Books

This edited volume builds and expands on the groundbreaking work of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood on the origins of capitalism. Whereas Brenner and Wood focused mostly on the emergence of capitalism in the English countryside (agrarian capitalism), this book utilizes their approach to offer original, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically informed accounts of transitions to capitalism – both agrarian and industrial – in a wide range of countries in order to provide within a single volume a diverse collection of relatively brief yet detailed case studies of the historical transition to capitalism distributed across three continents. Offering a new and highly original analysis of the global spread of capitalism, this book will be a unique contribution to the longstanding debate on the transition to capitalism.

1. Introduction
Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post

2. Expropriation and the Political Origins of Agrarian Capitalism in England
Spencer Dimmock

3. “Compelled to Sell All”: Proletarianization, Agrarian Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution
Michael Andrew Žmolek

4. Peasant Farming in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France and the Transition to Capitalism Under Charles de Gaulle
Stephen Miller

5. The Transition to Industrial Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century France
Xavier Lafrance

6. The Transition to Capitalism in Catalonia
Javier Moreno Zacarés

7. The American Road to Capitalism
Charles Post

8. Colonialism, Racism, and the Transition to Capitalism in Canada
Jessica Evans

9. The Peasantry and Tenancy-Market Dependence: Rural Capitalism in Meiji-Era Japan
Mark Cohen

10. Rural Property Relations and the Regional Dynamics of Brazilian Capitalism
Chris Carlson

11. The Political Economy of the Transition to Capitalism in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey: Towards a New Interpretation
Eren Duzgun

12. Uncertainty, Contingency, and Late Development in Taiwan
Christopher Isett

13. Rethinking the Rules of Reproduction and the Transition to Capitalism: Reading Federici and Brenner Together
Nicole Leach

14. Conclusion
Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post

How did industrial society emerge? This book argues that the answer is to be sought in understanding the relationship between the worlds first Industrial Revolution and the prior development in England of an agrarian capitalism. It was only in England that a unique set of social property relations which could be identified as capitalist first came about as an unintended consequence of the actions and struggles of the economy agents in the pre-capitalist or "feudal" economy seeking to reproduce themselves as they were. Through a complex and protracted process of transformation, involving the extinguishing customary law in agriculture, the majority of direct producers were converted to a condition of market-dependence and agrarian production was subjected to competitive market pressures that made the transformation of production an imperative, an imperative that demanded the dispossession of direct producers from the means of production and their control over the labour process. Threatened with such dispossession, peasants in agriculture and labourers in manufacturing resisted. This resistance, however, was sustained for a much longer period among craft workers in manufacturing than among agricultural workers.

Through an exploration of the evolution of British manufactures over the course of half a millennium, this work seeks to challenge readers to rethink long-standing views of the Industrial Revolution as the result of the natural unfolding of an already existing economic logic by showing how attempts by employers to transform production in such a way as to make it responsive to competitive market pressures were resisted by workers themselves seeking to shield themselves from full exposure to the market, in turn prompting the application of the coercive powers of the state to suppress such resistance. Contrary to the view that the decision by large sections of the British working class to abandon resistance to capitalism and the search for alternatives was voluntary, this study argues that such an accommodation only came about after a series of devastating defeats suffered by the artisan-led working class over the course of many generations.

Introduction

PART I: ENGLAND TRANSFORMED
Manufacturing and Agrarian Capitalism, 1348–1783

1. The Pre-History of Industry
2. Parliament and Revolution
3. Agrarian Capitalism:
The Key to Britain's Rise to Power
4. An Empire in Crisis
5. Harvesting the Agrarian Revolution

PART II: 'SUCH MACHINES ... AS CANNOT ERR'
Capital and Technology in the Making of Industrial England, 1700–1800

6. Technology and History
7. The Social Origins of the Factory
8. Factories and Machinery
9. Capital and Industry

PART III: CUSTOM'S LAST STAND
The Rise and Fall of Artisan-Led Resistance to Capitalism in England, 1783–1848

10. Custom and Law
11. Rebellion and Reaction
12. Class and the State
13. Reform and the Oligarchy
14. Chartists and Liberals

Conclusion

Epilogue