.6 Classes, particularly ruling classes, do not simply compete, go to war, or
collaborate or trade with one another within the boundaries of their respective polities,
5 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3, London 1991, p. 791.

4
countries or nations. Social-property relations most certainly therefore encompass intersocietal interaction and the influence of that interaction on the reproduction or transformation
of those relations.
The authors of How the West Came to Rule are well aware of this dialectical
integration of the vertical and horizontal relations within particular social-property relations.
However, during their discussion on social-property relations, one of Brenners key quotes, in
which he attempted to clarify their meaning, is shuffled, unfortunately, to the endnotes in the
back of the book, while in the main text the authors choose to rely on authors with misleading
interpretations of the Political Marxist perspective. Using these misinterpretations as their
platform, they unaccountably conclude that Political Marxism advocates, the singular
relation of exploitation between lord and peasant as the most fundamental and axiomatic
component of the feudal mode of production, which in turn constitutes the foundational
ontology and analytical building block upon which all ensuing theoretical historical
investigation is constructed.7 This is indeed, as has just been explained, the opposite of what
Political Marxism contends. Indeed Brenner explains in the quote in the endnotes that one of
the reasons that he formulated his perspective on social-property relations was precisely
because social relations of production in the classic or orthodox Marxist formulation seems
only to refer to the singular relationship in the immediate social organisation of production in
a particular mode of production or society. I will say more about this point below. Also, in the
same endnote, the authors express their confusion over Brenners inclusion of property in
his formulation of social-property relations. They argue that property is not a sufficient
abstract indicator of all different modes of production because it cannot be applied to huntergatherer societies. To be clear, property is central to a mode of production because who has
it and who does not is clearly of central importance. And access to property, whether
moveable wealth, land, housing, trading or production facilities, part of the state, or even the
producers themselves, is determined by struggle within and between the main classes.
Second, property features in hunter-gatherer societies in its absence. For the authors to cite
this as a reason for its inapplicability to modes of production generally is odd, because one
cannot apply production or class to such societies either.
As the foregoing (admittedly brief) exposition of Brenners social-property relations
hopefully demonstrates, the stings of the authors criticisms completely miss their mark.
Indeed the same misreadings are repeated in every critique of Political Marxism, whether
Marxist or non-Marxist.8 The implications for the traction of the authors critique and
therefore for the success of their own theory of Uneven and Combined Development are
enormous. Given that they have incorrectly concluded that social-property relations
encompass only the singular relation between lord and peasant, they are moved to say that
Brenners thesis cannot comprehend intersocietal interactions or the international other than
as an ad hoc addendum to his methodologically internalist analysis, and that this analysis
necessarily features a linear developmentalism which is hermetically sealed in one
country. Moreover, because they say the origin of capitalism is reduced by Brenner to the
appearance of wage-labour through the freeing of labour from subsistence-based
agricultural holdings, these origins are thereby reduced to the English countryside, immune
from external developments (even from urban development in the same country). The result
6 See, for example, Robert Brenner, Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went
Wrong, in Chris Wickham ed., Marxist History Writing for the Twenty-First Century, Oxford
2007, p. 58.
7 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 24, and for the endnote, pp. 28990, n. 76, and note 7 above.
8 See Spencer Dimmock, The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400-1600, Leiden 2014,
chapter 2 and chapter 8 especially.

5
is the obliteration of colonialism, slavery and imperialism from the history of capitalism.
Any discoveries, commercial, technological and cultural drawn from outside this small area,
for example those from the more advanced East, are in the authors view discarded.9
I will say more about these points later during the historical discussion. Firstly I want
to pursue further the authors understanding of social-property relations with regard to
questions of historical causation, particularly with regard to the productive forces.
Given the authors emphasis on intersocietal interaction, one gets the impression that,
from their perspective, the international has primacy in historical causation, over and above
any determination of change within particular countries. And yet in their theoretical
discussions on causation the determination is far from clear. For example, in the following
quote, social-property relations within particular countries appear to have primacy:
For whether the whip of external necessity translates into a privilege or disadvantage
of backwardness and relatedly the degrees by which the political and ideological
effects are progressive or reactionary is dependent on the outcome of social conflicts
both within the ruling class and between the ruling and subordinate classes. Thus, as
Ben Selwyn highlights, it is of great importance to examine how contending social
classes shape and respond to development processes through struggles, as the
outcomes of these struggles impact significantly upon process and outcomes of late
development. And, because the outcomes of these struggles cannot be predicted in
advance, neither can the process of uneven and combined development. To this extent
the socio-political and economic effects of uneven and combined development are
partly and necessarily indeterminate: we cannot say in advance exactly how the
developmental pressures of intersocietal relations will impact on any given society
without an analysis of the changing balance and struggle of class forces (in other
words, human agency), among other factors. And that changing balance is itself
shaped and partly determined by the wider intersocietal milieu.10
So the impact of intersocietal forces (the whip of external necessity) on change in any given
society or country is dependent upon the outcomes of struggles between and within the social
classes in that society. This is of course Brenners thesis, although it is not referenced as such.
It seems reasonable to suggest, and in fact Brenner has brilliantly demonstrated as much in
his comparative studies of medieval and early modern Europe, that unless a particular society
or country is conquered, and a new set of social-property relations are installed by the
conquerors, the established social-property relations and the outcomes of vertical and
horizontal struggles therein will be determinate in the face of external pressure. In other
words, the nature of the response to this pressure, and consequent outcome of this response,
will depend upon the nature of the social-property relations.11
I will examine the applicability of the above point below in more detail in the
historical discussion. Now we can turn to the authors theoretical discussion of the productive
forces.
The authors state that Political Marxists deny the development of the productive
forces any causal role in explaining the transition from feudalism to capitalism, since doing
otherwise would inevitably run the risk of technological determinism, emptying human
9 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 24.
10 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 50-1.
11 Brenner, Property and Progress, and his The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism, in T. H. Aston and
C. H. E. Philpin eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in PreIndustrial Europe, edited by, Cambridge 1985.

6
agency in the process.12 They then inform us that the productive forces do not only include
the means of production tools, techniques, raw materials from nature but the labour
process itself, the social organisation of production. Thus the determination of the productive
forces cannot be equated with technological determinism.13 The problem is, something that
Robert Brenner had argued in the 1970s, by confining social relations to the vertical
relationship in the immediate process of production, hence social relations of production,
the impression is that social relations are determined by production itself. Brenner argued that
it is as if technical changes in the immediate process of production naturally lead to a new
and suitable division of labour to apply them, and in doing so create new relations of
production. Class structures appear to be the product of technical changes in some kind of
automatic response in the immediate process of production by socio-technical managerial
relations to commercial and demographic forces - that is, to price fluctuations and changing
patterns of supply and demand.14 The significance of the property relationship between
appropriators and producers (the unequal allocation of land in feudal societies for example) is
not fully appreciated, and the political organization and power of the appropriators (monarchy
and aristocracy) over that of the producers (peasants and artisans) has been mistakenly
separated conceptually from class relations in the immediate process of production to another
sphere, namely the political superstructure.
Be that as it may, underlying Brenners whole project on the transition from feudalism
to capitalism has been his recognition that the productive forces had indeed developed
impressively in medieval and early modern non-capitalist Europe. This is witnessed by the
commercialization of the European economy between 1050 and 1300, developments in trade
thereafter, both in Europe and the New World, and in relations with the East, both in Asia and
the Baltic. And yet even with all of this dynamism, most of the European economy was
characterized between 1050 and 1750 not by capitalist development but by demographicallydriven cycles that were marked by falling labour productivity in agriculture. The outcomes
were subsistence and related socio-political crises, first in the late thirteenth and early
fourteenth centuries (the feudal crisis), and second, in the seventeenth century (the general
crisis of the seventeenth century). Only a few countries or regions, namely England and parts
of the Netherlands, achieved a breakthrough to self-sustaining growth in the face of these
same demographic patterns and the same economic (and cultural) context. For Brenner, it was
not the case that feudal/absolutist social-property relations were not able to develop the
productive forces, including technologies. The problem was that they did not generate the
imperative to systematically develop technology in order to cut costs through rounds of
systematic investment and accumulation. Only in this way would the Malthusian cycle of
overpopulation on finite resources combined with intensifying extra-economic forms of
surplus extraction from the peasantry be overcome, thereby leading to sustained growth. An
emerging system where both appropriators and producers were market dependent was
required for this to begin to happen.15
12 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 28.
13 I too am included in this charge of reducing the productive forces to techniques and yet I
had set out, on the first page of the chapter that the authors cite in my work, the same
definition of the productive forces that the authors themselves advocate: see Dimmock, The
Origin of Capitalism, p. 157.
14 Brenner, Property and Progress, p. 58; and his Neo-Smithian-Marxism, NLR I/104,
July-August 1977, pp. 25-93.
15 The alternative would be the removal of lordship and the appropriating class, thereby
leaving the surplus in the hands of the producers. This alternative has implications for
increases in innovation and productivity while avoiding expropriation and enforced market
dependence.

7
It is important to note that these specific demographic cycles, determined by specific
feudal/absolutist social-property relations, form no part of the authors perspective and
analysis. There is of course no clear geo-political explanation for them, and I will say more
about them below. The authors desire to incorporate the East in the origin of capitalism
necessitates highlighting the driving force of the productive forces in this transformation.
When this is done, it can be argued that the advanced East provided the required expertise
and technologies for the West to develop capitalism. The West benefited from privileges of
backwardness in this way. The other transformative role given to the productive forces in the
origin of capitalism is the related topic of the history of warfare. Warfare not only develops
the productive forces by increasing the need for technological developments in order for
rivals to stay one step ahead of each other, it also creates a large wage-labour force with
which to build things like ships, harbours and fortifications. Indeed, the authors do not quite
go so far as to say that there was a symbiotic relationship between war-making activities and
the rise of capitalism, but they come very close to it. 16 Warfare and the development of the
productive forces through commerce are, of course, the chief means of intersocietal
interaction, and so these are accorded primacy through the theory of Uneven and Combined
Development, as opposed to factors generated by social-property relations within particular
societies and countries.
With their focus on warfare and trade, and without addressing Malthusian
explanations of demographic change in pre-capitalist societies, the authors risk being firmly
installed in the commercialization thesis/Neo-Smithian Marxist canon. The significance of
social-property relations crops up here and there in the book, but, as I hope to demonstrate in
the following section, only in contradiction to their thesis of Uneven and Combined
Development.
The Origin of Capitalism in England: Part One
The authors reject the viewpoint that nomadic peoples are savages and uncivilized, one
traditionally attributed to the latter by their conquerors and modern Eurocentrics. Indeed, they
argue that the influence of the nomadic Mongol Empire is central to any analysis of how the
modern capitalist world came into being. For them, it was a crucial vector of uneven and
combined development which contributed to the making of capitalist modernity over the
longue dure. The authors trace the origin of capitalism directly from the development of the
Mongol Empire during the long thirteenth century (1210-1350), that is, from the first
interactions of nomads in the eastern steppes with more advanced societies in Asia, including
China. This development had the effect of disabling Chinas potential trajectory towards
capitalism, of halting the socio-political and economic development of eastern Europe, and
opening crucial trading links and opportunities between East and West for western European
traders. Thus, while having an extremely negative impact on development in the East, it
allowed for the development of the productive forces, capital accumulation, and the spread of
ideas in the West. In fact in this way it was the Fall of the East that set the conditions for
the later Rise of the West. Crucially, however, it unified the globe with disease, because
the opening up of the East through warfare and trade led to the Black Death in the West in
1348-9. As a result of the ravages of this plague, at least a third of the population of Europe
died within two years, and thus engendered significant institutional and socio-economic
developments and a transformation of the balance of class forces which directly led to the
transition from feudalism to capitalism in the English countryside. The changing balance in
class forces led, during the fifteenth century, to the end of serfdom in England and
polarization among the peasantry. Wealthier peasants accumulated vacant holdings and took
16 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 28-9.

8
on large leases thus paving the way for capitalism. In their explanation of why this should be
the particular outcome of the Black Death in England and not elsewhere, the authors appear
to follow Brenner in pointing to the peculiarity of English social-property relations. However,
they pull him up short in regard to one aspect of those relations: the relative cohesiveness of
the political organisation and institutions of the English monarchy and aristocracy. While they
concur that it was something peculiar to England, they argue that intralordly cohesiveness
was a sixteenth and seventeenth-century development, caused by the isolation of England
from warfare, and contingent on the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into south-eastern
Europe.17
I will leave the latter point to one side for now, because it is of central significance to
how the authors say agrarian capitalism developed in England in the sixteenth century, in
contrast to Brenners thesis. For now it is of great importance to address the authors theory
of the geopolitical origin of the feudal crisis because it gets to the heart of the applicability of
the authors geopolitical theory of Uneven and Combined Development.
The authors follow a number of scholars, including Brenner, in describing the Black
Death in 1348-9 as a major factor in the crisis of feudalism in Europe and subsequent
remodelling of social relations in the fifteenth century. The authors are aware that the Black
Death hit at a time of depression, malnutrition and famine, and that while this plague was an
exogenous shock, emanating from the development of the Mongol Empire, it bit deeply
because of the particular vulnerability of peasant populations in Europe at this juncture. They
also appear to recognize (although it is not clear to what extent) that the crisis of feudalism
was already systemic, before the Black Death.18 However, they do not feel the need to
explain what they mean by this, perhaps because it would pull them into the uncomfortable
waters of methodological internalism. And yet the origins of the famine and malnutrition
they describe require an explanation. The population-centred Malthusian explanation pointed
to the naturally rising population between 1100 and 1300 which led to rising rents, falling
wages, the severe fragmentation of peasant holdings and declining labour productivity due to
overpopulation on finite resources. Hence famine and plague was a natural check to this
crisis. Brenner argued that this overpopulation ceiling leading to crisis was a function of
feudal social-property relations and the specific rules for reproduction that those relations
engendered. The nature and implications of these rules for reproduction will need to be
explained in detail before we can go further.
For their reproduction, peasants desired to maintain the possession of their lands and
in the best conditions possible. Brenner argues that the desirable conditions for peasants were
full property rights on the land and payment of a small fixed, non-economic rent. Peasants
aimed to achieve this goal by strengthening their local communal organizations or institutions
of self-government, and by defending the force of custom in their lords manorial and
borough courts; not by specializing and competing against each other on the market. The
lords goal was to maintain or improve their controls over the peasants surplus, and also over
peasants bodies, in order to restrict a market in peasant labour power, thus avoiding
competition between lords for peasants. Lords did so by strengthening serfdom, and by
generating income channels through their broader manorial jurisdictional capacity - founding
market centres and small towns or boroughs, for example. The ability for lords to strengthen
serfdom (squeeze and control the peasantry) could only be achieved by an increase in their
military and legal powers. Their means for achieving this was what Brenner describes as
political accumulation. It was the accumulation of territory, government offices, and
political alliances that determined the level of power feudal lords and monarchs wielded, not
17 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 65-6, pp. 67-72, p. 76, pp. 815, pp. 88-91.
18 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 77-9.

9
only over each other, but over peasants. Political accumulation and state building increased
social cohesion amongst lords, but it was difficult because of the decentralized, fragmented
nature of power in feudal societies which forced lords to compete with each other for power,
resources and peasants.
For Brenner, feudal social-property relations gave rise to other crucial strategies for
reproduction. Peasants most pressing concerns were the survival of their families and the
continuity of the family line in the property they possessed, and they had to do this in very
challenging conditions. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly. If peasants got this
wrong they faced debilitating poverty and potential starvation. So they tended to have large
families to ensure security in old age; and where the size of holdings allowed, they tended to
subdivide holdings in order to provide the means for young heirs to get married early and set
up for themselves. This strategy served both to enable the continuance of the family line and
to ensure young heirs were not a burden for too long on their parents. This occurred even
where the custom was primogeniture. Rather than specialize, peasants typically diversified
their production of necessities to meet as many of their subsistence needs as possible and to
avoid market dependence and the insecurity it brought in the face of potential bad harvests.
They marketed only surpluses, if there were any. For lords, in addition to political
accumulation through warfare, state building, and hegemonic display, which enabled them to
maintain their status and political power both in relation to other lords and to the free and
unfree peasants on their estates, their main strategy for reproduction was extensive
economic growth. Because peasants possessed the vast majority of the land, and because of
the political nature of the relationship between lords and peasants, lords were denied any
opportunities to invest productively on land outside of their demesnes in order to increase the
labour productivity of the peasantry. They were therefore compelled to extend their lands by
taking them from other lords (and monarchs) or by new colonization in which peasants were
encouraged to break new ground, either by being offered favourable tenurial terms or by the
use of force. As a result of these reproduction strategies,
feudal economic development manifested a two-sided conflictive interaction: between
a developing system of production for subsistence through which the class of peasant
possessors aimed to reproduce themselves and provide for the continuity of their
families, and a developing system of surplus extraction by extra-economic
compulsion for non-productive consumption, by which the class of feudal lords aimed
to reproduce themselves as individuals and as a ruling class.19
So these reproduction strategies were determined by feudal social-property relations. Most
importantly for our purposes, these in turn, determined overall demographic and economic
development patterns peculiar to feudalism from the establishment of these relations in the
tenth and eleventh centuries to around 1300. These patterns were rapid population growth, the
extension of production and colonization of new lands, urbanization and the increasing
sophistication of international trade due to lordship demands for military equipment and other
luxuries, and increasing political centralization and state formation. In turn, however, these
feudal development patterns led to feudal forms of crisis. Feudal crises were characterized by
overpopulation and severe underemployment on materially finite and jurisdictionally defined
resources, declining labour productivity in the face of limited application of available
techniques (even while land productivity benefited from the increase in the number of
workers able to attend to it in the thirteenth century), reduced demand for manufactured
goods and a consequent decline in urban production and trade, a declining rate of increase in
the feudal levy on peasants over time, and an increase in warfare as lords sought to
19 Brenner, Agrarian Roots, p. 232.

10
compensate for the reduced income derived from an increasingly debilitated peasantry. These
elements of feudal crisis led to a downward economic spiral through the increased fiscal and
jurisdictional pressure on peasant production which had already been pushed beyond the
capacity that resources allowed. This, the actual systemic feudal crisis, was compounded by
terrible weather between 1315 and 1318 which caused a series of bad harvests, animal
disease, and famine which killed 10 percent of the population. It was then that a series of
devastating plagues in 1348-9 and again in the 1360s killed between a third and a half of the
population of Europe, and certainly half of the population of England where conditions were
comparatively more oppressive.
Like the Smithians, the authors have nothing to say about demographic patterns
engendered by the feudal/absolutist mode of production across the period 1015 to 1750. This
is understandable, given what seems to me to be an overemphasis on modes of productions as
combinations of previous and future modes, containing numerous forms of surplus extraction,
where even the core social relationships are barely granted sufficient weight. Their modes of
production are in continuous flux and never appear to become established.
It is also understandable therefore why the authors choose to follow, with
qualifications, S. R. Epsteins emphasis on the Black Death as watershed, rather than
address the causes of the prior systemic feudal crisis. 20 Epstein has produced a Smithian
analysis of economic growth in medieval and early modern Europe, although one more
complex than standard commercialization theses. He equates the Black Death with the feudal
crisis because he rejects the idea of a subsistence crisis in the late thirteenth and early
fourteenth century. While Epstein recognizes that there was a downturn in European
economies at this time, he states that there was no link between increasing population
densities and poverty, no Malthusian cycle. On the contrary, for him, increased population did
not lead to lower productivity but to higher productivity and increased use of technology. For
him, the existence, by the end of the thirteenth century, of large numbers of underemployed,
immiserated peasants reveals that market dependence was as natural to peasant society as
subsistence, and that this dependency had implications for structures of demand and growth.
For Epstein, it was lack of market integration due to jurisdictional fragmentation between
many political centres (lords, towns) which prevented peasant innovation and specialization
for the market because it created high transaction costs. State formation through warfare was
a countervailing force to this fragmentation, and warfare increased at the end of the thirteenth
century as these forces came to a head at this time, not because of the levelling off of lordship
income due to feudal crisis as Brenner had argued. Indeed, Epstein argues that if it was not
for those exogenous shocks, famine (bad weather) and plague (infection), there would have
been a continuity of the slow evolutionary path between the eleventh and fourteenth
centuries lifting constraints, unifying institutions, and promoting a higher growth path,
presumably towards capitalism. Instead the exogenous shocks set in train an even more rapid
period of change, of creative destruction, during the fifteenth century. The problems with
Epsteins thesis, not least his understanding of labour productivity, are numerous, but it is not
the purpose of this review to review him as well. 21 For now it is worth pointing out
similarities between the authors Marxist thesis, and Epsteins Smithian thesis, given that they
both place most emphasis on the history of markets and warfare, and do not give sufficient, if
any, credence to the crisis of feudalism as a systemic crisis.
The Origin of Capitalism in England: Part Two
20 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 77, n. 101-2.
21 S. R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300-1750, London and
New York 2000, pp. 38-49, pp. 54-5. For a detailed critique of Epstein see Dimmock, The Origin of Capitalism,
pp. 48-61.

11

As I have mentioned in the foregoing, the authors follow Brenners perspective on socialproperty relations in order to explain why social relations were remodelled in England after
the Black Death in a dramatically different way to those on the continent that is, in a way
conducive to the origin and development of capitalism. However they are highly critical of
Brenners assertion that it was the relative cohesiveness of the political organization and
institutions of the English monarchy and aristocracy stemming from the Norman Conquest in
1066 that enabled English lords to maintain controls over their relatively large demesnes and
peasant customary tenures in the fifteenth century. Brenner argued that it was these controls
which proved to be their trump card in the transition to capitalism, and that the transition was
an unintended consequence of struggles to maintain these controls, maintain their income and
estates, and ultimately reproduce themselves as they were. The authors say that Remarkably,
Brenner cites a distinctly international determination the Norman conquests of the 11 th
century as the central causal factor behind Englands uniquely intralordly cohesion. They
are surprised because for nowhere does Brenners treatment of this external determination
enter into his theorization of the development of capitalism. Instead, it appears as an ad hoc
international addendum.22
Hopefully this complete misreading can be put to bed once and for all. The first point
is that the Norman Conquest is not used by Brenner as an ad hoc international addendum to a
methodological internalist analysis. As the authors are well aware, and as I have explained
above, international warfare and conquest were key elements in the rules for reproduction of
the feudal ruling class that is, taking territory from one another, gaining lucrative ransoms,
promoting defensive alliances etc. And this international determination does not appear out of
the blue in Brenners analysis in any case. As he has said English feudal centralization was
no mere legacy of Anglo-Saxon rule, although this may have been an important contributing
factor. He recognized that, as a reflection of this centralization and cohesion, Already in the
tenth and eleventh centuries, most English peasants were of dependent status...since they
were obliged to do significant labour services and were subject to the appropriation of their
lands by the lord at their death. The Norman occupation of England appears to have brought a
further strengthening of feudal controls and the imposition of increased levies. 23 State
centralization, which was accompanied by a revolution in feudal tenures, was the outcome of
Anglo-Saxon Englands response to the turmoil of the Scandinavian/Viking invasions
between the eighth and early eleventh centuries. The Anglo-Saxon great estates were
fragmented into village or part village sized estates, and they were devolved to, or usurped
by, an enlarged class of knights. The fragmentation of estates, and the increase in the number
of knights who were supported by the multiplication of smaller estates (worked by both
slaves and increasingly enserfed peasants), was a means by which Anglo-Saxon kings and
nobles could generate successful fighting forces against the invaders. A similar process took
place on the continent with the break-up of the Carolingian Empire. Chris Wickham has
recently pointed out that the precocious cohesiveness of the English aristocracy and royal
control over political structures is revealed in the finding that England had ... moved from
being the post-Roman province with the least peasant subjection, in 700, to the land where
22 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 89. I too come in for similar
treatment in the authors, The Poverty of Political Marxism, International Socialist Review,
94, Fall 2014, p. 9, n. 20.
23 Robert Brenner, The Rises and Declines of Serfdom in Medieval and Early
ModernEurope, in Michael L. Bush ed., Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, London and New
York, p. 259, p. 261. See also Brenner, Agrarian Roots, pp. 254-8, on the significance of the Norman Conquest
for Englands medieval political cohesion.

12
peasant subjection was the completest and most totalizing in the whole of Europe, by as early
as 900 in much of the country, and by the eleventh century at the latest elsewhere.24
The centralization of the English state and development of national institutions which
accompanied these changes was
grounded on the effective resistance to the Danes by King Alfreds Wessex in the late
ninth century, on the conquest of the eastern Danelaw by his son Edward the Elder
between 917 and 920, and on thelstans more tentative successes in the north.
Eadreds later expulsion of the restored Norse king Eric Bloodaxe from York in 924
set the seal on the territorial expansion of what had been merely the kingdom of
Wessex. Within the boundaries of the new kingdom, though more to the south of the
Humber than to the north, royal control was imposed through a common pattern of
institutions: shires and hundreds, boroughs and mints, ealdormen and (by thelreds
day in the 990s) sheriffs. Beyond its borders lay British and Viking kingdoms in the
north and west over which English kings from thelstan to Edgar intermittently
claimed lordship. Here the instruments of power were not administrative units, their
courts, and officials, but armies, fleets especially fleets periodic submissions, and
tribute, such as the twenty pounds of gold and 300 pounds of silver that, according to
William of Malmesbury, thelstan was able to exact annually from the Welsh
princes. The quarter-century on either side of the year 950 saw the kingdom of
England at its pre-Conquest apogee.25
Had this not been the case, the whole of England would not have fallen in one battle on the
south coast in 1066. Be that as it may, the authors somehow allow themselves to disallow the
possibility that peculiar social-property relations in England, specifically the relative
cohesion and organisation of the feudal ruling class and monarchy, that led to the particular
outcomes of struggle after the Black Death (which the authors have already recognized), and
yes to the remodelling of social-property relations in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century,
may be traced back to the final establishment of these feudal social-property relations in
England in the eleventh century. They view this as temporal tunnelling, accusing Brenner of
essentially explaining the origin of capitalism by the Norman Conquest. For them This
leaves numerous questions over how far this picture of intralordly unity going back to the
eleventh century stands up when tested against the evidence of the intervening years. What
for example, they question, explains the fits of intralordly struggle during the Hundred
Years War and the Wars of the Roses.26
So the authors are not concerned to understand the complex ways in which the
relationships within the English ruling class affected socio-political and economic
developments after the Conquest, through the feudal crisis, and in the aftermath of the Black
Death. Nor do they wish to know how these socio-political and economic developments,
generated by highly specific relationships in England, compare with those on the continent
where the outcomes of struggle were very different. What they demand is an explanation of
particular bouts of dynastic warfare. When Brenner talks about the political cohesion among
feudal ruling classes in Europe, the extent of decentralization of sovereignty for example, or
jurisdictional fragmentation, to use Epsteins words, it is always in a relative and comparative
context. So it comes as no surprise to find dynastic infighting, even in England. The Hundred
Years War, traditionally dated between 1337 and 1453 began during the feudal crisis,
24 Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, London 2009, chapter 22.
The quote is on pp. 469-70.
25 Maddicott, 2010, The Origins of the English Parliament, 927-1327, Oxford 2010, pp. 2-3.

26 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 88-9.

13
although warfare had intensified more generally from the late thirteenth century, along with
taxation to pay for it at a time when peasants had least means. It was fought between the
realms of France and England on French soil over territories in France, and indeed over the
French crown itself. It ended with a resounding defeat of the English in 1453 after the French
had overcome their serious divisions of the earlier part of that century. The authors are no
doubt referring to the factional conflicts which led to the deposition of Richard II in 1399 by
Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV). The so-called Wars of the Roses began in 1455, soon after
the loss of all territories in France except Calais, although they were essentially a
continuation of what happened in 1399. They ended in 1485 with the death of the Yorkist
king Richard III on the battlefield, thus inaugurating 118 years of Tudor rule. One could also
include the problems in King Stephens reign (1135-54). His usurpation of Henry Is daughter
Matildas hereditary right to the throne led to serious dynastic warfare. The point is that, on
account of the developed structures and institutions of the English state, unity was maintained
in the short and medium run. Hence the lords maintained controls over the land and tenures,
including importantly their own relatively large demesnes, through the fifteenth century,
during these troubles. In fact some gentry took advantage of the lawlessness in the localities
during the second half of the fifteenth century to push through evictions and enclosure.
The authors wish, however, to retain the thesis that intralordly cohesion in England
was a central factor in the origin of capitalism in that country. So if, in their view, England
did not have a relatively unified kingdom and cohesive monarchy and aristocracy since
before the eleventh century, and especially afterwards - something that is recognized by all
specialists in medieval European history - the authors are required to search for a more recent
origin of this phenomenon. They find it in the Middle East; not the Mongol nomads this time,
but the Ottomans. They argue that Englands internal ruling class unity was in fact
predicated on its relative seclusion from the geopolitical tumult that gripped Europe in the
aftermath of the Black Death and that on closer inspection we shall find that Englands
isolation had distinctly international roots. The Ottoman Empire expanded rapidly through
the Balkans after its conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and by the 1520s it was laying siege
to the gates of Vienna in Austria. It came no further into western Europe, but it changed the
latters geopolitical balance. The Habsburg Empire, a recent composition (by means of
various marriage alliances) of the Spanish kingdoms, the Burgundian Netherlands, and
Austria, became preoccupied along with the Venetians and Genoese for decades with this
Muslim threat to the south-east of western Europe. This provided France, the Low Countries
and especially England with the geopolitical space to conduct modern state-building
practices, and most importantly it had the effect of isolating England from Habsburg
geopolitical pressures. According to the authors this isolation was conducive to the
development of capitalism in England. Isolation per se led directly to the reduction in
military resources held by the state and the demilitarisation of the nobility. The effect of this
was to remove the need for a strong tax-appropriating state (such as those of the French and
Spanish who were always at war with each other and with the Ottomans), it forced lords to
seek market mechanisms in order to exploit peasants in the absence of effective military
means, and it led to an unusually homogeneous ruling class because the latter had become as
a whole more commercial and civilian in background.
These three factors help to explain one of the fundamental propositions of Robert
Brenners argument on the origins of capitalism: that it was in England alone that
agrarian revolts were met with a unified and successful attempt by the state and
landed class to remove the peasantry from their land through enclosures. As peasants
were dispossessed, they turned to an alternative means to secure their means of
subsistence and social reproduction: selling their labour to landlords and capitalist

14
tenants in return for a wage. The persistent success of the state-nobility alliance in
dispossessing the peasantry of the means of production led to the emergence of a
free class of wage. The social property relations through which the surplus were
[sic] appropriated was thus transformed, from the extra-economic means of feudalism
to the economic or market mechanisms of agrarian capitalism.
The authors therefore conclude that it was the geopolitical isolation of England due to
pressures by the Ottomans on the south-eastern part of western Europe that gave rise to this
peculiar social form...that underpinned the exceptional growth of agrarian capitalism in
England.27
To begin with, the idea that from the 1520s England was isolated militarily from the
continent hardly stands up to the facts given Henry VIIIs wars with France, as well as with
Scotland and Ireland. These wars continued under Protector Somerset and Mary, and were
followed by the Elizabethan wars with France and Habsburg Spain, as well as those with
Ireland and Scotland which were to a large extent proxy wars for the continental powers. 28
England too fell to some extent under the Habsburg Empire for a time under Mary (1553-8),
thanks to her marriage to Charles Vs son Phillip, although safeguards against dictatorship by
the latter were inserted in the pre-nuptual arrangement. Henry VIII became bankrupt as a
result of his military exploits which he only overcame with the plunder of the monasteries
and debasement of the coinage, thus leaving problems for later reigns. Indeed Englands
reduction in military status in Europe was a result of the comparatively increased power of an
increasingly centralized France and the construction of the Habsburg Empire. So the loss of
Englands military status with the continent, in comparison to its apogee in the fourteenth
century, was not self-imposed. As a result of these changes, the English state, strongly
circumscribed by parliament as it was, was cautious about entering into costly wars,
particularly wars of territorial conquest on the continent which it no longer had any chance of
winning. Only under Elizabeth, and especially the early Stuarts, were there prolonged periods
of peace for the English. Even then, however, England experienced five more years at war
under Elizabeth (between 1559 and 1603) than during a similar time period under Henry
VIII, Mary and Edward VI (between 1509 and 1559).29
Even less convincing is the idea that this so-called isolation led to the demilitarization
of the nobility, which then forced them into capitalist methods of extracting a surplus from
their peasants as an alternative means of gaining income. The authors argue that, having
foregone their earlier ability to squeeze peasant surpluses through a militarily-backed
serfdom, a persistent state-nobility alliance nonetheless enabled the nobility to evict the
peasants wholesale. In order to address these ideas I would make the following points. As we
know, serfdom had virtually disappeared in England already by 1440, a long time before the
1520s, and so this certainly had nothing to do with the Ottomans. With regard to the
demilitarization of the nobility, what actually happened was that from the beginning of the
Tudor regime in 1485, in the aftermath of what turned out to be the end of the Wars of the
Roses, Henry VII outlawed private warfare and the building of castles, and he reinforced
injunctions against the keeping of retainers (large entourages of armed servants wearing the
lords colours) that had been introduced during the Wars of the Roses by Edward IV in the
1468. Offenders were sometimes executed but more often saddled with punitive financial
obligations and recognisances and this strategy was pursued by subsequent monarchs. Nobles
27 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 90, p. 115, pp. 117-19.
28 For good overviews see for example, Susan Doran, England and Europe in the Sixteenth
Century, Basingstoke 1999; S. J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 1485-1558, Basingstoke
1995.
29 Doran, England and Europe, p. 36.

15
were also weaned off private warfare through the increasing availability of royal offices (the
number of which expanded with the size of the royal demesne from Henry VIIs reign), the
increase in parliamentary seats, and the generation of new royal courts which gradually
provided legal channels to resolve disputes. But the fact remained that the monarchy was still
very much reliant on a militarized nobility and its ability to generate armies of dependents to
serve it in foreign wars. Significant changes did not occur in this respect until last decades of
the sixteenth century, and so this was a long and drawn-out process.30
More importantly, many lords were already by the end of the late fifteenth century
transforming their estates into the capitalist triad structure of commercial landlord, capitalist
tenant and wage-labourer. So for these reasons (among others) from the later fifteenth
century, and during the sixteenth century, the old power bases and affinities and values that
drew together groups of noble families and their military retainers gradually declined. During
this period the increasingly capitalist landed class allowed the monopoly of force and warfare
to be held by the state, subject to parliamentary taxation to pay for it in addition to the
monarchs own income from its estates, remaining feudal prerogatives (controls on wards
etc.), and customs on overseas trade. So the country remained militarized, but the militarys
social, political and technological organization changed. While the aristocracy still supplied
the leadership, increasingly under Elizabeth and early Stuarts the army itself was based on
trained soldiers drawn from local militias and handguns and pikes became the weapons of
choice.
The authors cite Brenner for their assertion that Englands ruling class became
unusually homogenous as a result of these changes.31 Brenner argued that the English landed
class had become largely capitalist by the early seventeenth century. As such its developing
homogeneity with increasingly capitalist features was a result of increasingly similar interests
regarding property, the constitution and religion. Regarding the latter, it is crucial to note that
the Protestant or Anglican settlement at the beginning of Elizabeths reign very importantly
helped to protect the large swathes of secularized property which came into lay lords hands
following the dissolution of the monasteries from being seized and granted back to the
Catholic Church. Now, Brenner laid out this thesis on the causes of capitalist homogeneity
among Englands nobility, gentry and their tenant farmers in England in his book, Merchants
and Revolution.32 And yet, curiously, the authors source for this homogeneity in their thesis
is Brenners earlier work, Agrarian Roots, which provides the important discussion on the
cohesiveness of the English feudal ruling class in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest.
This precocious cohesiveness in the eleventh century was of course something the authors
had vigorously argued against. Hence their assertion that English ruling class homogeneity
was only something that occurred during the sixteenth century in its capitalist phase.
This serious confusion aside, we are left to address the authors assertion that isolation
due to the preoccupations of the Hapsburgs with the Ottomans from the 1520s,
demilitarization of the nobility, and the homogeneity of the ruling class, explains how the
state and landed class were able to remove the peasantry and transform feudal into capitalist
social-property relations. The first point concerns periodization. As I have sought to explain
at length in my own work cited earlier, evictions and enclosure in England had already by the
1520s remodelled social-property relations profoundly in many areas of England. This had
nothing to do with Englands isolation, but was the unintended consequence of lords seeking
to maintain controls over their estates and generate income for their reproduction during the
30 See especially the chapter on Power in Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, Oxford
1965, pp. 199-272.

31 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 118, n. 219.
32 See the Postscript in Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict,
and Londons Overseas Traders, 1550-1653, London and New York 2003.

16
fifteenth century. This impulse took place in the context of the decline of serfdom and
reduction in customary rents in the face of peasant resistance. Already in 1489, the changes
had proceeded to such an extent that an alarmed state introduced a statute outlawing illegal
eviction and enclosure. That being ignored, in 1517 the state set up royal commissions in
every county apart from those on the border with Scotland to investigate and bring to court
every case going back to 1488-9. The results of these commissions form the basis of current
research.33 The second point is that, as indicated by the first point, the state did not ally with
the nobility to evict the peasantry and enclose manors and common fields but, on the
contrary, it was opposed to eviction and enclosure for a number of reasons: namely, the
potential loss of a taxation base, increasing lack of security against invasion given the
depopulation of coastal regions, and more broadly, and ideologically, the breakup of a
traditional commonwealth of harmonious orders. We are left to question, why would military
isolation, even if that were the case, lead to ruling class cohesion in this period? It is usually
warfare that galvanises the feudal ruling class not its opposite. And even then, why would
cohesion per se lead to the evictions of peasants and the development of capitalism?
The fact of the matter is that the uniqueness of the origin of capitalism in England
requires a detailed understanding of the peculiar nature of feudal social-property relations in
that country from their establishment. The outcomes of international and domestic sociopolitical and economic forces can only be examined, as Brenner has said, through the prism
of these relations; their development through the period of feudal expansion in the thirteenth
century, and their response to the feudal crisis and plague. The authors attempts to fit this
origin into a framework of geopolitical conflicts emanating from the East ignore essential
details in the histories of the countries that they are trying to explain, and we end up with a
distorted picture.
The Development of Capitalism in England
The authors also apply their geopolitical theory to the development of capitalism in England
during the seventeenth century and to the English Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. They argue that given the limits of agrarian capitalism, without extraeconomic force and the development of slavery in the New World, capitalism in England
would most likely have been choked off as there would have been nowhere for the
dispossessed peasants to go. And that, without the massive capital accumulation derived from
the profits of slavery and the raw materials produced by it, there would have been no
industrial revolution. Sounding very much like Adam Smiths theory of primitive
accumulation they argue that the American colonies and slave plantations generated both the
markets and the needed surpluses that assisted, through reinvestment, in jump-starting the
engine of industrial accumulation.34
To address these points in detail would require a piece of work beyond the purposes
of this review. However, some important points need to be made. The authors view of
agrarian capitalism is too one sided, as is their view of the English countryside. What they
miss is that agrarian capitalism, and capitalist development in England more generally, only
developed in symbiosis with industry, and that industry developed in the countryside from the
late fifteenth century around small towns, and away from many of the traditional medieval
towns. The latter worked mostly as distribution centres for rural industrial produce as well as
rural produce, with London eclipsing them all in this respect. This is why the industrial
33 See Spencer Dimmock, Work in Progress: Englands Second Domesday: Eviction, Enclosure and the
Inquisition of 1517, swansea.academia.edu/SpencerDimmock.

34 Anievas and Nianciolu, How the West Came to Rule, p. 152, pp. 162-73.

17
heartlands of Britain were and are agglomerations of small towns and these rural industrial
districts, not the extension of medieval cities.
The authors place emphasis on the forceful dispossession of peasants by landlords,
and I welcome this, something that is usually missing from accounts, both Marxist and nonMarxist. However, because they focus on towns and not rural industry, they assume that these
peasants had nowhere to go except perhaps London. And that while they recognize that this
dispossession created - uniquely in England - a strong source of demand for food because
increasing numbers of people could not grow it themselves, they assume that these people
were unable to act as consumers and pay for it because they had no work. For them, the
estimate that 200,000 people migrated to the New World from England alone during the
seventeenth century is evidence of the limits of English agrarian capitalism because it was
unable to absorb them.35 Now I myself am currently undertaking research which points to the
trauma and sometimes death caused by the ruthless expropriation of peasants, sometimes of
whole villages including elderly and children, in England from the late fifteenth century. So I
do not wish to gloss over the catastrophic effects on the peasantry of the emergence of
agrarian capitalism. In fact, the purpose of my work is to draw more attention to it. But there
is another side to this story, and that is the introduction in England during the hundred years
following the 1540s (after the major anti-enclosure rebellion across England of 1549) of over
a hundred new industries. These created hundreds of thousands of new jobs and thus aided a
strong structural demand. Often introduced by the state, at the recommendation of
Commonwealthmen economists, initially as a means of finding work for the poor and
dispossessed, and in the face of stagnating cloth exports after 1550, industry in England
became unprecedentedly diversified. Instead of relying on imports of an increasing number of
consumer items, beyond traditional staples for survival, these became produced in England
for an unprecedented growing home market. Initially the demand came from the growing
middling sort, farmers, clothiers and merchants (it was also the latter that stimulated the
expansion of trade by the Levant-East India combine in the East and Baltic from the 1550s),
but during the seventeenth century it increasingly came from all classes as wages moved
closer to prices. It is of course this mass consumer base and the creation of a strong internal
market that is key to capitalism becoming self-sustaining in England, and its avoidance of the
demographic ravages that affected most of the rest of the continent in the seventeenth century.
By the early seventeenth century many of these successful industries were exporting to the
continent and then to the New World. England even briefly became a net exporter of grain
before the unprecedented population rise from the late eighteenth century.36 In this way it was
also the strong home demand in England especially, more than elsewhere in Europe, which
stimulated the development of plantations in the New World for commodities like tobacco
and sugar, and which in turn provided outlets for commodities produced in England.37
35 Robin Blackburn estimates that between 170,000 and 225,000 people left the British Isles for America and
the Caribbean between 1610 and 1660, and says that England was exceptional in the mobility of its population
and its willingness to emigrate: Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the
Modern, 1492-1800, London and New York 1997, p. 228. Contrary to the authors analysis, it is not true that
these people were dumped there by the English ruling class as a means of removing vagrancy and sedition. In
many cases this was probably true but, as Blackburn shows, generally people were attracted by the offer of
substantial landholdings following the serving of up to seven years as indentured labourers.
36 Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Societyin Early Modern
England, Oxford 1978; C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500-1700, Volume II:
Industry, Trade and Government, Cambridge 1984; Stephen Broadberry et. al., British Economic Growth 12701870, Cambridge 2015.

37 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p. 219.

18
The authors argue persuasively for the importance of slavery in the New World for the
development of industrial capitalism in England. And as I have said earlier, their emphasis on
the appalling extra-economic means by which English capitalists obtained super-profits from
plantations in the New World and elsewhere in the developing British Empire in the
eighteenth century is an important one. However, I disagree with the authors contention that
slavery and other forms of extra-economic surplus extraction in the New World and later in
India through colonial subjection were intrinsic to capitalism per se, although they are
certainly to be included in the history of capitalism as it actually happened. Hence I do not
see this as a stick with which to beat Political Marxists with. It comes as no surprise that such
a capitalist class would take the chances and opportunities offered by slavery, particularly
driven by competition from other great powers. After all, the expropriation of the English
peasantry itself was largely the result of innumerable acts of violence. Therefore, accusing
Political Marxism of treating the English slave trade as yet another ad hoc internationalist
addendum to a methodologically internalist theory of capitalist development in one country is
overegging the theoretical pudding. It is something that can be explained historically rather
than theoretically. Political Marxism does not need to view the capital relation as some idealtype abstraction leading to a history of capitalism from which all other forms of social
relations must be expunged. The point is that the capital relation, where appropriators and
producers are market dependant, and labour is a commodity, led during its emergence from
the fifteenth century to fundamentally different patterns of economic and demographic
growth in contrast to elsewhere. These patterns were self-sustaining and, in contrast to noncapitalist patterns, generated growth in labour productivity even while population rose.
Without the super-profits of slavery, the history of capitalism and industrial development may
have taken a different course. But given that the symbiotic development of agrarian and
industrial capitalism had already taken great strides by the 1620s, when Virginia and
Bermuda were only just emerging, and that the social structure of England had been
irreversibly transformed by then, it is difficult to see how the force of this structure could
have been restrained or choked off so easily.
Unlike some recent histories of capitalism produced by standard forms of Marxism,
there are ways in which the authors thesis on Uneven and Combined Development connect
with Political Marxism. It has always been of interest why England, the first country to
develop and sustain capitalism through to the industrial revolution, had a relatively backward
economy at the outset of and during the emergence of agrarian capitalism. It is also relevant
to note that the diversification of Englands industrial economy in the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, which was a symptom and a cause of the emerging structures of
demand, was to some extent dependent upon the superior skills possessed by continental
artisans. These were either invited to England by the Crown or fled there as Protestant
refugees from the Counter-Reformation in France or during the Dutch Rebellion against the
Spanish Empire. The Crown awarded them patents in order to renew, develop and improve
industries in England that had previously been only of local significance. The authors thesis
may have important things to say about these issues. Uneven and Combined Development
also gets around the standard orthodox Marxist idea of a linear development of the productive
forces leading to capitalism via an urban division of labour which then transforms the
countryside. In fact, the authors argument, inadvertently or not, sets itself against such
accounts which allocate the leading role in the transition from feudalism to capitalism to
revolutionary classes. In those accounts the latter are drawn from subordinate groups, and
developed and driven by changes in the productive forces. So rather than going beyond
Political Marxism, the authors could fruitfully work with it. It seems to me, however, that the
authors desire to combat Eurocentrism, and at the same time to retain an orthodox Marxist,
productive forces, perspective, obliges them to overreach their method cum theory far beyond

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the controls of the historical evidence; for example, by granting the origin of capitalism to the
Mongols and Ottomans.
It also seems to me curious that, given the association of slavery and other atrocities
with the making of capitalism, countries in the East would be queuing up claiming to have
made a contribution to it. In this sense the crime of Eurocentrists is to unfairly claim
capitalism solely for themselves. I can only explain this by reference to the standard Marxist,
and often Political Marxist, assumption that capitalism is a progressive form of society, and
thereby the sine qua non for the development of a socialist society. So it follows that any
association with capitalist origins needs to be identified in order to be included in the
pantheon of contributors towards humanitys progress towards socialism. I reject this view,
first because it justifies the expropriation of peasants as progressive and therefore necessary.
And second, while certain aspects of life in capitalist society may appear to be enlightened
and democratic, capitalism cannot be seen as progressive per se, and in that sense it cannot
be equated per se with modernity. Any progressive aspects present in capitalist societies
stem from resistance to the dependency-creating, de-skilling logic of capitalism, and from
ideological, legal, political and physical resistance to capitalist excesses right from its
emergence. But this does not mean that such resistance will necessarily lead to the flowering
of a more enlightened, non-market classless society, although that is certainly possible. In
fact, the logic of Uneven and Combined Development suggests that it is in relatively
backward societies that the key to the future lies, perhaps as the knowledge of modern
production techniques combines with non-market and communal ideas, sensibilities, and
ways of living.