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Robert Brenner

precisely those same long-distance trade routes linking Europe with the
eastern Mediterranean. This was the initial rise of the market, and it pro-
4. vided the basis for the initial growth of the division of labour, focused
on merchant-led towns. Great industry grew up in those towns, notably
Property and Progress: in northern Italy and the southern Netherlands, supplying manufactures

Where Adam Smith Went Wrong to the trans-European market for luxuries and military goods that had
formerly been procured in the eastern Mediterranean or beyond—a kind
ROBERT BRENNER of import substitution. After that, the call of urban markets brought
about the transformation of the countryside, as feudal lords reorganized
their estates in a capitalist direction in order to produce and sell more
effectively to the towns. So, especially as feudal lords, absolutist states,
and mercantilist governments lost their capacity to prey on production
A-historical Materialism and fetter growth, the economy proceeded from medieval commercial
revolution, to early modern agricultural revolution, to modern industrial
The Dominance of Smithianism revolution.
During most of the first half of the twentieth century, there was wide- The foregoing story was, in fact, pretty much the same one that Adam
spread, if not unanimous, agreement that the way to understand the his- Smith told in The Wealth of Nations, Book III, which is largely devoted to
torical emergence of economic development in the West was through the the rise of capitalism. A narrative of extraordinary power, it was taken up
theoretical lens provided by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. As by such ideologically and politically diverse thinkers as Henri Pirenne,
everyone knows, according to Smith, the growth of output per capita the liberal Belgian historian, and Paul Sweezy, the American Marxist
takes place by way of the expansion of the market. This leads to the search economist. The picture it painted was one of more or less unilineal
for the gains from trade, leading to specialization and the increase of the progress, driven by the growth of trade.
division of labour, as well as capital accumulation, which together make
for rising efficiency, the increase of productivity. There ensues a pattern of The Rise of Malthusianism–Ricardianism
self-sustaining growth by way of the invisible hand . . . at least so long as Nevertheless, although this is sometimes today forgotten amid contem-
the economy is unfettered by rent-seeking states or other such parasitic porary celebrations of the market, Smithianism hardly went unchallenged.
entities. From the late 1930s, and especially from the late 1940s, the discovery of
Working with this framework, the Smithian historians of the earlier the demographic factor, the role of population, completely transformed
generation took as their point of departure what they called feudal econ- the economic historiography of the medieval and early modern periods.
omy, which they understood as natural economy, or production for use— For the next three decades, roughly through the 1970s, Adam Smith was
literally no trade. Feudalism had emerged, as they saw it, as a result of left in the shade by Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Of course, the
exogenous shocks, when a series of invasions—by the so-called barbar- newly emergent demographic interpreters in no way denied the extraor-
ians, then the Muslims, and finally the Vikings—disrupted the great dinary growth of trade and towns that took place in medieval and early
trans-Mediterranean trade routes that had long nourished the European modern Europe. This had been definitively established by the great
economy, going back to Roman and Greek times. Agrarian Europe, and Smithian historians of the first half of the twentieth century. What the
especially the lordly manors that constituted its basic cell structure, was demographic interpreters did call into question was the ability of trade
thus thrown back into self-sufficiency and, as a consequence of the result- and towns to bring about, in any automatic way, economic development,
ing decline of specialization and the division of labour, a long period of in the sense of the growth of labour productivity or per capita output.
stagnation. Demographic historians such as M. M. Postan thus noted that, in later
Against the background of feudal autarchy and non-growth, eco- medieval Europe, rural regions experiencing the greatest impact of
nomic development was once again unleashed by the re-establishment of the growing urban market sometimes responded to the opportunity to

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exchange by tightening rather than loosening serfdom, opening the 1000 through 1700 and beyond was understandable in terms of two
way to economic stagnation. Postan referred to the strengthening of great demographic cycles, ultimately driven by population increase and
villeinage in the Thames Valley, in the shadow of London, in thirteenth- declining agricultural labour productivity:2
century England. The classic case was of course East Elbian Germany
Phase A. Population rise from 1100 to 1300 leads to the Great Famine of
and Poland, where neo-serfdom emerged in tandem with the rise of 1316–17, the Black Plague of 1348–9, the Hundred Years War— ‘The General
international trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Commerce Crisis of the Fourteenth Century’.
thus opened the way to neo-feudalism which made for underdevelop- Phase B. Population decline in later fourteenth and early fifteenth
ment. In an analogous manner, other demographic historians like E. Le century—‘The Golden Age of Peasants and Workers’.
Roy Ladurie pointed out that, while the growth of urban demand Phase A. Population rise from 1450 to 1600 leads to a population ceiling,
offered peasants the opportunity for increased income, there, too, the c.1600, trans-European warfare—‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth
outcome was generally the opposite of economic growth. Peasant Century’.
Phase B. Population stagnation and decline in the later seventeenth/early
involvement in the market was accompanied by subdivision of holdings,
eighteenth century.
intensification of labour rather than rising investment, and falling labour
productivity . . . this leading not to economic growth, but to agricultural The bottom line, especially with respect to the hitherto hegemonic
involution.1 Smithian paradigm, was that the Malthusian cyclical pattern of secular
In the end, the demographic interpreters accomplished nothing less stagnation persisted throughout most of Europe, not just during the
than to replace the Smithian picture of unilineal progress resulting from medieval period, but into the middle of the eighteenth century. So much
the gains of trade with the Malthusian pattern of cyclical stagnation for unilineal progress.
driven by demographic growth. Roughly speaking, in this perspective,
population was seen, à la Malthus, to grow geometrically, output only The Limits of Malthusianism–Ricardianism and Smithianism
arithmetically. As population grew, peasants were obliged to occupy ever
Nevertheless, the Malthusian–Ricardian model had glaring weaknesses of
worse land and to break up holdings, which brought about declining
its own, which were more or less the mirror opposite of those of the
land–labour and capital–labour ratios. The inevitable outcome was
Smithian model. The Smithian historians had a great deal of difficulty
declining output per person, meaning declining labour productivity. As a
explaining why the spectacular, long-term growth of commerce and urban
consequence, the increased demand for food and land, driven by rising
industry had failed to elicit a sustained growth of agricultural productivity
population, outran supply, undermined by weakening productivity,
and failed to overcome long-term economic stagnation throughout most of
and there followed the famous Ricardian pattern of factor prices. Food
Europe before the industrial revolution—hyper-commercialized, indus-
and land prices rose relative to the prices of labour and manufactures.
trialized, and urbanized Flanders being a telling case in point. But, by the
Landlords and farmers did well at the expense of workers and town arti-
same token, the demographic interpreters were unable to explain why,
sans. Increasing poverty was an unavoidable accompaniment. Ultimately,
from various points during the early modern period, their model ceased
of course, population hit a ceiling, which was enforced by famine, disease,
to hold in certain limited but critically important regions of Europe,
and late marriage. There was then just the opposite pattern: falling popu-
despite continuing population increase. Thus, as virtually everyone rec-
lation, relatively cheap food and land, relatively high manufacturing
ognized, from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the
prices and wages.
economies of England and the northern Netherlands began an epoch-
As Postan and Ladurie, as well as other great demographic inter-
making process of what turned out to be self-sustaining Smithian growth.
preters like Wilhelm Abel of Germany, showed, European history from

2
M. M. Postan, ‘Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: England’, in The Cambridge Economic
History of Europe, I, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1966); Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans de Languedoc;
1
M. M. Postan, ‘The Chronology of Labour Services’, Transactions of the Royal Historical W. Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe: From the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries
Society, 4, XX (1937), pp. 192–3; E. Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc, 2 vols (Paris, (London, 2006).
1966), I, p. 8.

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In both places, the expansion of trade was accompanied by a profound this. Economic historians were once again finding so-called ‘Smithian
deepening of the division of labour in agriculture and industry; the spec- growth’ everywhere they looked.3
tacular accumulation of land and of capital; and, ultimately, the accelera- Now, in my opinion, this revival of Smithianism has been achieved
tion of technical change. From this point onward, in these two places, only by way of massive historiographical amnesia and with major
the growth of output per capita was never again stymied by the growth intellectual costs:
of population, which continued—indeed radically accelerated—right
1 The first of these costs is that the pervasive demographic cum eco-
through the nineteenth century. Simply put, the Smithians could not
nomic patterns discovered by the Malthusian–Ricardian historians
explain persistent stagnation in most of Europe through the middle of the
have been allowed to simply fall off the radar screen. In particular,
eighteenth century; but the Malthusians could not explain the take off into
there has been a failure to come to grips with, and a continuing
sustained growth in England and the northern Netherlands during the
inability to account for, the prevalence of the Malthusian–Ricardian
late medieval and early modern periods.
pattern of prices and income distribution throughout most of
Europe right into the period of the industrial revolution, even in
Posing, or Failing to Pose, the Problem of Economic Development
the face of the huge stimulus of urban demand.
By the mid-1970s or the early 1980s, the great historiographical conquests— 2 The second is what I would call a forced homogenization of the
and failures—of Smithianism and Malthusianism–Ricardianism had pattern of historical development in medieval and early modern
more or less clearly posed the fundamental conceptual and historical Europe. Since it was undeniable that trade and towns expanded
problem that had to be dealt with by economists and historians, if the impetuously throughout much of medieval and early modern
field was to move forward. The challenge was to resolve, conceptually Europe, it was, once again, simply assumed that this must have
and empirically, the following two closely interrelated questions: generated economic growth; that economic growth was, if not
universal, at least the rule rather than the exception. Historians
1 Why was it that over six or seven centuries—from around 1050 to
have therefore papered over the truly enormous divergence, dur-
1750—despite the impressive growth of towns and trade, most of
ing the early modern pre-industrial epoch, in the processes of
the European economy was characterized by two successive grand
growth between the dynamism experienced by the Anglo-Dutch
Malthusian demographically driven cycles, marked by falling
economies and the Malthusian–Ricardian stagnation that prevailed
labour productivity in agriculture?
almost everywhere else Europe.
2 Why was it that, at different points in the later medieval and
3 Finally, in what seems to me a fit of exuberance that I will let
early modern period, in the face of ongoing, indeed accelerated
others call irrational, historians of China, and other places in Asia,
demographic increase, a few economies of Europe achieved a
have not only found enormous evidence of the growth of trade in
breakthrough to self-sustaining growth?
their regions, which is quite irrefutable, but they have also gone on
Nevertheless, the fact remains that the economic historiography failed to to draw what seems to me the quite unfounded conclusion that
confront this issue, and indeed has, for the most part, continued to ignore this increase in exchange brought about economic development, in
it right up to the present. Indeed, far from the transcendence of the dual the sense of rising per capita output and rising labour productivity.
legacies of Smithianism and Malthusianism, we have had instead a Indeed, led by Ken Pomeranz and the so-called California school,
return—I would call it a regression—to Smithianism pure and simple. a new group of historians of China has refurbished and revised the
By the middle of the 1990s, as the turn to neo-liberal market opening old theory of capitalist sprouts and is arguing that, up to 1800,
became ever more pervasive on a world scale and as the US economy
experienced the supposed miracle of the New Economy, the rise of the
3
market was once again being nearly universally regarded in the eco- See B. M. S. Campbell, ‘Progressiveness and Backwardness in Thirteenth- and Early
Fourtheenth-century English Agriculture: The Verdict of Recent Research’, in J.-M.
nomic historiography of Europe and beyond as the automatic driver of Duvosquel and E. Thoen (eds), Peasants and Townsmen in Medieval Europe: Studia in Honorem
economic growth, so long as there were no political barriers preventing Adriaan Verhulst (Gent, 1995); G. Grantham, ‘Contra Ricardo: On the Macroeconomics of
Pre-industrial Economies’, European Review of Economic History, II (1999).

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economic growth had proceeded as dynamically and as far in the For Smith, then, the differentia specifica of modern economic growth or
Yangzi Delta as in England.4 economic development is not constituted by any once-and-for-all techno-
logical breakthrough, such as the rise of the factory or the adoption of
It is my view that all of these historiographical trends simply elide
inanimate power that one finds at the heart of modernization theory
the fundamental questions posed by dual legacy of Smithianism and
(as in Ernest Gellner). Nor is it, again, the rise of towns and of the
Malthusianism in the historiography, which I frame in the following
town–country division of labour (emphasized by Henri Pirenne), or
manner:
indeed the emergence of that interregional or international division of
1 In theory, or in general, what determines whether the Malthusian or labour at the core of world systems theory (developed by Immanuel
the Smithian pattern of economic evolution will prevail at given Wallerstein). Nor is it, in itself, that ‘original accumulation of capital’
times and places? which has, from time to time, featured in latter-day ‘Smithian’ accounts of
2 More concretely, or historically, what determined the divergent development—be this derived from the gold and silver mines of the
historical patterns of development within Europe during the Americas, the African slave trade, or whatever. All these things could—
medieval and early modern period—the persistence of Malthusian and sometimes did—contribute to an already ongoing process of eco-
stagnation throughout most of continental Europe through 1750, nomic development, but they could in no way constitute it or bring it into
the take-ff meanwhile to sustained growth in England and the being. What distinguishes modern economic growth, as Adam Smith
northern Netherlands from various points between 1450 and 1600? observes, is something much more general and abstract: it is the presence
in the economy of a systematic, continuous, and quasi-universal drive on
the part of individual direct producers to cut costs via specialization, cap-
Adam Smith’s Decisive Contribution and Its Critique
ital accumulation, and the transformation of production in the direction
of greater efficiency.
Smith’s Theory of Economic Growth as a Necessary Point of Departure
What, then, is it that accounts for the effective generalization through-
In any attempt to understand economic development, Adam Smith must out the economy of this form of individual economic behaviour? Smith
remain the indispensable point of departure—the place to start, if not to provides two basic mechanisms:
conclude. This is because Smith both captured the essence of modern eco-
1 In the first instance, individuals specialize because they find it in
nomic growth and discovered what might be called the key mechanisms
their self-interest to do so, in order to secure the gains from trade.
responsible for its taking place. Smith’s genius was, in my view, to locate
Because the gains to be had from specialization in the thing one does
the essence of modern economic growth in the generalized adoption, all
best are better than the returns from diversifying so as to produce
across the economy, of certain specific forms of individual economic
everything one needs for subsistence, economic agents choose the
behaviour—the adoption of a certain approach to economic life on the
former over the latter.
part of economic agents as standard. Modern economic growth thus takes
2 In the longer run, in order to successfully specialize, individuals
place where, and because, the economy is constituted by individuals who,
find that they have to further break up tasks, to accumulate capital
as the norm, seek systematically to maximize profits by means of cost-
and innovate so as bring in the latest technique, because this is the
cutting through ever deeper specialization, the systematic reinvestment of
only way they can survive in competition. So, there is a process of
surpluses, the obsessive adoption of the latest technique, and the move-
natural selection that makes for the prevalence of low-cost produ-
ment of means of production from line to line in response to changes in
cers by weeding out high-cost producers.5 The upshot is that, for
demand.

4
K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World 5
‘[G]ood management . . . can never be universally established, but in consequence of that
Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); R. Brenner and C. Isett, ‘England’s Divergence from the free and universal competition which forces every body to have recourse to it for the sake of
Yangzi Delta: Property Relations, Microeconomics, and Patterns of Development’, Journal of self defence’: A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, 2 vols
Asian Studies, LXI, 2 (May 2002). (Oxford, 1976), I, pp. 163–4.

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Smith, modern economic growth occurs because what individual and opportunities—in which they find themselves. These constraints
economic agents find to be in their self-interest and what they are present themselves to individual economic agents as unchangeable
compelled to do in order to survive under the pressure of compe- givens, because they are sustained by collective socio-political action. The
tition turns out, or just happens, to fit the requirements for eco- upshot is that every historically evolved type of society—what Marx
nomic development to take place in the economy as a whole. The called mode of production—has its own microeconomics.
particular choices individuals are inclined to make and that are
Social-property relations What will determine an economy’s micro-
selected out by the system turn out, or just happen, to bring about,
economics—i.e. what individuals will find it makes sense to choose—
in the aggregate, sustained economic growth. This coincidence is,
is the macro-structure, what Marx called relations of production, and
of course, what Smith is capturing with his notion of the invisible
what I will term social-property relations. I prefer social-property rela-
hand.
tions to the more standard relations of production for two reasons.
First, the term social relations of production is sometimes taken to con-
Transcending Smith and Malthus: An Alternative Approach to Development
vey the idea that the social structural framework in which production
The foregoing contributions of Smith seem to me the indispensable takes place is somehow determined by production itself, i.e. the form of
place—indeed, the only place—to start. For economic development in cooperation or organization of the labour process. This I think is disas-
the sense of the sustained growth of output per capita or labour produc- trously misleading. Second, I think it is necessary not only to lay bare
tivity, will take place, as Smith showed us, only (1) where the individuals the structuring or constraining effects of vertical class, or surplus extrac-
constituting the economy find it systematically in their self-interest to tion, relations between exploiters and direct producers, which is gener-
maximize the gains from trade, and (2) where competition weeds out ally what is meant by social relations of production. It is, if anything,
high-cost low-profit units. Nevertheless, it also seems to me that there is even more critical to bring out the structuring or constraining effects of
a very major problem entailed, which was left unresolved by Adam the horizontal relationships among the exploiters themselves and the
Smith. Contrary to what Adam Smith seems to have supposed, individu- direct producers themselves.
als or families will not always find it in their self-interest to allocate their Social-property relations, as I would define them, are thus the rela-
resources or means of production so as to maximize the gains from trade, tions among direct producers, relations among exploiters, and relations
even when they have the opportunity to do so. Nor will high-cost, low- between exploiters and direct producers that, taken together, make pos-
profit productive units always be weeded out by competition in produc- sible/specify the regular access of individuals and families to the means
tion. On the contrary, these things will happen, only under certain quite of production (land, labour, tools) and/or the social product per se. The
specific, and historically limited, social conditions. Where Adam Smith idea is that such relations will exist in every society and define the basic
thus fell short—to put it most generally—was in presenting his basic constraints on—the possibilities and limits of—individual economic
mechanisms as if they held universally, or, more precisely, in failing to action. They form the constraints because they define not only the
specify the socio-economic conditions under which his mechanisms resources at the disposal of individuals but also the manner by which
making for economic growth did and did not hold. individuals gain access to them and to their income more generally. They
It is at this point that historical materialist theory and history come define the resources at the disposal of individuals and the manner by
into their own. For historical materialist approaches offer a way to resolve which individuals gain access to them and to their income more gener-
and thereby transcend the problems in the a-historical perspectives of ally because they are maintained or reproduced collectively, that is
Smith and Malthus–Ricardo. beyond the control of any individual, by political communities which are
Most fundamentally, historical materialist approaches begin from a constituted for that very purpose. It is because political communities
denial of any notion of trans-historical individual economic rationality. constitute and maintain the social-property relations collectively and by
The contention is that, contra not only Smithians but also Malthusians, force—by executing the political functions that we normally associate
the specific forms of socio-economic behaviour that individuals and with the state—defence, police, and justice—that individual economic
families will find to make sense and will choose will depend on the actors cannot as a rule alter them, but must take them as a given, as their
society-wide network of social relationships—society-wide constraints framework of choice.

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Rules for reproduction It follows that, in view of the specific set of his- social-property relations under which the two Smithian mechanisms of
torically given social-property relations that prevails, the society’s indi- growth either will or will not hold. Specified a little further, the problem
viduals and families can be systematically expected to adopt a particular is to flesh out the following series of basic propositions:
corresponding set of economic strategies—or what I would call rules for
1 While economic development in the sense of the sustained growth
reproduction; for, in light of the possibilities and limits set by the social
of per-capita output simply cannot take place without the opera-
property relations, those strategies or rules make the most sense. We can
tion of Smith’s two mechanisms of growth, those Smithian mecha-
therefore say that the social-property relations determine the rules for
nisms will themselves function only where certain historically
reproduction.
specific social-property relations prevail, and these I would call
Developmental patterns Finally, since, given the prevalence of certain capitalist social-property.
given social-property relations, people can be expected to make the choice 2 By contrast, where pre-capitalist social-property prevailed—and
for certain given rules for reproduction, it follows that when those choices this is, I would argue, throughout most of world history in both
are made in aggregate, they give rise to certain corresponding overall east and west and north and south—the economy will fail to
developmental patterns, which Marx called, a bit pretentiously, laws of develop and, more than likely, experience a Malthusian–Ricardian
motion. Put another way, by asking what is the consequence of everyone pattern of cyclical stagnation.
following the economy’s rules of reproduction—everybody doing it, so to 3 It follows that the key to the emergence of modern economic
speak—one can discern or adduce the economy’s basic secular economic growth as characterized by Adam Smith was the onset of processes
trends. of transition through which pre-capitalist social-property rela-
tions were transformed into capitalist social-property relations.
So, the causal chain runs from historically specific, politically reproduced Such processes, for reasons I shall try to specify, were far from
social property relations to individual rules for reproduction to aggregate universal.
developmental patterns to society-wide forms of crisis.
It seems to me that a decisive advantage of this approach is that it Capitalism
allows one—indeed, obliges one—to clearly distinguish between, and
sharply pose, two very different issues that tend to be run together by a- What, then, are capitalist social-property relations? There are two defining
historical approaches: that is to say, change within the system versus elements:
change of the system, or, alternatively stated, the evolution of a society of 1 Economic agents must be separated from their means of subsis-
a given type versus the transition from a society of one type to a society tence. Though they may possess means of production—tools and
of a qualitatively different type. From this standpoint, evolution within the skills—the individual economic agents cannot possess their full
system follows from the reproduction of the social-property relations, means of subsistence, i.e. all that is necessary to allow them to
which continue to enforce the same rules for reproduction and in turn the directly produce what they need to survive. What this usually
same developmental patterns and forms of crisis. By contrast, a change of means, is that, at minimum, they must be deprived of ownership
the system requires the transformation of the social-property relations, of land, or at least land that, when combined with their labour
because only the latter results in the new rules for reproduction that are and tools, could provide them with everything they need to
required for the installation of new developmental patterns and forms of survive.
crisis. 2 Economic agents must lack means of coercion that would allow
them to reproduce themselves by systematically appropriating by
force what they need from direct producers.
Towards an Historical Theory of Economic Development
The idea here is simple and far-reaching, though not uncontroversial.
From the foregoing discussion, a point of departure for constituting a the- It is that, unless they are devoid of their full means of subsistence (again
ory of economic development naturally follows: namely to establish the not necessarily production) and the ability to secure their subsistence by

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force from the direct producers, economic agents will not be required to Table 4.1. Capitalism (simplified or stripped down version).
buy necessary inputs on the market. Unless they are required to buy
Social-property Rules for Development Forms
necessary inputs on the market, they will not be obliged to sell on the relations reproduction patterns of crisis
market in order to survive. Unless they are required to sell on the market
● Direct producers own ● maximize ● growth of labour
in order to survive, they will not be subject to the competitive constraint, means of production price–cost ratio, productivity/
their very survival dependent upon their producing competitively. but not full means of maximize profits; output per person,
Unless, finally, they are subject to the competitive constraint, they cannot subsistence. ● specialize; especially in
be expected to try to maximize their profits by seeking the gains from ● They are thus dependent ● accumulate/ agriculture;
on the market. reinvest surpluses; ● capacity to support
trade, so they cannot be counted on to specialize, accumulate, innovate, ● They are thus obliged ● innovate: bring in ever larger
and move from line to line in response to demand. This last point is most to buy their inputs, in latest invention; proportion of
essential, for what is implied is that the mere operation of self-interest on turn required to sell ● move from line to population out of
the part of individual economic agents in response to the opportunities their outputs to secure line to meet agriculture;
the funds to buy their changing demand. ● rising real wage
provided by the growth of the market cannot be expected, let alone inputs, and so required due to declining
counted upon, to detonate self-sustaining growth. The bottom line is that to produce competitively cost of food;
Adam Smith’s two mechanisms of growth will operate only where eco- in order to survive. ● increase in
nomic agents are not just involved in, but also dependent upon the market ● Economic agents discretionary
lack the capacity to spending
for their inputs and therefore subject to competition, and in addition appropriate the means (manufactures,
where those same economic agents are unable to sustain themselves by of their reproduction services) leading
recourse to forceful appropriation from the direct producers. It is the from the direct producer to growth of
prevalence of the specific social-property relations that renders produ- by force. domestic market;
● increasing
cers free and subject to the competitive constraint, having to produce proportion of
competitively to survive, that makes for economic development. (See population in
Table 4.1.) towns;
● self-sustaining
growth and end
Feudalism of Malthusian
demographic
In order to sustain the foregoing argument, it is necessary to prove a,
ceiling.
rather large, two-pronged proposition: that is to say that, in the presence
of pre-capitalist social-property relations, even given the substantial
growth of opportunities to exchange, economic actors not only (1) found To put the matter crudely, it is my contention that the agrarian
it individually sensible to adopt economic strategies or rules for reproduc- economies that came on the scene from the time of the origins of settled
tion that were incompatible with the requirements of economic develop- agriculture until the early modern period were, almost universally, struc-
ment in the aggregate, but also (2) found it individually and collectively tured by variants of a single broad type of pre-capitalist social-property
sensible to act in ways that maintained and strengthened those social- relations, of which the form that prevailed in medieval and early modern
property relations. Despite the presence of market incentives, economic Europe represented one particular example. This broad type of social-
actors failed to find a strategy of price/cost maximization by means of property relations can be understood as ‘just the opposite’ of capitalist
intensified specialization, accumulation, and innovation to be in their indi- social-property relations. Its widespread prevalence, I would contend,
vidual self-interest or compelled by competition. Over time, therefore, out- explains not only why, from the rise of settled agriculture until the early
put and income per person not only failed to rise with population, but often modern period, what might be called commercialization—the rise of
tended to fall. Even so, neither individuals nor groups could find it in their trade, towns, and the urban—agricultural division of labour—was near
own self-interest to seek to transform the social-property directions in a universal, but also why, despite commercialization, non-development,
capitalist direction. and particularly the Malthusian–Ricardian form of non-development,

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was also essentially universal. The transformation of pre-capitalist social- feudalism—was politically constituted, containing an irreducible political
property relations in a capitalist direction—the transition from pre- element: it was made possible by the political functioning of the peasant
capitalist to capitalist social property relations—was thus the key, community, which endowed its members with the rights that gave them
historically, to the onset of modern economic growth. In the remainder of their possession of the means of subsistence, specifically their land.
this chapter, I attempt to make sense of these propositions and to demon- Beyond that, it was sustained by the paradoxical fact that lords could not,
strate their usefulness for understanding the evolution of feudalism in as a rule, find it in their own interests to separate their peasants from the
most of Europe from the eleventh through the middle of the eighteenth means of subsistence.
century; the transition from feudalism to capitalism in parts of western
Lordly surplus extraction by extra-economic coercion Lords were not
Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; and the
lords by virtue of being landowners, holders of demesnes (indeed, they
implications of the latter for the ensuing emergence of a new pattern of
did not always have demesnes). This was because peasants possessed
self-sustaining growth.
their means of subsistence and so were under no compulsion to take up a
commercial lease or hire themselves out as waged workers in order to sur-
The Evolution of Feudalism in Medieval Europe vive. Lords could not, then, count on the availability of either commercial
tenants or waged workers to valorize what demesne land they held, i.e.
What then were the social-property relations that constituted the on an adequate market in labour power or leasers. As a result, they could
European feudal economy, and why did these systematically give rise to not, as individuals, find it in their interest to expropriate the land pos-
long-term patterns of non-development, despite nurturing the extensive sessed by their peasants because, having done so, they would find them-
development of commerce, urbanization, and the town–country division selves with no one to turn to work on or lease their plots. This was,
of labour? beyond the action of the peasant community, a further powerful factor
contributing to the maintenance of peasant possession. The outcome was
Feudal Social-property Relations that lords could ensure their economic reproduction as lords, ideal-
typically, only by appropriating part of the product of the peasant posses-
Peasant possession Like most agricultural societies since the origins of
sors by force.7 In addition, because under feudalism, at least in its classical
sedentary agriculture, European feudalism was constituted, at its founda-
form, lords took a surplus in some sense individually—rather than collec-
tions, by what I would call peasant possession. By this I mean that agri-
tively via some sort of centralized taxation—they always faced the prob-
cultural producers had direct access to factors of production—land, tools,
lem of implicit competition among lords for peasants. What this meant
and labour—sufficient to enable them to maintain themselves without
was that successful surplus extraction by extra-economic coercion tended
recourse to the market. What made possible peasant possession was, in
to require the exertion of some degree of control over peasants’ lives,
the first instance, villagers’ self-organization—or the self-organization of
some restriction on peasant freedom, especially with respect to mobility.
leading villagers—in a conscious political community. This community
What enabled lords actually to succeed in taking a surplus by extra-
ensured the maintenance of the position of each of its members as posses-
economic coercion was their constitution of self-governing political com-
sors by carrying out a series of functions that should, again, be identified
munities or states, however large or small. These communities made
as quintessentially political. It helped to establish rules for landholding
possible lords’ application of force and, in that way, the performance of
and inheritance.6 On occasion, it appears even to have helped organize
the set of key political (‘governmental’) functions that enabled lords to
defence of its members against outsiders. And it helped to settle disputes
make regular, coercive transfers of wealth from peasants, as well as from
among its members concerning property and persons and to enforce
law and order by carrying out justice and police functions. The upshot
was that peasant possession—like virtually all private property under
7
As a consequence of the secular tendency for population to increase and for peasants to
subdivide their holdings on inheritance, there was a long-term tendency for the size of some
6
I say ‘helped’ in this context, for, where lordship was established, peasants in fact carried peasant holdings to fall below that required to provide their full means of subsistence. For
out these functions in collaboration with, and subordinately to, lords. this, and its implications, see below, pp. XXX .

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other lords.8 They thereby established, and made possible the valorization extraction and class domination, with the consequence that the lordly
of, lords’ rights in peasants’ product, so that, for individual lords, it was class, controlling the means of coercion, inevitably constituted the state.
membership in such communities or states, with associated rights, that, in
the last analysis, made them proprietors. Their property was ‘politically Feudal Rules for Reproduction
constituted’.
The extensive coincidence of the processes of the constitution of polit- The structure of social-property relations, reproduced by collectivities of
ical communities and the constitution of private property—of state lords and by collectivities of peasants, constituted the basic framework in
formation and class formation—throughout the pre-capitalist epoch can- terms of which individuals and/or families decided upon the best strat-
not be overstressed. Under feudalism, overlords could amass power—to egy for their economic reproduction. By examining how this worked out
insure their economic reproduction, as well as to carry out public govern- for feudal economic agents, we can lay bare the fundamental concrete, or
mental functions—only by constituting a political community. But over- specific, problems with the Smithian notion that the Smithian mecha-
lords could constitute a political community only by effectively endowing nisms of growth–specifically the pursuit of the gains from trade and oper-
followers with what I have just termed politically constituted private ation of competition as constraint and field of natural selection–can be
property—rights to an income, generally (but not exclusively) arising expected to operate irrespective of the reigning system of social property-
from rights in peasant wealth, derived classically from seigneurial juris- relations. We can explicate, in particular, the manner and degree to which
diction over peasants and land or, alternatively, from offices financed out production for the market did emerge and develop and lay bare the
of taxation of peasants—or, less formally, from gifts or payments from the limitations upon its capacity to bring about economic growth either
overlords. It was the lords’ self-organization into a political community, by transforming the reigning rules for reproduction or the system of
under the leadership of the overlord, that made possible the application social-property relations.
of the force that was the sine qua non both for the coercive redistribution
of income and wealth by which individual lords maintained themselves Peasants
at the expense of peasants and other lords, and for the simultaneous exe-
Peasants tended to adopt the rule for reproduction ‘produce for subsis-
cution of the standard functions of government by those same lords. The
tence’, the strategy of deploying their families’ land, labour, and capital to
lordly community made possible taxation—the taking of levies by indi-
produce directly all that they needed to survive, marketing only physical
vidual lords from peasants—fundamentally for lords’ personal use, but
surpluses. They did not, that is, adopt the Smithian rule for reproduction,
also to finance public services. It carried out justice and police functions,
‘produce for exchange, ‘specializing in what they did best, accumulating
basically to protect lords’ property rights by quelling peasant resistance
their surpluses, and adopting the latest technique. This is not to say that
and restricting mobility, but also to settle disputes among the lords them-
peasants did not involve themselves in trade—for of course they did, to a
selves and to enforce law and order against unruly members of the lordly,
significant degree. Rather, it is to contend that they eschewed specializa-
as well as the peasant, community. It was responsible for military opera-
tion and the resulting market dependence. How do we explain this, espe-
tions, fundamentally to make possible predatory ventures to take other
cially as it implies that peasants failed to seek all the gains from trade that
lords’ wealth, but also to allow for defence. State building, with the
were theoretically possible?
implied capacity to wield force, was thus necessary for the lords’ surplus
The preliminary, but nonetheless crucial reason why peasants selected
produce for subsistence as their basic rule for reproduction is that they
could, so long, of course, as they continued to possess the means of subsis-
tence. Possession of the means of subsistence relieved peasants from the
8
Because lordly political communities carried out the governmental functions we normally necessity to depend on the market for most of their inputs; it therefore
associate with states, while disposing of the means of force to make this possible, they shielded them from competition. They had what they needed to survive,
should be understood as states, despite their multiplicity, their small size, their localized
so they did not have to go to market for essentials. Therefore there was no
scope, and their property-constituting (surplus-extracting) function. This is not, of course, to
deny that, even early on, some lordly states were unified and had jurisdiction over broad need for them to produce competitively in order to continue to make a go
territories. of it. Even if others might adopt a new cost-cutting technique, peasant

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possessors did not have to. Failing to adopt a cost-cutting innovation that through exchange. Bad harvests were common but unpredictable, tend-
could bring down the price of their output would presumably reduce the ing to occur in bunches and to lead to ‘crises of subsistence’. Such crises
returns peasants could net from selling their surpluses by reducing their not only brought extremely high food prices over several years; simulta-
market share or the return per unit of sales. But, since they did not depend neously, because of those high food prices, they also brought reduced dis-
on sales on the market for survival, this would not put them out of cretionary spending for most of the population, thus reduced demand
business. and unusually low prices for non-essential, non-food items. Under these
But this still leaves unanswered the question of why peasants rejected conditions, peasants who specialized in non-food crops would face the
production for exchange by means of all-out specialization. They might possibility—the precise probability of which they could not calculate—of
not have been compelled to seek the gains from trade in order to survive, finding themselves squeezed between the high costs of the inputs (espe-
but why did not they find it something they wanted to do anyway? After cially food) that they had to purchase and the low returns from their out-
all, as Adam Smith proved, pursuing the gains from trade is the most effi- put, and in serious danger of death from famine. Given the uncertainty of
cient way to allocate one’s labour, as well as capital and land, if one the harvest and the unacceptable cost of ‘business failure’—namely the
wishes to maximize exchange value from the goods or service one pro- possibility of starvation—peasants could not afford to adopt maximizing
vides. Why did not peasants find it in their self-interest to do so? There exchange value via specialization as their rule for reproduction and
can be no doubt that, like everyone else, peasants wanted to secure the adopted instead the rule of ‘safety first’ or ‘produce for subsistence’.
gains from trade, to the extent possible, all else being equal. That, after all, Again, this did not imply staying out of the market. It meant eschewing
was only rational. But the problem was that all else was not equal: for spe- full-scale specialization leading to dependence on the production and sale
cializing to secure the full gains from trade jeopardized the attainment of of non-food crops (such as wine, flax, and the like) and instead diversify-
other, overriding peasant aims. ing so as to directly produce everything needed for survival and market-
We can thus pinpoint the fatal flaw of what might be called Smithian ing only what was left over. It cannot be overstressed that agriculturalists’
trans-historical micro-economics in the following way. While Smith bril- adoption of this non-Smithian strategy was conditional upon their posses-
liantly specified the gains that come from specialization for the market, sion of the means of reproduction; without the latter, peasants would
compared to diversification for subsistence, he failed to demonstrate a have lacked their shield from competition; they would have been com-
trans-historical, or generalized, self-interest in specialization because he pelled to buy their inputs on the market; and thus had little choice but, in
failed to consider and investigate the other side of the coin, i.e. the poten- Smithian manner, to specialize so as to secure the gains from trade so as
tial costs that could accrue or damages that might result from such to meet the competition.
specialization. Where Smith went wrong therefore was to neglect the
Having large families Peasants had to secure insurance against illness
potential losses from trade and to entertain the possibility that these might
and old age in a society in which there was no institution upon which
outweigh the gains from trade. Peasants in possession of their means of
they could rely for this outside the family. It therefore made sense to
subsistence thus refrained from seeking the full gains from trade because
have as many children as possible, in order to insure that there would be
the trade-offs entailed by specialization were too great. The problem was
some who survived long enough to be able to take care of them in case
that specialization by definition meant market dependence; market
they were sick and when they got old. But they could not viably take
dependence entailed subjection to competition; and standing up to
this route and simultaneously choose to produce for exchange and
competition required maximization of profits by minimization of costs.
thereby subject themselves to competition and the resulting pressure to
Nevertheless, for peasants what was required to maximize their
maximize their price–cost ratio. This was because having and supporting
price–cost ratio by minimizing costs was incompatible with the pursuit of
additional children implied a reduction in the surplus of which the fam-
other goals they could not sacrifice. What were these overriding goals and
ily could dispose for the long years in which those children were unable
why was their realization incompatible with the maximization of the
to bring in as much income as they cost to sustain. Peasants with large
gains from trade?
families who turned to specialization would thus find themselves at an
‘Safety first’ Peasants had, above all, to make sure of their supply of intolerable competitive disadvantage. By contrast, producing for subsis-
food. But, peasants could not count on a regular, adequate supply of food tence gave peasants sufficient insulation from the exigencies of market

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competition, so they could secure social insurance in the only way market, specifically by trading their physical surpluses, but they had to
available to them. stop short of becoming dependent upon it.9
Subdivision of holdings as basis for social insurance, early marriage,
Lords
and the perpetuation of the family line Peasant possession gave them
the effective right to subdivide their holdings and they tended to adopt By virtue of their rights in their peasants’ product, lords commanded non-
this custom (even where primogeniture was the formal rule) almost uni- market access to sufficient income to directly provision their households
versally, unless lords prevented them from doing so. In this way, they and secure their basic needs. They were thereby shielded, like peasants,
made sure that their (male) children actually had the capacity to provide from the requirement to produce efficiently on the market in order to
care for them, and ensured the perpetuation of the family line. Sub- stand up to economic competition in order to survive. Nevertheless, in
division also enabled peasants to respond to the demands of male view of the fact that feudal society was constituted by a multiplicity of
children for the wherewithal to start families of their own and, indeed separate, initially localized, lordly groups organized for the purpose of
provided the basis for early marriage, for lacking direct access to plots by exerting force, politico-military competition was a fact of life. As a conse-
inheritance (younger) sons would have had to spend a much longer time quence, lords had little choice but to concern themselves with acquiring
amassing the economic basis for forming a family. Nevertheless, like the wherewithal to engage effectively in warfare, as well as the conspicu-
burdening the holding with many children, subdividing holdings, by ous consumption that betokened their status. They therefore had every
reducing their size, naturally undercut their productive potential (unless inducement to attempt to increase the income from their estates in order
they were extremely large to begin with). Adopting this rule for repro- to purchase the military and luxury goods that they needed to sufficiently
duction to secure highly valued goals of both parents and children was reward, equip, and expand their followings. What was the best way to do
thus incompatible with market dependence and the exigencies of stand- this?
ing up to competition, and thus required eschewing specialization and Some lords lacked demesnes and depended for their income entirely
pursuing a strategy of diversification—production for subsistence/safety on payments in money and kind from dependent peasants. But even
first—to make it viable. those lords who held ample lands would face virtually insuperable barri-
ers if they sought to increase their income by means of increased invest-
In sum, possession of the means of subsistence, by shielding peasants ment and innovation in agricultural production, given the nature of their
from the competitive constraint, permitted them to eschew all the poten- relationship with the peasants upon whom they depended for their
tial gains from trade and to take the necessary steps to maximize their labour force. Because peasants possessed their own plots and laboured on
utility. Peasants’ choice for diversifying to provide subsistence and lords’ demesnes only under the threat of force, they had little incentive to
marketing only physical surpluses expressed no economic irrationality, make effective use of the improved means of production with which lords
but represented the most sensible way to secure economic security, as might equip them, and lords were of course in no position to fire them for
well to pursue understandable non-economic goals, under conditions in their failure to do so. Deprived of the threat of dismissal, perhaps the best
which neither economic security nor those non-economic goals could be disciplinary device yet discovered to motivate careful and intensive work
achieved in conjunction with market-dependent, competitive production. in class-divided societies, lords found the supervisory costs of securing
Peasant possessors could not take full advantage of the market by special- satisfactory work too high to justify much agricultural investment or
izing because specializing meant market dependence; market depend- innovation. They therefore had to find alternatives to improvement if they
ence meant subjection to the competitive constrain; and achieving wished to increase their income.
competitiveness was incompatible with diversifying so as to minimize the
risk of death through starvation, the provision of health and old age
insurance through having large families, and securing the capacity of
their male children to establish the basis for their own material reproduc- 9
The foregoing analysis is premised, of course, on peasants actually being able to maintain
tion, so as to care for their parents, to marry, and to secure the family line. the means of subsistence, something it was not always possible for them to do. See below,
Peasants might seek the gains from trade by involving themselves in the pp. XXX.

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Extensive growth Although they had minimal capacity to transform Feudal Developmental Patterns
production so as to increase productivity, lords could increase output and
It was the generalized adoption by individual lords and peasants of the
income by opening new lands to agricultural production along already-
rules for reproduction imposed by feudal social-property relations that lay
existing lines. This might be achieved via simple assarting, the carving
behind long-term patterns of feudal development. By grasping the pro-
out of arable from waste, or, more grandly, via colonization, the expansion
gression from feudal social-property relations to feudal rules for reproduc-
of feudal economy into new regions. Either way, extending the area of cul-
tion to feudal forms of growth and and feudal forms crisis, it becomes
tivation was the lords’ main form of productive investment and perhaps
possible to understand the general lines of feudal evolution across Europe
the best way if increasing their output, incomes, and capacity to buy on
as whole. Of course, though partaking of a common trajectory, different
the market.
regions took paths that differed from one another in important respects.
‘Political accumulation’ In the absence of access to new land, lords had These divergent paths were crucial in determining divergent long-term
little means to increase their income except by improving their ability to outcomes, to which it is necessary to return.
redistribute wealth coercively from peasants or other lords. As a result,
Population growth Peasants’ proclivities to have large families and sub-
lords often found their most viable rule for reproduction to be what I call
divide holdings facilitated early marriage and relatively low levels of
political accumulation. This entailed applying their surpluses to building
celibacy. The latter made for relatively high fertility and, in turn, rapid
up their military and political potential by constructing stronger—better
population growth. All across the European feudal economy demo-
armed, larger, and more cohesive—political communities to better
graphic increase accelerated from some time in the eleventh century and,
dominate and control the peasantry and to more effectively wage war.
virtually everywhere, brought about a doubling of population before the
Rather than systematically investing, they pursued an anti-growth strat-
end of the thirteenth century.
egy of compulsively consuming—namely systematically dispersing their
money on military equipment to arm their feudal bands and on luxury Colonization The only method by which the feudal economy could
goods to bring vassals around them and keep them there. State- achieve real growth was by opening up new land for cultivation.
building—by attracting more followers to the lordly political community, Economic development in feudal Europe may thus be understood, at one
better equipping them with weapons, and enabling them to pursue a level, in terms of the familiar race between the growth of the area of set-
form of life that distinguished them as members of the elite—was, in the tlement and the growth of population. During the twelfth and thirteenth
end, the sine qua non for lordly survival and prosperity. centuries, feudal Europe was the site not only of dynamic efforts at assart-
It must be emphasized that lords’ adoption of ‘political accumulation’ ing, i.e. scratching out new arable land from forests and wastes. It was
as a rule for reproduction is inexplicable merely as one viable means for also the scene of great movements of outward expansion by settler-
increasing lordly income. It was imposed upon lords by the structure of colonizers. The latter were often organized and led by lords, who pushed
the feudal economy as a whole. Inter-lordly competition was thus the eastward across the Elbe, conquered the Iberian Peninsula, and would,
feudal analogue of inter-capitalist competition and it functioned like eventually, reach out from Portugal and Spain across the Atlantic to the
capitalist competition as a field of natural selection, weeding out those Americas. But, in certain crucial instances, the colonization process was
lords or groups of lords—i.e. lordly states—that could not stand up to undertaken by peasants, notably in the case of the reclamation of land
military pressure, from the time in which feudal political communities from the North Sea, to constitute much of what was to become the
tended to be small and rudimentary, right through to the era of huge, northern Netherlands.
absolutist warfare states. Lordly groups therefore had no choice but to
Limited growth of the productive forces and declining productivity of
turn to political accumulation so as to build up their military potential
labour As population grew and peasants subdivided holdings, the
merely for purposes of defence. At the same time, under conditions where
material foundations for improving production—indeed of peasant pro-
it was difficult to extend production, conquest and plunder might very
duction itself—were progressively weakened. Agriculture had to be
well prove the most cost-effective way to increase income.
extended to land that was less fertile and/or more costly to bring under
cultivation. Holdings got smaller, and the ratios between land and

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labour and capital and labour diminished. Because the man–land ratio of 35 acres, or even 50 acres or more, especially if it had the help of sea-
steadily increased, yields tended to grow. But this growth of output per sonal labour at harvest time.10 But the majority of peasants often appear
unit of land was an expression of, and was purchased at the cost of, a to have lacked plots even half that size, i.e. around the minimum needed
decline of output per unit of labour. To make matters worse, as peasant to provide for a family’s subsistence.11 The outcome was that peasant agri-
plots got smaller and they yielded ever less food, peasants were obliged culture was unable to allocate its supply of labour efficiently, specifically
to transfer to arable production land previously devoted to the support of meaning that there was a great deal of disguised unemployment in the
animals, the key source of the manure that was required to keep the land dominant, grain-producing agriculture. The resulting pressure on peasant
in heart. But this naturally undermined soil fertility, accelerating the family incomes and waste of potentially productive labour constituted an
decline of agricultural labour productivity that overshadowed every enormous fetter on the growth of peasant productiveness. Peasants’ ten-
aspect of feudal economic evolution. dency to have many children and to subdivide their holdings among their
The peasants’ approach to agriculture tended to preclude the ongoing sons obviously worsened this problem, especially as peasants’ parcelliza-
improvement that would have been required to counter the tendency tion of plots tended to overwhelm the tendency to the build-up of
to declining output per person. Shielded from competitive constraint, sufficiently large holdings in the agricultural economy as a whole.
peasants lacked an overriding incentive to develop new techniques or Part and parcel of the same syndrome, peasants often lacked not
systematically to adopt existing ones. At the same time, their choice of only the land, but also the capital, needed to produce grain effectively—
production for subsistence as their fundamental rule for reproduction especially through investing in animals, as well as in farm infrastructure.
limited the specialization that was usually a prerequisite to technical Surpluses were small, and access to credit highly restricted. And the dif-
advance. It was not that peasants were resistant to technological change ficulties were of course exacerbated over time, as population grew, wealth
per se. For example, over the course of the medieval period, they adopted was divided, and collateral disappeared.
progressively larger and better ploughs. Still, the introduction of new Finally, individual peasant plots were, most often, integrated within a
techniques tended to take place as a once-and-for-all occurrence, not an village agriculture that was, in critical ways, controlled by the community
ongoing self-sustaining process. of cultivators. The peasant village regulated the use of the pasture and
The underlying problem was that a high degree of market dependence waste on which animals were raised, and the rotation of crops in the com-
was required to bring in the technical improvements that really could mon fields. Individual peasants thus tended to face significant limitations
have made a difference, those that would come to constitute ‘the new on their ability to decide how to farm their plots and thus on their capacity
husbandry’. The latter was largely about creating a more symbiotic to specialize, build up larger consolidated holdings, and so forth.
relationship—to replace the age-old conflict—between arable and animal
Feudal state-building In the face of its limited potential for increasing
production and was highlighted by the integration of fodder crops
agricultural output, and under pressure from the inter-lordly politico-
(clover, sainfoin, turnips, etc.) into new rotations. The increased cultiva-
military competition that was built into the feudal structure of decentral-
tion of fodder crops could allow for the support of a larger numbers of
ized coercive surplus extraction, the lords tended to find that investing
beasts for ploughing, hauling, and manure. Meanwhile, as a consequence
their surpluses so as to increase the size and sophistication of their politi-
of the nitrogen-fixing properties of the fodder crops themselves, it would
cal communities, or states, was an indispensable means to ensure their
directly contribute to the fertility of the soil. But the fact remains that,
survival and increase their wealth and power. This was especially because
although apparently well known in several parts of Europe in the
inter-lordly competition for peasants, intensified by the lords’ need for
medieval epoch, these improvements generally were not systematically
additional peasant cultivators to valorize newly reclaimed land, as well as
integrated into rotations until the early modern period due to peasants’
inter-lordly disputes over jurisdictional rights within villages, tended to
resistance to the high degree of specialization and reliance on market sales
that they entailed.
The problem of limitations on specialization was compounded by the 10
R. C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1992), pp. 57–8.
small size of peasant plots, which tended to grow ever smaller. In basic 11
Data on the size of peasant plots are all too scarce. This generalization is based on evidence
grain production, a family labour force could on its own cultivate farms from later thirteenth-century England (in the great survey, the Hundred Rolls), as well as
English and French studies of individual lordly estates.

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provide the peasantry with major openings for playing lords off one not, typically, either capitalists or proto-capitalists. Like peasants and lords,
against one another, as well as for resistance, thereby limiting the lords’ urban industrial producers depended upon political communities for their
take. It was also because that same inter-lordly competition constituted a politically constituted private property, and found membership in these
field for natural selection, which, over time, increasingly favoured those communities the sine qua non for their economic reproduction. Especially
lords able to improve their politico-military capacity, in much the same in the face of the precariousness of the medieval food and other markets,
way as inter-capitalist competition composed a field for natural selec- artisans were thus obliged to organize themselves into gilds which had as
tion that favoured those units able to improve their techno-productive their chief purpose securing their members’ income by reducing the
capacities. uncertainty of market production through constituting a shield against
This is not to say that a high level of lordly organization was always competition. In order to keep prices up, gilds limited entry, enforced
required. Nor is it to argue that state-building took place as an automatic production standards, and restricted output. As a consequence, though
or universal process. On the eastern frontier of European feudal society, innovations of course took place from time to time, artisan-dominated
colonization long remained an easy option, and there was relatively little industry displayed little of the tendency to self-sustaining specialization,
internally generated pressure upon the lordly class to improve its self- accumulation, and innovation required for dynamic industrial growth.
organization. At the same time, just because stronger feudal states might Merchants found themselves in a position roughly analogous to that
become necessary did not always determine that they could be success- of artisans. Merchants’ profits depended upon their ability to buy cheap
fully constructed. But the fact remains that, to the degree that they and sell dear and therefore required political regulation of trade for their
remained internally disorganized, lordly groups would tend to be that sustenance. This was because, without controls over entry and quantities
much more vulnerable not only to peasant resistance and flight that could traded, competitive processes would tend to force the purchase price up
undermine their capacity to take a surplus, but to depredations from the and the sales price down until they equalized one another. Merchants,
outside that threatened their very existence. The evolution of the feudal too, therefore—like lords, peasants, and artisans—depended for their
mode of production, over the course of the medieval and early modern reproduction upon their organization into political communities, specifi-
periods, was therefore characterized by the prevalence, in every region cally privileged companies. To be effective, the latter needed charters that
and across Europe as a whole, of ever larger and more powerful political could be backed up politically and forcefully, and so almost always had to
communities or states.12 be issued by the prince or leading aristocrats. Like virtually all other feu-
dal actors, merchants found that their private property and economic
The expansion of the market and the growth of towns The immediate
reproduction had an irreducibly political aspect. Indeed, the best way for
expression of lordly political accumulation leading to the growth of ever
merchants to increase their profits was, very often, to strengthen their
larger and more powerful lordly political communities or states was the
companies’ trading privileges.
growth of exchange and the rise of towns. The lordly class needed ever
more, and more sophisticated, weaponry and luxury goods (especially The restricted scope of commercialization and the town–country divi-
fine textiles) to respond to intensifying intra-feudal politico-military com- sion of labour: limited growth of the non-agricultural labour force and
petition. The growth of exchange made possible the rise of a circuit of of the domestic market Commerce, merchants, and towns were thus in
interdependent productions in which the manufactures of the towns, no way external to the feudal economy; on the contrary, because they
produced in response to the demand of the lords, were exchanged for responded directly to the requirements for lords to carry out their rules
peasant-produced necessities (food) and raw materials, appropriated by for reproduction, they were integral to its functioning from the very start.
the lords and demanded by the town population. Great industrial and commercial cities emerged in Flanders and northern
In this nexus, both artisan industrial producers and merchant interme- Italy from the tenth and eleventh centuries on the basis of their industries’
diaries were of course central, but it should be emphasized that they were ability to capture a preponderance of the demand for textiles and arma-
ments emanating form the lordly class of Europe as a whole. In turn, they
12 placed ever-greater pressure on commercialization in the countryside. But
This is not of course to deny the converse, viz. that relatively strong states could be found
in every feudal epoch, even quite early on, as for example in Anglo-Saxon England. For the the fact remains that both the social-property relations in agriculture and
historical processes of state-building across different regions of Europe, see below, pp. XXX. the character of the town–country division of labour put strict limitations

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not only on urbanization but the degree to which the growth of towns The Malthusian–Ricardian pattern of relative prices and the growth of
could stimulate the response of agricultural production. poverty Because agricultural labour productivity declined as population
The trend to declining labour productivity in agriculture tended to increased, the evolution of the feudal economy was marked by a distinc-
lead naturally to declining agricultural surpluses per agricultural worker tive evolution of relative prices that expressed its fundamental nature. As
and therefore to put strict limits on the potential for growth of the rela- the number of persons grew, demand for food and land to provide food
tive size of the non-agricultural labour force and, specifically, of towns. naturally grew correspondingly. But, because output per person declined,
At the same time, because peasants had only limited ability to make demand outran supply, tending to drive up the relative prices of both
market purchases, the growth of lordly demand constituted the main food and land. At the same time, because food prices rose, income avail-
driving force for urban industrial and commercial expansion, but it too able for discretionary expenditures declined. As a result, the demand per
was limited by the size of the agricultural surplus. During the whole of person for non-necessities, notably manufactured goods, declined, even
the medieval and early modern period through 1750, throughout most of while manufacturing productivity avoided the declining productivity
western Europe the non-agricultural population as a proportion of the that gripped agriculture, with the consequence that the relative prices of
total failed to grow, while that of the towns increased at best from 10 per manufactures fell. Meanwhile, as the potential labour force grew, even as
cent to 12 per cent.13 the economy’s dynamism decreased, real wages tended to fall. This, in
combination with the decline in the size of peasant plots, meant that the
The growing weight of unproductive production In the first instance,
rate of poverty inexorably increased.14
the growth of the town-country social division of labour within feudal
society benefited lords, for it reduced costs of production through increas- The (partial) commercialization of peasant agriculture, the rise of
ing specialization, thereby making military and luxury goods relatively proto-industry, and the increase of land productivity at the expense of
cheaper. Nevertheless, in the longer run, it meant the growth in the size of labour productivity The ultimate result of the long wave of demo-
the economy’s unproductive sector at the expense of its productive one. graphic expansion leading to subdivision of holdings was to leave a sig-
On the one hand, feudal levies were used to pay for the output of the nificant part of the peasant population, by the thirteenth century, first
growing urban centres, thus on military goods and luxury consumables, without agricultural surpluses and ultimately with insufficient land to
but neither of the latter flowed back into the productive process as means provide fully for its subsistence. A greater proportion of the peasantry
of production or means of consumption for the direct producers. On the than ever before was rendered at least partially dependent upon the mar-
other hand, as lords succeeded in increasing their unproductive con- ket. Nevertheless, (usually partial) market dependence for these peasants
sumption by improving their ability to redistribute income away from the led not to any breakthrough toward modern economic growth, but an
peasantry coercively, they further limited the agricultural economy’s intensification of the long-term trends toward stagnation and decline.
capacity to improve, for increased levies reduced peasants’ disposable Increasing numbers of peasant plots could not support their possessors,
income, and thus their ability to support themselves as the agricultural but peasants had little choice but to cling to them, because they provided
labour force or to make greater investments in tools. So, if the growth of an indispensable contribution to their livelihood. This was especially
towns depended on agrarian surpluses and tended to increase the because, due to the structurally limited size of the non-agricultural labour
demand for agricultural output, it also further constricted the capacity of force, as well as the restricted employment opportunities offered by
agriculture to support it. towns dominated by artisans organized in privileged gilds and merchants
organized in privileged companies, the economic alternatives available to
peasants outside of agriculture were minimal. Under the pressure of pop-
ulation increase, growing numbers of peasants thus found themselves

13
R. C. Allen, ‘Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800’,
European Review of Economic History, III (2000); J. de Vries, European Urbanization 1500–1800 14
Postan, ‘Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: England’, 549–65; H. E. Hallam,
(Cambridge, 1984). The conclusion on the share of the urban labour force in the total during ‘Population Movements in England, 1086–1350’, in idem (ed.), The Agrarian History of
the medieval period depends on extrapolating back to that era the findings of de Vries for England and Wales, vol. II: 1042–1350 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 508–93; J. Z. Titow, English Rural
the early modern period. Society 1200–1350 (London, 1969), pp.

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Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong Robert Brenner

‘stuck’ on the land, while their demand for means of support beyond their commercial rent or to hire themselves out as agricultural labourers or go
own plots increased as the size of their holdings decreased. Peasants into domestic manufacturing. But their having to do so offered lords,
had little choice but, in one way or another, to accept decreasing living richer peasants, and merchants unprecedented opportunities, for it pro-
standards and increasing exploitation or ‘self-exploitation’, in order to vided them with an ever-increasing supply of effectively captive labour.
survive. With no other place to go, semi-landless peasants had to intensify their
Peasants who had insufficient land to provide their subsistence labour and reduce their living standards to the extent necessary to secure
directly but who had commercial access to urban markets could seek to a lease or employment. Lords and wealthier peasants could therefore
make ends meet by making more intensive use of family labour—not secure the best returns from their land by spending money on the employ-
only their own but also, especially, that of their wives and children. All ment of additional peasants rather than on improved means of produc-
else being equal, peasants in this position would have devoted their addi- tion and by leasing land to peasants obliged to produce with the goal of
tional labour to the production of food grains, for, in the face of food family survival (rather than to larger farmers aiming to make a profit).
prices that rose with population increase, this would have brought the Merchants made the same choice in organizing domestic manufacture.
best returns (so long as the demographic upturn continued). But the prob- Simply put, peasant families’ capacity and necessity to intensify labour
lem was that increasing labour inputs in food grain production quickly and accept lower returns per unit of labour input made substitution of
brought sharply declining increases in output (rapidly falling marginal labour for capital the optimal way to improve lordly and merchant
returns to labour). Peasants were therefore obliged to fall back on the cul- income.15
tivation of such ‘labour-intensive’ commercial crops as flax, dyes, and
garden vegetables, as well as legumes and sometimes fodder crops. They In sum, under the pressure of an ever higher man–land ratio, precisely in
might turn, as well, to domestic industry organized by town or rural order to continue to ‘produce for subsistence’, peasants were, paradox-
merchants. Still, to follow this path, peasants had to pay a heavy price. ically, obliged to turn ever more intensively to the market—to commercial
Because the pressure on peasants to pursue the production of specialized agricultural and industrial pursuits. But, because they did so by necessity
crops or domestic manufacturing was accompanied by rising food (grain) rather than by choice, they not only failed to secure the gains from trade
prices, both commercial agriculture and proto-industry yielded ever that would have accrued to them had they had plots of sufficient size to
smaller returns per unit of labour input than did wheat, so always repre- continue to produce and sell surpluses in food grains, but suffered decli-
sented a decrease in the cost-effectiveness with which peasants allocated ning productiveness and declining living standards in the process. The
their major resource. Put another way, although commercial crops and implication for the economy as a whole was that during the thirteenth
domestic manufacture yielded increased output and income per house- and the first part of the fourteenth century—and in the feudal economy’s
hold or per unit of land—rising land productivity—it did so only at the ‘up’ phases of demographically driven expansion more generally—
cost of a further decrease in output per unit of labour—declining labour increasing commercialization and proto-industrialization represented no
productivity. The peasants’ turn to commercial agriculture and proto- step toward development, but an aggravation of ongoing economic invo-
industrialization should not therefore be understood, in Smithian fashion, lution. In the words of Slicher van Bath, the rise of intensive husbandry
as a voluntary attempt to secure the gains from trade in response to and, we might add, of proto-industrialization ‘was not a picture of
growing market opportunities, but rather as a second choice, made under wealth, but of scarcely controlled poverty . . . The cause was . . . the neces-
duress, as the only way to survive in the face of insufficient land to sity to eke out a living for an increased and dense population’, under
cultivate food grains. conditions where peasants had no other options.16
Whereas intensifying labour could not, after a point, raise yields for
grain, it could long continue to raise yields for many non-grain commer- 15
B. M. S. Campbell and M. Overton, ‘Productivity Change in European Agricultural
cial crops, although perforce at the cost of declining output per unit of Development’, in Campbell and Overton (eds), Land, Labour and Livestock (Manchester, 1991),
labour input. This was the classic route to peasant ‘self-exploitation’. pp. 30–2.
Peasants with insufficient land to secure their subsistence either directly 16
B. H. Slicher van Bath, ‘The Rise of Intensive Husbandry in the Low Countries’, in J.
or through commercial sales were obliged to lease additional land at a Bromley and E. H. Kossman (eds), Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia (London,
1968), p. 15. Proto-industry ‘should [thus] be viewed as an autonomous response of an area

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Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong Robert Brenner

Feudal forms of crisis income from, one another. Peasants were thus subjected to increasing rents
and the ravages of warfare at the very time that their capacity to respond
The long-term process of extensive growth—powered by demographic
had been severely weakened, and this led to population stagnation and
growth, and overlaid by the intensification of political accumulation lead-
decline. The particularly sharp reduction in population that followed upon
ing to the growth of feudal states which supported ever larger, parasitic
the famines and plagues of the fourteenth century brought major reduc-
urban centres—had, in the last analysis, to lead to predictable forms of
tions in lordly revenue leading to sharply increased lordly demands—
crisis.
resulting in a downward spiral of rising exploitation, increased inter-lordly
Malthusian crisis Given declining labour productivity, population military conflict, and declining population that was not reversed in many
growth faced unavoidable limits, and, all over Europe, from various places for more than a century. The lordly revenue crisis and the ensuing
points in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, there was seigneurial reaction thus prevented the normal Malthusian return to equi-
increasing evidence of overpopulation and the letting up or actual ceas- librium. A general socio-economic crisis, the product of the overall feudal
ing of population growth. In this situation, all else being equal, there class-political system, rather than a mere Malthusian downturn, gripped
should have been a simple Malthusian adjustment in which demographic the European agrarian economy until the middle of the fifteenth century.17
decline—via famine, disease, and later marriage—brought population (See Table 4.2.)
back into line with available resources, opening the way for a new phase of
demo-economic expansion. But this straightforward homeostatic mecha-
The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism
nism could not take effect because the operation of the feudal economy
encompassed a balancing not merely of peasants’ requirements for sub-
Conceptualizing the Transition to Economic Development
sistence with the potential output of medieval agriculture, but of lords’
requirements for political accumulation with the peasants’ potential If feudal social-property relations, so long as they were maintained by
aggregate surplus. lordly and peasant political communities, tended to make for the adoption
of certain rules for reproduction on the part of individual lords and peas-
Crisis of seigneurial revenues Because the lords’ growing needs for mil-
ants and, for that reason, certain aggregate or economy-wide developmen-
itary and luxury consumption were ultimately determined by the growing
tal patterns and forms of crisis, the question that obviously arises in
requirements of intra-feudal competition in an epoch of increasingly well
attempting to understand the breakthrough from Malthusian–Ricardian
constructed feudal states and ever more costly warfare, the lords could not
stagnation to Smithian self-sustaining growth is how to understand a
easily adjust their demands downward to the declining capacity of the
transition from the feudal mode of production to an economy in which
underlying agricultural population to meet them. While the slowdown of
economic agents systematically adopt capitalist rules for reproduction.
population growth of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century thus
The Smithian approach clearly faces profound difficulties in even recog-
meant the deceleration of pressure on the available resources, it also meant
nizing this problem, let alone resolving it. This is because its fundamental
a slowdown in the growth of the number of rent-paying tenants and so
premise is that, in response to the opportunities offered by the rise of com-
thereby a deceleration in the growth of lordly rents. To maintain sufficient
merce, individual economic agents can, more or less trans-historically, be
politico-military potential, lords sought to compensate for the slowdown
expected to find it in their economic interest to seek the gains of trade by
in the growth of their income by increasing their demands on the peas-
specializing, and, beyond that, accumulating surpluses and innovating,
antry, as well as by initiating military attacks upon, so as to redistribute
thereby detonating an ongoing process of economic development by way
of the invisible hand. From that point of departure, it is difficult to take on
trapped in a cycle of relative overpopulation and the ensuing parceling out of agricultural board the idea that a system of social-property relations, sustained by the
land and pressure on agriculture income, coupled with the inability of the surrounding
towns to absorb emigration from the countryside’: H. van der Wee, ‘Industrial Dynamics
and the Process of Urbanisation and De-Urbanisation in the Low Countries from the Late
17
Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century: A Synthesis’, in idem (ed.), The Rise and Decline of For these dynamics, and their instantiation in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Urban Industries in Italy and the Low Countries (Late Middle Ages–Early Modern Times) Normandy, see G. Bois, Crise du féodalisme: Économie rurale et démographie en Normandie
(Louvain, 1988), p. 347. orientale du début du 14e siècle au milieu du 16e siècle (Paris, 1976).

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Table 4.2. Feudalism. Table 4.2. continued

Social-property Rules for Development Forms Social-property Rules for Development Forms
relations reproduction patterns of crisis relations reproduction patterns of crisis

Reproduced by peasant political community Reproduced by lordly political community

● peasant possession of ● produce for ● population growth ● over- ● lordly exaction by ● political ● opening up of new Feudal crisis
the means of subsistence, subsistence (also ● ever smaller population extra-economic coercion, accumulation, lands, expansion ● population

i.e. land, labour, and called ‘safety first’), holdings leading to i.e. forceful taking of i.e. use levies from ● ever larger feudal falls
means of production i.e. diversify to ● movement onto fall in feudal rent. This is peasants to build states ● lordly

sufficient to maintain produce everything worse land population exploitative, because larger, more ● growing demand income falls
themselves needed, marketing ● little specialization labour, rent, or money cohesive, better for military and ● lords tax

only surpluses or investment is taken from peasants armed political luxury goods peasants
● have large families ● declining labour without compensation groups, or feudal ● growth of trade and take
● subdivide holdings productivity and without peasant states and towns (as from other
● marry early (Malthusian choice (non-contractual) ● expand area of expression of lords
pattern) settlement, either lordly demand through
● rising food and through bringing for military and war (to
land prices, falling more land into luxury goods) compensate
real wages and cultivation ● growth in for falling
prices for (assarting) or unproductive incomes)
industrial goods through expenditures ● population

in A Phase colonization, falls, as

(opposite in i.e. extending peasants face
B Phase) feudalism to new increased
● restricted home regions levies at
market due same time
to peasant they are
production for already
subsistence and suffering
minimal growth from falling
of labour incomes
productivity, and as
keeping food production
prices high and is disrupted
discretionary by war
● lords face
spending low
● home market falling
dominated by incomes, etc.
● a downward
demand by
lords spiral
● limited population
out of agriculture,
in towns.

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collective action of class-based political communities, might create incen- order to exploit them by taking part of their product without recom-
tives for individuals to adopt economic strategies that, though individu- pense—let alone to separate them from their plots? But, even assuming
ally sensible, turn out, in aggregate, to be subversive of economic growth. that the individual lord could have successfully accomplished the libera-
The explanatory tactic that Smithianism broadly speaking has therefore tion then expropriation of his peasants, it is hard to understand why he
been obliged to pursue is to understand changes in social structure, or would have found it in his interest to do so, in view of that fact that, given
social-property relations, as taking place in the same way as other eco- the prevalence of feudal social-property relations, the economy that sur-
nomic changes—specifically, as the aggregate result of the piecemeal ini- rounded him was constituted by other feudal lords capable of exerting
tiatives of individual economic agents, acting at the micro-level, so as to extra-economic controls over their peasants and peasants who themselves
maximize profits of their economic units, in this case, by reorganizing possessed their means of subsistence. Given those social background
their units’ structure of property so as to increase their cost-effectiveness conditions, in which an individual lord was unable to have recourse to
in much the same manner as they might reorganize their units’ structure already-existing well developed markets in tenants or workers, to whom
of production itself, in accord with factor prices and the availability or could the lord have expected to turn in order to farm his estate? He could
advance of technology. hardly have relied on his just-expropriated peasants to remain in the
In a series of famous passages in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith neighbourhood. But, even if the latter had been willing to stick around
offers what has turned out to be the classic instantiation of this approach, and to come back and work for the lord, the lord would have found him-
so as to account, in effect, for the historical transition from feudalism to self in a very poor bargaining position to lease to or to hire them, given
capitalism in England. In Smith’s scenario, the starting point is the the lack of competition for tenancies and jobs.
appearance of merchants from the towns at lords’ estates, offering for sale The steps that Smith has his individual lord undertake would of
to lords ‘baubles’ hitherto unavailable (but quite irresistible) to them. course have made sense on the premise that the society-wide transition
Lords, who were previously limited in what they could consume by the to capitalism had already been completed—i.e. the lords as a class had
prevalence of the natural economy, are motivated to respond by attempt- ceased to be able to take a rent by extra-economic coercion and the direct
ing to rationalize their estates so as increase their income. First, they dis- producers had already been separated from their means of subsistence
miss their very costly retainers as faux frais of production, free their and been reduced to market-dependent tenants; in other words that they
peasants, and kick most of those same peasants off their plots. Then, they were already capitalist landlords, owners of the land, able to access a
offer the best-off among the latter, presumably on a competitive basis, developed market in tenants. But to adopt this premise would obviously
commercial leases to farm larger, consolidated plots that the landlords be to take for granted the existence of what it is necessary to account
have built up and brought together. The upshot, in aggregate, of this same for. If, by contrast, one gives credence to peasant possession and lordly
process, taking place manor by manor across the economy, is the rise, de exaction by extra-economic coercion as the givens of the feudal social-
facto, of capitalist farming in England.18 property system, sustained on a system-wide basis by the collective action
It should nevertheless be more or less self-evident that Smith can of communities of lords and peasants, one would have to conclude, as did
accomplish this conceptualization only by failing to take seriously the a range of non-Smithian historians from M. M. Postan to Maurice Dobb,
existence of feudal social-property relations as constraints on the actions that, to best respond to increased opportunities to market the product of
of individual economic agents. Only in this way can he conceive of the their estates, individual lords would have attempted to strengthen their
transformation of social-property relations as taking place as the result of grip on the peasantry so as to extract more from them in a feudal manner.
initiatives taken at the micro-level and presumed to generalize them- Rather than detonating a transition to capitalism, the ensuing process
selves economy-wide. If it were admitted that, as in medieval England, could very well have led to a strengthening, and epochal extension in
peasants actually possessed the land, the rationality of a lord dismissing time, of the feudal mode of production—and clearly did across north-
his retainers would be hard to credit, for, without them, how could a lord eastern Europe, in East Elbian Germany and Poland, during the later
have ensured the forceful domination over his peasants that he needed in medieval and early modern period.
In recent decades, historians have tended to accept that, in the pres-
ence of feudal lordship, the rise of trade cannot be counted to set in train
18
Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book III.

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a process of transition. A number of them have made, however, the social differentiation can unquestionably be expected to take place rather
equally Smithian argument, that, once lordship had been overcome, indi- rapidly in the presence of the market, because those producers are not just
vidual peasants could be expected to set off the transition to capitalism by involved in the market but dependent upon it. As a consequence, not only
way of a process of social differentiation. In this vision, larger peasants, is profit-maximization necessarily the economic norm, but natural selec-
taking advantage of presumed economies of scale, beat out, on the mar- tion is enabled to take place by way of competition. But to make reference
ket, smaller and less effective producers. In turn, the former then emerge to such a process to account for the transition is once again to explain the
as a rural bourgeoisie, the latter fall into the ranks of the rural proletariat, rise of capitalism by assuming its existence.20
and the former hire the latter, instantiating the rise of capitalism.19 Nevertheless, if the problem, at bottom, with Smithian approaches is
But, as with the scenario presented by Adam Smith, this process, envi- their taking for granted the prevalence of a capitalist social property sys-
sioned by latter-day Smithians, must assume that the transition to capital- tem and capitalist economic agents pursuing capitalist economic goals to
ism has already taken place in order to successfully explain it. In the explain the rise of capitalism, the question that immediately imposes itself
presence of peasant possession, larger, more efficient peasants can, by with respect to the approach I have adopted here may be seen to be just
virtue of their greater productiveness, take a greater share of the market the opposite. In view of the strong system-maintaining bias that I have,
at the expense of their less-well-off counterparts, but they cannot put explicitly and implicitly, attributed to the operation of systems of social-
them out of business, appropriating their assets and reducing them to the property relations in general and feudal social-property relations in par-
ranks of the proletariat. This is, again, because the latter are shielded from ticular, how can a transition to capitalism ever be expected? Not only have
competition by their direct, non-market access to all the inputs they need I argued that, so long as feudal social-property relations were maintained,
to reproduce their families. As a result, wide swathes of the economy are peasants and lords would find that it made sense to adopt the same rules
impenetrable by the standard processes of capitalist natural selection, and for reproduction, leading, in aggregate, to the same economic tendencies
potentially capitalist peasants can find only a limited market at best for to non-development and the same forms of socio-economic crisis. But
proletarians to hire and/or commercial tenants to lease their land to. I have implied as well that, in so far as either lords or peasants had
In individual cases, peasants might buy land from others so as to build anything to say about it, feudal social-property relations would in fact
up larger holdings. Nevertheless, this could not easily happen on an be maintained, for peasants and lords sustained their own political com-
economy-wide basis, since peasant possession of their land was the foun- munities precisely with the purpose of constituting, reproducing, and
dation for their economic reproduction, and they had few alternative strengthening to the maximum extent possible peasant possession and
ways to make a living. For that reason, peasants would not easily part surplus extraction by extra-economic coercion, respectively. The unavoid-
with their holdings, and, as a consequence, land prices tended to be able conclusion is that, even were either lordly or peasant collectivities
driven up disproportionately. In any case, given the overriding tendency entirely successful in realizing their aims against the other, they would
for peasants, large and small, to turn to ‘safety first’, to have large fami- bring about continuity not qualitative change. Lords would install even
lies, and to subdivide holdings on inheritance in pursuit of economic tighter feudal controls over the peasants in the interest of greater exac-
security, social insurance, and the extension of the family line, parcelliza- tions by extra-economic coercion; peasants would put an end to lordship
tion of land could be expected to outrun agglomeration. Of course, where and secure untrammelled peasant property and the capacity to take the
direct agricultural producers are already separated from their means
of subsistence—not necessarily the means of production—a process of
20
It is true, of course, that, as population rose, ever greater numbers of peasants found them-
selves with insufficient land to make ends meet and thus to an increasing extent dependent
upon the market. But, as has been stressed, in this situation lords, merchants, and the peas-
19
See, for example, M. Dobb, ‘From Feudalism to Capitalism’, in R. H. Hilton (ed.), The
ants themselves found it made sense to pursue not greater capital accumulation and
Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1976) and P. Croot and D. Parker, ‘Agrarian
improvement but, on the contrary, greater squeezing of the direct producers by taking a
Class Structure and the Development of Capitalism: France and England Compared’, in
greater share of their product and by impelling greater intensification of labour. The com-
T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philipin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and
mercialization of agriculture and proto-industrialization that resulted from demographic
Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985). Cf. R. Brenner, ‘Dobb on the
increase and subdivision of holdings did not therefore lead to capitalist development but to
Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, II (1978).
agro-industrial involution. See above, pp. XXX.

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Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong Robert Brenner

full fruits of their labour. But the upshot in either case would not be the modern period, there ensued a process of non-development cleav-
transition to capitalism but the strengthening of pre-capitalist social- ing closely to the path of Malthusian–Ricardian secular stagnation
property relations. Since I began with the contention that the sine qua installed during the medieval period; while in those regions where
non for economic development was precisely the separation of the capitalist social-property relations were installed, there were
producers from their full means of subsistence (though not necessarily breakthroughs to self-sustaining growth.
production) and their freedom from any structure of surplus extraction
by extra-economic coercion, a question imposes itself. How could the The Crisis of Seigneurial Incomes and Its Results: The Restructuring of
system of feudal social-property relations ever give way to a system of Feudalism Versus the Rise of Capitalism
social-property relations that was essentially its opposite?
From the emergence of banal lordship in the tenth and eleventh centuries,
It seems to me that there is only one logical answer: insofar as break-
out of the disintegration of the Carolingian empire and the gradual devo-
throughs to modern economic growth occurred, these must be understood
lution of power to ever more localized political units, peasants sought to
to have taken place as the unintended consequences of actions either by indi-
resist lordly demands and to secure full control over both their persons
vidual lords or peasants or communities of lords or peasants seeking to
and their holdings, to reduce or eliminate feudal rent.21 This much is
reproduce themselves as feudal-type actors in feudal-type ways. In other
generally acknowledged. But less well understood is the extraordinary
words, the emergence of capitalist social-property relations resulted from
degree to which peasants actually succeeded in realizing their goals dur-
attempts by feudal individual actors to carry out feudal rules for repro-
ing the subsequent centuries. The peasants’ capacity to stand up to lordly
duction and/or by feudal collectivities to maintain feudal social-property
pressure stemmed from their ability to exploit a fundamental weakness
relations, under conditions where seeking to do so had the unintended
built into the social-property system by which lords reproduced them-
effect of actually undermining those social-property relations. Only
selves economically. The lords’ polity as a whole was highly decentral-
where such transformations occurred did economic development ensue,
ized, broken up into myriad rivalrous lordly groups, built around castles
for only where capitalist social-property relations emerged did economic
and constituted by mounted knights in armour, and constructed in the
actors find it made sense to adopt the new rules for reproduction imposed
first instance to dominate so as to exploit peasants. This meant that lords
by the new system of social-property relations.
were set in competition with one another for peasants, and this was par-
ticularly the case in the early medieval period when land was plentiful; at
In the remainder of the chapter, I give some historical and conceptual sub-
those moments when lords sought to open up new land, especially by
stance to the foregoing, rather abstract, stipulations as to how to under-
way of great movements of colonization to the east, south, and north-
stand the transition from feudal non-development to modern economic
west; and in the later medieval period when population dropped sharply.
growth by carrying out the following two tasks corresponding to the two
But it also meant that they faced a major structural barrier to working
prongs of my argument:
together on a regular basis beyond narrow limits to sustain their control
1 To begin to explicate and instantiate my contention that the rise in the face of peasant resistance and flight. Peasants could thus play lords
of capitalist social-property relations must be understood as an off, one against another, to extract concessions. Moreover, because lords
unintended consequence of the pursuit of feudal goals by feudal were often in conflict precisely over who had jurisdiction over peasant
actors, I elucidate the divergent responses by lords and peasants to communities, peasants could make use of their own solidarity, which
the late medieval socio-economic crisis in regions where, during often extended across several villages in a region, to mount successful
the subsequent, early modern epoch, some form of feudal social- local struggles to establish their rights.
property relations was maintained and in regions where some The surprising outcome was that, even before the onset of the demo-
form of capitalist social-property relations emerged. graphic crisis in the fourteenth century, throughout much of western
2 To begin to substantiate my thesis that the rise of capitalist social- Europe, great swathes of the lordly class faced serious difficulties in net-
property relations was the sine qua non for economic develop-
ment, I attempt to show that, in those regions where some form of
feudal social-property relations was maintained during the early 21
M. Bloch, French Rural History (orig. 1930; London, 1966).

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ting sufficient revenue from their estates, and had as a result been date, therefore, the peasantry through much of the region was able to
severely weakened. Once population collapsed after 1348, virtually the begin to undermine lordly powers. By the end of the thirteenth century,
entirely lordly class found its very capacity to maintain itself seriously through occupation of uncultivated land, through flight to the manors of
threatened, all the more so because the sudden increase in the land–man other lords, and especially through long processes of struggle for charters
ratio exacerbated inter-lordly competition for peasants and because the of rights on a village-by-village basis, it had succeeded in securing fixed
lords’ response to their revenue problem, by way of stepped up warfare money rents and the right to inherit.23 The immediate result was that,
and taxation, tended to deepen the demographic downturn. If they were with the exception of the greatest among them, lords were increasingly
to survive qua feudal lords, seigneurs across Europe had no choice but obliged to stand idly by as the steady increase of the prices of land and food
to rebuild the institutions by which they exacted part of the product of grains that paralleled the growth of population eroded the real value of
their peasants and to stand up to and make war upon other lordly their dues and, in turn, their incomes, unless they could somehow secure
groups. What were required were political forms of class organization, more land and/or larger numbers of peasant tenants. When population
i.e. feudal states, which could not only wield ever greater military ceased to grow as early as the second half of the thirteenth century, the
power, but could also counter ever more successfully peasant mobility lordly class as a whole could not avoid a major crisis of seigneurial
and peasant resistance. revenues, which was only exacerbated following the demographic
disasters of the fourteenth century.24
The Maintenance through Restructuring of Feudal Social-property Relations In France, and much of western Germany, the characteristic long-term
solution to the later medieval crisis was therefore the construction of
Over the long run, throughout most of Europe, east and west, feudal
‘absolutist’, or tax–office, states. Suffering from reduced revenues, local
lords did succeed in securing their reproduction as feudal lords by
lords were often too weak to stand up to the expansionist designs of those
constituting more cohesive political communities and building more
great lordly competitors, monarchs and princes, who extended their terri-
effective states that could deal with and transcend the debilitating
torial jurisdiction at their expense. At the same time, many of these same
problem of inter-lordly competition that had hitherto been their Achilles’
local lords were only too happy to offer their collaboration with those
heel. This they accomplished by organizing themselves into political com-
monarchs and princes, in exchange for places in their emerging feudal
munities of much greater territorial scope than peasants were capable of
states. For their part, rather than expanding their politico-military follow-
and evolving systems of surplus extraction by extra-economic coercion
ings in the usual decentralized manner by granting land and rights over
that, by virtue of their increased centralization, enhanced their ability
peasants (e.g. fiefs) for loyalty and service, monarchs and princes granted
to cooperate in taking peasants’ surpluses. The resulting acceleration of
offices in new centralized administrations, to be financed out of centralized
state-building was partly a response to the exigencies of the late medieval
tax revenues.25
crisis of seigneurial revenues and ensuing intensification of military
conflict. But it can be understood more generally as a further stage in
the long-term processes of political accumulation under pressure of 23
F. L. Ganshof and A. Verhulst, ‘Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: France, the Low
inter-lordly competition and lord–peasant class struggle that marked the Countries, and Western Germany’, in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, I, 2nd edn
evolution of European feudalism from its inception.22 (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 334–9; G. Fourquin, ‘Le temps de la croissance’, in G. Duby and A.
Wallon (eds), Histoire de la France rurale, 4 vols (Paris, 1975–6), I , pp. 388–90, 394, 483–4, 491;
Western Europe: Peasant Proprietorship and the Absolutist State France R. Fossier, ‘Les conquêtes paysannes’, in La terre et les hommes en Picardie jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe
and areas adjacent to it, including parts of western Germany, was the siècle, 2 vols (Paris, 1968), II, pp. 708–23.
original home of banal lordship, and feudalism there assumed its 24
H. Neveux, ‘Declin et reprise: La fluctuation bi-seculaire, 1330–1560’, in Duby and Wallon
‘classical’, localized and competitive, character. From a relatively early (eds), Histoire de la France rurale, II, pp. 36, 39; G. Fourquin, Les campagnes de la région parisi-
enne à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris, 1970), pp. 175–9; Fossier, La terre et les hommes en Picardie, II,
pp. 555–6, 714; Bois, Crise du féodalisme, pp. 200, 202–3, 217–18.
25
J.-F. Lemarignier, La France médiévale (Paris, 1970), pp. 227–30, 238–48, 296–8; E. M. Hallam,
Capetian France, 987–1328 (London, 1980), pp. 115–19; Bois, Crise du féodalisme, pp. 204, 254–6,
22
See R. Brenner, ‘The Rises and Falls of Serfdom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, in 364; Fourquin, ‘Le temps de la croissance’, pp. 381–2, 483; Fourquin, Campagnes de la région
M. L. Bush (ed.), Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage (London, 1996). parisienne, pp. 151–3, 166–8, 189–90.

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The emerging tax–office state offered decisive advantages over its Elbian Germany and Poland—significantly later than in western Europe,
decentralized predecessors in exploiting the peasantry. Because taxes out of an epoch-making process of colonization. Small groups of lords
were taken on a centralized basis, peasants could not make use of mobil- took charge of the eastward movement and had little choice but to offer
ity and inter-lordly competition to undermine lordly levies (even when peasants extremely favourable terms in order to induce them to emigrate
the state was fairly small). Because a state with much greater territorial and settle. As a result, lordship in the region was from the beginning
scope and politico-coercive capacity was collecting the revenues, peasants highly atomized and competitive, and correspondingly weak. To expand
found themselves with insufficient power to resist paying taxes success- their income, lords depended upon opening up vast tracts of land, great
fully, for their own organization was generally confined to the village or estates upon which they settled ever more peasants. Emigration, popula-
set of villages linked by a market town. tion growth, and the reclamation of new land powered a long phase of eco-
By the end of the long period of feudal economic expansion at the start nomic expansion, as in the west. But, when population ceased to grow in
of the fourteenth century, the tax–office state forms were still embryonic, western Europe, immigration toward the east largely dried up. Lords
a long way from consolidation. But, during the subsequent period of cri- found that, in view of the highly decentralized and rivalrous character of
sis, it experienced substantial development. As population downturn ren- the region’s feudal structure, they could not continue to maintain them-
dered local lords’ revenue problems even worse, monarchs and princes selves as lords in the old way, especially as they lacked the capacity to raise
were able to extend their administrations by carrying out expansionist levies on an essentially free peasantry who paid minimal customary rents.
military campaigns that naturally attracted impoverished seigneurs who In north-east Europe, lords were able to transcend the ensuing threat to
assumed positions in the army, or in the taxing apparatus that was built their domination, indeed their very survival as lords, only over the very
up to finance the army, or in the system of royal justice. The ensuing wars, long run, by securing a hitherto inconceivable level of self-organization
and the novel tax levies that accompanied them, proved disastrous for the through constructing a new form of state aimed explicitly at limiting inter-
peasantry, delaying the recovery of production. But, in the longer run, not lordly competition and controlling peasant mobility. In so doing, north-
only the tax–office state but also the peasants and their proprietorship east European lords were able to exploit key advantages that were, in a
emerged the stronger. In extending their authority vis-à-vis local lords, sense, the flip side of their previous weakness. Like the lords of the region,
expanding absolutist states were, from very early on, only too glad to con- the peasants of north-east Europe, compared to their counterparts in
firm the freedom and grant legal recognition to the already powerful western Europe, were only minimally organized at the village level, as
rights that peasants had themselves won from their seigneurs, for they had constituted only weak institutions for self-government and the
seigneurial rents competed with centralized taxes. At various points dur- regulation of cultivation in the wake of the process of colonization. This
ing the later medieval period, peasants thus secured from the absolutist was entirely understandable, in view of the minimal weight of lordship,
state full freedom, the end of their status as serfs in those provinces where the virtual non-existence of lordly controls, but it left the peasantry with
it still persisted, and legal ownership of their plots, and this was critical minimal resources to resist novel lordly demands. At the same time, as a
in preventing lords from responding to their late medieval revenue crisis reflection of the late, colonial development of the whole region, the new
by attempting either to re-enserf their peasants or to expropriate them ruling class of castellans had, in the process of establishing their own lord-
from their lands. On the other hand, these same peasant plots now ship in the region during the thirteenth century, brought about the disso-
emerged as a fertile field for the increasing taxation upon which the lordly lution of hitherto dominant princely states through processes analogous
officeholders of the tax–office state came to subsist.26 to those in the west two centuries earlier by which banal lords had estab-
lished their jurisdictions at the expense of the Carolingians and their
North-east Europe Feudal social-property relations and the political
princely successors. This left them with only a rudimentary political
communities that sustained them developed in north-east Europe—East
organization, corresponding to that of west European feudalism in its
classical epoch. But it also meant that they were relieved from having to
26
Fourquin, Campagnes de la région parisienne, pp. 189–190, 430–2; Neveux, ‘Declin et reprise’, confront any overarching ‘national’ states with systems of law that
pp. 135–6; P. Chaun, ‘L’état’, in F. Braudel and E. Labrousse (eds), Histoire economique et sociale granted protection of property and persons to all free men, including
de la France, 4 vols in 7 pts (Paris, 1970–80), I, pt 1, pp. 91–3; J. Jacquart, La crise rurale en those peasants who had managed to secure there freedom, such as
Ile-de-France, 1550–1670 (Paris, 1974), pp. 102–3.

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Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong Robert Brenner

had emerged in several places in western Europe, notably France and emerging French monarchy–classic processes of political accumulation
England. driven by inter-lordly competition—Anglo-Norman feudal lords brought
The outcome was that, in the process of organizing themselves for the into being a more centralized form of lordly political community or feu-
first time into provincial and national political communities—which took dal state than existed anywhere else in Europe at that time. By organizing
the form of provincial and national diets or estates—the feudal lords of themselves ‘nationally’ through the monarchical state—which thereby
eastern Europe were able to build from the ground up, encountering no assumed major powers to impose discipline on its aristocracy—they were
legally entrenched free peasantry. They were thus able to confine political able to achieve an unusually high level of cooperation with one another
participation in the institutions of the new political order—i.e. ‘citizen- in operating their decentralized (implicitly competitive) system of sur-
ship’—to themselves and, as the opposite side of the same coin, define plus extraction by extra-economic coercion, as well as in making war. The
the whole of the peasantry as unfree and as their own property. characteristic, and decisive, manifestation of this evolution in the direc-
Meanwhile, they imposed a legal obligation on one another, as well as the tion of greater cohesiveness was the imposition of a national system of
towns, to return fleeing serfs. By tying peasants to their estates by means common law to which the lordly class was itself subjected, which at once
of vastly out-organizing them politically, north-east European lords were endowed access to the king’s courts to all freemen, including peasants
able to transform the nature of feudal exploitation in the region, expand- who had succeeded in establishing their own free status, and excluded
ing the size of their demesnes at the expense of peasants’ subsistence plots from the king’s courts all those peasants who were unfree, consigning
and imposing historically unprecedented levels of labour services. As in them to the jurisdiction of their lords. As a consequence of the resulting
much of western Europe, lords thus revived the system by which they increase in lordly powers, during the period from the late twelfth through
coercively took a surplus from the peasantry by profoundly expanding to the early fourteenth century, at a time when French lords were, by and
the scope and cohesiveness of their political communities, extending the large, experiencing declining feudal levies as a consequence of peasant
long-term feudal evolutionary process by which there emerged, over time conquests, English lords enjoyed an economic golden age (that may have
in every region of Europe, ever larger and more powerful feudal states.27 extended right up to the eve of the Black Plague) by virtue of their ability,
with the help of their monarchical state, to impose a tighter form of
The Transition to Capitalist Social-property Relations serfdom, of feudal domination, upon their tenants, not to mention to
effectively wage war on a trans-European scale.28
In contrast to the evolution that took place throughout most of the
Nevertheless, in the wake of the catastrophic collapse of population,
Continent during the late medieval and early modern period, in limited
even the politically unified English lordly class was unable to make its
regions of north-west Europe, the outcome of the lords’ and peasants’
system of decentralized surplus extraction by extra-economic coercion
attempts to cope with the late medieval crisis of feudalism by feudal
function effectively. Following the Black Plague, lords sought to compen-
means issued in capitalist social-property relations as an unintended
sate for the radical decline in the number of their tenants by raising rents
consequence.
and making use of Parliament—another expression of the unusually high
England In the course of extended conflicts with the Franks in north- level and broad scope of their political organization—to tighten controls
west France, the conquest of England, and ensuing wars with the over peasant mobility, and for a time they do appear to have succeeded.
But, in the face of the enormous decline of the man–land ratio, lordly
27
efforts at cooperation ultimately gave way to the pressures of competition
For this, and the previous, paragraph, H. Lowmianski, ‘Economic Problems of the Early
Feudal Polish State’, Acta Poloniae Historica, III (1960); A Giesztor, ‘Recherches sur les fonde-
for tenants, opening the way for peasants to win their freedom by means
ments de la Pologne médiévale: état actuel des problèmes’, Acta Poloniae Historica, IV (1961); of resistance and setting lords against one another. The revolt of 1381,
J. Bardach ‘Gouvernants et gouvernés en Pologne au moyen âge et aux temps modernes’, despite the defeat of the peasant rising, seems to have opened the flood-
Recueils de la société Jean Bodin, XXV (1965); K. Modzelewski, ‘Le système du ius ducale en
Pologne et le concept de féodalisme’, Annales E.S.C, XXXVII (1982); S. Russocki, ‘Figure ou
réel: Le féodalisme centralisé dans le centre-est de l’Europe’, Acta Poloniae Historica, LXVI 28
(1992); H. Rosenberg, ‘The Rise of the Junkers in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1410–1653’, American For a fuller account of these developments, specifically the self-centralization of the
Historical Review, IL (October 1943). English feudal aristocracy around the monarchy and its consequences, see R. Brenner, ‘The
Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, in The Brenner Debate, pp. 254–8, 264.

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gates. Peasants now streamed away from their manors, and their lords could be found throughout most of western Europe—was certainly
could do nothing to stop them. This was because other lords on neigh- important in this respect. But what turned out to be their trump card was
bouring estates could not only offer more favourable terms in gen- their ability to turn to, and rapidly build up further, the powerful national
eral, especially lower dues, but could also grant them their freedom monarchical state that they had constructed during the medieval epoch.
by offering them the status of free tenants. This they accomplished in With the decisive help of the early Tudor state and its courts, English
formal–legal terms by offering each peasant a copy of the section of the lords were able to valorize in court their claim, against the contentions of
manorial roll where the terms of his tenancy were stated—in effect a con- their tenants, that much formerly customary, now copyhold, land held by
tract, in theory between legal equals, that the peasant could go to court to their peasants was ultimately subject to arbitrary, thus variable, fines or
enforce. The upshot was to render irreversible the process of peasant rents on transfer (at inheritance or otherwise). It could therefore, sooner
enfranchisement, cutting off the possibility of re-enserfment, because the or later, be transformed into what was, in effect, a commercial lease—and
common law enforced by the crown, with the support of lords great and was, therefore, in the end, the lords’ property. With that state’s indispen-
small, endowed all freemen with the protection of the king’s courts. By sable assistance, they were able, in turn, to quell the series of major
the second quarter of the fifteenth century, the vast majority of English peasants revolts during the first half of the sixteenth century that were
peasants had won their freedom, and, as a consequence of their much motivated precisely by the goal of vindicating and confirming peasants’
improved bargaining position,were paying, at least for the time being, customary rights. As a consequence, English lords succeeded in cutting
much lower rents.29 short peasants’ push to win not just their freedom, but fixed payments
In the face of peasants’ success in winning their freedom and legal and rights of inheritance to their land. They thereby at once established
backing for their customary rights as recognized in the manorial rolls, their property rights in the land and, by separating their tenants from
much of the English feudal class, their capacity to take an income from their full means of subsistence, rendered them dependent upon the
manorial land held in customary tenure now in question, faced a funda- market.30
mental threat to their existence as lords. Their way blocked by peasants’ It must be emphasized that, in asserting their right to vary the level of
freedom, English lords could not respond to the danger that confronted dues as they wished, English lords were, in their view, acting in time-
them by seeking to reimpose upon their tenants the hitherto existing honoured fashion and merely reaffirming their feudal right to impose
form of decentralized feudal levies. At the same time, because they arbitrary levies on their customary tenants. Their aim was not to establish
held outright broad demesnes and were unwilling to regard the cus- a new system, but merely to prevent peasants from consolidating a set of
tomary holdings of their peasants as anything but, in the last analysis, possessory rights–namely fixed dues and rights to inherit—that would
their own property (something peasants of course would have dis- not only have extinguished the lords’ ability to take an anything like an
puted), English lords had no interest in the construction of a tax–office economic return from the customary land, but, in view of the tendency to
state, for such a state would have had to depend on taxes on their own inflation under population growth, threatened their capacity to take any
land—and not, as in France or western Germany, on that of the peas- real rent at all. Nevertheless, the epoch-making, if unintended, conse-
ants. English lords therefore had little choice, in contrast to their coun- quence was to subject their tenants to competition for leases, thereby
terparts in north-eastern Europe with their neo-serfdom and in western imposing upon them the necessity to forsake production for subsistence
Europe with their absolutist states, but to make use of their not insub- and adopt capitalist rules for reproduction. Now rendered market-
stantial feudal political class organization to turn what remained of their dependent and subjected to competition in production, emerging farmers
rights in their peasants’ customary land into their own unconditional had no choice but to eschew ‘safety first’, as well as the other rules for
ownership. Their continued holding, throughout the medieval period, of reproduction that had been made possible by peasant possession of the
large swathes of land outright—i.e. demesnes of a much larger size than means of subsistence, and to adopt the Smithian rule of maximization of

29
R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London, 1969), pp. 35–59; J. A.
Raftis, Tenure and Mobility (Toronto, 1964), pp. 139–45; Z. Razi, ‘Family, Land, and the Village 30
For this, and the preceding paragraph, see Brenner, ‘Agrarian Roots of European
Community in Later Medieval England’, Past and Present, XCIII (November 1981). Capitalism’, pp. 291–9.

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one’s price/cost maximization by way of specialization, accumulation, able to secure from them directly all that they needed to survive. They
and innovation. were therefore rendered dependent upon the market for key inputs, and
ultimately obliged to sell goods and services to pay for them. This meant
The northern Netherlands As did that of north-east Europe, the Dutch
subjection to competition, with the consequence that peasants were willy-
feudal economy emerged out of an extended process of colonization. But
nilly transformed into farmers, compelled to turn to pursuits that they
here peasants took the lead, establishing what was to a great extent a new
could provide at relatively low cost. The latter turned out to include fish-
agricultural economy by bringing land formerly submerged by water
ing and shipping and, ultimately, specialized dairying and cattle raising.
under cultivation. The outcome was that lordship was never strong, and
So, by attempting, as feudal actors in a feudal manner, to continue to sus-
before long had, over much of the territory, essentially given way to both
tain feudal social-property relations and feudal rules for reproduction—
peasant liberty and full peasant property in relatively large plots of land.
specifically peasant possession and production for subsistence—on
The latter were consolidated by the establishment by pioneering peasants
terrain that, over time, ceased to allow this, Dutch peasant agriculturalists
of powerful village institutions to regulate systems of ditches and dikes
brought about the opposite effect they intended. They undermined the
that had been created to secure the land from the sea.31
necessary conditions for their own established form of life and ended
The fact remains, however, that, though largely unburdened by feudal
up installing the social-property relations that would underpin a new
lordship and in full possession of their plots, Dutch agricultural produ-
capitalist economy.32
cers were unable to establish themselves on a permanent basis, as peasant
possessors of the means of subsistence. Dutch development was shaped
Divergent Social-property Relations, Diverging Economic Paths
by the fact that it occurred, for the most part, at the limit of the feudal
economy, through processes whereby settlers sought to extend their tradi- It is my fundamental argument that, just as the establishment and repro-
tional agriculture on what was ultimately marginal land, peat bogs that duction of feudal social-property relations determined both the rise of a
were drained and diked. Initially, following their success in reclaiming commercial economy instantiated in the town–division of labour and a
land from the sea, settler agriculturalists did, at least to a notable degree, constricted Malthusian–Ricardian pattern of secular stagnation driven by
succeed in their goal of setting themselves up as arable farmers able to population growth and declining labour productivity, the rise of capital-
carry out the diversified productive activities, above all the production of ist social-property relations provided the sine qua non for Smithian self-
food, that were required to shield them from market dependence and the sustaining growth—the obsessive pursuit of the gains from trade via
pressures of competition. But, over the long run, changing ecological con- price/cost maximization under the pressure of competition making for
ditions would not permit them to continue, in this mode, to produce for specialization, accumulation of surpluses, and innovation, and leading to
subsistence, marketing only physical surpluses. the ongoing growth of output per unit of labour input. It remains there-
During the later medieval period, the peat lands settled or sank and fore to show that the divergent systems of social-property relations that
the surrounding water level rose, with the consequence that land that had consolidated themselves in different parts of Europe in the late medieval
been initially suitable for arable production ceased to be so. Peasants were and early modern era—revamped versions of the old structure in north-
separated from possession of their means of subsistence by ecological east Europe, Germany, and France, parallelled by agrarian capitalism in
shifts taking place at the margin of the feudal economy. More or less sud- England and the northern Netherlands—gave rise to correspondingly
denly, they found their land unable to produce food grains. As a conse- divergent patterns of non-development and development.
quence, though remaining owners of their plots, the peasants ceased to be

31
J. de Vries, Dutch Agriculture in the Golden Age (New Haven, CT, 1974), pp. 24–32; J. de Vries
and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the
Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 16–20; P. Hoppenbrouwers, ‘Agricultural 32
For this, and the previous, paragraph, Hoppenbrouwers, ‘Agricultural Production and
Production and Technology in the Netherlands, c. 1000–1500’, in G. Astill and J. Langdon Technology in the Netherlands’; de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, pp.
(eds), Medieval Farming and Technology: The Impact of Agricultural Change in Northwest Europe 17–18; J. L. van Zanden, The Rise and Decline of Holland’s Economy: Merchant Capitalism and the
(Leiden, 1997). Labour Market (Manchester, 1993), pp. 30–1.

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Restructured Feudalism: The Continuation of the Malthusian–Ricardian their initially large holdings, much of the French peasantry had, at first,
Pattern commanded sufficient surpluses to enter urban food markets in a big way.
But as plots and thus surpluses diminished under the impact of subdivi-
France: peasant proprietors and the tax–office state With the emergence
sion, a process of decommercialization soon ensued, and by 1550 ship-
in France of a restructured system of social-property relations character-
ments to the towns were in decline, despite rising prices for provisions.
ized, as before, by lordly surplus extraction by extra-economic coercion
Meanwhile, as early as the 1520s, there was the onset of a new and
(but now in the form of the absolutist tax–office state)– in combination
extended series of ‘crises of subsistence’, indicating that the agricultural
with peasant possession–now in the guise of full peasant ownership—
economy was already being stretched.33
economic actors adopted rules for reproduction rather analogous to
Ultimately, as in the thirteenth century, peasants began more and more
those that prevailed under classical feudalism. As a result, during the
to find themselves deprived of plots sufficient for subsistence, a process
early modern period there was a second run-through of the long-term,
aggravated by rising taxation. Lacking other alternatives, they had little
two-phase demo-economic cycle that marked the medieval epoch.
choice but to intensify labour on their own plots, seek employment as
While much of the French peasantry emerged from the population
agricultural wage labourers, and take up leases to make ends meet.
catastrophes of the later medieval period with unusually large farms,
Especially by deploying their family labour force more fully, they once
peasants did not generally break from their commitment to their long-
again raised the productivity of their land at the expense of the produc-
established rules for reproduction—production for subsistence in connec-
tivity of the labour, especially in those places where it was possible to take
tion with having large families and subdividing holdings to make
up the production of labour-intensive commercial crops or to enter
possible the settling of children on their own plots and in turn a demo-
domestic manufacturing. At the same time, in having little choice but to
graphic regime of early marriage and low celibacy. Lords, for their part,
intensify labour and/or accept ever lower wages and/or pay ever higher
were able to depend for their economic reproduction to a much greater
rents to cover the difference between what their plots provided and what
extent than before on offices financed by absolutist taxation, which
they needed to survive, they were obliged to increase ‘self-exploitation’
increased rapidly from about 1550. Otherwise, they had to be content to
and/or to make it possible for landlords to take from them ever increas-
profit from the rents they could derive from (rather narrow) demesnes,
ing ‘hunger rents’ and/or for merchants to enjoy increasing profits by
since peasants had, in most parts of the country, succeeded in fixing rents
employing more labour rather than equipping their workers with new
on customary land at derisory levels.
plant and equipment.
From 1450 until the latter part of the sixteenth century, the French
From the latter part of the sixteenth century, the French social econ-
economy enjoyed a ‘growth phase’ similar to the long expansion from the
omy, like that of most of the rest of Europe, began to descend into a
eleventh through the later thirteenth century. Aided by peasants’ acces-
‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ quite analogous to its
sion to unusually large holdings on the morrow of the population catas-
fourteenth-century predecessor, as an incipient Malthusian demographic
trophes and lords’ initially restrained tax levies, population growth took
crisis was compounded once again by a crisis of seigneurial revenues.
place exceptionally quickly, reaching the thirteenth-century ‘Malthusian
As output per person declined and population growth came to a halt,
ceiling’ by 1560–70. The area of settlement grew correspondingly rapidly,
seigneurial revenues tended to stagnate. Civil wars became endemic, for-
expanding outward on the basis of a new wave of assarting and colon-
eign military adventures multiplied, the state apparatus expanded, and
ization. As rent income rose with the reoccupation of land and taxes
absolutist taxation rose precipitately, as lords sought to compensate for
increased (at first slowly), the corresponding increase in lordly demand
stationary incomes from their estates by way of politico-military redistri-
for military and luxury goods provided the foundations for a new rise of
industry, towns, and trade.
Nevertheless, while there were no technical advances to speak of, 33
For this, and the previous, paragraph, see Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Masses profoundes: la paysan-
rising population soon brought about the pulverization of holdings nerie’, in Braudel and Labrousse (eds), Histoire économique et sociale de la France, I, pt 2, pp.
555–61; Neveux, ‘Declin et reprise’, pp. 101–3; H. Neveux, Les grains du Cambrésis (Lille,
and reliance on less fertile land, leading once again to a decline in labour 1974), pp. 692, 697–8; Bois, Crise du féodalisme, pp. 337–40; Jacquart, ‘Immobilisme et catas-
productivity, manifested in rising land and food prices and declining trophes, 1550–1660’, in Duby and Wallon (eds), Histoire de la France rurale, II, pp. 213, 216–21,
terms of trade for industrial versus agricultural products. On the basis of 224–5, 237–9.

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Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong Robert Brenner

bution. Nevertheless, as rising taxation and military depredations under- Capitalism in Agriculture and the Breakthrough to Self-sustaining Growth
cut peasant production, peasant population fell and peasant revolts grew
England: commercial landlordism and capitalist tenantry The late
in number, exacerbating lordly revenue problems and setting off the
fifteenth century saw the emergence of commercial landlordism and a
same sort of downward spiral, driven by demographic decline and rising
market-dependent commercial tenantry as a consequence of the separa-
exploitation and war, that had disrupted the economy during the
tion from their means of subsistence of peasants who had won their
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.34
freedom from serfdom. Lords retained large demesnes, which were leased
North-east Europe: from neo-serfdom to economic regression The for commercial rent. Customary tenants, who had gained their freedom
emergence in north-east Europe at the end of the middle ages of a very via resistance and flight in the late fourteenth and fifteenth century,
much tighter form of feudal social-property relations than had hitherto gained ‘security of tenure’, but only in the limited sense that they could
prevailed—neo-serfdom made possible by the rise of provincial and now go to the king’s courts to enforce the conditions of their customary
national diets or estates—opened the way for a predictable overall evolu- holdings (copyhold). But these conditions were not necessarily favourable
tion. As in France (and much of the rest of western Europe), lords and to the tenants. Customary tenants were thus, over time, reduced to lease-
peasants adopted, albeit in somewhat altered form, essentially the same holders, for landlords successfully (throughout most of England) asserted
rules for reproduction that they had maintained during the medieval their right to levy variable fines on inheritance or on other transfers of
period. At first, through much of the sixteenth century, as population and holdings, and these came to substitute for commercial rents.36
the area of settlement grew, production increased and the income of both Reduced to market dependence, commercial tenants had no choice
lords and peasants grew, while commerce expanded. But in the longer run but to adopt ‘production for exchange’ as their rule for reproduction,
agricultural growth on the basis of expanding demesnes and increasing initiating a revolution in the mode of life of English agriculturalists. The
services offered only the most restricted possibilities for development pressure of competition thus compelled them to maximize profits by spe-
despite the fact that it was increasingly oriented to international markets. cializing, accumulating surpluses, innovating, and moving from line to
By the 1560s and 1570s, with labour productivity declining and popu- line in response to fluctuations in demand. It induced them at the same
lation growth coming to a standstill, Poland’s national output appears to time to eschew the panoply of peasant rules for reproduction that had
have reached its outer limit, and the results were apparently much the depended upon their possessing the means of subsistence and producing
same throughout the rest of north-east Europe. From this point onward, for subsistence, especially having many children so as to secure insurance
the growth of the lords’ product depended upon coercively enforced for ill health and old age and subdividing holdings. With the end of sub-
redistributive measures and was largely achieved by increasing the size of division on inheritance, the material basis for the early marriage pattern
the demesnes at the expense of the peasants’ plots. But this process could that had prevailed throughout much of Europe in much of the medieval
go only so far, as it eroded the system’s chief productive force, the peas- period, and continued to do so during the early modern period, was thus
antry. To maintain military and luxury consumption, lords were obliged eliminated. Because they could no longer immediately secure from their
to resort to the familiar ‘political’ remedies and became increasingly parents the material basis for founding a family, sons generally had to
involved in devastating warfare, both internal and external. The result wait until they were older to marry. Later marriage age, as well as higher
was severe economic regression and social dislocation, the north-east rates of celibacy, thus became the norm.
European version of the ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’.35 The adoption of new rules for reproduction by agricultural producers
brought a novel, unprecedentedly dynamic pattern of overall develop-
ment. With the generalization of competitive pressures and with the end
of subdivision, there quickly ensued a classical process of social differen-
tiation, leading to the rise of a class of substantial commercial farmers, the
34
For this, and the previous, paragraph, see Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Masses profoundes: la
paysannerie’, pp. 576–85; Jacquart, ‘Immobilisme et catastrophes’, pp. 186–211, 242–75.
35 36
A. Maczak, ‘Export of Grain and the Problem of Distribution of National Income in the Brenner, ‘Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, pp. 294–6. Cf. B. M. S. Campbell,
Years 1550–1650’, Acta Poloniae Historica, XVIII (1968); J. Topolski, ‘La regression économique ‘People and Land in the Middle Ages, 1066–1500’, in R. A. Dodgshon and R. A. Butlin (eds),
en Pologne du XVIe au XVIIIe siècles’, Acta Poloniae Historica, XII (1962). An Historical Geography of England and Wales, 2nd edn (London, 1990), pp. 112–13.

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Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong Robert Brenner

yeomen. It was on the basis of the rise of the yeomen as commercial- and devoted the south of the country even more fully than before
competitive farmers, that there was, for the first time, a breakthrough to to the cultivation of grain.40
the secular rise of agricultural productivity. How did this occur?
With labour productivity in agriculture finally on the increase, the
1 Compared with medieval peasants, with their subsistence plots of English economy broke definitively from the Malthusian–Ricardian pat-
12 acres or less, by 1600 English farmers disposed of large hold- tern of secular stagnation during the course of the seventeenth century.
ings, averaging about 60 acres. Indeed, farms of 100 acres or more Despite the steady growth of population, there were no significant subsis-
covered 70 per cent of the cultivated surface. This enabled English tence crises after 1597. Indeed, by 1700, English farmers were succeeding
agriculturalists for the first time efficiently to deploy their family in supporting more than half the population,41 even though the English
labour force in grain production.37 Above all, they succeeded in population continued to grow, breaking through old Malthusian ceilings.
eliminating the massive disguised unemployment that had hith- Meanwhile, the increasing proportion of the population of the land in
erto held down labour productivity. At the same time, by having non-agricultural pursuits, as well as the emergence of an agricultural pop-
recourse to wage labour, they were able to adjust labour inputs to ulation largely dependent upon the market, made for the early rise of a
the needs of the changing requirements of production, seasonal or domestic market—for consumer goods, small tools, and the like. When, in
otherwise. the later seventeenth century, the ongoing growth of agricultural produc-
2 Under pressure to compete, farmers sharply stepped up capital tivity finally issued in falling relative prices for food, the resulting rise in
investment, above all in animals, and this allowed for major gains real wages and in turn of discretionary expenditures provided the basis for
in the pulling of carts, ploughing, and the fertilization of the soil.38 a dynamically growing market for industrial goods. Well before the classi-
3 As market-dependent producers, farmers could no longer seek to cal industrial revolution, then, on the basis of agricultural revolution,
avoid specialization, so now had no hesitation in integrating fod- England had gone a good way toward modern industrialization.
der crops into complex new rotations, premised upon full-scale
The northern Netherlands: commercial farming and capitalist develop-
specialization and commercialization. At the core of what came to
ment By 1500, Dutch agriculture lacked a peasantry, in the sense of
be known as the ‘agricultural revolution’, the cultivation of these
peasant possessors able to adopt the rule for reproduction of ‘production
plants allowed simultaneously for the more intensive use of the
for subsistence’. Whether owner-operators on the inland peat lands or
soil and the increase in soil fertility.39
commercial leaseholders on the large arable farms that dominated the
4 Finally, there was an impressive development of the regional divi-
land along the coast, Dutch agriculturalists found themselves unable to
sion of labour, as farmers adapted and readapted their crops to
provide their full subsistence, and were thus market dependent and
soil and climate in accord with changing techniques. Initially,
subject to competition in production, with little choice but to specialize
agriculturalists were obliged to grow grain on the heavy, clayey,
and produce for exchange. The result was an economic evolution, rather
and wet, but relatively more fertile, soils of the Midlands, despite
analogous to that of England, despite the many major differences
the relatively greater difficulty of ploughing this land. However,
between Dutch and English agriculture in structure and operation.
on finding that the new fodder crops took better on hitherto less
Dutch agriculture developed in response to the requirements of dairy
fertile light sandy soils than the heavy ones, they reverted to ani-
and livestock production, which offered the greatest opportunity for
mal raising in what had been the old granary of the Midlands,

37
Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman, pp. 73–4.
38
E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in 40
E. L. Jones, ‘Introduction’, in Agricultural and Economic Growth in England, 1660–1815 (New
England York, 1967), pp. 9–11, 36–7; E. L. Jones, ‘Agriculture and Economic Growth in England,
(Cambridge, 1990), pp. 37–44. 1660–1750: Agricultural Change’, Journal of Economic History, XXV (1965), pp. 10–18.
41
39
E. Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (London, 1967); E. Kerridge, The Farmers of Old E.A Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the
England (London, 1973); J. Thirsk, ‘Seventeenth-century Agriculture and Social Change’, in Early Modern Period’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXV (1985); G. Clarke, ‘Labour
idem (ed.) Land, Church and People: Essays Presented to Professor H. P. R. Finberg, Supplement Productivity in English Agriculture, 1300–1860’, in Campbell and Overton (eds), Land,
to Agricultural History Review, XVIII (1970). Labour and Livestock.

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Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong Robert Brenner

profit in much of maritime Netherlands, given the region’s ecology and Conclusion: Patterns of Economic Evolution in
proximity to markets. Initially, Dutch farmers undertook a run of com- Comparative Perspective
mercial non-agricultural pursuits, like fishing, shipping, and cloth pro-
duction, to help them eke out a living from the difficult soil. But over time, The rise of capitalist social-property relations on the land in England and
especially as cheap grain imports from eastern Europe became available the northern Netherlands unleashed an economy-wide transformation
and market demand grew all across Europe, competitive pressures amounting to nothing less than modern self-sustaining economic devel-
induced them to shed their non-agricultural sidelines and specialize ever opment. Above all, the subjection of agricultural producers in possession
more intensely in the specialized production of butter, cheese, and cattle. of their means of production but not their means of subsistence to the
In so doing, they undertook large-scale investments, not only in land pressures of competition impelled them to adopt capitalist rules for repro-
reclamation (where they were aided by urban investors), but in farm duction that made for the central break beyond pre-capitalist economy—
infrastructure and farm implements. Farms did not have to become very the ongoing rise of labour productivity in agriculture, rather than its
large, since economies of scale in dairy and livestock raising were limited; opposite. The resulting breakthrough can be seen in the whole pattern of
still, plots were not subdivided, and reached a size well above the aver- English and Dutch economic evolution in the period leading into the
age in neighbouring lands, such as inland Flanders, that were dominated industrial revolution and the way that it diverged from that on most of
by possessing peasants farming for subsistence and parcellizing their Continent during this epoch.
holdings. The outcome over the course of the century and a half or so after The economies of England and the Netherlands were the only ones in
1500 was an impressive increase in labour productivity.42 Europe to experience increasing agricultural productivity across the early
As in England, the rise of capitalist social-property relations—lead- modern period; everywhere else in Europe there was stagnation or
ing to the growth of specialization, investment, ‘larger’ farms, and—as decline. (See Table 4.3.) In this respect England further extended its lead
a consequence — rising labour productivity in agriculture — provided the in the century 1750–1850. (See Table 4.4.) By virtue of the growth of their
basis for the transformation of the overall pattern of economic develop- agricultural productivity, England and the Netherlands were not only
ment. Rather than developing in conjunction with the production of freed from the limitation of Malthusian ceilings, but also, at the same
commercial crops (and the cultivation of grain for food) as an extension time, were able to support a rapidly increasing proportion of the popula-
of peasants’ drive to ‘produce for subsistence’, industrial production in the tion out of agriculture, leaving everyone else, in this respect, ever further
Netherlands was early on ejected from farm households as a consequence behind. (See Table 4.5.) In both places, moreover, the population was
of their specialization in agriculture. It therefore located itself in specialized pulled in the direction of industry and the towns by the unparallelled
firms in dynamic country towns which grew up to meet the demands of growth of discretionary spending (non-necessities), dependent in turn on
farmers for implements, services, and consumer goods. By the seventeenth growth of real wages that was, once again, without equal elsewhere in
century, a substantial majority of the labour force had left agriculture, and, Europe. England and the Netherlands were indeed the only locales which
while population grew as rapidly as anywhere in Europe in this epoch, it broke beyond the traditional Malthusian pattern whereby real wages fell
hit no Malthusian ceiling. With the English, then, the Dutch economy, like as population rose, and saw real wages rise rather than decline between
no others in Europe, substantially escaped the ‘seventeenth-century crisis’ 1500 and 1750/1800. (See Table 4.6.)
by achieving ongoing economic development.43 The opposite side of the same coin was a path of industrial develop-
ment unmatched elsewhere, most especially in England. In both England
and the Netherlands, industry ceased to develop as a peasant sideline, as
a method of rounding out the peasant consumption basket, pursued with-
out reference to the rate of return it yielded. In fact, separated from arable
production, manufacturing developed, particularly in England in special-
ized industrial districts, which quickly evolved into fast-growing towns,
42
De Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, pp. 98–210. that offered a long series of advantages unavailable to domestic produc-
43
De Vries, Dutch Agriculture in the Golden Age, pp. 110–15; de Vries and van der Woude, The
First Modern Economy, pp. 18–19, 200–4, 208–9, 272, 351, 665–6, 688. tion by peasants–including the development of skills, the rise of specialist

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toolmakers, plus the range of external economies long ago noted by Table 4.5. Distribution of the population by sector, 1500 and 1750.
Alfred Marshall. The rate of urbanization between 1500 and 1800,
Urban Rural Total Agricultural
especially in England but also in the Netherlands, had, again, no close Non-agricultural Non-agricultural
parallels elsewhere in Europe. (See Table 7 and 8.) It is not perhaps too 1500 1750 1500 1750 1500 1750 1500 1750
much to say that just as the supersession of the peasantry was the key to
England 0.07 0.23 0.18 0.32 0.25 0.55 0.74 0.45
the growth of agricultural productivity and agricultural revolution, the Netherlands 0.3 0.36 0.14 0.22 0.17 0.58 0.56 0.44
separation of manufacturing from the peasantry was the indispensable Belgium 0.28 0.22 0.14 0.26 0.42 0.48 0.58 0.51
foundation for dynamic industrial development, and ultimately the France 0.09 0.13 0.18 0.26 0.27 0.39 0.73 0.61
industrial revolution. Germany 0.08 0.09 0.18 0.27 0.26 0.36 0.73 0.64
Austria/Hungary 0.05 0.07 0.19 0.32 0.24 0.39 0.76 0.61
Spain 0.19 0.21 0.16 0.16 0.36 0.37 0.65 0.63
Table 4.3. The growth of agricultural productivity in Europe, 1500–1800.* Italy 0.22 0.23 0.16 0.19 0.38 0.42 0.62 0.58
England Netherlands Belgium France Germany Spain Austria Source: R. Allen, ‘Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800’,
European Review of Economic History, III (2000), p. 20
1500 1 1.07 1.39 0.83 0.74 0.89 0.91
1600 0.76 1.06 1.26 0.72 0.57 0.76 0.57
1700 1.15 1.24 1.2 0.74 0.54 0.87 0.74
Table 4.6. European real wages: building craftsman.*
1750 1.54 1.48 1.22 0.8 0.56 0.8 0.91
1800 1.43 1.44 1.11 0.83 0.67 0.7 0.81 1550–99 1600–49 1650–99 1700–49 1750–99
*Output per worker, England in 1500 ! 1.00.
London 9.6 9.4 10.7 11.4 11.4
Source: R. Allen, ‘Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800’,
Amsterdam 5.1 6.7 7.2 7.8 7
European Review of Economic History, III (2000).
Antwerp 6.4 6.7 6 6.2 6
Paris 4.6 4.3 4.4 3.9 3.6
Augsburg 3.7 2.9 4.6 4 3.6
Table 4.4. European agricultural labour productivity levels, 1750 and 1850.* Vienna 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.2 3.4

1750 1850 *Nominal wages in ounces of silver deflated by consumer price index.
Source: R. Allen, ‘Wages and Prices in Europe From the Middle Ages to the First World War’
England 100 100 (August 1998), Department of Economics, University of British Colombia website.
Netherlands 96 54
Belgium 79 37
France 52 44
Germany 36 42 Table 4.7. European urbanization: relative increase in population by sector, 1500–1750.
Austria 57 32
Total Urban Rural Agricultural
*Output per worker, England ! 100. non-agricultural
Sources:
England 2.4 7.7 4.24 1.46
1750 R. Allen, ‘Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800’,
Netherlands 2 2.46 3.07 1.48
European Economic Review of Economic History, III (2000), p. 20.
Belgium 1.84 1.46 3.81 1.64
1850 G. Clarke, ‘Agriculture in the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1860’ in J. Mokyr (ed.), The
Germany 1.52 1.63 2.27 1.33
British Industrial Revolution (Boulder, CO, 1999), p. 211.
France 1.44 2.09 2.07 1.21
Italy 1.55 1.58 1.85 1.47
Spain 1.28 1.49 1.3 1.22
Source: R. Allen, ‘Economic Structure and Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1300–1800’,
European Review of Economic History, III (2000).

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Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong

Table 4.8. Urbanization in England and on the Continent: percentage of total population in
towns with 10,000 or more people.

1600 1700 1750 1800

England 6.1 13.4 17.5 24

North and west Europe 9.2 12.8 12.1 10
minus England
Europe minus England 8.1 9.2 9.4 9.5
Source: E. A. Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the
Continent in the Early Modern Period’, Journal of Interdisiciplinary History, XV (Spring
1985), p. 708.

111