SUGGESTIONS AND DEBATES

Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution:

Reflections on the Brenner Debate and its Sequel

ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD

The "Brenner Debate" launched by Past and Present in 1976 was about
"agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial
Europe". Robert Brenner's recent book, Merchants and Revolution, has
opened a new front in the debate by introducing merchants and "com-
mercial change" into the equation.1 Although the book's massive Post-
script carefully situates Brenner's analysis of commercial development
in the context of his earlier account of the agrarian transition from
feudalism to capitalism, this is unlikely to foreclose debate about how,
or even whether, his more recent argument about the role of merchants
in the English revolution can be squared with the original.Brenner
thesis. What is at issue here is not just divergent interpretations of
historical evidence but larger differences about the nature of capitalism.
The following argument has more to do with the latter than with the
former, and it will be concerned with Brenner's work and the debates
surrounding it not just for their own sake but for what they reveal about
the dominant conceptions of capitalism, in Marxist and non-Marxist
histories alike.
One important reviewer of Brenner's recent book has already claimed
to discover a fundamental contradiction between his latest work and his
original thesis. This criticism goes straight to the heart of the issues I
want to explore. Perry Anderson has argued that there is a "deep
paradox" in Brenner's account of the English revolution, at odds with
his original theory of European economic development.2 While in his
earlier thesis, "it was the unique self-transformation of the English
landowners^ which ushered in the world of capital - and it alone", in

1
Brenner's original article was first published in Past and Present, 70 (February 1976).
Responses from M.M. Postan and John Hatcher, Patricia Croot and David Parker, Hcide
Wunder, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Guy Bois, R.H. Hilton, J.P. Cooper and Arnost
Klima followed in subsequent issues, with a comprehensive reply from Brenner at the
end. The whole debate was republished in T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds), The
Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial
Europe (Cambridge, 1985). The new book is Merchants and Revolution: Commercial
Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Cambridge and
Princeton, 1993).
2
Perry Anderson, "Maurice Thomson's War", London Review of Books, 4 November
1993, p. 17.

International Review of Social History 41 (1996), pp. 209-232.

210 Ellen Meiksins Wood
Merchants and Revolution the new merchants have "the catalytic role",
especially in converting "a Parliamentary revolt into an armed revolu-
tion". "Here, if ever," Anderson continues,
were revolutionary bourgeois. The species declared a fiction in France was bel
et bien a reality in England, a hundred years before the Convention. There is
a nice irony that it should be massive historical evidence, running against - not
with - a theoretical conviction which has brought a Marxist scholar to this
conclusion. The detractor of the significance of merchant capital in principle has
been the first to establish, in spell-binding detail, its role as a demi-urge in
practice.
My intention here is not simply to consider the validity of this claim
about Brenner's work but, more generally, to explore the widely shared
assumptions on which that claim is based and their implications for our
understanding of capitalism. I shall not pretend to contribute anything
of substance to the resolution of contentious empirical questions about
agrarian development in pre-industrial Europe or the role of various
classes in the English Civil War. But the claim that there is a "deep
paradox" in Brenner's work - that the role he now assigns to revolution-
ary merchants runs counter to his explanation of the transition to capital-
ism as a process rooted in agrarian relations - has less to do with
disagreements over matters of historical fact than with certain assump-
tions about "bourgeois revolution" and, indeed, about what defines
capitalism as a historically specific social form. The object here is to
bring into focus these larger issues rather than to adjudicate among the
various readings of historical evidence proposed in the Brenner Debate.

The "Brenner Debate"

First, a brief sketch of the Debate itself as it relates to the issues here
in question. Brenner's original article, "Agrarian Class Structure and
Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe", took aim at two
dominant models of historical explanation. The first was the increasingly
dominant demographic model according to which economic development
in post-medieval Europe followed long-term cycles in population
growth - what he called a secular Malthusianism. The second, a histori-
ographical orthodoxy against which the demographic model had at the
outset often defined itself, was the commercialization model, which
attributed the processes of European economic change to the growth of
markets and trade. The latter model - which, in one form or another,
has arguably appeared in every major explanation of the transition to
capitalism since the late eighteenth century - has been largely out of
favour in recent years; but it still exerts at least a subterranean influence,
not only on conventional wisdom but (as I shall suggest in what follows)
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 211
even on its scholarly critics, including the demographers who claim to
have displaced it.3
Brenner attacked the very foundations of both these competing
models. In particular, he emphasized their inability to account for the
fact that very different, indeed opposite, effects were produced in differ-
ent countries by the same factors - with consequences not only for
income distribution between classes but also for long-term economic
growth and the development of productive forces. These divergent effects
of apparently similar causes - similar demographic patterns in one model
and insertion in the same network of increasing trade in the other -
were enough to put in question the status of these causes as independent
variables and seriously weakened the explanatory force of the dominant
models. In their place, Brenner constructed a powerful alternative
explanation for the unprecedented process of self-sustaining economic
growth which established itself in early modern England. His explanation
focused on the varying configurations of social property relations which
determined the divergent effects, in different contexts, of other factors
(whose importance he did not dismiss) such as demographic cycles or
the expansion of trade. The critical factors for him were the different
patterns of relations between feudal lords and peasants which distin-
guished not only Eastern from Western Europe, but also England from
France, and so on. Only in England, he argued, did the dominant
property relations compel the principal economic actors, landlords and
peasants, to follow a distinctive and unprecedented course, the uninten-
ded consequence of which was capitalism - as landlords largely devoid
of extra-economic powers of exploitation, and peasants increasingly
dependent on the market for access to their means of self-reproduction,
found themselves relying on the proceeds of cost-effective and competi-
tive production, specialization, accumulation and innovation.
The ensuing debate drew in a wide range of distinguished historians
whose various oxen Brenner had gored. When the whole debate was
republished in a single volume, the result was described in the publisher's
blurb, with ample justification, as "one of the most important historical
debates of recent years". But while the debate generated much that was
profoundly illuminating - including a comprehensive reply by Brenner
to his critics, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism", which
recapitulated, clarified and expanded his argument decisively4 - there
remained something not quite satisfying about the proceedings. Brenner's
explanation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism must surely
rank as one of the most important and fruitful advances in modern

J
I have discussed the dominant models in Vie Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical
Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London, 1991), ch. 1, and Democracy Against
Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1995), especially ch. 5.
4
Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, pp. 213-327.
212 Ellen Meiksins Wood .
historical scholarship, with major theoretical as well as empirical implica-
tions. Yet despite a wide range of more or less interesting and sometimes
telling local disagreements registered by Brenner's critics, there remained
larger issues on which the participants in the debate seemed to be talking
at cross purposes.
Not the least of the problems was that the critics sometimes tended
to beg the question by simply reproducing the very assumptions that
Brenner was challenging. His argument was from the start predicated
on the historical specificity of capitalism and was directed against the
widespread inclination to take as given precisely those features of capital-
ism that require explanation. This had certainly been true of the commer-
cialization model, which assumes that trade and markets are by nature
tendentially capitalist, requiring only expansion and not qualitative trans-
formation. The pre-existence of capitalism is in effect invoked, in a
circular fashion, in order to explain its coming into being, without
acknowledging the specificity of its distinctive competitive pressures, its
systemic imperatives of profit-maximization, accumulation and improving
labour-productivity.
Nor was it clear that the underlying premises of the demographic
explanation were as far removed from the "commercialization model"
as its exponents claimed. While challenging the primacy of expanding
markets as a determinant in European economic development, they
continued to assume, as Brenner pointed out, that development occurred
"more or less automatically, in a direction economically determined by
the 'laws of supply and demand'". 5 Those laws might be determined in
more complicated ways than the commercialization model could account
for - not simply as a function of almost contingent developments in the
contraction and expansion of trade but in response to the complex
(natural?) cycles of population growth and decline or Malthusian
blockages; but the nature of the market and its "laws" was never put
in question, nor did the demographic model represent a challenge to -
or, for that matter, an explicit defence of - the prevailing convention
according to which the capitalist market is not so much qualititively
different from as quantitatively larger and more inclusive than markets
in non-capitalist societies.
Not all the implications of Brenner's thesis were plainly stated in the
Brenner Debate, although some of them have been elaborated else-
where.6 It was, however, clear that his argument, in contrast to those
of his critics, presupposed the specificity of the capitalist market and the
5
Ibid., p. 10.
6
The most important of these other works are Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist
Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism", New Left Review, 104 (July-August
1977), pp. 25-92; "The Social Basis of Economic Development", in John Roemer (ed.),
Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, 1985); and "Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to
Capitalism", in A.L. Beier et al. (eds). The First Modem Society (Cambridge, 1989).
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 213
necessity of explaining its very particular "laws", its historically unique
impetus to self-sustaining growth based on an equally unique systemic
compulsion constantly to improve the productivity of labour. This unique
historical drive was not simply a function of markets as they had always
been, or of some age-old law of supply and demand, but the product
of distinctive social property relations whose origins he sought to explain.
There were other ways too in which Brenner's critics, including both
demographic historians and some Marxists, argued against him from a
vantage point that took for granted the very features of capitalism that
demanded explanation. So, for example, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
in an argument that presupposed a separation of the "economic" and
the "political" which is specific to capitalism, attacked Brenner for
conflating economic and political factors by talking about "surplus-
extracting, or ruling, classes" as if they were one and the same. Similarly,
Guy Bois took exception to the "voluntarism" of Brenner's "political
Marxism" which, he maintained, neglected economic factors altogether.
The latter account of Brenner's argument seemed to be reinforced in
.the introduction to the volume by Rodney Hilton, who (with a diplomatic
and more or less coded note of dissent) presented the issue between
the two varieties of Marxism, represented respectively by Bois and
Brenner, as having to do with the relative weight given to forces as
distinct from relations of production, the "whole mode of production"
as distinct from just class conflict, economic as distinct from simply
political factors. Hilton, despite his own tremendous contribution to the
history of class struggle, seemed to be hinting that Brenner had leaned
too much in the "politicist" direction.
The criticisms levelled by Bois and Le Roy Ladurie were quite substan-
tially beside the point, for Brenner's whole argument was predicated on
the important observation, proposed originally by Marx, that pre-
capitalist societies were characterized by "extra-economic" forms of
surplus extraction, carried out by means of political, juridical and military
power, or what Brenner now calls "politically constituted property". In
such cases, direct producers - notably peasants, who remained in posses-
sion of the means of production - were compelled by the superior force
of their overlords to give up some of their surplus labour in the form
of rent or tax. This is in sharp contrast to capitalism, where surplus
extraction is purely "economic", achieved through the medium of com-
modity exchange, as propertyless workers, responding to purely "eco-
nomic" coercions, sell their labour-power for a wage in order to gain
access to the means of production. Following this insight to its logical
conclusion, Brenner was not, as Le Roy Ladurie complained, simp-
listically assimilating economic and political factors, nor, as Bois main-
tained, "privileging" political as against "economic" factors in his
explanation of the transition from feudalism, but rather exploring the
consequences of the fusion of the "economic" and the "political", the
214 Ellen Meiksins Wood
unity of "surplus-extracting" and "ruling" classes, which was, precisely,
a constitutive feature of the feudal mode of production.
Nor was it a matter of neglecting the technical forces of production.
Brenner was simply building on the fundamental difference between the
capitalist mode of appropriation, which depends on improving labour-
productivity - and hence encourages the improvement of productive
forces - and pre-capitalist modes of appropriation which are not driven
by the same requirement to improve the productivity of labour. The
principal question, then, was how old forms of "politically constituted
property" were replaced in England by a purely "economic" form, and
how this set in train a distinctive pattern of self-sustaining economic
growth.
If Brenner's critics had failed to engage these larger issues, they
nevertheless compelled him to elaborate his argument. One result was
a profoundly innovative discussion of what he called "political accumula-
tion", the process by which various - and especially English and French -
feudal lords responded to the "crisis" of feudalism not by encouraging
the development of productive forces (which would have presupposed a
capitalist logic) but by enhancing their coercive powers of appropriation,
especially by means of state-centralization. Among the most fruitful
outcomes of this exploration was a comparative account of state-
formation in England and France and the very different patterns of
relations between landlords, peasants and the monarchical state associ-
ated with their respective processes of feudal centralization.
Brenner also explained much more clearly than he had before how
the specific disposition of agrarian relations in England gave rise to a
distinctive pattern of economic growth. He made it clear that the issue
was not simply the size of holdings which permitted English lords to
benefit from increasing productivity when their extra-economic powers
failed them, but rather the specific conditions of English tew<wf-farmers
which subjected them to the imperatives of market competition. Not
only did they sell their products in the market like other commercial
farmers, but their very access to land was mediated by a market in
leases which compelled them to produce competitively, by means of
improvement and specialization, in order to pay economic rents. (It
should probably be added here that the importance of such "economic"
forms of tenure cannot be judged simply on the basis of how many
farmers actually held their land on such terms. The point is that,
whatever their numbers, once their more productive agriculture estab-
lished the conditions of survival and success, it could impose its logic
on land held in different ways, and on farmers whose tenure may have
been more unconditionally secure but who might nevertheless bring their
goods to the same market.) At the same time, the distinctive position
of English landlords, the relative weakness of their access to "extra-
economic" means of exploitation by direct coercion, had implications
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 215
too. While in other conditions landlords might obtain the best returns
simply by squeezing their tenants, English landlords were increasingly
dependent on the capitalist profits of their tenants, and hence less on
enhancing their own powers of appropriation than on encouraging more
competitive production.
One final point probably needs to be clarified about the implications
of the Brenner thesis. One line of argument that might be pursued against
it has to do with the claims it makes for the distinctive productivity of
English agriculture in the era of "agrarian capitalism". If Brenner is
correct about the specific logic of English property relations and their
effects in compelling farmers to produce cost-effectively, to specialize,
accumulate and innovate, it ought to be clear that English agriculture
was significantly more productive than others. Yet some historians have
argued, for example, that the "productivity" of French agriculture in,
say, the eighteenth century, at the height of English "agrarian capital-
ism", was roughly equivalent to that of the English.
Only the most basic misunderstanding of the issues, however, and the
most fundamental misconceptions about the specificity of capitalism, can
turn this into an argument against Brenner's assertions about English
agrarian capitalism. It turns out that what is at issue here is not productiv-
ity (output per unit of work) but total output. The critical point is that
in France a much larger number of people engaged in agricultural
production was required to yield an output similar to that generated by a
small agrarian population in England. In fact, the absence of agricultural
"improvement" is one of the most notable facts about French agriculture
at the time of English agrarian capitalism, as is the striking difference
between the attitudes of French and English landlords towards their
tenants.7 Nothing could illustrate more clearly the distinctiveness of
English property relations and their contribution to the evolution of
capitalism - not only in establishing a new dynamic of self-sustaining
economic growth but in creating the agricultural surplus, labour force
and market that laid a foundation for industrialization. Far from
challenging the specificity of English agrarian capitalism, then, the "pro-
ductivity" of French agriculture only serves to confirm it.

Merchants and Revolution

The scene of the original Brenner thesis was the English countryside.
Inevitably, questions were to arise about the role he would assign to
7
On the lack of "improvement" in French agriculture in the seventeenth century and
throughout much of the eighteenth, see Hugues Neveux, Jean Jacquart and Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie, L'age classique des paysans, 1340-1789 (Paris, 1975), especially pp. 214-
215. On the failure of French landlords to regard their tenants as entrepreneurs or
improvers, see Robert Forster, "Obstacles to Agricultural Growth in Eighteenth-Century
France", American Historical Review, 75 (1970), especially p. 1610.
216 Ellen Meiksins Wood
cities, trade and merchant classes, more conventionally associated with
the rise of capitalism. This is the background against which to read
Merchants and Revolution. It is a very different kind of work than any
of his others, a massive and detailed study, in large part prosopographical
and supported by the kind of archival evidence and empirical specificity
that would satisfy even the most exacting professional historian. Instead
of ranging widely across centuries and geographic boundaries in the
manner of the Brenner Debate, this book stays closer to the kind of
temporal and spatial parameters more palatable to the profession, espe-
cially in these "revisionist" days. Its command of detail and its erudition
are impressive, and it is clearly the product of many years of painstaking
research. These qualities will no doubt compel historians of the period
to take his work very seriously; so it is to be hoped that they, and
other readers, will also be compelled to reflect on the larger project of
which it forms a part. Perhaps they will feel obliged to consider its
implications for the kinds of long-term historical processes that have
become unfashionable to think about, at a time when "grand narratives"
are out and contingency, fragmentation and very local, particularistic
and proximate causes are in (if causality is admitted at all).
Brenner's book is too rich in detail and nuance to summarize except
in the broadest terms. The argument has fundamentally to do with the
economic and social changes that transformed the English merchant
classes, specifically in London, first displacing the Tudor Merchant
Adventurers in favour of the great monopolistic trading companies which
dominated the Levant-East India trade, and then giving rise to a new
social group, the "new merchants" who flourished in the growing colonial
trade and the new commercial order connected especially with the
plantation economy (together with "interloping" merchants in the East
India trade). This new social formation, which came to fruition in the
1640s, was to play an important part in the Civil War as a crucial link
in the parliamentary alliance which joined aristocratic oppositionists at
one extreme with London radicals at the other; and, after Cromweirs
victory, the new merchants played a dominant role in the formation of
the Commonwealth's commercial policy, in sharp opposition to the old
company merchants on whom the Crown decisively depended.
The new merchants, together with an important group of colonizing
aristocrats increasingly detached from the old alliance between landlords
and company merchants, formed an important base for the relatively
radical but anti-democratic republicanism (given explicit expression, for
example, by Ireton in the Putney Debates) which formed an increasingly
uneasy alliance with popular forces. The very alliance that brought the
Commonwealth to power drove away the bulk of the parliamentary
classes, while the undemocratic republicanism of the Commonwealth
leadership was bound to come into conflict with the popular radicalism
of its supporters among artisans and small tradesmen, especially in
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 217
London, and among the army rank and file. The Commonwealth leaders
consolidated their power by destroying their most radical allies, compel-
ling the regime to rely that much more heavily on those elements in
the alliance with whom they had most in common ideologically, notably
the new merchants. But this political formation, resting on a narrow
social base, could not survive its irreducible contradictions, what Brenner
calls a disjunction between political and social power.
It was no doubt inevitable that this unstable regime would end as the
leadership of the Commonwealth was forced to choose between conces-
sions to popular radicalism in order to secure its social base and an
"institutional and constitutional conservatism'* which would win greater
support from the parliamentary classes, a choice that ended in a repudi-
ation of the radical alliance by Cromwell and his officers. But if the
new merchants lost something of their political prominence in the new
dispensation, the alliance between them and the landed aristocracy would
be strengthened as the aristocracy became-ever more firmly rooted in
agricultural capitalism and commercial expansionism. When the project
of the parliamentary capitalist aristocracy which had come on to the
agenda in 1640-1641 was realized in 1688 and its sequels, so too, argues
Brenner, was "the project of 1649-1653 of its leading allies outside
the landed classes, the American colonial and East Indian-interloping
leadership" (p. 716). An increasingly capitalist aristocracy became even
more intertwined with expansionist commercial interests, as well as with
a dynamic manufacturing sector.
The lengthy Postscript to Merchants and Revolution - a small book
in itself - situates the story of the London merchants in the larger context
of Brenner's original thesis about England's long-term development and
specifically in relation to debates on the Civil War. Like the original
Brenner Debate, it begins by canvassing two major currents of interpreta-
tion, this time the traditional social interpretation - including both
Marxist and non-Marxist variants, represented respectively by such distin-
guished historians as Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone - and the
"revisionist" tendency (Conrad Russell, John Morrill, et al.).*
The first depicts a declining traditional aristocracy in crisis, unable to
benefit from new economic opportunities and turning to the Crown for
support, pitted against a rising "bourgeoisie", including not only mer-
chants but a thrusting yeomanry and gentry, poised to take advantage of
a new economic order. Like the "commercialization model" of economic

See George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist
Challenge (London, 1987), for an earlier, analogous treatment of the French Revolution
and the debate between the old "social interpretation" and the "revisionist challenge".
Like Brenner's Postscript, Comninel's Conclusion also sketches an alternative historical-
materialist "social interpretation" of the Revolution, not based on the model of a direct
confrontation between a feudal aristocracy and a capitalist bourgeoisie. This account of
the French Revolution is to be elaborated in a future volume.
218 Ellen Meiksins Wood
change, this interpretation depends on assuming a "bourgeois [i.e. capit-
alist] society" existing in embryo within a largely inert feudal society
and struggling to be released from its bondage; but, Brenner argues
(without, perhaps, doing justice to the important modifications intro-
duced in recent years by other Marxist historians, especially Christopher
Hill and Brian Manning), this model has foundered on its inability to
demonstrate that there actually existed the kind of opposition between
feudal and capitalist classes on which it depends, or that the division
between royalists and parliamentarians corresponded to a social division
between classes or even within the landed class. The English aristocracy,
extraordinarily homogeneous in the seventeenth century, was itself
increasingly involved in agrarian capitalism (depending not on "extra-
economic" appropriation but on economic rents from capitalist tenants
subject to competitive pressures) and largely united in its opposition to
any absolutist programme. By contrast, the mercantile elite, benefiting
from privileges and monopolies conferred by the Crown, were among
the king's staunchest supporters.
But if "revisionism" has flourished at the expense of the traditional
social interpretation, its own conception of politics in seventeenth-century
England as little more than a disconnected series of very local clashes
among particular groups and factions, within a larger context of national
consensus, is unable, Brenner convincingly argues, to account for certain
consistent patterns of political conflict over similar constitutional and
religious issues, repeated from before the Civil War to 1688 and beyond.
His challenge to the dominant revisionisms should provoke yet another
major debate and may even bring about yet another "paradigm shift".
The revisionists, he suggests, have relinquished the advantage possessed
by the old social interpretation, which recognized the necessity of
accounting for the repeated patterns of conflict in seventeenth-century
England by looking for their social-structural roots. Only an alternative
social interpretation can fill the explanatory gap.
Again, Brenner offers an alternative, building on his earlier accounts
of England's long-term economic and political development, its specifi-
cities and differences, especially in contrast to France. The demilitarized
ruling class of England was, even by European standards, unusually
devoid of "extra-economic" powers or "politically constituted property"
and increasingly reliant on purely "economic" modes of appropriation.
This meant both that it had no use for an absolutist state like the
French, which served a section of the aristocracy as a form of property,
and also that the English state was a uniquely centralized and unitary
formation, formed by aristocracy and monarchy together in an unusually
cooperative process, a state unchallenged by competing aristocratic juris-
dictions but serving the aristocracy as an instrument of order. Yet if
the English aristocracy provided no social base for absolutism, it also,
and for the same reasons, lacked the means to withstand any absolutist
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 219
project by the Crown without forging alliances with other forces and
accepting a dangerous degree of popular mobilization - as occurred in
the 1640s and again during the exclusion crisis of 1679-1681. The particu-
lar nature of the English state and social property relations created, to
put it simply, a structural disposition to political alliances which acquired
a momentum of their own.
Brenner shows how, in the pre-Civil War period, the logic of such
alliances pushed the growing conflicts over taxation (especially of
commerce), religion and foreign policy beyond the limits of any social
divisions within the ruling class - such as those between the bulk of the
propertied classes which had no use for absolutism and the relatively
small group that did, notably the old merchant elite. It is not difficult
to explain the emergence of a powerful Parliamentary opposition once
it became clear that the king could not be deflected from his apparently
absolutist project; and why, until the middle of 1641, Parliament was
almost entirely united in its opposition not to monarchy as such but to
any absolutist programme. What requires explanation is the very exis-
tence of a significant Royalist party under those circumstances. The
irony is that, with a ruling class largely united in its anti-absolutist
interests, the base of support for the Crown would not have sufficed to
create a substantial Royalist alliance if the revolutionary threat unleashed
by popular agitation and Parliamentary mobilization of popular forces
had not driven many propertied Parliamentarians back into the arms of
the king. Here Brenner has more in common than he explicitly concedes
with the social interpretation of other Marxist historians like Christopher
Hill and Brian Manning, who have shown how popular mobilization
itself became a major source of conflict, creating a Royalist party -
and ultimately the Restoration - as the threat from below temporarily
overshadowed the threat from above.9 At any rate, the political project
of the Parliamentary artistocracy was thus left unfinished, to be more
or less completed in the settlement of 1688-89.

4
* Deep paradox"? Bourgeois revolution vs. transition to capitalism
In his Postscript, Brenner unequivocally situates his account of London
merchants in the context of his earlier thesis about the transformation
of social property relations in the English countryside and its role in
the transition to capitalism. The scene may have shifted in Merchants
and Revolution, but there is, on the face of it, nothing in his historical
account of London merchants that contradicts the original thesis about
the development of English agrarian capitalism. There is no warrant

9
See, for example, Brian Manning, Vie English People and the English Revolution
(London, 1991, 2nd ed.), especially chs 1 and 3; and Christopher Hill, Vie Century of
Revolution (New York, 1961), pp. 121 and 124-125.
220 Ellen Meiksins Wood
here for any reinstatement of the old division of capitalist bourgeoisie
and feudal aristocracy, nor is commerce depicted as the solvent of
feudalism. It was not the expansion of trade as such, not the mere
existence nor even the size of markets, but the transformation of social
property relations - particularly on the land - that fuelled the transition
to capitalism by subjecting producers to market imperatives, thereby
completely transforming the logic of commerce and the structural role
of markets.
If a "new merchant" class played a prominent role, or even existed,
it was because agrarian capitalism had opened the way not just for a
quantitative increase in trade but for a qualitatively new kind of com-
merce. This was in turn sustained by an alliance with agrarian capitalism,
an alliance between classes united in their economic and political interests
against absolutism and in favour of economic expansionism. Nor does
Brenner's argument - which stresses the symbiosis of agrarian capitalism
and the new commerce, together with a dynamic manufacturing interest -
lend support to the view that British capitalism's agrarian origins held
back its development to a full maturity. It was, if anything, the old
merchant class that represented the ancien regime, not least in its role
as pillar of of the royalist alliance; while the landed interest impelled
commerce toward capitalism.
Why, then, might a sophisticated reader remain convinced that, for
all his disclaimers, Brenner has shifted his ground and embroiled himself
in a "deep paradox"? Here, again, we come up against the question-
begging assumptions which plagued the original debate, the tendency to
argue from the very premises Brenner is challenging.
In the original debate, Brenner's principal objective was to find an
explanation for the rise of capitalism which did not assume the very
thing that needed to be explained. Although he certainly did not deny
that cities, trade and markets which had evolved throughout Europe
were a pre-condition for the development of English capitalism, neither
did he assume that cities and markets were by nature or even tendentially
capitalist, or that capitalism existed in embryo within the interstices of
feudalism, in the shape of trade and burgher classes, just waiting for
the fetters of feudalism to be broken. Instead, he sought a moving force
within the dominant relations of feudalism itself, in the relations between
lords and peasants.
The consequences of this argument for all variants of the commercializ-
ation model of economic development, and even for demographic
explanations which ultimately still rely on some transhistorical principles
of supply and demand, are ^obvious. But Brenner's thesis had no less
far-reaching implications for conventional Marxist explanations. Among
other things, it threw down a powerful challenge, at least by implication,
to the conventional Marxist idea of "bourgeois revolution". This idea
shared many assumptions of the commercialization model even when
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 221
the bourgeois revolution was situated in the context of English agrarian
capitalism, with a forward-looking yeomanry or gentry to supplement
the old revolutionary bourgeoisie. This was a challenge already hinted
at in Brenner's criticisms of "neo-Smithian" Marxism in his earlier
writings. Later, he made it even more explicit.
The traditional conception of bourgeois revolution, he argued, belongs
to a phase of Marx's work still heavily dependent upon the mechanical
materialism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and contrasts
sharply with his mature critique of political economy.10 The earlier theory
of history simply begs the central question: productive forces develop
almost naturally via the division of labour which evolves in response to
expanding markets, so that the pre-existence of capitalism is invoked in
order to explain its coming into being. The traditional conception of
bourgeois revolution as an account of the transition to capitalism is, then,
self-contradictory and self-defeating, because on its own assumptions,
it renders revolution unnecessary in a double sense. First, there really is no
transition to accomplish: since the model starts with bourgeois society in the
towns, foresees its evolution taking place via bourgeois mechanisms, and has
feudalism transcend itself in consequence of its exposure to trade, the problem
of how one type of society is transformed into another is simply assumed away
and never posed. Second, since bourgeois society self-develops and dissolves
feudalism, the bourgeois revolution can hardly claim a necessary role."
Having argued that the "bourgeois revolution" was a question-begging
formula which, like the old commercialization model, assumed the very
thing that needed to be explained by attributing to the bourgeoisie a
capitalist rationality that needed only to be released from the bonds of
feudalism, Brenner opened the way for a thorough reassessment of the
bourgeoisie and its role in the rise of capitalism. This is the background
to his account of London merchants, and especially the Postscript. The
charge that he has undermined his own original thesis simply replicates
the circular and question-begging logic which that thesis was designed
to correct.
The point is nowhere better illustrated than in Perry Anderson's "deep
paradox". The issue here is the importance Brenner attaches to the role
of the new merchants in the Civil War. For Anderson, they constitute
a revolutionary bourgeoisie of a kind that played no part in Brenner's
original account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The new
account also places towns and trade at centre stage, Anderson suggests,
while the original story took place in the countryside. Anderson here

10
Again, a similar argument had been made before by Comninel in Rethinking the
French Revolution, which also elaborated the differences between Marx's earlier debt to
Enlightenment materialism and liberal historiography and his later critique of political
economy.
11
Brenner, "Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism", p. 280.
222 Ellen Meiksins Wood
invokes what amounts to his own version of the commercialization
model. "The idea of capitalism in one country, taken literally," he
writes,
is only a bit more plausible than that of socialism. For Marx the different
moments of the modern biography of capital were distributed in cumulative
sequence, from the Italian cities to the towns of Flanders and Holland, to the
empires of Portugal or Spain and the ports of France, before being "systematic-
ally combined in England at the end of the 17th century." Historically, it makes
better sense to view the emergence of capitalism as a value-added process
gaining in complexity as it moved along a chain of inter-related sites. In this
story, the role of cities was always central. English landowners could never have
started their conversion to commercial agriculture without the market for wool
in Flemish towns - just as Dutch farming was by Stuart times in advance of
English, not least because it was conjoined to a richer urban society.12
It should probably be noted here that Marx, in the passage cited by
Anderson, is explaining not the origins of capitalism but the "genesis
of the industrial capitalist", not the emergence of specifically capitalist
"laws of motion", or specifically capitalist social relations, or the impera-
tives of self-sustaining growth, but the accumulation of wealth which,
only in the right, already capitalist, social conditions (i.e. in England)
was to be converted from simply the unproductive profits of usury and
commerce into industrial capital. As for the origins of the capitalist
system, the "so-called primitive accumulation" which gave rise to spe-
cifically capitalist social property relations and the specific dynamic associ-
ated with them, Marx situates it firmly in England and in the countryside.
It is here too that the conditions emerged for the unprecedented kind
of internal market that Marx regarded as the sine qua non of industrial
capitalism.13 Like Brenner, Marx acknowledges the need to explain the
distinctiveness of England's development. Not the least of England's
specificities, as Brenner points out, is that while other centres of produc-
tion even in the medieval period had experienced export booms, early
modern England was unique in maintaining industrial growth even in
the context of declining overseas markets:14 in other words, albeit within
a network of international trade, capitalism indeed in one country.
Lest, however, we get distracted by speculations about Marx's views
on the relation between agrarian and industrial capitalism (or about the
questions he left unanswered and, indeed, the inconsistencies he left
unresolved), let us simply note that Anderson's observations here pre-
cisely beg the question. It is one thing to say, for example, that English
commercial agriculture presupposed the Flemish market for wool. It is
quite another to explain how "commercial agriculture" became capitalist

12
Anderson, "Maurice Thomson's War", p. 17.
13
See, for example, Marx, Capital, I (Moscow, n.d.), pp. 699-701.
14
Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development", pp. 76-77.
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 223
agriculture, how the possibility of trade became not only the actuality
but the necessity of competitive production, how market opportunities
became market imperatives^ how this specific kind of agriculture set in
train the development of a capitalist system.15 Brenner's argument at
the very least makes it necessary to demonstrate - not merely to assume -
that commerce and capitalism are one and the same, or that one passed
into the other by a simple process of growth. Failing that, Anderson is
assuming the very thing that needs to be demonstrated, namely that
commerce, or indeed production for the market (a widespread practice
throughout much of recorded history), became capitalism by means of
sheer expansion, which at some point achieved a critical mass. His
argument suffers from the very circularity that Brenner has so effectively
challenged.
Whether or not Anderson has given an accurate account of the role
assigned by Brenner to the new merchants in the Civil War, there is no
evidence in the Postscript that Brenner is ready to make the concession
Anderson ascribes to him. But more fundamentally, Anderson's argu-
ment, reproducing the question-begging assumptions of the old commer-
cialization model, seriously mistakes the issues in the debates surrounding
the concept of bourgeois revolution. Two principal issues are raised by
the "bourgeois revolution": the first has to do with how, or whether, a
revolution was necessary to the emergence of capitalism, or, at least, to
"smooth its path", as Anderson puts it. This question has a corollary:
if revolution was a necessary or inevitable moment in the development
of capitalism, was it cause or effect? The second major question concerns
the relation between "bourgeois" and "capitalist".
Brenner has certainly argued that the specific development of English
social property relations was bound to produce serious conflict between
a growing capitalist aristocracy and a non-capitalist monarchy. At the
same time, as we have seen, he has demonstrated that the traditional
conception of bourgeois revolution as an account of the transition to
capitalism is circular and self-defeating. It cannot explain the emergence

15
The Dutch example, incidentally, while it continues to be perhaps the most perplexing
one for historians of the transition, does not make quite the point Anderson wants it to
make. It does indeed provide an example of an advanced agriculture and thriving interna-
tional trade, "conjoined to a richer urban society"; but it has been argued that the
very characteristics which the commercialization model treats as the motors of economic
development - flourishing cities and international trade - proved in the Dutch case to be
major factors in blocking further development. (See, for example, Jan de Vries, The
Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500-1700 (New Haven, 1974).) According to
this argument, the Republic's powerful cities, which certainly promoted its early develop-
ment, eventually strangled Dutch productivity by imposing upon it a rentier-type parasitism
which acted as a drain on its flourishing agriculture. At the same time, dependence on
the traditional international trading system subjected the Republic to a European economic
crisis in the seventeenth century to which England alone remained immune - not least
because of England's internal market and its "capitalism in one country".
224 Ellen Meiksins Wood
of a social form whose pre-existence it must assume. Nevertheless, if
capitalism pre-exists the revolution, it still remains possible for revolution
to be an effect of capitalist relations and, of course, a factor in the
further economic and political development of capitalist society - as,
indeed, it seems to be in Brenner's own account of the English revolution
as the product of capitalist developments in agrarian social property
relations. (It would, however, presumablyiollow that in later capitalisms,
whose development was conditioned by the competitive pressures of an
already existing capitalist system elsewhere, revolutions would play a
rather different role; but that question is far beyond the scope of this
essay.16) The critical difference between Brenner's agrarian model and
the traditional "bourgeois" and commercialization models is that his
actually explains what the other merely assumes.
While in the traditional model, an already present capitalist society
simply grows to maturity, in Brenner's model, "one type of society is
transformed into another". The point is not that city is replaced by
countryside in his analysis, nor that trade and commerce play only a
marginal role, but rather that Brenner acknowledges the specificity of
capitalism and its distinctive "laws of motion". This also means acknow-
ledging the necessity of explaining how trade and commerce (not to
mention cities), which have existed throughout recorded history, became
something other than they had always been.
It goes without saying that the existence of cities and traditional forms
of trade throughout Europe (and elsewhere) was a necessary condition
for England's specific pattern of development; but to say this is, again,
far from explaining how they acquired a distinctively capitalist dynamic.
Brenner has yet to explain the role of cities and the urban economy in
European economic development; but, by giving an account of how the
market acquired a qualitatively new role in agrarian production relations,
in a situation where the principal economic actors, appropriators and
producers, became market-dependent in unprecedented ways, he has
established the context in which the systemic role of towns and trade
was transformed. And once the specific dynamic of the capitalist market
is clear, it is possible to consider how its new competitive pressures
imposed themselves on the rest of Europe and the world.
This brings us to the second question raised by the concept of "bour-
geois revolution", the one most fundamentally at issue here: the relation
between "bourgeois" and "capitalist". It is not clear who, according to
Anderson, has declared the revolutionary bourgeois in France a "fic-
tion" - though it cannot be Brenner. There are even "revisionist"
historians of the French Revolution who allow the bourgeoisie a

16
In Pristine Culture, I make some suggestions about other patterns of capitalist develop*
ment, in which, for example, pre-capitalist state forms served to advance capitalist develop-
ment once they were subjected to the competitive pressures of English capitalism.
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 225
"revolutionary" role, however much they may question the role of the
Revolution in bringing about a major social transformation (as distinct
from a political coup) from something like feudalism to capitalism, or
however much they may deny that there was any fundamental social
division between aristocracy and bourgeoisie. We may be utterly con-
vinced that the Revolution was undoubtedly "bourgeois", indeed much
more so than the English, without coming a flea-hop closer to determin-
ing whether it was also capitalbt." As long as we accept that there is
no necessary identification of "bourgeois" (or burgher or city) with
"capitalist", the "revolutionary bourgeois" can be far from being a
fiction, even - or especially - in France, where the model revolutionary
bourgeois was not a capitalist or even an old-fashioned merchant but a
lawyer or office-holder. At the same time, if the "revolutionary bour-
geois" in England was inextricably linked with capitalism, it is precisely
because the very nature of trade and commerce had already been
transformed by the development of capitalist social property relations
in the English countryside.18

Continuing the "transition debate"

The original conception of "bourgeois revolution" has been modified
and refined by Marxists in various ways, making it less dependent on
the class opposition between feudal aristocracy and capitalist bourgeoisie
and in some respects detaching it from the commercialization model.
For some Marxist historians, it has become little more than a conven-
tional shorthand for summing up the processes by which revolutions of
various types since the seventeenth century have removed obstacles to
capitalist development. One might object that even to identify "bour-
geois" with "capitalist", as this formula continues to do, is again to
reproduce the assumptions of the commercialization model; or that to
speak of obstacles and their removal is still to take for granted the
self-development of capitalism, without explaining its coming into being.
None the less, in these usages, the "bourgeois revolution" has gone
some distance beyond the commercialization model and its Marxist
variants. If anything, those varieties of Marxism that place burghers and
towns in the vanguard of history have long been displaced by Marxist
explanations of the transition from feudalism to capitalism that situate
its principal dynamic in the countryside.
Brenner was certainly not the first Marxist to seek the "prime mover"
of the transition in agrarian class relations. There already existed a

17
For a treatment of the French "bourgeois revolution" as non-capitalist, see Comninel,
Rethinking the French Revolution, especially the Conclusion.
" I discuss some of the ways in which English trade differed from the traditional commer-
cial system in Pristine Culture, ch. 6.
226 Ellen Meiksins Wood
strong tradition of Marxist historiography, rooted in Marx himself but
inspired especially by the work of Maurice Dobb, that opposed Marxist
versions of the commercialization model in just this way, arguing that
cities and trade were not in themselves inimical to feudalism.19 In the
"Transition Debate", Dobb and others insisted that the "prime mover"
in the transition was to be found in the relations between lords and
peasants. Hilton in particular spelled out the ways in which money,
trade, towns and even the so-called "commercial revolution" belonged
integrally to the feudal system. They certainly contributed in complex
ways to the transition, but they were not antithetical or inimical to
feudalism and could not be regarded as its principal solvents.
Both Dobb and Hilton suggested that the class struggle between lords
and peasants contributed to the dissolution of feudalism and the rise of
capitalism by liberating petty commodity production from the fetters of
feudalism. Dobb, for example, argued that, while class struggle did not,
"in any simple and direct way", give rise to capitalism, it did serve to
"modify the dependence of the petty mode of production upon feudal
overlordship and eventually to shake loose the small producer from
feudal exploitation. It is then from the petty mode of production (in
the degree to which it secures independence of action, and social differen-
tiation in turn develops within it) that capitalism is born."20 Similarly,
Hilton suggested that the pressures imposed by lords on peasants to
transfer surplus labour generated the improvement of production tech-
niques and the growth of simple commodity production, while peasant
resistance to those pressures was crucially important to the process of
transition to capitalism, "the freeing of peasant and artisan economies
for the development of commodity production and eventually the emer-
gence of the capitalist entrepreneur".21
These arguments are clearly different from the old commercialization
model. What, then, of their relationship to the Brenner thesis? Here,
we can turn to a review of Merchants and Revolution by Brian Manning,
which criticizes Brenner from the explicit vantage point of Dobb's
thesis.22
19
The most important starting-point in this tradition was Maurice Dobb's Studies in the
Development of Capitalism (London, 1946, reprinted in 1963 and 1972). Paul Sweezy's
criticism of this work in 1950 sparked a major debate among Marxists (now often called
the "Transition Debate") on the issue of the "prime mover" in the pages of Science and
Society, later republished, with additional materials, in R.H. Hilton (ed.), The Transition
from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1976), which forms the (largely silent) background
to the Brenner debate. Among the central issues in the "Transition Debate" were the
role of money rents, trade, markets and cities in feudalism and the relation between town
and country.
20
Hilton, Transition, p. 59.
21
Ibid., p. 27.
22
Brian Manning, "The English Revolution and the Transition from Feudalism to Capital*
ism", International Socialism, 63 (Summer 1994).
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 227
Manning too raises the obvious question about the connection between
this book and Brenner's general interpretation of the transition from
feudalism to capitalism. His principal objections, however, have more
to do with the flaws in the original thesis itself than with any contradic-
tions between that thesis and the recent book - though his conclusion
is that Brenner's account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism
makes him finally incapable of accounting for the English "bourgeois
revolution". "Two points of debate are central", he argues: "who were
the agents of transition and how far had the transition proceeded by
1640?"23 Attributing to Brenner the view that the principal agents were
capitalist aristocrats, Manning contrasts this view to Dobb's contention
that "capitalism in its revolutionary form developed from the ranks of
the small producers".24
The relevant process is the differentiation of the peasantry in medieval
England which created two distinct strata, a poorer peasantry and "rela-
tively well-to-do peasant farmers" able to "take advantage of new eco-
nomic opportunities, to lease larger holdings and to employ wage labour.
The critical point of transition for Dobb, Manning points out, occurred
when the small producer became prosperous enough to rely-more on
the work of hired labourers than on his own and that of his own family.
A capitalist class was born "from the ranks of production itself".25
"There is a conflict", Manning continues, "between the idea of capitalism
developing from below in Dobb's account and the idea of capitalism
developing from above in Brenner's account. But there had to be the
developments such as Dobb described if there were to be the develop-
ments such as Brenner describes" - that is, there had to be richer
peasants who could function as capitalist producers before there could
be capitalist landlords.26 So, Manning argues, Brenner's focus on the
aristocracy as agents of the transition, at the expense of small agricultural
and industrial producers from whose ranks petty capitalists were rising,
makes him finally incapable of explaining the critical revolutionary role
of the "middling sort" in radical and popular movements.27

23
ibid., p. 81.
24
Ibid., p. 85.
25
Ibid., p. 82.
26
Ibid. Manning here cites Colin M o o e r s , The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism,
Revolution, and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany (London, 1991)
in support o f his views o n the yeomanry.
27
Brenner does n o t at all, as w e shall s e e , neglect the role o f small producers in the
development of capitalism. O n the contrary, h e seeks t o explain it. For the m o m e n t , it
is, however, worth noting a small irony in Manning's o w n account o f the transition. F e w
other historians have done as much t o illuminate popular radicalism in t h e English
Revolution as Brian Manning. Y e t , at least for the purposes o f his argument against
Brenner, h e seems t o reduce all revolutionary impulses among popular radicals t o a drive
towards capitalism and t o the aspirations o f rising capitalists, at the expense o f other,
more subversive and democratic motivations for challenging the existing order, indeed for
228 Ellen Meiksins Wood
If Brenner's thesis about the role of capitalist landlords can, according
to Manning, be partially rescued by acknowledging that petty capitalist
accumulation preceded and accompanied it, there still remain doubts
about how far capitalist development had already proceeded by the time
of the Revolution. Here the question turns for Manning on the extent
of wage labour: not just how many landholders - whether middling
farmers or landlords - had become capitalists but how many of the
poorer classes had been reduced to a proletariat. Since capitalism presup-
poses the existence of a proletariat, he maintains, the fact that the
degree of dependence on wage labour seems still to have been limited
argues against Brenner's contention that by 1640 the ruling class was
already largely capitalist, that is, dependent on rents appropriated from
capitalist tenants.
There are undoubtedly many important historical issues to be debated
here, as Manning points out - about the extent of economic leases in
seventeenth-century England, about the degree of proletarianization,
about the role of industrial development, and so on. And it is also worth
noting that Brenner, while giving a central role to popular mobilization in
bringing about a revolutionary confrontation by dividing a remarkably
united ruling class, is surprisingly silent about his debt to the ground-
breaking work of Brian Manning (and Christopher Hill) on this score.
But what is striking about Manning's account of the transition to capital-
ism is again the extent to which it begs the question, and, as a con-
sequence, the degree to which he and Brenner are talking at cross
purposes.
First, the question of agency: the crux of Manning's argument, follow-
ing Dobb, is that richer peasants (rising capitalists) had to exist before
landlords could profit from capitalist rents. The first point that comes
immediately to mind is that richer peasants have existed at many times
and in many places without becoming capitalists. It still remains to be
explained why richer peasants in England began to behave in ways
substantially different from any other prosperous peasants throughout
recorded history, why English yeomen were not like Russian kulaks, or
indeed like large tenant farmers in France at the same time. Brenner's
objective is precisely to explain what others have taken for granted.
The point for him is not that landlords pioneered capitalism while
yeomen played no role or simply followed suit. His argument has to do
with the specific logic of English property relations and class struggles,
in which the self-reproduction of both economic actors came to depend,
directly or indirectly, upon capitalist appropriation - specifically, the
maximization of exchange value via cost-cutting and improving produc-
tivity, by specialization, accumulation and innovation. The point is to

challenging property forms conducive to capitalist development. Brenner's explanation

serves admirably to account for both kinds of revolutionary forces.
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 229
explain how a fundamentally new economic logic was established, how
the main economic actors were obliged to follow new "rules for reproduc-
tion" completely different from those of any pre-capitalist society, the
consequence of which was to set in train an unprecedented process of
self-sustaining economic growth. The "rise of the yeoman" was certainly
critical to the development of capitalism, and "middling" capitalist
farmers are central to Brenner's story. But his object is to explain how
such people came to be capitalists at all.
This also helps to place in perspective Manning's other point about
how far the mode of production had changed by 1640. There are, of
course, empirical questions that can be debated, for instance about how
many tenant fanners were already paying economic rents (though simply
to contrast such rents to customary payments, as Manning does, will
not suffice to settle the question, since Brenner has made a substantial
case that many customary tenures had long since begun to function
effectively as economic leases28). For Manning, however, since "capital-
ism presupposes the existence of a proletariat", the critical question
seems to be how many commercial farmers were profiting from the
employment of wage labour, either directly, as in the case of capitalist
tenant-employers, or indirectly through the appropriation of rents from
such tenants: if England before 1640 was not yet a "predominantly
wage-earning society", he suggests, it cannot in any meaningful sense
be called capitalist. The process of expropriation that produced a mass
proletariat is the "prelude to the history of capitalism".29
How, then, is Brenner's argument affected by Manning's question
about the extent of wage labour? The problem here is not only an
empirical one. We may agree with Manning about his answer - that the
extent of wage labour was limited - while having doubts about his
question and the assumptions on which it is based. The process of
expropriation is certainly central to the story of capitalism, as Brenner
would be the first to insist. Nor would he disagree that England in the
seventeenth century was not a "predominantly wage-earning society".
But here too there is a begging of the question, and here again Brenner
sets out to explain what others have taken for granted. He does not
assume that a pre-existing division between rich and poor peasants (such
as has existed at other times and places) would inevitably lead to their
polarization into rich farmers and dispossessed labourers. As he points
out, for example, both England and France in the later fifteenth century
possessed a middle peasantry with relatively large holdings; yet from this
common starting-point, they diverged in substantially different historical
directions, the French towards increasing morcellization of peasant hold-
ings, the English towards the agrarian triad of landlord, capitalist tenant

28
Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, pp. 293-296.
29
Manning, "The English Revolution", p. 84.
230 Ellen Meiksins Wood
and wage labourer; the English towards agricultural improvement, the
French towards agricultural stagnation. Nor does he assume that the
English ruling class could, or even would if they could, simply expropriate
small farmers by brute force (how often has this been the preferred
strategy of pre-capitalist ruling classes with a capacity to extract surpluses
by coercive "extra-economic" means, while producers remain in posses-
sion of the means of production?).
So the differentiation of the English peasantry (the "rise of the
yeoman") which eventually ended in a polarization between capitalist
farmers and propertyless labourers remains to be explained, and Brenner
sets out to do this. His explanation has to do with the new economic
logic that subjected English farmers to the imperatives of competition
in unprecedented ways and degrees. This logic was imposed on farmers
whether or not they consistently employed wage labourers (and applied
even when the tenant was himself, or together with his family, the direct
producer). Perhaps the simplest way to make the point is this: peasants
elsewhere and at other times had availed themselves of market opportu-
nities, but English farmers were distinctive in their degree of subjection
to market imperatives.
Brenner has set out to explain why and how this came to be so, how
producers were deprived of non-market access to the means of their
self-reproduction and even land itself, how landlordly forms of exploita-
tion were transformed from "extra-economic" surplus extraction to the
appropriation of capitalist rents, how it came about that both landlords
and tenants were compelled to move in response to the imperatives of
competition, how new forms of appropriation established new compul-
sions and how those compulsions conditioned the differentiation, and in
large part the dispossession, of the peasantry (both through purely
"economic" pressures of competition and through more direct coercion,
by landlords with a new kind of economic interest in large and concen-
trated holdings). A mass proletariat was the end not the beginning of
the process; and it cannot be emphasized enough that for Brenner, the
market-dependence of economic actors was a cause not a result of
proletarianization.
Some might want to argue that the term "capitalist" should be reserved
for that end result, but it needs at least to be acknowledged that the
end of the process presupposes the process itself. It also needs to be
acknowledged that this process itself already represented a major histor-
ical rupture and new economic "laws of motion", without which a
mature capitalism would not have emerged. The great strength of Bren-
ner's argument as against the others is that it recognizes the specificity
of that new historical process, that new economic logic, and makes a
convincing effort to explain how it came about, instead of assuming the
very things that need to be explained.
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution 231
It can be argued that even those Marxist historians who have done
so much to displace the commercialization model have similarly tended
to assume some of what needs to be explained. Even for historians like
Dobb, Hilton and Manning, the problem seems to be mainly to discover
how direct producers were freed to avail themselves of market opportun-
ities, how "petty commodity production" (embodied in small or "mid-
dling" producers) was liberated by class struggle and allowed to grow
into capitalism. For all their displacement of capitalist development from
towns and trade to countryside and agriculture, these arguments in a
sense reproduce the question-begging assumptions of the commercializ-
ation model, although this time middling farmers or yeomen serve as a
kind of functional, if rural, equivalent of the burghers in the old model,
while class struggle between exploiting and exploited classes - landlords
and peasants - is given a role as the moving force which removed the
obstacles to the free development of petty commodity producers into
capitalists. The assumption seems to be that "middling" producers, faced
with market opportunities and freed from the shackles of feudalism,
would naturally take the capitalist road. Despite the focus on production
and exploitation rather than simply exchange, despite the emphasis on
class struggle, and despite the shift from city to countryside, these
Marxist explanations have in common with the commercialization model
a tendency to "explain" the transition to capitalism as an enhancement
of market opportunities rather than the establishment of market imperat-
ives, a "shaking loose" or liberation of an already existing economic
logic, not the coming into being of a new one. So here too some kind
of pre-existing capitalist rationality is invoked to explain the emergence
of capitalism, and the same basic question is begged.30

30
For more on these points, see my "From Opportunity to Imperative: the History of
the Market", Monthly Review (July-August 1994). As should by now be clear, the issues
in the debate surrounding the commercialization model do not turn on a simple opposition
between urban and rural, town and country, even agriculture and commerce or industry.
This critical point seems to have escaped another Marxist reviewer of Merchants and
Revolution. Alex Callinicos, welcoming Brenner's excursion into the history of mercantile
classes, suggests not so much that there is a contradiction between the recent book and
the earlier thesis but rather that it has up to now been unclear "what place his account
allows for other forms of capitalism", apart from its agrarian variety (New Left Review,
207 (September-October 1994), p. 131). "Thus," he continues, "critics such as Chris
Harman have taxed Brenner for ignoring the role played by urban mercantile capitalism
in the transition. Sympathizers such as Ellen Wood have in turn dismissed such objections
as examples of Pirenne's old heresy of identifying capitalism with trade. On the face of
it, Merchants and Revolution invalidates objection and defence alike." Callinicos's remark
about "Pirenne's heresy" suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues. My
objection (like, I venture to say, Brenner's) to the Pirenne thesis and other versions of
the old model is not simply that they have concentrated on the city rather than the
countryside, or on agriculture rather than trade, but rather that they treat commercial
activity and profit-taking (whether urban or rural) as capitalism-in-embryo, requiring only
232 Ellen Meiksins Wood
Brenner, I would argue, moved beyond the "Transition Debate" by
recognizing that the problem was to discover not how producers were
freed to avail themselves of capitalist opportunities but how they came
to be subjected to market imperatives, the compulsions of competition,
capital accumulation, profit-maximization and the necessity of increasing
labour-productivity. TTiese compulsions were not inherent in traditional
forms of commercial profit-taking, the age-old practice of buying cheap
and selling dear. They did not operate, for example, on merchants who
typically bought craft-products in one market and sold them on at a
higher price in another; nor did these imperatives operate on peasants -
even those who sold their produce in the market - who, however
exiguous their holdings, enjoyed non-market access to their conditions
of self-reproduction. Brenner's effort to explain how, in the very specific
conditions of English agrarian relations, producers became market-
dependent, is surely a major breakthrough in historical scholarship. His
work remains among the very few attempts to explain the origins of
capitalism without already assuming, in circular fashion, its prior
existence.
There is still much work to be done, not least in explaining the role
of towns, markets and burghers in the development of capitalism. But
one thing is clear: no history of the transition from feudalism to capital-
ism will be remotely adequate that fails to come to grips with the
specificity of capitalism and of the historical process that brought it into
being. Anything less than a full engagement with that specificity is
unlikely to explain the development of capitalism, so much as to assume
the very thing that needs to be explained.

quantitative expansion rather than qualitative transformation to become capitalism -

making no distinction between commercial profit-taking and capitalist appropriation. Callin-
icos is here again, as elsewhere, lapsing into the same confusion - as if the specificity of
capitalist property relations, with the systemic laws of motion generated by them, still
eludes him, in much the same way that it has long eluded advocates of the commercializ-
ation model. Finally, some readers will no doubt have noticed that my argument here
has implications for the Marxist debate (for example, in the "Transition Debate") about
the two paths to capitalism: "Way I" - the "really revolutionary way" - where petty
commodity producers grow into capitalists, and "Way II", where merchants take over
production. Some of this debate has, again, been conducted as if the development of
petty producers into capitalists required no real explanation, apart from an account of
how opportunities were expanded or obstacles removed. I touch on this point in "From
Opportunity to Imperative".