What are the key issues in the different phases of the debate on the transition from

Feudalism to Capitalism?

The past millennium has witnessed a veritable historiographical revolution in the study of the
early modern epoch and debates over the origins of capitalism have subsequently taken on new
dimensions. As an ongoing arena of historical and sociological investigation, The transition from
feudalism to capitalism was and remains a major theoretical question with widespread political
implications.

The transition debate can roughly be seen as having passed through three stages. The first great
debate was between Maurice Dobb (Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 1946) and Paul
Sweezy. The second phase of this debate began with Robert Brenner's article 'Agrarian Class
Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe' in Past And Present (1976). The
more recent, the third phase has reflected on alternatives to understanding the transition debate
by challenging the long prevalent "eurocentric" approach.

Henri Pirenne's 'Pirenne Thesis' provided a background on which the debate rested. His work
highlighted how feudalism emerged where he attributes that the absence of trade transformed
Europe from a growing "economy of exchange" into a new "economy of consumption." The
model presupposed the development of capitalism to be the natural outcome of acts of exchange-
the growth of cities and the liberation of merchants to build the "commercial society"- the
highest stage of progress which was liberated from political and cultural constraints.

Often using the concept and methodology of "historical materialism", Marxian economists and
historians have attempted to explain the evolution of human society and its economic system.
Central to historical materialism is the idea that humanity’s material circumstances, not the
philosophy of idealism, shape its existence and that a society’s dominant mode of production
reflects its material circumstances.

The 'Dobb-Sweezy' debate began with Sweezy's criticism of Dobb in the spring edition of
Science and Society(1950). While Dobb looked at feudalism as a social/property relations of the
production between the feudal landed aristocracy and the peasant-serf; Sweezy viewed feudalism
as a system of production for use. Identifying the prime mover in both the models was the
outstanding question where they stood differed- while Dobb had said that the primary cause was
a crisis in social relations of feudalism as a result of inevitable class struggles, Sweezy located a
factor external to these relations, i.e., in the expansion of trade.

Maurice Dobb challenged the old commercialization model which Henri Pirenne was a
proponent of, concluding that most of the factors that caused the eventual fall of feudalism was
endogenous to the feudalistic system. The contradictions of a feudalistic economic system were
mostly to be found in the class struggles between a land-owning and wealthy aristocracy and
their extremely exploited and repressed serfs. He, however, questioned whether markets could be
the sole or even decisive factor to sufficiently explain the decline of feudalism. Dobb pointed out
the contradiction when in Western Europe trade was reviving, Eastern Europe was experiencing
the 'second serfdom'- therefore, even trade as a prime mover lead to contradicting results in
different parts of Europe.

Paul Sweezy, basing his work inside the Marxist framework and Pirenne's model argued the
feudalism was intrinsically tenacious, self-perpetuating and resistant to change and therefore the
cause of change must be external. For Sweezy, the prime mover behind the demise of feudalism
was the growth of overseas trade thanks to the Silk Road to China being closed in the 15th
century by the Ottoman Empire and the development of large mercantile sailing fleets by rival
European powers. But he further argues that while the expansion of trade was sufficient to
dissolve feudalism and usher in a transitional phase of “pre-capitalist commodity production”
that was unstable, but it did not lead to capitalism. There was a subsequent distinct phase of the
growth of capitalism in the 17th and 18th centuries. Sweezy highlights the role of towns and
growing needs of revenue of the ruling class, that made these towns powerful 'urban magnets'
offering liberty and employment thereby attracting fleeing serfs. He also explains 'second
serfdom' by the help of geography, that Eastern Europe being on the periphery of exchange
economy kept it, producers, on the land and could not escape the landlord who restored newer
forms of exploitation.

Centring both their arguments on a passage from Marx (Capital, Vol III), Dobb attributed the rise
of capitalism to the liberation of petty commodity production and primitive or original
accumulation in agriculture wherein with decreasing control, the serf could develop his own land
and generate a surplus to become valid in the market. Sweezy pointed out that this capitalist
economy developed outside agriculture and later incorporated and commercialised agriculture
because the first manufacturers were large scale merchant enterprises and it was their
accumulated wealth that shot up the full-fledged production. Therefore merchants carrying trade
dissolved feudalism and created capitalism.

The final point of distinction between Dobb and Sweezy was how they understood this
transitional period. For Dobb, 14th century saw Feudalism enter into a crisis where the period
remained feudal in its entirety while Sweezy saw the transitional period to be of "simple
commodity production"- neither feudal or capitalist and therefore a distinct period in its own
merit. Although later research has shown little support to Sweezy's theory, with one of the chief
critics being Robert Brenner who viewed this theory to as "neo-Smithian", because for him the
dissolution of feudalism was not sufficient for the rise of capitalism. Dobb, however, saw the
decline and rise as more or less the same, implying a certain similarity with that of the
commercialisation model. And as E.M Wood pointed out- there is a qualitative and not simply
quantitative difference between petty commodity production and capitalism - a difference, which
this debate failed to bring out.

Rodney Hilton, another Marxist scholar, agreed with Dobb and furthered the debate making a
fundamental distinction between feudal rent and capitalist rent. Highlighting the significance of
money rent, which for Hilton had helped increase feudal exploitation- he explained how the
landlord still appropriated rent, wherein the land held the peasant as much as the peasant held the
land but the lord controlled their mobility. Hilton argued that feudal relations did not change
rather the exaction model changed, becoming more complex, comprehensive, helping in the
fuller realisation of services.

Kohachiro Takahashi brought insights from the east, where for him capitalism meant the
changing form of labour-power. He saw the 'the first capitalist manufacturers' from Sweezy's
model and with Dobb's explanation of original accumulation, he saw capitalism to have been
imposed from above. According to him, the first was seen in Western Europe, where the feudal
property was reorganized; while the second was seen in Prussia and Japan, where the feudal
property was consolidated.

A.B. Hibbery and F.Y Polyansky saw towns as en element in the development of feudal
socio-economic order, where to them commerce became integral to feudalism and later surplus
from agriculture expanded this feudal regime.

Proacci felt that, although Dobb had convincingly refuted the Pirenne thesis, he failed to
reconstruct the internal dialectic of feudalism. Cristopher Hill made an intervention on behalf of
Dobb, where he identified the stage in the process, when feudalism disappears, as the English
Revolution alongside simultaneous development of capitalism.
The Annales school of thought represented by M.M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
suggested that that demographic change also affected the transition and that the laws of demand
and supply determined the shift to capitalism. The 11th-13th centuries and 15th-16th saw a
growth in population leading to scarcity and rising prices, while 14th-15th century and
17th-18the century saw a decline bringing change in productivity, famine and plague with
ecology playing an important role to maintain the demographic balance. The continual reversal
in the land-man ratio must have been a determinant in bringing about the transition.

Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein's works began the second phase of the debate where
past theories were furthered. Braudel argued from a global context, acknowledging the intensive
use of money, joint-stock companies and new business methods. Wallerstein introduced the
'World System Theory' trying to divide the economy into four parts of core, semi-periphery,
periphery and external alongside determining the relationships between different regions. He
drew relationships of exchange and exaction between core economies and how periphery regions
aced as buffers, that would eventually explain the case of colonisation of American empires by
Spain and Portugal. This theory drew attention to the international context of capitalism.

Perry Anderson synthesizes non-Marxist themes with a conventional Marxist emphasis on social
relations, where to him the appearance of money brought about a conflict between the feudal
lords and monarchy. He presupposes the result to be a displacement of coercion upwards,
creating a centralised, militarized 'absolutist state' as seen in the case of France and later
England.

Robert Brenner carried forward Dobb's argument, initiating the Brenner Debate where to him the
role of the class struggle became internal to feudalism and regarded it to be the case rather than
the consequence of the course of historical development. Brenner emphasized on the inability of
the demographic model and the neo-Malthusian approach, arguing that trade and demography
cannot be sole proponents of change as feudalism, and like any other age, was prone to the
demographic-production disproportion cycles and therefore a natural phenomenon.
Brenner sought to redefine "class struggle " and it's nature, arguing that it depended on the
balance of forces between contending classes. For Brenner, the class struggle became a long
process of struggle where a “protracted, piecemeal village by village struggle” took place,
whereby they accumulated resources for resistance. Firstly, West Europe had been the core area
of the European civilizations from the earliest times, whereas Eastern Europe had formed the
margins. Secondly, Western Europe was more densely populated than Eastern Europe. Also,
Western Europe had seen more continuous settlement and cultivation, whereas in Eastern Europe
the pattern was more erratic. As a result, in Western Europe, there was a greater struggle for land
and more people had to make do with limited resources. While absolutism in France was sought
as a transitional phase by many historians and Dobb's explanation relied solely on primitive
accumulation, Brenner explained this difference to be a causal effect in how state intervened int
he class struggle. Thus, the nature of state intervention determined the difference in the pattern of
economic development. He compared England on one hand, and France and Western Germany
on the other, to explain this. Brenner saw England to be on the margins of Feudal polity while
France was in the core area. Large scale landholding did not mean that there was capitalist
development and new kind of property relations formed the basic condition to the rise of
capitalism. He argued that the change in the mode of production was not a stand-alone event
therefore, the feudal mode of production was prone to recurring crisis due to its relations of
productions. He deals with Marx's "revolutionary way" to capitalism, arguing that capitalist
tenant in England was not just a petty producer but one who had grown to some appropriate level
of prosperity and therefore his specific relations subjected him to market imperatives. This
argument sided with Sweezy's contention that transition was a result of landlord's weakness to
suppress peasants but Brenner's focus was upon the aristocrats transforming themselves from
feudal lords to capitalist landowners- which was in contrast with Dobb's.
Brenner clubbed the erstwhile arguments, bringing it under on umbrella. His explicit point of
departure was precisely the two-phase grand agrarian cycles of non-development, bound up with
demographic change. He also says that it is impossible to grasp the evolution of the feudal
economy as a whole simply by means of the so-called “economic” formula. Guy Bois critiqued
Brenner saying he was privileging political against economic factors, saying the state cannot be
the primary determinant. To Bois, the difference lay in the total structure of feudal experience.
France had a more acute and sharper version of feudalism than England's marginal experience.
Although, the inability to come satisfactorily to terms with the “fusion” between the “political”
and the “economic”, that profoundly marked the feudal-productive system became the central
weakness of both Bois and the demographic interpreters. Patricia Croot and David Parker both
accused Brenner undermining the role of small capitalist farmers and they see the property
arrangements in France to be of a temporary arrangement.

Seeing this from an entire neo-Marxist point of view, the entire theory of "Capital" should be
considered as the study of the properties of a 'model', as all the historians have, and its import for
a particular case will depend on the soundness of judgement with which it is used. Again in the
non-structuralist interpretations of the "Capital", the emphasis is placed on its logical form as the
ideal average of capital in general, as we have seen in the paragraphs above. Therefore, in
'history', "Das Kapital" is then abstracted to a model which encapsulates the historical process
and its many dimensions into a moment of pure capital and labour. Secondly, and contradicting,
Capital, in a very significant sense is not merely an exercise in political economy but also its
critique. History imparts to the relevant categories all their characteristic properties and also sets
forth the initial conditions of the model in which their principal relations are to be explored.

E.M. Wood makes an important point by saying that capitalism is not a natural tendency towards
freedom but specific social relations that emerged on the basis of the denial of the right to
property, and while expanding the Dobb-Brenner theory she states that it was capitalism which
was in crisis at the end of the 20th century.

Heide Wunder sees the thesis as anglo-centric, and questions other divergent evolutions. This
leads us to the third phase- "anti-eurocentric" writings which posits a new understanding of the
Transition Debate, mainly arguing that there is nothing natural and unique about European
capitalism- it was just a knowledge system that legitimized the West and helped colonisation.

E.A Wrigley argued that the capitalist advances could have only limited results and was not
enough to propel England out of the medieval cycles of crisis. Change of property relations could
change the nature of Organic Economy only, and this is why England's change in energy
resources (here, coal) made the breakthrough happen which was not peculiar to the European
structure or capitalist relations.
John Hobson talks about Western manipulation in appropriating the 'pristine' view and creation
of the false modern world. For him, the East and West have been interlined through Oriental
Globalisation since early medieval times but the rise of 18th century saw colonialism which
made the West appropriate East's resources thus dominating the narrative over industrialisation.
Although the Europeans played an active role in developing their own fate, the contribution of
the East cannot be undermined.

J.M Blaut sees the rise of Europe and its modern industrialisation as a result of colonialism and
not from the internal forces or factors unique to pre-modern Europe, where nothing was more
developed or had innate development potential until 1500AD. An important observation can be
made here, whereof a potential crisis exists between the criticism of the internalist method of
Eurocentrism and the criticism of Political Marxist definitions of Capitalism. The former line of
criticism focuses on questioning the limited geographical scope of historical analysis while the
latter line is categorical and concerned with the definition or theorisation of capitalism's
specificity.

The transition to capitalism remains a problem of continuing scholarly fascination. Debates as to

the nature of capitalism and the reasons for its historical emergence endure precisely because
they address the concern of so many sociologists, historians and others to find an order in the
"past", so as to give meaning for the "present" and hope for the "future". However this may be,
the terms in which such ventures as the transition debate are currently being conducted reflect a
profound crisis with the evolutionary paradigm inherited from the nineteenth century. They are
not merely empirical registrations but is important that these approaches to historical research
provide solutions as well. The absence of a coherent structure gives more dynamism to this
debate and thus keeps on developing further.
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