¹ Brenner's, original article was first published in Past and Present, 70 (02 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Responses from M.M. Postan and John Hatcher, Patricia Croot and David Parker, Hcide Wunder, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Guy Bois, R.H. Hilton, J.P. Cooper and Arnost Klima followed in subsequent issues, with a comprehensive reply from Brenner at the end. The whole debate was republished in Aston, T.H. and Philpin, C.H.E. (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The new book is Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge and Princeton, 1993).

² Anderson, Perry, “Maurice Thomson's War”, London Review of Books, 4 11 1993, p. 17Google Scholar.

³ I have discussed the dominant models in The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London, 1991), ch. 1, and Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1995), especially ch. 5.

⁴ Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, pp. 213–327.

⁵ Ibid., p. 10.

⁶ The most important of these other works are Brenner, , “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review, 104 (07–08 1977), pp. 25–92Google Scholar; “The Social Basis of Economic Development”, in Roemer, John (ed.), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; and “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, in Beier, A.L. et al. (eds), The First Modem Society (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar.

⁷ On the lack of “improvement” in French agriculture in the seventeenth century and throughout much of the eighteenth, see Neveux, Hugues, Jacquart, Jean and Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, L'age classique des paysans, 1340–1789 (Paris, 1975), especially pp. 214–215Google Scholar. On the failure of French landlords to regard their tenants as entrepreneurs or improvers, see Forster, Robert, “Obstacles to Agricultural Growth in Eighteenth-Century France”, American Historical Review, 75 (1970), especially p. 1610CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ See Comninel, George, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London, 1987)Google Scholar, for an earlier, analogous treatment of the French Revolution and the debate between the old “social interpretation” and the “revisionist challenge”. Like Brenner's Postscript, Comninel's Conclusion also sketches an alternative historical-materialist “social interpretation” of the Revolution, not based on the model of a direct confrontation between a feudal aristocracy and a capitalist bourgeoisie. This account of the French Revolution is to be elaborated in a future volume.

⁹ See, for example, Manning, Brian, The English People and the English Revolution (London, 1991, 2nd ed.), especially chs 1 and 3Google Scholar; and Hill, Christopher, The Century of Revolution (New York, 1961), pp. 121 and 124–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Again, a similar argument had been made before by Comninel in Rethinking the French Revolution, which also elaborated the differences between Marx's earlier debt to Enlightenment materialism and liberal historiography and his later critique of political economy.

¹¹ Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism”, p. 280.

¹² Anderson, “Maurice Thomson's War”, p. 17.

¹³ See, for example, Marx, Capital, I (Moscow, n.d.), pp. 699–701.

¹⁴ Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development”, pp. 76–77.

¹⁵ The Dutch example, incidentally, while it continues to be perhaps the most perplexing one for historians of the transition, does not make quite the point Anderson wants it to make. It does indeed provide an example of an advanced agriculture and thriving international trade, “conjoined to a richer urban society”; but it has been argued that the very characteristics which the commercialization model treats as the motors of economic development – flourishing cities and international trade – proved in the Dutch case to be major factors in blocking further development. (See, for example, de Vries, Jan, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700 (New Haven, 1974)Google Scholar.) According to this argument, the Republic's powerful cities, which certainly promoted its early development, eventually strangled Dutch productivity by imposing upon it a rentier-type parasitism which acted as a drain on its flourishing agriculture. At the same time, dependence on the traditional international trading system subjected the Republic to a European economic crisis in the seventeenth century to which England alone remained immune – not least because of England's internal market and its “capitalism in one country”.

¹⁶ In Pristine Culture, I make some suggestions about other patterns of capitalist development, in which, for example, pre-capitalist state forms served to advance capitalist development once they were subjected to the competitive pressures of English capitalism.

¹⁷ For a treatment of the French “bourgeois revolution” as non-capitalist, see Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution, especially the Conclusion.

¹⁸ I discuss some of the ways in which English trade differed from the traditional commercial system in Pristine Culture, ch. 6.

¹⁹ The most important starting-point in this tradition was Dobb's, MauriceStudies in the Development of Capitalism (London, 1946Google Scholar, reprinted in 1963 and 1972). Sweezy's, Paul criticism of this work in 1950 sparked a major debate among Marxists (now often called the “Transition Debate”) on the issue of the “prime mover” in the pages of Science and Society, later republished, with additional materials, in Hilton, R.H. (ed.), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1976)Google Scholar, which forms the (largely silent) background to the Brenner debate. Among the central issues in the “Transition Debate” were the role of money rents, trade, markets and cities in feudalism and the relation between town and country.

²⁰ Hilton, Transition, p. 59.

²¹ Ibid., p. 27.

²² Manning, Brian, “The English Revolution and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism”, International Socialism, 63 (Summer 1994)Google Scholar.

²³ ibid., p. 81.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 85.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 82.

²⁶ Ibid. Manning here cites Mooers, Colin, The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution, and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany (London, 1991)Google Scholar in support o f his views o n the yeomanry.

²⁷ Brenner does not at all, as we shall see, neglect the role of small producers in the development of capitalism. On the contrary, he seeks to explain it. For the moment, it is, however, worth noting a small irony in Manning's own account of the transition. Few other historians have done as much to illuminate popular radicalism in the English Revolution as Brian Manning. Yet, at least for the purposes of his argument against Brenner, he seems to reduce all revolutionary impulses among popular radicals to a drive towards capitalism and to the aspirations of rising capitalists, at the expense of other, more subversive and democratic motivations for challenging the existing order, indeed for challenging property forms conducive to capitalist development. Brenner's explanation serves admirably to account for both kinds of revolutionary forces.

²⁸ Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate, pp. 293–296.

²⁹ Manning, “The English Revolution”, p. 84.

³⁰ For more on these points, see my “From Opportunity to Imperative: the History of the Market”, Monthly Review (July–August 1994). As should by now be clear, the issues in the debate surrounding the commercialization model do not turn on a simple opposition between urban and rural, town and country, even agriculture and commerce or industry. This critical point seems to have escaped another Marxist reviewer of Merchants and Revolution. Callinicos, Alex, welcoming Brenner's excursion into the history of mercantile classes, suggests not so much that there is a contradiction between the recent book and the earlier thesis but rather that it has up to now been unclear “what place his account allows for other forms of capitalism”, apart from its agrarian variety (New Left Review, 207 (09–10 1994), p. 131)Google Scholar. “Thus,” he continues, “critics such as Chris Harman have taxed Brenner for ignoring the role played by urban mercantile capitalism in the transition. Sympathizers such as Ellen Wood have in turn dismissed such objections as examples of Pirenne's old heresy of identifying capitalism with trade. On the face of it, Merchants and Revolution invalidates objection and defence alike.” Callinicos's remark about “Pirenne's heresy” suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues. My objection (like, I venture to say, Brenner's) to the Pirenne thesis and other versions of the old model is not simply that they have concentrated on the city rather than the countryside, or on agriculture rather than trade, but rather that they treat commercial activity and profit-taking (whether urban or rural) as capitalism-in-embryo, requiring only quantitative expansion rather than qualitative transformation to become capitalism – making no distinction between commercial profit-taking and capitalist appropriation. Callinicos is here again, as elsewhere, lapsing into the same confusion – as if the specificity of capitalist property relations, with the systemic laws of motion generated by them, still eludes him, in much the same way that it has long eluded advocates of the commercialization model. Finally, some readers will no doubt have noticed that my argument here has implications for the Marxist debate (for example, in the “Transition Debate”) about the two paths to capitalism: “Way I” – the “really revolutionary way” – where petty commodity producers grow into capitalists, and “Way II”, where merchants take over production. Some of this debate has, again, been conducted as if the development of petty producers into capitalists required no real explanation, apart from an account of how opportunities were expanded or obstacles removed. I touch on this point in “From Opportunity to Imperative”.