The Hidden Abode

In defense of neo-Smithian Marxism

November 12, 2022

Introduction

In the late 1970s, American historian Robert Brenner penned a pair of essays critiquing the prevailing theories of agrarian change in late medieval and early modern Europe. The first, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” was primarily a broadside against the “demographic model” (associated with the Annales school in France and M. M. Postan in England) with a shorter critique of the “commercialization model”; the second, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” was a more substantial critique of the “commercialization model” in its Marxist variant. Brenner’s contributions sparked a heated debate in the pages of Past & Present which was eventually published as The Brenner Debate.1

Every now and then the Brenner Debate resurfaces in miniature controversies, primarily although not exclusively among Marxists. Ellen Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism, based substantially on Brenner’s work, remains a popular introduction to the subject among general readers. In fact, Brenner’s framework is now the basis for a veritable multi-disciplinary research program in history and its associated fields (“Political Marxism”).2

In spite of its popularity and rigorous formulation I have to admit I ultimately find the Brenner thesis to be unconvincing. The aim of this post is to explain why, and why I find something like “neo-Smithian Marxism” to be a more plausible alternative.

Commerce and capitalism

First, let’s briefly go over the “commercialization model” and Brenner’s critique of it.

Brenner uses the term “commercialization model” to refer to any model of agrarian change that emphasizes the role of market demand. In its simplest form, the commercialization model goes something like this: in the context of an agrarian economy where most producers have limited market involvement and produce for subsistence (“feudalism”), the expansion of concentrated market demand will induce agricultural producers to specialize their production for the market in order to realize the gains from trade. This leads to the rise of specialized commercial farming in which producers are more or less fully dependent on the market and must be successful at competition to survive (“agrarian capitalism”). This results in a continuous rise in agrarian productivity and the ability to support more people off the land.3

Brenner’s objection to this line of explanation is twofold:4

Why was it that over six or seven centuries — from around 1050 to 1750 — despite the impressive growth of towns and trade, most of the European economy was characterized by two successive grand Malthusian demographically driven cycles, marked by falling labour productivity in agriculture?

And, conversely:

Why was it that, at different points in the later medieval and early modern periods, in the face of ongoing, indeed accelerated demographic increase, a few economies of Europe achieved a breakthrough to self-sustaining growth?

In other words: the commercialization model is unable to explain the absence of capitalism across broad swathes of historical time.

The crux of Brenner’s critique is that the commercialization model projects an essentially capitalist rationality onto the pre-capitalist past. Peasants, according to Brenner, do not become specialized commercial farmers in response to market demand because they have direct, non-market access to their means of subsistence. This allows them to practice a strategy of diversified, “safety first” agriculture focused on autoconsumption rather than market production. They pursue this strategy because low yields and frequent (but unpredictable) harvest failures render the capitalist strategy of specialized commercial farming too risky. Years of bad harvest feature increased prices for basic foodstuffs and decreased prices for specialized and non-food crops; market dependent producers risk being squeezed between high input costs and low output prices, presenting a very real risk of starvation. In the face of this, commercial opportunities can induce greater market involvement but stops short of full-scale capitalist specialization.5

Since it would be irrational for peasants to voluntarily adopt capitalist “rules for reproduction” (a strategy of market specialization leading to competition and continuous reinvestment of surpluses), Brenner holds that agrarian capitalism could only be the (unintended) result of class struggle. This was accomplished in England when, in the period after the Black Death, landlords reaffirmed their rights to peasant property and rendered them “in effect” commercial leaseholds.6

What I have presented above is, of course, a highly abbreviated recap of Brenner’s critique of the commercialization model. It is not a full summary of Brenner’s other arguments (for instance, against the specifics of Wallerstein’s argument), where he is often on firmer ground. Nevertheless I think it is fair to focus on this line of critique specifically because it forms a weak link in his chain of argument.

Commercialization and its discontents

The main problem with Brenner’s argument is that it rests very heavily on a dubious model of peasant behavior. Of all his critics, I think Jan de Vries put it best:

Why might a direct producer not see his opportunity precisely in greater market involvement? Brenner’s argument relies almost entirely on the concept of risk-aversion: markets expose the peasant to too much risk. Here Brenner advances a viewpoint shared broadly by historians. It is a viewpoint with important implications, for if it is true the peasant is rendered ineligible as a modernizer of agriculture. And it is a viewpoint that is demonstrably false.7

In his response to de Vries, Brenner effectively concedes this point, but doubles down by asserting that markets in the period under consideration really were riskier:

But I have never made the argument that de Vries is here attributing to me — viz., that recourse to specialization is in some general, trans-historical way riskier than diversified, subsistence production … What I do argue is that, under the conditions that generally prevailed in medieval and early modern Europe … there was vast uncertainty about the availability of food, with subsistence crises to be expected but their timing unpredictable.8

However, Brenner’s concession is more problematic for his argument than he lets on. Once it is admitted that markets can be reliable enough to induce producers to become specialized commercial farmers under certain conditions, it shifts the terms of the debate away from an exclusive focus on the class structure and towards a consideration of the market structure: under what market conditions do producers become induced to commercialize?

Most scholars today agree that commercialization and productivity growth was driven by expanding market demand, and particularly concentrated demand from growing urban centers.9 Yet it is also clear, as Brenner notes, that market demand alone is incapable of detonating a transition to agrarian capitalism. This has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream.10

The commercialization model is able to account for this by placing markets in their local institutional and environmental context. The impact of the market is refracted through the prism of local conditions; or, to put a Marxian gloss on it, the class structure and the market have a reciprocal influence.

This point is made lucidly by the late Stephan R. Epstein:

Similar property relations will provide different incentive structures for peasants depending on the wider institutional context in which production takes place; weaker or stronger urban powers, for example, can effect the terms of trade between agricultural and manufactured products and significantly alter constraints on commoditization and trade.11

Epstein focused mainly on the problems posed to trade by the jurisdictional fragmentation of European feudalism. Other authors place special emphasis on the high costs of overland transport and primitive transportation and communication networks.12 These different factors (geographical, technological, institutional, etc.) are often considered together under the rubric of “transaction costs.” High transaction costs would have the effect of limiting the extent of commercialization in both its depth (how much producers can rely on the market) and width (the spatial range). Brenner’s objection that the commercialization model is unable to theoretically account for the transition to capitalism is therefore unfounded.

France and England revisited

If Brenner’s theoretical critique of the commercialization model is highly debatable, something similar can be said of his comparative empirical arguments.

In his 1982 essay, for instance, Brenner takes France as the quintessential “feudal” point of comparison. Here, where the peasantry won their struggle for secure land tenure, there was no move to agrarian capitalism because peasants were not forced into market dependence by seigneurial reaction. Not even the immense pull of the Parisian market could induce them to abandon safety first agriculture.13 Hence France fell back into the typical pattern of Malthusian stagnation.

As I see it, there are two problems with this argument. First, as Epstein points out, Brenner’s points of reference are large — too large.14 Brenner frequently contrasts the fate of England as a whole with France as a whole; but in the early modern period, with its high transportation costs and jurisdictional fragmentation, national economies were rarely coherent units. Rather, comparisons should be made at the regional level. And this brings us to the second issue with Brenner’s empirical comparison; the Paris Basin featured specialized commercial farming with comparable levels of productivity (including labor productivity) as the most advanced regions of England.15

If France is not quite as Brenner presents it, neither is England. Brenner’s account of the transition to capitalism in England focuses primarily on peasants' failure to win secure property rights and their reduction to market dependence through landlord action rather than, say, the enormous growth of London or success in international commerce. His critics, however, have produced findings that directly challenge this account:

  • First, it is not clear that copyhold tenure was really as insecure as Brenner insists. David French and Richard Hoyle have noted that copyhold of inheritance, which prevailed in eastern England, was in effect a “perpetual tenancy” with fixed rents and fines “which fell short of the market value of the land."16
  • Second, while a transition to leasehold did occur, this is not to say “that all land was held by modern-type leases with commercially determined rents,” since many were “beneficial” leases with long terms and low rents.17
  • Third, it is clear that the increases in agricultural productivity during the “Agricultural Revolution” were not exclusive to enclosed farms but were shared with open field agriculture.18 In other words, unenclosed fields also experienced “Smithian growth.”

That a change to agrarian capitalism happened in England is not in question.19 It seems more likely, however, that agrarian capitalism was driven by urbanization and trade than changes in land tenure.20 In connection to this and to the preceding section, it seems noteworthy that England and the Netherlands had precociously developed “national” markets with relatively high levels of market integration.21 Both countries had plentiful access to maritime and riverine transport, which was significantly less costly than overland transportation, and in both countries cities appear to have had weak corporate powers over their hinterlands (although not, in the Dutch case, for lack of trying).22 This is surely not a sufficient explanation for the divergence between northwestern Europe and the continent, but the fact they had market structures more conducive to commercial specialization seems to me to be an essential part of the story.

Smith and Marx

How difficult is it to reconcile the plausibility of the commercialization model (and apparent implausibility of the Brenner thesis) with a commitment to Marxist, or at least Marx-ish, historical analysis?

If “Marxist history” means a single-minded focus on class struggle as the “prime mover” in history, then it is admittedly pretty difficult. But as Rodney Hilton pointed out in his introduction to The Brenner Debate, there is more than one way to use Marx for historical analysis. The gulf between the position taken by contemporary historians and non-Brennerian Marxists is not really all that large. Chris Wickham even goes so far as to say that Epstein’s work on market integration is “explicitly Marxist."23 In the end, any model that accepts the validity of “capitalism” as a category of historical analysis is in some way indebted to Marx.

Bibliography

  • Allen, Robert. “Progress and Poverty in Early Modern Europe.” The Economic History Review 56, no. 3 (August 2003): 403–43.
  • Allen, Robert. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  • Aston, T.H., and C.H.E. Philpin. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Past and Present Publications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  • Bateman, Victoria. Markets and Growth in Early Modern Europe. Perspectives in Economic and Social History, no. 20. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012.
  • Brenner, Robert. “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism.” In The Brenner Debate, edited by T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, 1st ed., 213–328. Cambridge University Press, 1985.
  • Brenner, Robert. “The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism.” Journal of Agrarian Change 1, no. 2 (April 2001): 169–241.
  • Brenner, Robert. “Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong.” In Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Chris Wickham, 49–111. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • Epstein, Stephan R. “Cities, Regions and the Late Medieval Crisis: Sicily and Tuscany Compared.” Past and Present 130, no. 1 (1991): 3–50.
  • Epstein, Stephan R. “The late medieval crisis as an ‘integration crisis’.” In Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and social change in Europe,” edited by Maarten Prak, 23-48. London: Routledge, 2001.
  • French, Henry, and Richard W. Hoyle. The Character of English Rural Society: Earls Colne, 1550-1750. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
  • Glennie, Paul. “Town and Country in England, 1570–1750.” In Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800, edited by Stephan R. Epstein, 1st ed., 132–55. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  • Hart, Marjolein’t. “Town and Country in the Dutch Republic, 1550–1800.” In Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800, edited by Stephan R. Epstein, 1st ed., 80–105. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
  • Hoffman, Philip T. Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450 - 1815. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
  • Langton, John. “Conclusion: The Historical Geography of European Peasantries, 1400-1800.” In The Peasantries of Europe, edited by Tom Scott, 372-400. New York: Longman, 1998.
  • Pinilla, Vicente. “The Impact of Markets in the Management of Rural Land.” In Markets and Agricultural Change in Europe: from the 13th to the 20th century, edited by Vicente Pinilla, 11-36. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2009.
  • Scott, Hamish, and Tom Scott. “The Agrarian West.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750, edited by Hamish Scott. Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • De Vries, Jan, and A. M. van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  • Vries, Jan de. “The Transition to Capitalism in a Land without Feudalism.” In Peasants into Farmers?, edited by P. Hoppenbrouwers and J. Luiten van Zanden, 4:67–84. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2001.
  • Whittle, Jane. “Leasehold Tenure in England c.1300-c.1600: Its Form and Incidence.” In The Development of Leasehold in Northwestern Europe, c. 1200 – 1600, edited by Bas van Bavel and Phillipp Schofield, 10:139–54. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2009.
  • Whittle, Jane. The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440-1580. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
  • Wickham, Chris. “What Has Marxism Done for Medieval history, and What Can It Still Do?” In Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Chris Wickham, 32-48. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • Wood, Ellen. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso, 2002.
  • Wrigley, E. A. The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • Zanden, Jan Luiten van. “The Development of Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1500-1800.” In Land Productivity and Agro-Systems in the North Sea Area (Middle Ages - 20th Century). Elements for Comparison, edited by Erik Thoen and Bas J.P. van Bavel, 2:357–75. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1999.

  1. Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. ↩︎

  2. https://politicalmarxism.wordpress.com/ ↩︎

  3. Compare Overton and Campbell, “Productivity Change in European Agricultural Development,” pp. 19-22 ↩︎

  4. Brenner, “Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong,” p. 53 ↩︎

  5. Brenner, “Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong,” p. 67 ↩︎

  6. Brenner, “Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong,” pp. 96-98; Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” pp. 291-299 ↩︎

  7. de Vries, “The Transition to Capitalism in a Land without Feudalism,” p. 72 ↩︎

  8. Brenner, “The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism,” p. 193 ↩︎

  9. van Zanden, “The Development of Agricultural Productivity in Europe, 1500-1800,” pp. 370-372; Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society, pp. 170-171; Allen, “Progress and Poverty in Early Modern Europe”; Scott, “The Agrarian West,” p. 411; Pinilla, “The impact of markets in the management of rural land,” pp. 13-18 ↩︎

  10. Pinilla, “The impact of markets in the management of rural land,” p. 17 ↩︎

  11. Epstein, “Cities, Regions, and the Late Medieval Crisis,” p. 7; see also Epstein, “The late medieval crisis as an ‘integration crisis’,” pp. 31-44 ↩︎

  12. Langton, “Conclusion: The Historical Geography of European Peasantries, 1400-1800” pp. 385-394; Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society, pp. 170-184 ↩︎

  13. Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” pp. 303-305 ↩︎

  14. Epstein, “Cities, Regions, and the Late Medieval Crisis,” p. 3 ↩︎

  15. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society, pp. 140-141, 190; this directly contradicts Ellen Wood’s defense of Brenner when she claims that only land productivity was similar (Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, p. 57) ↩︎

  16. French and Hoyle, The Character of English Rural Society, ch. 1; Richard Smith, “The English Peasantry, 1250-1650” ↩︎

  17. Whittle, “Leasehold Tenure in England c. 1300-c. 1600,” p. 151 ↩︎

  18. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, ch. 3 ↩︎

  19. Whittle, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism, p. 9 ↩︎

  20. Glennie, “Town and country in England, 1570-1750,” pp. 135-139; Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, chs. 3-4; Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth, ch. 4 ↩︎

  21. Bateman, Markets and Growth in Early Modern Europe, ch. 2; de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, pp. 172-192 ↩︎

  22. Hart, “Town and country in the Dutch Republic, 1550-1800,” pp. 82-85; Glennie, “Town and country in England, 1570-1750,” pp. 133-135; de Vries, “The transition to capitalism in a land without feudalism,” pp. 80-82 ↩︎

  23. Wickham, “What Has Marxism Done for Medieval History, and What Can It Still Do?,” p. 33 ↩︎