At 06:30 PM 12/11/2006, you wrote:
please explain.
Brenner dates the origins of capitalism to the late 14th century. It was a function of changes in the countryside driven by historically contingent factors (plague, etc.) that resulted in the creation of profit-driven farming based on leases. In this agrarian universe, there were zero workers--zero. Meanwhile a little more than a century later the largest concentration of laborers anywhere in the world was in Potosi, Bolivia. Wood does not believe that there was capitalist production there, however. Brenner never writes about Latin American so I don't know exactly what he thinks.
