In the debate on the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, discuss the varying stands on the Prime Mover.

In Marxist historiography, and indeed in any study of medieval to pre-modern Europe, the most important topic of discussion has been the so-called transition of Europe from feudalism to capitalism. In Marxism, this is a particularly important point of argument and study as it follows the schematic progress of societies as envisioned by Marx (going from communal agriculture, to feudalism, to capitalism and eventually to socialism).

This essay shall attempt to assess what the major factor(s) (or, in Marxist terminology, the prime mover) were that enabled the transition of feudal Europe to capitalism. Various important issues, such as that of the fact that this so-called universal transition in the entirety of Europe in itself is largely misleading, and others, shall be dealt with, bringing in important historical perspectives, and the debates that ensued from these perspectives.

Property Relations Perspective vs. Exchange Relations Perspective

Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism was a work that sparked off what has come to be known as the Dobb-Sweezy debate. Dobb, in his definition of serfdom, assesses it as being virtually identical to ‘serfdom’: an obligation laid on the product by force and independently of his own volition to fulfill certain economic demands of an overland, whether these demands take the form of services or of dues to be paid in money or kind.

According to Dobb, the following form the major characteristics of feudalism: (1) a low level of technique,; (2) production for the immediate need of the household or village community; (3) compulsory labour on the lord’s estate or demesne; (4) political decentralization; (5) conditional holding of land by lords on some kind of service-tenure; (6) possession by a lord of judicial or semi-judicial functions in relation to the dependent population. This ‘classic’ form of feudalism was most the western European model.

This definition describes feudalism as an economic system in which serfdom is the predominant relation of production, and in which production is organized in and around the manorial estate of the lord. This implies that markets are for the most part local and that long-distance trade while not necessarily absent, plays no determining role in the purposes or methods of production. Therefore for Dobb, feudalism is a system of production for use.

According to Dobb, the claim that the impact of commerce as an external force that finally overwhelms the stable internal economy is not a sufficient argument. He finds that there is as much evidence that the growth of money economy per se led to an intensification of serfdom as there is evidence that it was the cause of the feudal decline. One of the examples he brings forth to support this is the “second serfdom” of eastern Europe in which there was a revival of the old system associated with the growth of production for the market.

On the basis of this, Dobb argues that if the only factor at work in western Europe had been the rise of trade, the result might as well have been an intensification as a disintegration of feudalism. Therefore, he reasons that the system must be looked at internally to find the cause/mover of feudalism. The essential cause of the breakdown of feudalism was the over-exploitation of the labour force: serfs deserted the lords’ estates en masse, and those who remained were too few and too overworked to enable the system to maintain itself on the old basis. It was these developments, according to Dobb, and not the rise of trade, which forced the ruling class to adopt “capitalist” expedients which finally led to the transformation of productive relations in the countryside.

He stresses in a later rebuttal to his critic Paul Sweezy that he is not suggesting that class struggle of peasants against lords gives rise, in any simple and direct way, to capitalism. What it does is to modify the dependence of the petty mode of production upon feudal overlordship and eventually to shake loose the small producer from feudal exploitation.

Paul Sweezy criticized this view of Dobb, and went on to suggest an external prime mover for the decline of feudalism. He illuminates the point that while there may have been an increase in the dependent population, there was a concomitant rise in serf population; therefore the over-population having enabled serf desertion can be viewed critically. He feels that the instability caused by two major factors in feudal society: feudal warfare among lords, and the rise in numbers of dependent population, did certainly create a pressure on the existing social structure, but was not enough or did not have enough tendency to transform it.

According to Sweezy, there needed to be external alternatives presented to the serf’s which would have then convinced them to desert the lords’ manors en masse. He feels that the strained relationship between the serf and the lord was not enough to cause the breakdown of the system that followed the crisis. They needed to have an alternative to turn to, and he brings to attention the fact that the rise of towns in western Europe happened around the same time. These towns—offering liberty, employment, and improved social status—acted as a powerful magnet to the oppressed rural population.

Since Dobb considers the rise of towns to be primarily concomitant with trade, he relinquishes any chance of recognizing the rise of the towns as being part of the internal feudal system, according to Marx’s construct. Sweezy illuminates the fact that it was the lack of urbanism in eastern Europe which brought about an intensification of feudalism in the fifteenth century.

Sweezy also lays great importance on the growth of trade. When trade began to expand in the tenth century, it was in the sphere of long-distance trade for luxury goods. But it eventually outgrew the peddling stage and established localized trading and transshipment centres, which had to be provisioned from the surrounding countryside. This resulted in a higher form of specialization and division of labour, resulting in a system of production forexchangealongside the old feudal system.

The rise of towns in western Europe did a great deal more than merely offer a refuge to fleeing serfs; it also altered the position of those who stayed behind. Also, the manor was fundamentally inefficient and unsuited to produce for the market. Sooner or later, new types of productive relations and new forms of organization had to be found to meet the requirements of a changed economic order.

Sweezy uses the second serfdom to support this view. Closest to the rise of towns, the serfs gained a bargaining position with the lords. On the periphery though, the worker cannot run away because he has no place to go. When the expansion of trade instills profit motive into the ruling class, the result is not the development of new forms of exploitation but the intensification of old forms.

Dobb’s theory holds that the decline of western feudalism was due to the overexploitation by the ruling class of society’s labour power. But Sweezy counters that the decline of feudalism was due to the inability of the ruling class to maintain control over and overexploit society’s labour power.

Robert Brenner and Long-Term Demography

Robert Brenner is another influential historian of the transition debate and he brings various new elements which support Dobb’s initial stand. Brenner focuses on the conceptualization of long-term economic changes in medieval Europe, and the differences not only between western and eastern Europe, but within western Europe itself between England and France, though this shall not be discussed here.

His argument is that it is the structure of class relations, of class power, which will determine the manner and degree to which particular demographic and commercial changes will affect long-term trade in the distribution of income and economic growth. Class structure, according to him, has two aspects. First, the relations of the direct producers to one another, their tools and the land; second, the inherently conflictive relations of property, called the ‘property relationship’ or the ‘surplus extraction relationship’. Brenner stresses that economic development can only be fully understood as the outcome of the emergence of new class relations more favourable to a new system of production.

The demographic model, by Postan and Ladurie, illustrates that the subdivision or overcrowding of holdings and the exhaustion of resources means over-population, which leads to Malthusian checks, like famine/starvation, leading to demographic decline. The 14th and 15th centuries witnessed a decline in population as a result of falling productivity, famine and plague. Ultimately, demographic catastrophe led to a drastic reversal of the man/land ratio. This demographic change brought about precisely the opposite conditions to those which prevailed in the 13th century.

Postan showed that in the medieval period the force of the market, far from automatically bringing about the dissolution of serfdom, actually did coincide with its intensification, as is seem in the case of eastern Europe, where peasant bondage worsened alongside the development of capitalism in the west. Ladurie has shown that even following the downfall of serfdom a tendency towards capitalism could not necessarily be assumed, even under the impact of the market.

Brenner focuses on two comparative analyses for this period: (1) of the intensification of serfdom in eastern Europe in relation to its process of decline in the west; and (2) of the rise of agrarian capitalism and the growth of agricultural productivity in England in relation to their failure in France.

In explaining the decline of serfdom, he points that the inability of the serf-based agrarian economy to innovate in agriculture even under extreme market incentives has to do with the heavy extraction of surplus by the lord and is also because of the barriers to mobility of men and land. Thus the lord’s surplus extraction tended to confiscate not only the peasant’s income above subsistence but at the same time to threaten the funds necessary to refurbish the peasant’s holding and to prevent the long-term decline of its productivity. Also, the lord’s most obvious mode of increasing income from his lands was not through capital investment and the introduction of new techniques, but through squeezing the peasants by increasing either money rents or labour services.

There were in fact known and available agricultural improvements which could have brought significant improvements in the demesne output, but the English landlords did not need avail to this, since they had alternative, “exploitative” mode available to them. At the same time, lack of funds made it impossible for the peasantry to use the land in a free and rational manner.

The crisis of peasant accumulation, productivity and subsistence was accompanied by an intensification of class conflict with different outcomes in different places depending on the balance of forces between the contending classes.

Brenner clearly denies the direct impact of the forces of supply and demand being the primary reasons for the decline of feudalism. He also does not believe that the pressure of trade as a convincing argument, and draws on the irony that at different points, the same trade has been used to explain both the intensification of serfdom in the east and the rise of capitalism in the west.

In conclusion to Brenner’s argument, it must be pointed out that according to him, by the end of the 17th century, English landlords controlled a large proportion of cultivable land, and it was the emergence of the classic landlord/capitalist tenant/wage-labourer structure which made possible the transformation of agricultural production in England. Therefore, both the decline of feudalism as well as the rise of agrarian capitalism was guided by changing class relations. This is not to say that peasant productive was incapable of improvement, only that it could not provide the agrarian basis for economic development.

In France, this new class structure did not develop primarily due to the overarching influence and ubiquity of the centralized state which developed a class-like phenomenon, which tended to intervene in favour of the peasants, who were the major taxpayers, against the landlords, who struggled to get some sort of sovereignty.

Beyond the Transition Debate:

Perry Anderson, in Lineages of the Absolutist State, stresses that the economic mode of production cannot be defined on an economic material base. He considers the method of surplus extraction as being equally relevant as the relations of production in understanding economic development of medieval and pre modern Europe. He considers capitalism to be a complex synthesis of the Antiquity mode of slavery and the feudal social structure. He also lays stress on political factors, and concurs with Sweezy on the importance of the growth of towns.

But Anderson is criticized for obscuring theories of internal conflict in modes of production and not explaining enough the policies of capitalists and proto-capitalists. There is also an inherent contradiction in his viewpoint, for he seems to stress on internal forces and social relations while at the same time supporting the theory of rise of towns and trade, which as was shown earlier, are mutually exclusive of each other in Marxist historiography.

Immanuel Wallerstein’s main focus is on trade, the commercialization model, but he talks of super-national factors/entities. His main argument is for “world-economies”, of which he considers Europe one of the first to develop. He concedes that there had been world-economies before, but they always transformed themselves into empires: China, Persia, and Rome. There were other world-economies contemporaneous to fifteenth-century Europe, but it alone embarked on the path of capitalist development, enabling it to rush far ahead of the others. He studies this contrast.

While conceding that feudalism as a system is not necessarily antithetical to trade, yet he believes that a feudal system could only support a limited amount of long-distance trade as opposed to local trade, primarily because long-distance trade was a trade in luxuries, not in bulk goods. As we shall see, it was the need for essential bulk commodities that really led to the breakdown of the feudal system in totality.

He explains the crisis of the fourteenth century as being one in which the immediate cause of the dilemma was to be found in technological limitations (stemming from arguments by Hilton and Perroy). The emphasis here is on the fact there was no large reinvestment of profits in agriculture such that would significantly increase productivity. This was because of the inherent limitations of the reward system of feudal social organization. This squeeze in the economy led to increased exactions on the peasantry which were then counterproductive, and resulted in peasant flight.

In France, the large estates were then sold and rented for money to the better off peasants, who were in a position to obtain favourable terms. In the non-marginal arable land areas of western Europe, the excessively large demesne gives way to smaller landholdings. Thus, simultaneously, there is the rise of a medium-sized peasantry on arable land in western Europe, the beginning of enclosures of less arable lands in western Europe, and the concentration of property into large estates in eastern Europe.

In the political sphere, in the heyday of western feudalism, when the state was weakest, the landowners thrived. Lords of the manor would never welcome the strengthening of the central machinery were they not in a weakened condition when they found it more difficult to resist the claims of central authority and more ready to welcome imposed order; the economic crisis provided such a situation.

Debasement of money in this period is another factor considered important by Wallerstein for later colonial expansion that assisted the transformation of Europe. Possible reasons for this debasement include: the reduction of state debts, scarcity of means of payment, and the loss of bullion to trade with India and China.

It was in this period that the boundary lines of much of what is modern Europe was decided. On the closepacked western edge of Europe, any excessive ballooning of territory was checked by competition and geographical limits. Unless they extended their empire overseas. This is Wallerstein’s basic argument: that after a thousand years of surplus appropriation under the feudal mode, a point of diminishing returns had been reached, and Europe had to develop a new form of surplus appropriation, by means of a world market mechanism.

He considers three things essential to the establishment of such a capitalist world-economy: an expansion of geographical size of the world in question, the development of variegated methods of labour control, and the creation of relatively strong state machineries in the core states. The second and third aspects were dependent in large part on the success of the first. The territorial expansion of Europe hence was a key prerequisite to a solution for the crisis of feudalism.

Wallerstein goes on to support his argument by showing that, contrary to popular belief, overseas expansion by Portugal and later other European nations, was done not luxury goods, but instead for essential commodities like staples, sugar and wood, which was becoming harder to come by in the Iberian peninsula. Another reason cited by him is that the motive also lay in the feudal nobles’ need to occupy more land to draw revenue in order to restore their dwindling real income.

De-Centred Europe

A newer school is historiography dealing with this argument is that of the Anti-Eurocentrics, who argue that European historians are of the view that European feudalism is a unique event, and only western Europe was capable of such a transition. Eurocentricism’s basic assumption is that the East has been a passive bystander in world historical development and therefore can be marginalized from the story of world history.

Comparisons with other parts of the world have been used to show that “Europe”—or in some formulations, western Europe, Protestant Europe, or really only just England—had within itself some internal ingredient of industrial success or was uniquely free of impediments suffered by other regions during the same period which, for all practical purposes, seemed to show the same degree of progress as late as the seventeenth century. Therefore the question arises as to what it was that these historians believed set western Europe apart from the rest of the world and made it possible to transform into a capitalist society before any other.

Writers like Kenneth Pomeranz, while understanding and acknowledging the vital role of internally driven growth in Europe, emphasize how similar those processes were to processes at work elsewhere, prominently in East Asia, till almost 1800. Pomeranz locates the difference lying in European overseas expansion to explain the difference between European development and what was seen in certain other parts of Eurasia, primarily China and Japan. Pomeranz aims to de-centre Europe and place it on a global conjuncture to be studied alongside other areas objectively. He also believes that a more durable approach would be to look within Europe to see what made Britain distinct within Europe.

Eric Hobson is insistent that the East enabled the rise of the west through two main processes: diffusion/assimilation and appropriationism. The Easterners created a global economy and communications network after 500 BCE along which the more advanced European ‘resource portfolios’ diffused across to the West. And, western imperialism after 1492 led the Europeans to appropriate all manner of eastern economic resources to enable the rise of the West.

In his view on the important of colonies in shaping European capitalism, Pomeranz stresses that the perception of an interacting system in which one part (Europe) benefited more than others does not justify calling that part the “center” and assuming that it shaped everything else.

Writers like E L Jones have argued that beneath a surface of “pre-industrial” similarity, sixteenth- through eighteenth-century Europe had already moved far ahead of the rest of its world in the accumulation of both physical and human capital. But recent work, such as that by John Hajnal, has shown that there were economic booms and rising living standards in pre-industrial settings outside Europe as well. However, these are usually treated by Eurocentric historians as being temporary “flowerings”.

To prove that Europe, or Britain, was not alone in the path towards capitalism, Pomeranz draws on various evidence to show that Europe had not accumulated a crucial advantage in physical capital prior to 1800 and was not freer of Malthusian pressures than many other large economies. He also examines new kinds of consumer demand, the cultural and institutional changes that accompanied them, and the possibility that differences in demand had important effects on production.

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Bibliography:

  1. Rodney Hilton (ed): The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism
  2. Aston and Philipin (ed): The Brenner Debate
  3. Immanuel Wallerstein: The Modern World-System
  4. John Hobson: The Eastern Origins of the Western Civilization
  5. Kenneth Pomeranz: The Great Divergence
  6. Class notes