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Richard Grassby, The Idea of Capitalism before the Industrial Revolution (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999); Robert S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Richard Lachmann, Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2017

Rebecca Jean Emigh
Rebecca Jean Emigh
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

In the 1970s and 1980s, two influential books, both entitled, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, were published (Holton 1985; Sweezy 1976). The titles were signs of the times: reflecting a concern with explaining a supposedly decisive shift in historic Europe economic systems. Today, “transition” language is likely to take the form of the title of this essay and the books reviewed here, employing some plural form of the principal nouns, and question marks. As the format indicates, current scholarship questions whether such a transition took place at all, and argues that if it did, it was regionally and historically specific.

Type
CSSH Discussion
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , January 2004 , pp. 188 - 198
Copyright
© 2004 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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