"The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism"by Robert Brenner
from The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Preindustrial Europe
"In what follows, I will take up each of the foregoing objections in
the course of presenting a more fully developed interpretation of
the problems of European feudal evolution and of the transition to
capitalism. In Section I, I will attempt, once again, to lay bare what
I believe to be the faulty foundations upon which the demographic
interpretation has been constructed. In Section II, I will try to
sketch a general approach to long-term feudal socio-economic evolution,
and then to demonstrate that this approach can better grasp
the actual course of medieval economic development, income distribution
and feudal crisis in the different European regions than
can either the demographic interpretation or Bois's "falling rate of
feudal levy" approach. Finally, in Section III, I will, in direct
response to the criticisms that have been raised, lay out what I take
to be the origins of the different property systems which emerged in different regions of Europe during the early modern period, and
explain why these property systems were in fact central in determining
the subsequent paths of economic development."
from Introduction
