Jim D: I've summarized my position in the post that you are responding to. I don't have time to elaborate it. If you weant to go further, I'd ask you to read my Brenner critique --and, by the way, re-read Brenner's three articles, because he doesn't say what you say he says. About: landlords. technloogical revolution. Non-asgricultural players in the transition.Etc. Also you might re-read Dobb. He knew very well that the transition occurred after the freeing of the serfs. In 1600 the nature of England as a society was feudal. (Dobb's reponse, maybe the seocnd response, to Sweezy in the Transition volklme.) You'r perfectly free to be a "lumper" and deny that the Bourgeois Revolutions were the basic turning point in the replacement of feeudal society in NW Eureope by capitalist society. I don't agree. Karl didn't, either. Basic issues re Brenner. On rhe rise of capitalist agriculture in England, he romanticizes the Yeoman tenant farmer, neglects landlords' improvements, ignores handicrafts, some of the wool production, etc., and virtually dismisses parallel Dutch and Flemish (in about 2 pages in The Brenner Denbate; I think he calls Flanders "the exception that proves the rule"). He virtually ignores southern Europe, where the same rural processes were going on, probasbly a bit earlier. He says NOTHING about the rest of the world. He sees the rise of the yeoman tenant farmer as inaugurating, quickly, a technological revolution which in fact did not occur for another 300 years or so. He is a Malthusian. Much more but I forget. "I feel no obligation to go back and re-read Brenner's articles in order to defend him. Nor am I interested enough in reading criticisms of Brenner because that requires the diversion lots of time from research, personal life, and/or sleep to deal with the details of those criticisms. " Suit yourself. But don't expect a scholarly exchange on Brenner. "If I remember correctly, Brenner was talking about a generally one-sided class struggle by the land-owners in alliance with their tenants against the direct producers (who were not serfs)." Sorry: you don't remember correctly. Landowners were not players in the process for Brenner. "BTW, I think that the issues of the pen-l debate do NOT concern the "Bourgeois Revolution" (in England, the Civil War roughly 1640-1660, and the "Glorious" Revolution, 1688). These had the effect (despite the heavy religious content of these conflicts) of the _cementing_ of bourgeois _political_ rule rather than changing the nature of _economic_ rule in the countryside and later in the cities (some of which sprang up in the countryside, where the guilds could be evaded)." WOW! economism! "I NEVER denied that other areas of the world could have been "developing," so that issue is irrelevant here." "Of course the issue is what where they transitioning to? were they introducing proletarian wage-labor on a large scale?" The answer is yes until we get to the kicker, "large-scale". Brenner's story doesn't tell us how small-sclale capitalist agriculture turned into a large-scale, national-scale, capitalist economy -- and polity. Scale outside of Europe is relative. Some fairly large regions of China, and some city-states elsewhere, were introducung proletarian wage-labor and class relations as early as England was. I'll give you references if you're interested. "I never denied the existence of "agricultural estates" in other places besides England,... I don't know about the agricultural estates in Cyprus and Malabar (or even Flanders), though. The word "estate" covers a multitude of sins, including slave plantations and especially feudal estates. What was the nature of these "estates"? What kind of social relations of production prevailed? " What I meant was that every phenomenon of sprouting capitalism that you find in English agriculture you can also find in many other places. "One of Brenner's points is that if the option of forcing labor to do the work is an option, the "estate"-owners are much more likely to use that force rather than to introduce new ways of plowing, etc." Brenner is shown to be wrong in arguing that the feudal lords did no improving. He makes that argument, along with the argument that later landlords were not improving (only their larger tenants were) , to set the stage for his grand assertion: large tenant farmers became the first capitalists and imediately instituted a technologivcal revolution in stark contrast to the earlier as well as contemporasneous landlords (and to the peasants of France-- here again he's wrong about technology). "But you still have to face the issue (brought up many times on pen-l, by several people) of why the benefits of colonialism to the colonizers helped England become capitalist but not previous conquering powers like the ancient Persian or Roman empires." We are talking about societies already moving out of the tributary or feudal system and towards -- something like -- capitalism, not ancient Rome. " Colonialism hardly seems sufficient to explaining the rise of capitalism (unless you use some other definition of capitalism than I am using)." I don't say it was. "... colonialism (looting, land-grabbing, the subjugation of foreign peoples, gold-grabbing, etc.) has been so common in human history" There's more to colonialism than this. Colonialism is mostly production, much of it capitalist production. Cheers Jim B
