Ghosh, Transicion en Inglaterra y Alemania (JAC, 2015)

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Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. •• No. ••, •• 2015, pp. ••–••.
Rural Economies and Transitions to Capitalism:

Germany and England Compared (c.1200–c.1800)
SHAMI GHOSH
Based on a synthesis of the empirical scholarship on England and Germany, this paper
demonstrates that in both regions, rural socio-economic developments from c.1200 to
c.1800 are similar: this period witnesses the rise to numerical predominance and growing
economic significance of the ‘sub-peasant classes’, which had a growing impact on the
market as a result of their increasing market dependence, and from which – towards the
end of the period – a rural proletariat emerged. Against the influential theory of Robert
Brenner, it is argued that the period c.1200–c.1400 cannot really be categorized as
‘feudal’ according to Brenner’s definition; and ‘agrarian capitalism’ does not adequately
describe the socio-economic system that obtained by the end of the sixteenth century. A
genuine transition to capitalism is only evident from after c.1750, and can be found in
Germany as well as in England; it is predicated both on ideological shifts and on the
evolution of the rural proletariat, which is only found in large numbers by or after
c.1800.
Keywords: transition from feudalism to capitalism, agrarian history, sub-peasant
classes, economic development, England, Germany, Brenner debate, industrious
revolution
INTRODUCTION
In two works published in 1976 and 1982, Robert Brenner proposed an explanatory frame-
work for the evolution in England, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of what he
defined as ‘agrarian capitalism’ (Brenner 1985a [1976], 1985b [1982]). He then argued that a
transformation of relationships between landlords and cultivators led to the creation of a
largely free and competitive market in land and labour, while simultaneously dispossessing
most of the peasants. Thus from the old class divisions of owners of land on the one hand,
Shami Ghosh, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 59 Queen’s Park Crescent East, Toronto, Ontario, M5S
2C4, Canada. e-mail: shami.ghosh@utoronto.ca
I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Government of Canada), the
University of Leicester, and Magdalen College, Oxford, for supporting the postdoctoral fellowships that enabled
me to produce the present paper. An earlier version was presented to the Medieval Social and Economic History
Seminar at the University of Oxford in 2012, and I thank Ian Forrest for inviting me to speak there, and the
participants for their comments. Drafts were read by Lawrin Armstrong, Laurence Brockliss, Chris Dyer, Antoni
Furió, Tim Newfield, John Nightingale, Tom Scott and Chris Wickham, to all of whom I am deeply indebted. I
am especially grateful for Chris Dyer’s manifold support, criticisms and encouragement during and after my time
in Leicester, and Tom Scott and Chris Wickham’s detailed and incisive comments on the first version of this
paper; and to all three for providing me with unpublished material and/or offprints. I also thank Jonathan
Healey, Nicolas Schroeder and Jude Welburn for discussion, and the three anonymous reviewers for this Journal,
as well as the Journal’s editors, for their comments and criticisms. My greatest debt is to Lawrin Armstrong,
without whose invaluable encouragement, advice, repeated rereading and support over the past several years this
paper would never have been completed. The research for the present article was carried out in 2008 and
between October 2009 and April 2013; while I have incorporated some of the more recent scholarship, I have
made no attempt to be comprehensive.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd doi: 10.1111/joac.12096

2 Shami Ghosh
and an unfree peasantry with customary rights of use to land on the other, a new tripartite
structure came into being, comprising landlords, free tenant farmers on relatively short-term
market-determined leases and wage labourers; this Brenner defines as ‘agrarian capitalism’.
Wage labourers were completely market-dependent – a rural proletariat – and tenant farmers
had to compete on the land market in order to retain their access to land. This last fact was
the principal motor of innovation leading to a rise in productivity, which, coupled with the
growth of a now-free labour market, was essential for the development of modern (industrial)
capitalism (Brenner 1977; Brenner 1985b, 323–7; Brenner 1985c). Thus the transformations of
agrarian class structures lay at the root of the development of capitalism in England. This is a
theory that Brenner has since repeated a number of times – admittedly with some modifica-
tions, but none of fundamental consequence. The sole really significant refinement of
Brenner’s earlier arguments is that he now concedes that the Low Countries also made an
early transition to capitalism, precisely because of the lack of feudal class structures (Brenner
2001).1
Brenner has already been criticized on empirical grounds by a number of scholars, but the
critique has almost exclusively concerned developments in England (Aston and Philpin 1985;
Glennie 1988; Hoyle 1990; Mate 1993; Whittle 2000; Hatcher and Bailey 2001, 67–120;
French and Hoyle 2007); exceptions that concern Germany are the brief interventions of
Heide Wunder and (less explicitly) Govind Sreenivasan (Wunder 1983, 1985; Sreenivasan
2004). In addition, Terence Byres has presented an alternative theoretical approach comparing
the rise of capitalism in America and Prussia (Byres 1996, 2009), and more recently also
argued, in this Journal, that Brenner paid too little attention to processes of pre-capitalist
differentiation (Byres 2006; based principally on Hilton 1990, 66–78). Byres’ work is,
however, as empirically outdated as that of Brenner.2 Brenner’s paper on the Low Countries
has also received cogent criticism in this Journal from Ellen Meiksins Wood, who argued that
we need to operate with a more precise definition of what capitalist market dependence is, as
opposed to other forms of market dependence (Wood 2002b).
Drawing on the insights of these scholars, as well as the late Larry Epstein’s work (Epstein
2007), this paper argues both that what Brenner defined as the feudal mode of production
provides an insufficient theoretical framework for the understanding of socio-economic struc-
tures even in much of England from c.1200 to c.1400,3 and also that ‘agrarian capitalism’ is a
misleading way of defining the following period. Unlike earlier critiques of Brenner, but like
1
For the sake of fairness, most of my discussion of Brenner will, where possible, cite his most recent statements
of his thesis (Brenner 2001, 2007).
2
For reasons of space, I cannot here provide more thorough engagement with and rebuttal of these and other
theories of transition; see, however, in addition to the studies just cited, the works of Epstein, Hilton and Wood
(Hilton, 1975, 1978, 1985, 1990; Epstein 2000, 2007; Wood 2002a). Spencer Dimmock’s recent spirited defence
of Brenner (Dimmock 2014) appeared too late to be taken into consideration in the present paper and a detailed
discussion and rebuttal is not possible here; Dimmock does not address the comparative issues raised below, nor
the question of the significance of the sub-peasantry.
3
For Brenner, the principal characteristics of the feudal economy were the fact that peasants possessed enough
land for subsistence, and did not produce significantly for the market; thus extra-economic coercion was required
to extract surplus from them; because of the lack of a free market in land, there was a close tie between peasant
families and their lands; because of a lack of economic incentives, there was little possibility of increasing
productivity, and the only form of growth was extensive. Brenner believes that ‘because peasants had only limited
ability to make market purchases’, ‘the growth of lordly demand constituted the main driving force for urban
industrial and commercial expansion’ (Brenner 2007, 74–7). No proletariat could emerge under feudal social-
property relations because producers were ‘shielded from competition by their direct, non-market access to all
the inputs they need to reproduce their families’ (Brenner 2007, 87). Furthermore, ‘economic differentiation was
conditioned upon a process of competition in production by already market-dependent leasehold farmers’, and thus
economic differentiation, when it occurred, was the result, not cause, of capitalism (Brenner 2001, 196).
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Rural Economies and Transitions to Capitalism 3
Brenner’s original theory, the present study adopts a comparative perspective, juxtaposing
Germany with England. Brenner himself compared Germany and France with England, but
his Germany comprised only the regions east of the Elbe, where he saw a continuation and
strengthening of feudal social-property relations. This view even of ‘east-Elbian’ Germany
needs to be revised, not least because of vast regional differences depending on which part of
east-central and Eastern Europe one examines (Melton 1988; Hagen 1998; Cerman 2011).4
Moreover, southern Germany is a more appropriate comparandum in many respects, as this
region was, in terms of population density and urbanization at least – as well as in other
respects, as I shall argue below – very similar to England in its developments during the
medieval and early modern centuries.5
The next three sections of this paper present, on the basis of a synthesis of empirical
scholarship, a narrative of economic change, demonstrating why the Brenner thesis is no
longer empirically defensible. The first part of this paper shows that both England and
Germany already had, in the period from c.1200 to c.1400, systems that incorporated both
feudal restrictions of various kinds as well as a high incidence of wage labour and commer-
cialization. The proportion of the rural population without direct access to land sufficient for
its subsistence – the ‘sub-peasant classes’6 – was already significant, and thus a very high
percentage of the rural population was already market-dependent, and there was a great deal
of socio-economic differentiation. Despite growing differences in terms of institutional
arrangements and forms of land tenure, with regard to commercialization and market depen-
dence, the period examined in the next section – c.1350 to c.1650 – also evidences many
similarities between Germany and England, particularly with regard to increasing social strati-
fication and market dependence; however, in neither case can we really speak of a transition
to capitalism, not least because for most people, market dependence was not complete, and
many non-market factors still influenced people’s economic lives and behaviour. It is only
during the eighteenth century, discussed in the fourth section of this paper, that we see the
beginnings of a consumer society and the birth of a true proletariat – developments that,
coupled with the rise of a genuinely capitalist (that is, profit- and growth-oriented) economic
ideology, signal the beginnings of capitalism; these developments are found in both Germany
and England. In the concluding section of this paper, I present an outline of a theory that
explains the preceding narrative.
COMMERCIALIZATION IN A ‘FEUDAL’ SOCIETY, c.1200–c.1400

Both England and Germany experienced, in the five centuries before c.1300, massive growth
in population, an expansion of the cultivated area, improvement in agricultural productivity,
4
I use ‘east-Elbian Germany’ following the convention, but it should be clear that the term is actually
unhelpful in terms of demarcating any coherent region. In the following, my analysis is confined to the more
western ‘east-Elbian’ regions, mainly Bohemia, Brandenburg and Silesia, although occasionally I also rely on
studies of Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Schleswig-Holstein and Livonia.
5
By ‘southern Germany’, I mean primarily the regions lying within modern Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg,
as well as the adjacent parts of northern Switzerland and northern Austria; henceforth, when I use the term
‘Germany’ without qualification, I refer only to these regions and ‘east-Elbian’ Germany (see previous note);
south and east will always be clearly demarcated with regard to detail. Note also that my comments on England
(like Brenner’s) refer essentially to the southern and Midland regions, and apply less to the western and northern
counties.
6
I coin this term, which I use interchangeably with ‘sub-peasantry’, on the basis of ‘die unterbäuerlichen
Schichten’, commonly used in German scholarship to indicate those below the status of peasants with full
holdings. This was by no means a homogenous class; but a great deal of further work is necessary to establish the
significances of differentiation among the sub-peasant classes.

4 Shami Ghosh
increasing urbanization, a rise in the numbers of markets and fairs, growing regional special-
ization, and a greater division of labour between town and country, with the implication also
of higher levels of town–country exchange and interdependence (Rösener 1985, 33–7, 142–3,
146–7; Henning 1991, 165–389; Rösener 1991, 335–40, 373–86; Górecki 1992, 45–62, 87–8,
93–101, 211, 286; Henning 1994, 138–258; Kowaleski 1995, 9–77; Britnell 1996, 5–52,
79–101, 113–27; Masschaele 1997; Störmer 1999; Dyer 2002, 187–227; Britnell 2004, 138–
217).7 Social stratification also increased: the landless and land-poor became a very significant
proportion of the rural population, and by the middle of the fourteenth century there had
emerged a substantial sub-peasantry, persons without access to enough land to cater to their
subsistence needs (these persons could comprise 20–60 per cent of the rural population,
depending on the region). Such persons had to resort to at least some amount of wage
labour, some form of rural industry, the production of non-subsistence crops or livestock for
the market, or some combination of these three options. In regions near towns especially,
there was a rise in the production of cash crops, and in many parts of southern Germany in
particular, there was a significant growth in rural industry by the fourteenth century (Amman
1953; Grees 1975, 131–3; Rösener 1985, 66, 198–214, 223–7; Hoffmann 1989, 255–8;
Henning 1991, 235–53; Rösener 1991, 198–207, 352–3, 407, 502–42; Górecki 1992, 82–3;
Henning 1994, 173–6, 227–37, 239–46; Britnell 1996, 79–81; Fox 1996; Dyer 2002, 166–7,
169–71; Britnell 2004, 172–9; Campbell 2005, 48–9, 53–8, 62–3; Cerman 2005).
During the thirteenth century, the manorial system experienced its apogee in England: at
this point, tenants were still burdened, at least in theory, by significant labour dues, as well as
numerous restrictions on their activities and a variety of arbitrary exactions (Britnell 1996,
140–7; Dyer 2002, 106–45; Britnell 2004, 224–32). In much of Germany, in contrast, the
process of dissolution of the manorial system was already quite advanced by c.1300, and by
1400, direct management of demesnes by means of obligatory labour services was hardly to
be found among the larger lordships in southern Germany (Dollinger 1982, 121–37; Rösener
1985, 37–8, 222–6; Rösener 1991, esp. 373–566; Henning 1994, 167–70; Kuchenbuch 1997;
Ghosh 2014, 197–9, 201, 202–3). Lands still held in demesne were generally cultivated by
wage labourers (Dollinger 1982, 155–8; Rösener 1983; Schaab 1983; Rösener 1991, 385–6,
389, 435, 446, 449, 473, 484, 492–3). Most large demesnes had been leased out over the past
centuries, generally as parcels rather than whole; the resulting holdings comprised, in southern
Germany, normally up to 40 acres of arable (though on occasion they could reach twice that
size); over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, even these holdings were
frequently subdivided into smaller plots (Dollinger 1982, 127–30; Rösener 1991, 469–71,
521–30; Henning 1994, 174). In general, lands were leased for a fixed share of the crop
determined by custom, rather than a cash rent, though cash payments were by no means
uncommon. Labour services that had been owed to the demesne were commuted for cus-
tomary rents (sometimes in cash), with only a few days of regular service remaining in the
year, of little economic value; even perquisites arising out of personal bondage were frequently
7
Here and in the following, I present a synthesis based on the very wide range of specialized scholarship cited,
much of which provides detailed studies of individual regions or micro-regions, or itself synthesizes such studies.
Since the scholarship is very diverse (as are the methods used in it), and since, particularly with regard to
Germany, the source material so far examined is patchy, it is normally not possible to provide harmonized
national or regional figures on the basis of these studies (as, indeed, the syntheses I refer to rarely do, citing
instead the results of a range of local studies). For reasons of space, I do not present in detail the figures from
each study for each region or micro-region concerned. In the present state of research for the German regions
in particular, my findings are based on the results of multiple regional studies that are as yet too diverse to be
harmonized into aggregate data; while the statements made here are valid as preliminary conclusions on the basis
of the extant scholarship, much more research is needed before proper statistical comparisons can be carried out.

commuted for cash payments (Dollinger 1982, 128–9, 131–3, 140–6; Rösener 1991; Demade
2004a; Ghosh 2014, 197–8, 201–2). Thus by c.1350, a greatly increased part of the surplus was
paid in coin, and continued access to the means of subsistence required market exchange
(Dollinger 1982, 128–9, 140–6, 152, 154, 172–3; Rösener 1985, 220, 222–7; Rösener 1991,
495–502; Górecki 1992, 51–3, 243–58; Ghosh 2014).
The east-Elbian regions that came under German law differ in this respect, as a good deal
of land still remained in demesne c.1300, and demesnes could reach sizes of 250 acres
(comparable to what obtained in England) (Hoffmann 1989, 94–6; Campbell 2000, 67–71).
The fourteenth century, however, witnessed a retreat from direct management even here, so
that in Silesia by c.1400, only about a fifth of the land was held in demesne, and was mainly
worked by hired labour; in Brandenburg and Bohemia as well, landlords seem often to have
abandoned direct management by the end of the fourteenth, or at the latest during the
fifteenth century (Hagen 1985, 89; Hoffmann 1989, 115–22; Čechura 1994, 48–52, 58).
Furthermore, already from the thirteenth century, on many estates, rents and dues were
increasingly paid in cash, and there was frequently little in the way of forced labour services
(Hagen 1985, 83–9; Hoffmann 1989, 80–1, 126–32, 256–7; Górecki 1992, 243–58; Čechura
1994, 48, 52; Enders 2000, 120; Enders 2008b, 147–53). Even dependent holdings in the east
could be very large, often reaching sizes of between 50 and 150 acres of arable in Wrocław
and Brandenburg in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Hagen 1985, 83–4; Hoffmann
1989, 238, 245–50; Cerman 2005, 337–8). This suggests a good deal of social stratification and
the availability of wage labourers, since the latter would have been needed to cultivate such
large holdings; thus even some fullholding peasants (those with sufficient land for their
subsistence after all dues were paid) would have been employers of wage labourers. There
would therefore already have been some divergence of interests between various classes within
the village community, as was also the case by c.1300 in both southern Germany and
England.
By this point, about half the rural population in many parts of England were either
smallholders (those with a plot of land that would not be sufficient for their subsistence) or
the absolutely landless, and were thus dependent on wage labour or some form of
by-employment to survive (Hilton 1990, 72; Dyer 2002, 163; Britnell 2004, 172–3; Campbell
2005, 48–9). This is probably a higher percentage than in southern Germany; but even there,
by c.1350 at the latest, population growth, although coinciding with extensive growth, never-
theless created many regions where most holdings were too small to support a family, leading
to the rise of the sub-peasant classes already discussed above. While some east-Elbian regions
are likely to have been less stratified because of relatively lower levels of population density, in
much of Bohemia, Silesia and Brandenburg, the sub-peasantry (often dependent on cash-
cropping, particularly in regions close to towns) comprised a significant proportion of the
rural population by the fourteenth century (Hagen 1985, 84; Hoffmann 1989, 245–50; Enders
2000, 45; Cerman 2005; Enders 2008b, 61).
While the growth of a population lacking direct access to means of subsistence need not
necessarily mean an increase in the importance of wage labour, the existence of large
numbers of land-poor and landless does imply a rise in market dependence of some sort:
market gardening, producing cash crops or livestock, or artisanal production. Increasing pro-
duction for the market was only possible because of a rise in demand, channelled through
urban and rural markets and fairs – and growing urbanization meant both expanding urban
markets and more and better-articulated networks of interregional trade (Rösener 1985, 129,
155; Henning 1991, 190–1, 211–17; Britnell 1996, 79–101, 125; Masschaele 1997; Irsigler
2000; Britnell 2004, 149–52). It was not just urban markets and luxury demand, however, that

6 Shami Ghosh
soaked up urban and rural commodity and craft production: this period saw a growth in the
numbers of rural markets, where consumers were the wealthier peasants, but also those who
lacked both wealth and the means of producing their necessities themselves (Rösener 1985,
98–103; Dyer 1994a; Henning 1994, 253–4; Dyer 1995; Britnell 1996, 79–81, 114–15; Dyer
1998, 151–60, 169–77; Britnell 2000, 2–6; Dyer 2011). Thus it is evident that the rise of a
non-self-subsistent population is intimately connected with an expansion of commercializa-
tion and market demand. The growth of towns and the increasing density of the urban
network also generated demand for various cash crops, as well as non-agricultural rural
(by-)employment, which, if not creating either population growth or stratification, certainly
enabled a larger number of people to survive in rural areas even without sufficient land from
which they could subsist.
The market involvement of peasants with full holdings was not motivated solely by pres-
sure from above (rents or taxes), but also by the fact that they were ‘encouraged by the
prospect of purchasing goods’; the growth of the infrastructure of exchange was possible
only because of the existence of an extensive market ‘which included peasant consumers’
(Dyer 2005, 25). Involvement in the market grew at least in part out of the desires of
wealthier villagers to emulate the classes above them and distinguish themselves from those
below. The upper reaches of rural society can be seen extending credit to their poorer
fellows, building larger houses and consuming better products, and even dressing in a way
often perceived to be above their station (Rösener 1985, 87–8, 103–4, 208, 213; Dyer 1998,
151–87; Dyer 2002, 171–4, 356–7; Dyer 2005, 135–9). There is also evidence of some
accumulation of land among fullholding peasants – but it is likely that this would normally
have been for a minimal period: holdings were acquired not as a form of primitive accu-
mulation of capital, but rather in order to endow the next generation, when the accumu-
lated lands would be split up again (Rösener 1985, 213; Dyer 1998, 122; Dyer 2002, 176–7;
Ghosh 2014, 196–7, 203). It was therefore – pace Brenner – neither just economic nor just
extra-economic coercion that changed the relationship of producers to the market (and to
each other), but also the changing patterns of non-subsistence consumption among the
producers. Arguably, however, it was sheer need that made the smallholders and landless
dependent on the market, and this need resulted in large part from increasing differentiation
among the non-landowning classes.
By the middle of the fourteenth century, then, in both England and Germany, there
obtained a system that certainly often constrained the rights and movements of the rural
non-landowning classes, that could be very exploitative of them, and within which extra-
economic coercion operated on those who cultivated the land. This system could be said to
conform to a model of the feudal mode of production in that (some) surpluses were
extracted by extra-economic means and the locus of the class struggle – the struggle over
who gets to enjoy the fruits of labour that is surplus to what is needed for the producers’
subsistence – was the extraction of rents and services, rather than the market. Divided rights
to property and personal servitude of some sort generally remained in place. There may
appear to be some differences between Germany and England in terms of methods of
surplus appropriation: in England, what obtained was a system in which, in theory, surplus
labour was extracted directly, and in Germany, one in which a surplus product was taken –
that is, surplus was extracted in the form of rents. However, even in England, labour services
had largely been commuted for rents in kind or cash, and were largely performed by hired
labourers (Dyer 2002, 140–4; Campbell 2005, 36–40; Schofield 2009). Moreover, it has been
suggested that where it was still surplus labour that was extracted in England, those
performing the labour were not just the peasants directly subject to the landlords’

extra-economic coercion: these peasants generally either paid cash rents instead of doing the
labour, or hired others to perform (some of) the labour services they owed (Fox 1996,
561–4; Campbell 2005, 38, 46, 55) and thus, in either case, much of the labour would
actually have been performed by someone else. Furthermore, in both regions, by c.1400
non-rent elements – taxes and jurisdictional perquisites often unconnected with land tenure
– probably comprised a larger share of the surplus extracted than had been the case in
c.1200; they were also, along with tithes, increasingly extracted in coin, and thus comprised
a growing portion of the cash surplus extracted (Dollinger 1982, 180–2, 184–8; Rösener
1983, 103–4, 107, 118–20, 126–7, 131; Rösener 1985, 225; Rösener 1991, 549–50, 564;
Britnell 1996, 105, 111; Britnell 2004, 258, 291). This meant that it was not just the sub-
peasant classes who were increasingly dependent on the market: with the rising importance
of dues to be paid in coin, even full peasants needed to realize a cash income in order to
retain access to their means of subsistence, which in turn led to a further layer of market
involvement – and arguably dependence.
In both Germany and England, therefore, despite some differences in the mode of pro-
duction, the mode of consumption was being transformed: more people – non-elite people –
needed to turn to the market for increasing proportions of their consumption needs, and
many of these people were (relatively) unaffected by direct extra-economic coercion for the
extraction of surplus value, in that since they had little or no land, they were less or not at
all dependent on landlords’ grant of access to land for their subsistence and social repro-
duction; landlords’ coercion thus had less immediate effect on their production.8 Thus by
c.1350 we have, in England and Germany alike, a system that is different from the relatively
non-monetized, non-commercial rural economies that had been predominant in both
regions at least until c.1000; and the economic logic of the system that obtained was
increasingly influenced by the growth of a market (of which, of course, the urban compo-
nent was also of crucial significance) for subsistence commodities and cheap non-subsistence
goods, rather than being driven solely or primarily by elite consumption of high-status
goods. Already by the fourteenth century, many of the prerequisites for capitalistic growth
(rising agricultural productivity, a growing non-agricultural population, social stratification,
market dependence, non-elite non-subsistence consumption and the fragmentation of inter-
ests of the non-landowning class) can be found – within the constraints of feudal social-property
relations.
DIVERGING FORMS OF PRE-CAPITALIST MARKET DEPENDENCE,

c.1350–c.1650
During the course of the fourteenth century, many parts of England and Germany suffered
population losses of a third or more. Demographic collapse and economic decline did not
necessarily coincide, however, and it is now apparent that not all regions were equally
8
While it is certainly true that the market institutions on which these people were dependent were by no
means ‘free’, and functioned within various customary and thus arguably ‘feudal’ restraints, the pertinent point
here is that although there might have been such constraints on their economic behaviour, there was little need
for extra-economic coercion in order to extract the surplus value or even the production of the sub-peasant classes:
economic coercion – the inability to subsist without producing for the market, rather than for a feudal lord –
was sufficient. While production relations could also have the character of extra-economic coercion – notably
the case in Italy, where urban, feudal oligarchies exercised tight control over production – there is less evidence
for such coercion in non-agrarian production relations in southern Germany and England; the situation was
different in some eastern regions, discussed briefly below following note 12.

8 Shami Ghosh
affected. Those areas that suffered did not necessarily do so at the same time or for the same
reasons; many German regions escaped the Black Death of 1347–50, and either suffered no
demographic collapse or experienced it only in the fifteenth century because of war. Thus the
notion of a general, and in particular socio-economic, late-medieval ‘crisis’ caused at least in
part by plague is unjustified, although high mortality figures still seem plausible for England
(Rösener 1985, 255–76; Hoffmann 1989, 135, 273–318; Henning 1991, 391–423; Čechura
1994, 130–4; Henning 1994, 297–311; Schuster 1999; Enders 2000, 158–74; Maur 2001,
11–58; Dyer 2002, 228–97; Vasold 2003; Britnell 2004, 491–501; Kießling 2005; Enders
2008b, 114–28; Mengel 2011).
In both Germany and England, there is little evidence for an absolute decline in levels of
commercialization, regional specialization and urbanization relative to the population as a
whole, even though, unlike in England, feudal constraints of various kinds remained in place
in Germany; the urban percentage of the German population in fact increased between 1350
and 1450 from ∼10 to ∼16 per cent (Rösener 1983, 137–8; Rösener 1985, 272–3; Henning
1991, 403–12; Henning 1994, 293–6, 322–4; Britnell 1996, 161–78; Kießling 1996, 2011;
Britnell 2000, 9–21; Whittle 2000, 178–224; Scott 2001, 72–152; Dyer 2002, 293–7, 303–4,
346–62; Wrightson 2002, 34–6, 87–108, 128–9, 139, 147–9, 159–76, 186–90, 194–201;
Britnell 2004, 347–81; Dyer 2005, 132, 176–90). This suggests that relative to population,
there was in both places no contraction, and probably an increase in levels of market
exchange and possibly dependence, continuing the trend that had already begun by the
thirteenth century. Arable cultivation was cut back in favour of a growth in livestock-raising –
and both sectors were as market-oriented as before, if not more so; there was also an increase
in the production of cash crops such as flax (Rösener 1983, 149, 155–6; Rösener 1985,
259–6; Campbell and Overton 1993, 76–86; Henning 1994, 311–17; Kowaleski 1995, 299–
300; Campbell 2000, 430–6; Enders 2000, 387–8; Hille 2000, 29, 33–4; Scott 2001, 81–90;
Britnell 2004, 388–423; Kießling 2011, 17–18, 21–2). While population levels recovered
slowly in England, overall household consumption of manufactured products and animal
protein probably increased in both regions (Rösener 1985, 95, 103–6, 115–17; Blanchard
1996; Scott 1997, 207–10; Dyer 1998, 158–60, 174–7; Britnell 2000, 12–14, 16; Wrightson
2002, 140; Dyer 2005, 131–2; Muldrew 2011, 192–200). Rural industry, in particular non-
luxury cloth production, experienced significant growth, both for export and to meet rising
internal demand, both urban and rural (Henning 1991, 423–41, 637–51; Henning 1994,
319–21; Scott 1997, 104–12, 115–21; Dyer 1998, 175–7; Whittle 2000, 247–52; Scott 2001,
91–112; Dyer 2002, 323–7; Wrightson 2002, 40–1, 47, 104–7, 139–40, 166–70, 194–5, 198;
Kießling 2011).
In regions that had suffered severe population loss, abandoned lands were not simply
occupied by smallholders and the landless (though this did also happen). In many cases these
lands, along with commons, were acquired by already fullholding peasants, and as a result,
even in the fifteenth, and especially during the sixteenth century, as population levels rose
again, there is evidence that the poorer segments of rural society suffered because of a
growing divergence of interests between themselves and the fullholding peasants, which led to
increasing stratification and difficulty accessing land for the lower orders of rural society
(Sabean 1972, esp. 36–113; Grees 1975, esp. 10–51, 84–158; Rösener 1983, 151, 157–8;
Rösener 1985, 272–4; Overton 1996, 36–46; Whittle 2000, 178–224; Scott 2001, 48–55,
176–8; Sreenivasan 2001; Dyer 2002, 346–62; Scott 2002, esp. 274–87; Wrightson 2002,
98–104, 135–7; Demade 2004b, 131–2; Dyer 2005, 66–85; Koch 2007, 96–9; Healey 2011;
Scott 2012). Rather than a levelling out of society, therefore, the overall trend appears to have
been an increasing divergence between the land-poor and landless (who collectively remained

the majority) on the one hand, and those with full holdings or large farms on the other.9
There is thus a second aspect to increasing commercialization: it is not just that the upper
stratum of rural society spent more on non-subsistence goods, but also that the lower strata
spent more on subsistence goods and more such people were dependent on the market, and
possibly more so than had earlier been the case, since by c.1600, their holdings were often
smaller, and many had lost some of the cushion of access to common lands.
There was indeed some contraction in the numbers of markets and fairs in England in the
fifteenth century, and many towns saw their economies and populations shrink. Nevertheless,
most of the older fairs and markets (rather than those established between c.1250 and c.1350)
remained in place, and there seems to have been no general contraction of local and interre-
gional exchange (Britnell 1996, 155–64; Britnell 2000, 9–21). Unlike in England, in much of
southern Germany, new markets continued to be established in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries; by c.1550 at the latest, and probably by c.1500 or earlier, there was at least one
market (formal or informal) or small town within about a day’s journey of almost every
village or hamlet (a density comparable to that in England), and there is no sign of any
abatement of local trade through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century (Scott and
Scribner 1996; Scott 1997, 122–72; Sczesny 2002, 38; Irsigler 2003; Kießling 2004; Katzinger
2006; Scott 2006; Koch 2007). Equally important is the fact that while some towns lost part
of the industrial base to their prosperity, this did not mean a shrinking of industrial produc-
tion altogether; rather, as in England, a greater percentage of manufactured goods was pro-
duced in the countryside, leading to more interdependent town–country relationships, and
arguably tying rural societies even more tightly within already established networks of
exchange (Kießling 1989, 1996, 2004; Scott 1997, 73–172; Whittle 2000, 247–52; Scott 2001,
113–15, 132–52; Dyer 2002, 323–7; Wrightson 2002, 104–7, 139–40, 166–70). The survival
and growth of industry in the countryside also implies the survival and growth of a rural
non-agricultural population (Grees 1975, 130–4). In many rural areas, from as early as the
fourteenth century, increasingly large sections of the population were dependent on spinning
and weaving, and also on producing flax (Amman 1953), and by the middle of the sixteenth
century, in some parts of southern Germany, as much as 50 per cent of the cloth sold in
urban markets was woven by rural weavers (Kießling 2011, 17).
In Germany, the system of customary feudal dues remained in place, and in the wake of
demographic decline, there were some efforts on the part of landlords to increase the burdens
on their peasants and add more arbitrary labour services to natural and money rents. While
these efforts did have some success in the east-Elbian regions, this was generally the case only
from the second half of the sixteenth century, until which point the status, property rights and
living standards of peasants were normally still relatively good in comparison to regions
further west (Wunder 1983, 1985; Hagen 1985, 89–116; Melton 1988, 321–22, 326–7;
Hoffmann 1989, 353–69; Čechura 1994, 109–29; Enders 2000, 190–7, 318–45, 373–85, 392–
416; Scott 2001, 182–97; Enders 2008b, 147–56, 171–200; Cerman 2012, 22–38). In southern
Germany, by the late sixteenth century peasants tended to have factually secure and heritable
tenure, few or no regular labour services (corvée) were owed,10 and despite a greater constric-
tion of movement than was the case in England because of personal bondage, most rural
people may have been less economically oppressed by specifically feudal burdens than they had
9
These developments were common to regions in England and Germany that had suffered severe population
loss, and those German areas that had not, suggesting that demographic arguments are insufficient means of
understanding this period.
10
Arbitrary demands were certainly a bone of contention in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but by
c.1600 seem not to have been terribly onerous in most places.

10 Shami Ghosh
been in the fourteenth century (Sabean 1972, 19–35, 45–99; Rebel 1983, 21–42; Rösener
1983; Wunder 1983, 1985; Robisheaux 1989, 28–36, 186–90; Scott 2001, 153–82; Sreenivasan
2001; Blickle 2004, 40–89, 111–31; Sreenivasan 2004, 9–50; Scott 2005a; Warde 2006, 101,
105, 212).
Nevertheless, by c.1600 in almost all of Germany, formal dependence of one form or
another still remained in place for much of the rural population, and could entail restrictions
on conveyance and movement, as well as requiring some sort of payment of dues of homage
and arbitrarily levied labour services. Subject status thus remained a burden on peasant
resources. It tended to be linked with landholding and was therefore, by the end of the
sixteenth century, more a tenurial relationship between lord and peasant, rather than personal
bondage in a strict sense (though the latter also still existed, and often had little to do with
land tenure). It is therefore likely that the landless, although not immune from personal
bondage, were legally less constrained than the landed; and smallholdings in some regions
seem to have been held in more favourable forms of tenure than full holdings (Grees 1975,
113–17). Peasants could also still not enjoy full title to land, and rents continued to be
determined, at least in part, by custom rather than the market (Holenstein 1996, 26–44,
81–94; Scott 2001, 168–94; Scott 2002; Blickle 2004). Land had not, however, been recon-
verted to demesne, and regular labour services in southern Germany remained minimal or
non-existent; peasant labour thus remained primarily in peasant use.
The period between 1200 and 1600 also saw an increase in the various perquisites of
lordship, coupled with the growth of fiscal territorial lordships and states; the burdens these
imposed on the rural population often had little connection to landholding, as lords’ incomes
from jurisdictional rights of various sorts, as well as tithes, increased significantly, as did the
exactions of the states (Schulze 1995; Heimpel 1966, 30–6; Rösener 1983, 103–4, 107,
118–20, 126–7, 131, 146–7; Isenmann 1999; Blickle 2004, 69–71, 126–8; Sreenivasan 2004,
139–41; Scott 2010, 59–67; Bahlcke 2012; North 2012, 145–54). These payments almost
always had to be in coin, and thus even if peasant rents remained mainly in grain and did not
rise much, the need to raise cash for various non-rent payments almost certainly grew.
In contrast to Germany, in England, the period after c.1350 saw the large-scale abandon-
ment of direct management of demesne land that had already largely been completed in
Germany. Simultaneously, ‘serfdom, as an aspect of customary tenure, largely disappeared
between 1380 and 1420’ (Whittle 2004, 240). Even if servile status was no longer common,
however, customary tenure itself survived through the sixteenth century and beyond, and
indeed most land continued to be held in forms of tenure, the conditions of which, whether
customary or leasehold, were not in reality determined primarily by the market (Britnell
1996, 217–23; Overton 1996, 31–5, 147–61; Whittle 2000, 24–84; Dyer 2002, 330–49;
Wrightson 2002, 71–5, 132–5; Britnell 2004, 429–45; Whittle 2004; Dyer 2005, 178–9;
194–210; French and Hoyle 2007; Whittle 2008). In terms of the forms of tenure, therefore,
England and southern Germany were not all that different, as south German customary
tenure was also normally quite secure and, as we have seen, did not necessarily pose a
particularly debilitating economic burden.
In southern Germany, demesnes had been dissolved in a period of relatively high popula-
tion levels, and lands had therefore been let in parcels; in England, demesnes were leased out
at a time of low population density, and tended to be leased in larger holdings. Thus, while in
Germany the abandoning of direct management of demesne lands had seen the rise of a class
of tenants with substantial holdings, these were in the range of 20–40 acres, with larger
holdings relatively rare. This was enough for a family to subsist on, pay their dues and realize
a respectable marketable surplus, without requiring much non-family labour input for most of

the year. Tenants who benefited from the leasing of demesne lands in England often had
much larger holdings, reaching 100 acres or more. Nevertheless, even as late as the early
seventeenth century, very few holdings were over 100 acres and a substantial proportion of
full holdings remained significantly smaller (Overton 1996, 172–3; Whittle 2000, 190–5; Dyer
2002, 294, 353, 357–8; Wrightson 2002, 188; Dyer 2005, 79). In southern Germany too, there
was some accumulation of land among the fullholding peasants by the end of the sixteenth
century, and we do sometimes encounter larger holdings of 60 acres or more of arable; but
such properties seem to have been less common than in England.11
The growth of larger holdings necessitated more use of wage labour than had earlier been
the case, and in England, there arguably came into being an even greater distinction between
the landless and smallholders on the one hand, and the tenants of large farms on the other
(Whittle 2000, 178–224; Wrightson 2002, 137–41, 186–90, 194–8; Whittle 2004, 246). By the
middle of the seventeenth century, there had certainly been a significant increase in the
amount of land in England held in forms of tenure that were completely or largely unencum-
bered by customary constraints, with tenants of such holdings having few or no obligations
beyond the payment of rents, and few or no restrictions. However, in many regions (includ-
ing, for example, Norfolk, characterized by very high levels of social stratification and market
dependence), a large amount of land was still held in forms of customary tenure that were
also quite secure, and tenants could indeed hold land in both customary and leasehold tenure
(Glennie 1988; Hoyle 1990; Overton 1996, 30–5, 151–6; Whittle 2000, 64–82; French and
Hoyle 2007). In Germany, very little land was held in anything comparable to English
commercial leases; but a good proportion of leasehold land even in England (it does not
appear to be possible to determine quite how much) was not held in commercial leases, and
thus the rents were not determined primarily by the market (Whittle 2008).
These distinctions notwithstanding, in southern Germany as in England, there was a great
rise in market dependence at all levels of society, coupled with a rise in monetization and
credit dependence. The majority of rural people were landless and smallholders, and over the
course of the sixteenth century, the divergence between these classes and the fullholding
peasants only increased, as the numbers of the latter remained largely static, while the sub-
peasant classes grew in size. This meant that an increasingly large group of people was both
impoverished and unable to access their means of subsistence without turning either to wage
labour, industrial production, or producing cash crops – or a combination of all three; all were
forms of market dependence. The majority of the rural population did not, therefore, actually
live from grain production: animal husbandry, horticulture, seasonal wage labour of various
kinds, cultivating cash crops and spinning were the main sources of income for most people,
often permanently rather than as a stage in the life cycle (Grees 1975, esp. 10–51, 84–158;
Rebel 1983, 93–113; Robisheaux 1989, 77, 84, 156; Hille 2000; Scott 2001, 48–55, 176–8;
Sreenivasan 2004, 43, 153–4; Scott 2012). Fullholding peasants were also, however, increasingly
dependent on realizing a cash profit in order to maintain access to their holdings, in order
both to pay cash rents and taxes, and to pay off debts incurred to inherit their lands, since
they generally – as in many parts of England (Whittle 2000, 135, 143–4, 158; Wrightson
2002, 62–4; Dyer 2005, 180) – had to make substantial settlements with the yielding heirs and
often also the retiring peasants. Thus there emerged a system of credit dependency on the
11
There is no synthesis for holding size in Germany for this period; I base myself on studies of five districts in
southern Germany between 1524 and 1606, the findings of which appear to be corroborated by studies of
Upper Bavaria between c.1670 and 1721 (Heimpel 1966, 6; Rebel 1983, 58; Schlögl 1988, 123–5; Robisheaux
1989, 86–8; Schlögl 1992, 138–9; Beck 1993, 238–40; Hille 1997, 48; Sreenivasan 2004, 150; Warde 2006, 118).

12 Shami Ghosh
part of the wealthiest of the peasantry: they needed money to inherit, and they then needed
to realize a profit in order to be able to pay off their loans and retain access to their lands
(Rebel 1983, 87–91, 113–7; Robisheaux 1989, 186–90; Sreenivasan 2004, 155–203). This
created a dependence on the market: at Ottobeuren, for example, cash was raised from
increased textile production, as well as the sale of wood, livestock, dairy products and the
growing export of grain to profitable urban markets, including especially, from the end of the
sixteenth century, those in Switzerland (Eitel 1970, 512–15, 517–18; Sreenivasan 2004, 101,
266–71). So desperate were the various levels of rural society to raise cash on the market that
they frequently contravened staple rights and engaged in illegal trading in order to increase
their cash incomes (Sreenivasan 2004, 270–6). It was not, however, just pressure from above
that forced people into market relations: in Upper Austria, for example, tenants with large or
middling holdings also invested in inns, mills or carting, and made considerable sums of
money from these investments, far beyond what was necessary to pay off initial debts as well
as rents and taxes (Rebel 1983, 113–17).
Over the course of the sixteenth century, therefore, market exchange had become essential
for the social reproduction of all classes of rural society in southern Germany, and by the
early seventeenth century, most people were in some manner dependent on the market in
order to be able to survive. Since full employment in farm service was probably less promi-
nent than in England (because of smaller farm sizes), and therefore fewer people were
insulated from the market by being housed and fed, the German sub-peasantry were possibly
more dependent than their English counterparts on rural industry and cash crops; a market-
dependent mode of consumption was common. This market dependence built, at least in part,
on factors that were already present before c.1350, and had grown in significance since then:
high levels of social stratification that forced on many people a dependence on the market; and
the existence of exchange networks, which created and channelled demand and thus enabled a
dependence on the market. In these respects, at least, southern Germany seems to have had
much in common with England, despite the manifest differences in holding size and forms of
tenure.
There were many similarities between eastern and southern Germany at least up to the
end of the fifteenth century; however, from around 1550 peasant tenure in the east became
increasingly linked to greater unfreedom and more labour services, with the early seventeenth
century leading to more oppressive feudal burdens (Harnisch 1980, 55–80, 95–126; Hagen
1985, 107–16; Melton 1988; Hoffmann 1989, 353–74; Enders 2000, 308–45, 373–86, 392–
416; Maur 2001, 65, 70–3, 75, 77–81, 84–99, 193–8, 208–9; Scott 2001, 182–97; Hagen 2002,
32–68; Enders 2008a, 260–382; Enders 2008b, 171–6, 181–201). Nevertheless, there remained
a good deal of social differentiation and significant numbers of smallholders or landless even
in the east. While in the years between 1550 and 1630 the lords’ exploitation of the peasants
by means of forced labour services increased, landlords also employed growing numbers of
wage labourers,12 peasants remained (often quite extensively) involved in the market and a
thriving rural industry expanded; although this was also largely under landlords’ control, and
producers’ independent access to markets could be somewhat restricted, landlord-controlled
rural industry in regions such as Bohemia was dependent on a commercialized peasantry and
sub-peasantry as its market (Harnisch 1980, 27–55, 127–41, 157–89; Hagen 1985, 107–12;
Melton 1988, 322–3; Melton 1998, 304–5, 317–18; Enders 2000, 340–1, 389–92, 429–38,
442–3; Hagen 2002, 60–2; Enders 2008a, 243, 246–7; Enders 2008b, 176–9, 216–20; Cerman
12
Fullholding peasants also probably employed wage labourers, as their holdings could still be in the range of
80 acres or more (Hagen 2002, 54).

2012, 87–8, 91). While labour services were reintroduced, and efforts were made to extract
arbitrary fines, these were not always very successful, and increased labour services were often
coupled with a reduction in rents (Hagen 1985, 104–8; Enders 2000, 396–400; Cerman 2011,
248; Cerman 2012, 70–3). Even in the early seventeenth century, while peasants were cer-
tainly oppressed and forced to perform labour services, their lands generally were not expro-
priated, the greater part of the land still remained in peasant hands, peasant holdings remained
quite large and the peasants were able to obtain a surplus from their land beyond what was
needed for payment of dues – and they used this surplus, often in the face of fines imposed
by lords, in order to involve themselves in market relations, as both producers and consumers
(Harnisch 1980, 127–41, 157–89; Hagen 1985, 113; Enders 2000, 389–91; Ogilvie 2001;
Cerman 2011, 244–5, 252; Cerman 2012, 58–61, 109–11).
The so-called ‘second serfdom’ of east-central Europe thus certainly did not – in the
‘east-Elbian’ regions examined here, at any rate – preclude increasing social differentiation,
more use of wage labour and growing market dependence, even though from the late
sixteenth century, eastern peasants in many regions were generally more oppressed by labour
services and arbitrary exactions than their western counterparts. In the west as well, peasants
were still constrained by customary laws and subject status in some form, and in both regions
the locus of exploitation was therefore still, for fullholding peasants, to a large extent (though
by no means exclusively) the feudal rent, rather than a market-determined rent or wage.
Nevertheless, because of increasing social stratification, in eastern and western Germany alike,
a growing proportion of the population was increasingly affected by the market, and arguably
more so than by (direct) feudal exploitation. With regard to social differentiation and con-
comitant market dependence, therefore, it is far from clear that there is necessarily much of a
difference arising for any region based on its location at any point on the spectrum of
social-property relations ranging from the supposed ‘second serfdom’ of east-central Europe to
very weak customary relations in England (Hagen 2011; Cerman 2012, 95–128).
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, then, in both Germany and England, we have
economic systems that were highly commercialized; in which the majority of the rural
population did not have access to enough land for subsistence; in which there was a good
deal of wage labour; and in which most people were dependent on market exchange of some
sort in order to live. Farms of more than about 60 acres were rare but not unknown in
southern Germany, and common in the east; although larger farms were more common in
England, in both places, the majority of holdings remained of more moderate size. However,
even in England, although tenants’ production (regardless of the size of their holdings) tended
to be market-oriented, it was also subsistence production, in that farms seem also to have fed
the households that lived on them; and the dual aim of subsistence and exchange seems to
have been common to both customary and leasehold tenants (Dyer 1994b, 317; Wrightson
2002, 53; Dyer 2013, 30–1). In other words, while tenants were dependent on the market to
maintain access to the land, and farm servants on the labour market to find employment,
neither needed to turn to the market for their daily sustenance; this is a milder form of
market dependence than what we find in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, given that
there were more large farms in England, most of southern Germany at least probably
remained less dependent on wage labour than most of southern and central England. Produc-
tivity in both regions was high enough to allow for profitability of the full holdings, but there
appears to have been no significant rise in total factor productivity between c.1300 and c.1700
(at the earliest) in either Germany or England, and it is not clear that total factor productivity
in southern Germany lagged significantly behind that in most of England, although parts of
East Anglia were exceptional (Campbell and Overton 1993; Overton 1996, 84–8, 120).

14 Shami Ghosh
Large farms had certainly come into being in England, and much land was enclosed.
Nevertheless, through most of the sixteenth century, peasant tenure was generally de facto quite
secure; relatively little land was engrossed by evicting tenants; and a good deal of the land still
tended to be passed on within the kin group. Accumulation of land by English tenants did
not, moreover, necessarily mean either the creation of consolidated large farms or that tenants
were accumulating because of some sort of capitalist urge: in the sixteenth century (and even
in the seventeenth and eighteenth), holdings were often fragmented rather than contiguous
and were frequently acquired to ensure children’s inheritances, and thus dispersed again
(Whittle 2000, 168–70, 190; Dyer 2002, 358; Wrightson 2002, 62–3, 100–2; French and
Hoyle 2007, 211–43). Although open fields and commons were certainly enclosed in this
period, 45 per cent of the land had already been enclosed by c.1500 (Overton 1996, 148).
Furthermore, much of this enclosure had taken place before 1350; and the engrossing,
enclosure and conversion to pasture by peasants were cumulatively more significant than
similar activities undertaken by landlords (Dyer 2005, 72, 244).
Even in Norfolk, the most commercialized and least ‘feudal’ part of England, ‘it is question-
able whether there was a net loss of land from the customary sector’; it is ‘not possible to cite
the fifteenth-century transfer of land from customary to leasehold as a cause of increased
insecurity of tenure in the sixteenth century’ (Whittle 2000, 72). There also does not seem to
have been any particular decline in the land–family bond (the retention of land within a kin
group over generations) in this period, and it seems to be the case that the land market
evidenced no linear move towards a greater percentage of non-kin transactions over the
centuries (Dyer 1980, 302–5; Sreenivasan 1991, and the ensuing debate in Past and Present,
volume 146, 1995, 151–87; Whittle 1998; Whittle 2000, 86–167; Wrightson 2002, 135, 138;
French and Hoyle 2003; Dyer 2005, 47–51; Clarke 2006; French and Hoyle 2007, 179–207).
Arguably, if the land market is dominated by competition for land between prospective
tenants, a significant level of ‘stickiness’ of land within kin groups would not occur. If this
period had seen a linear move towards capitalistic competition between tenants, we would
expect an increase in non-kin transactions to be continuous, rather than being very much in
evidence by the thirteenth century, and falling significantly in the seventeenth, before recov-
ering in the eighteenth. In fact, it seems to be the case that as population levels rose and land
became more expensive, more land was retained within the family rather than less, as land-
holders increasingly began to preserve holdings intact and provide non-inheriting children
with cash settlements rather than land. There is little evidence that rents were determined by
competition on the land market (thus making tenure very insecure for most tenants) until at
least the late eighteenth century; and there is little to indicate that such competition as existed
had much to do with gaining or retaining access to the means of subsistence: it seems, rather,
to have been a matter of ensuring a sufficient inheritance for tenants’ children (Wrightson
2002, 186–7; Ormrod 2013, 211, 215; Whittle 2013, 15–16).13 Pressure on rents from the
landlords was also not a motor of innovation, as most landlords encouraged their tenants ‘to
stick to well-tried and established practices’ (Overton 1996, 184; Whittle 2008, 143).
Although there was arguably a higher incidence of wage labour in rural England than in
southern Germany, until the later eighteenth century, most of the agricultural labour force
(probably as much as two thirds) still comprised farm servants hired on annual contracts
including board and lodging, and even day labourers received a good portion of their wages
13
Many customary tenants also sublet their lands at market rates (Whittle 2008, 144–7); if it is the case that ‘the
bulk of sublet land was rented by the larger farmers’ (Whittle 2004, 244; cf. Healey 2011, 172–4), the market
would only have affected most subtenants’ ability to accumulate further, not their access to means of subsistence.

in kind; furthermore, many of the rural poor still had some small plots of land, a cow or two
and some smaller animals, and some access to commons: they were by no means as yet a
completely market-dependent proletariat (Kussmaul 1981; Overton 1996, 41–2; Whittle 2000,
225–304; Wrightson 2002, 196–8; Muldrew 2011, 128–30, 226–7, 230–1, 246–57). In
sixteenth-century Norfolk (arguably the most commercialized region of England), ‘wage
labour was a means to supplement these people’s smallholding economy, rather than a full-
time occupation’ (Whittle 2000, 241); and the fact that probably at least half of the population
needed the ‘supplement’ of wage labour to survive was also not something that arose from the
breakdown of the manorial system and the creation of large tenant-run farms: already by
c.1350, ‘the English economy was dependent on hired labour’ (Whittle 2000, 297; and simi-
larly Fox 1996; Dyer 2005, 218–20). Until at least the early eighteenth century, wages,
whether in kind or coin, were also not determined solely by a ‘free’ labour market, and nor
indeed was even the fact of servanthood itself, since the conditions of service were still
determined in large part by custom and by the legislation of the landowning class (Kussmaul
1981, 36, 166–7; Bennett 2010; Whittle 2000, 275–301). It was not until after c.1750 that the
bulk of rural labourers were fully proletarianized with nothing but their labour to sell, and
completely exposed to the market without the shelter of annual contracts and payments in
kind, including housing. English wage labourers were thus very much akin to those employed
on large farms in various regions of Germany, and by no means a true rural proletariat within
a system of ‘agrarian capitalism’.
Certainly, market dependence was common in rural southern England. However, complete
dependence on the market for all subsistence needs was not yet the norm for most people,
neither tenant farmers nor wage labourers, since both tended to meet most of their consump-
tion needs from their own production. As in southern Germany, however, landholders often
needed to raise large initial sums of money in order to inherit, and therefore needed to make
profits from their holdings to pay off their loans: they were dependent on the market to retain
access to their means of subsistence. As in Germany, despite the drop in population in the
fifteenth century, levels of commercialization do not seem to have decreased, and might even
have increased relative to the population; certainly, there was increasing commercialization
with the resurgence of population growth from c.1550. There appears to have been more
accumulation on the part of tenant farmers in England than in southern Germany; but the
size of holdings in itself says little about how capitalist a society is: peasant holdings in many
parts of eastern Germany, under the harsher conditions of the ‘second serfdom’, were of sizes
comparable to the farms of the English tenants in c.1600.
One key element of the nature of the capitalist market is arguably that the force of
competition creates a need for innovation and higher levels of productivity. It is apparent,
however, that German peasants were capable of attaining profits without raising yields signifi-
cantly (and they clearly also needed to attain profits to pay their debts); and there is little
evidence for any significant improvement in total factor productivity even in English agricul-
ture between the fourteenth and the end of the seventeenth century: most of the increase
(especially in labour productivity) occurs only in the decades after c.1700, when productivity
increases are found in Germany as well. Productivity in some (but by no means all) sixteenth-
century English regions was significantly higher than in Germany in the sixteenth century,
but the major rise in arable productivity had already taken place by c.1300. Average English
cereal yields for the period up to 1739 are in fact slightly lower than those for the period
1250–1349: ‘what is striking is the stability of the pattern for the 500 years from 1250, and
the dramatic changes that take place in the succeeding century’ (Overton 1996, 120; see also
Campbell and Overton 1993; Overton and Campbell 1999). There is, of course, a difference

16 Shami Ghosh
between arable productivity and the profitability of a holding, and in England we find an
increase in livestock stocking densities, which led to more profits (not least because stock-
raising incurred lower labour costs than cereal cultivation).14 This took place in Germany as
well in the sixteenth century, although a more widespread transition to intensive stock-raising
seems to date from the second half of the seventeenth century (discussed in the next section
of the present paper) – but it occurred for much the same reasons: increased demand, lower
labour costs and increasing prospects of profitability. Despite differences in forms of land
tenure, more formal subjugation in Germany, and more large farms and wage labour in
England, with regard to market dependence and commercialization, the two regions therefore
actually appear quite similar by the early seventeenth century.
Neither Germany nor England was really capitalist by c.1650, if by capitalist we mean
either complete dependence on the market for all or even most inputs or a compulsion,
arising from the market, continuously to increase profitability, or – as I would prefer it –
both. Both societies had become highly commercialized and market-dependent by this
point, a development that was arguably crucial for the (later) rise of capitalism – but by no
means necessarily had to lead to it. In England, the market could have more of an influence
on the price of access to land than in Germany; but even in England, the market was not
yet the sole determinant of the cost of subsistence or social reproduction for most rural
people, and it was most probably not even the principal one for a large proportion of the
population: tenants with full holdings and farm servants. In both England and Germany, the
expansion and diffusion of rural industry as an alternative – and market-dependent – form
of accessing one’s means to subsistence while still often maintaining some level of access to
land was a critical factor in allowing and enabling the growth of a market-dependent popu-
lation; it was predicated on increasing demand for and consumption of manufactured goods
among all segments of society. The changes in demand structures, which were nourished by
and enabled the spread of rural industry and the growing proportion of the population that
needed non-agricultural work to survive, began as early as the fourteenth century, and were
consolidated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, before assuming even greater impor-
tance later.
THE BEGINNINGS OF CAPITALISM? SUBSISTENCE, IDEOLOGY AND THE

MARKET, c.1650–c.1800
Germany experienced some decades of crisis from c.1620, leading to population losses of a
third or more in many regions by c.1650; some areas did not regain their pre-war popula-
tions until c.1750, although most had recovered by c.1700 (Pfister 2007, 10–18, 71–80; see
also Schlögl 1988, 59–81; Robisheaux 1989; 201–16; Schlögl 1992, 148–52; Vasold 1993;
Theibault 1995, esp. 165–74; Hille 1997, 120–45; Enders 2000, 645–67; Sreenivasan 2004,
283–91; Enders 2008a, 70–3; Enders 2008b, 337–8). Once again, demographic crisis did not
bring about a return to self-sufficiency and a retreat from commercialization. Already from
c.1670 in some regions, and during the eighteenth century in most places, we find even
higher levels of market-dependent specialization, as many people, sometimes whole villages,
turned to stock-raising or the cultivation of cash crops, both obviously implying dependence
14
It is important to stress here, therefore, that the profitability of holdings could be and was increased without
necessarily implying any genuine rise in labour productivity: more profits could be accrued with less expense in
terms of labour cost, but since stock-raising required less labour, this says nothing about increasing labour
productivity per se. On the relationship between profitability and labour productivity, see also note 16.

on the market (Schlögl 1988, 296; Robisheaux 1989, 247–56; Sabean 1990, 43–4, 49–50,
52–4; Troßbach 1993, 57, 64–6; Hille 1997, 197–8, 205; Enders 2000, 1007; Sreenivasan
2004, 345). In some areas there appears to have been some consolidation of holdings in the
hands of the wealthier peasants, but even where this did not take place, with the exception
of the partible-inheritance regions (mainly in the west and south-west), there was no frag-
mentation of holdings and landowning structures remained the same, with as much or more
land concentrated in the hands of a few fullholding families, whose numbers remained
more-or-less constant. Social stratification thus deepened, eased only (in some places) by
emigration; the sub-peasantry grew in number, and comprised, probably by c.1750 and cer-
tainly by c.1800, as much as 80 per cent of the rural population (Peters 1967, 1970;
Henning 1969; Grees 1975; Melton 1988, 329–30, 339–40; Robisheaux 1989, 243–7, 255;
Sabean 1990, 49–51, 61–5; Achilles 1991, 58–61; Beck 1993, 232–43; Troßbach 1993, 36–8;
Theibault 1995, 210–13; Hille 1997, 222–34; Melton 1998, 302–5, 321; Enders 2000, 745–6;
Sczesny 2002, 44–5, 226, 231–3, 238–40, with appendices 26–9; Sreenivasan 2004, 304–30;
Koch 2007, 96–9; Enders 2008a, 246–57; Štefanová 2009, 34–5, 47–8; Cerman 2012, 127–
8). These people were increasingly engaged in wage labour, and there was a rise in the
numbers of (normally free, increasingly also often migratory) wage labourers and servants,
who, in parts of southern Germany, comprised two thirds or more of the rural population
by the second half of the eighteenth century (Schlögl 1988, 150–61, 313, 316; Troßbach
1993, 41–3, 57–8; Hille 1997, 171–3, 183–4; Sreenivasan 2004, 306–7). There was also in
many areas a further expansion of rural industry, and a concomitant increase in dependence
on it on the part of the sub-peasant classes, often coupled with intensive cash-cropping on
smallholdings; in many regions, most people were, by the late eighteenth century, engaged in
rural industry in some manner, even if not yet exclusively so (Schlögl 1988, 306–13;
Reininghaus 1990, 64–75; Achilles 1991, 60–1, 115–17; Beck 1993, 359–60, 367–9, 505–75;
Troßbach 1993, 55–8; Hille 1997, 54, 168, 173; Enders 2000, 756–7, 1007–9; Sczesny 2002,
esp. 221–49, 328–36, 343–6, 358–61; Sreenivasan 2004, 331–5; Enders 2008a, 254–60, 496–7;
Štefanová 2009, 30). Regions in south-western Germany that were characterized by regimes
of partible inheritance were among the most densely populated in Germany, and here we
find very small holdings, intensive cash-cropping, local specialization of production and a
good deal of occupational diversity that included a substantial dependence on rural industry,
often combined with some market-oriented agrarian activities; these were poorer areas than
many of the grain- and livestock-producing regions of impartible inheritance, but were
equally or more market-dependent and market-oriented (Sabean 1990, 43–4, 49–50, 52–4,
62–5, 156–60; Walter 1990; Medick 1996, esp. 39–293; Ogilvie 1997; Warde 2006, 120, 127,
326–8, 357–8).
Even in the east-Elbian regions, from c.1650 onwards the work of cultivation was increas-
ingly performed by hired hands, as landlords began, even before the abolition of serfdom in
the late eighteenth century, to depend ever more on housed farm servants and wage labourers
housed on smallholdings or cottage plots; moreover, even the servile peasants employed
labourers (as indeed they had done earlier as well), since in Brandenburg, for example, their
holdings could in the eighteenth century often be as large as 120 acres – comparable in size
to English tenant farms – and in many east-Elbian regions, holdings of 80 acres or more
remained common (Melton 1988, 329–30, 335–8, 341–7; Melton 1997, 29–37; Melton 1998,
302–5, 311–15, 321–2, 325; Hagen 2002, 60–5, 205–8, 391–422; Enders 2008b, 506–11,
605–6; Cerman 2011, 246–50; Cerman 2012, 124–6). East-Elbian peasants who owed labour
services often sent hired labourers in their stead; labour services were also increasingly com-
muted for cash payments, and demesnes were by the eighteenth century worked primarily by

18 Shami Ghosh
wage labour (Peters 1967, 1970; Melton 1988, 325, 335–6, 341–7; North 1988; Melton 1994;
Melton 1998, 303, 304, 309, 320–22; Hagen 2002, 101, 211; Enders 2008a, 362–7; Cerman
2011, 247; Cerman 2012, 127). Full holdings were generally smaller in Bohemia than Bran-
denburg (around 60 acres), but even here, only about a third of the population had holdings
this large, and by c.1800 in many regions over half the rural population was completely
landless (Melton 1998, 321; Cerman and Zeitlhofer 2002; Štefanová 2009, 34–5, 47–8).
Nevertheless, as long as wages were still to a large extent paid in kind, servants were housed
and a substantial number of wage labourers still had garden plots, even the sub-peasant classes
were not yet completely dependent on income from wage labour for their subsistence. In
Germany, the full proletarianization of the majority of the population was only completed by
c.1850, when even smallholders lost their lands and became completely dependent on wages,
and servanthood was phased out in favour of day labourers (Achilles 1993; Hagen 2002,
593–645).
In England as well, despite an earlier decline in the institution of service in husbandry in
the first half of the seventeenth century, the incidence of servanthood again increased from
c.1650 to c.1750, and it is only by c.1830 that it was finally phased out in favour of day
labourers, leading to greater numbers of people being more-or-less completely dependent
on the market for their survival (Kussmaul 1981, 97–134; Snell 1985, 67–103; Daunton
1995, 398–400, 431–2; Overton 1996, 178–82; Muldrew 2011, 218–33, 246–57). In the
eighteenth century, agricultural day labourers still received part of their wages in kind, but
there was naturally a far greater money component when labourers did not receive full
board and lodging; the shift to hiring labourers meant that the latter received less in terms
of value than they would have done as servants (Muldrew 2011, 228) and were thus more
dependent on the market. The final factor in the process of complete proletarianization was
the loss of access even to small plots of land and commons, completed largely only in the
nineteenth century, which removed the last possibility of some shelter from the market by
the provision of direct access to the means to produce some portion of the household’s
subsistence (Snell 1985, 138–227; Humphries 1990; Neeson 1993; Daunton 1995, 108–11;
Overton 1996, 176–8; Shaw-Taylor 2001a; Muldrew 2011, 250–9).15 Precision about the
relative numbers of completely market-dependent people in Germany and England by
c.1800 is not possible at the moment, but the order of magnitude seems likely to be
roughly similar, as is the chronology: even if the completion of the processes of rural prole-
tarianization took place later in Germany than in England, it was a matter of a few decades
rather than a century or more.
While many English labourers managed to maintain and improve their material standards
of living by increasing their inputs in order to be able to consume more on the market,
others sank into greater poverty; there was thus a combination of increasing voluntary market
involvement for the consumption of non-subsistence and non-luxury goods, as well as greater
involuntary market dependence for the consumption of subsistence commodities (Daunton
1995, 178–80; Wrightson 2002, 194–8, 307–20). Those who managed to improve their stan-
dards of living are likely either to have been hired as full-time servants or were engaged in
manufacturing of some sort, and managed to retain a cow or pig and/or access to some land
15
Shaw-Taylor argues that labourers were fully proletarianized even before the nineteenth century
(Shaw-Taylor 2001b, 2004). His data are from the 1780s and later, and need not be representative of earlier
decades; he also ignores the potential value of garden plots, despite acknowledging that they could have reduced
the level of market dependence considerably. Since he does not differentiate between servants and labourers, his
argument that in southern England ‘agrarian capitalism’ – defined as a high incidence of (undifferentiated) wage
labour – predominated by c.1700 must be treated with caution (Shaw-Taylor 2012).

(either a garden plot or commons), or their households engaged in a mix of these occupa-
tions; service was normally only a relatively brief stage in the life cycle, and thus the
improving standards of living were almost certainly confined to a minority among the
sub-peasant classes (Kussmaul 1981, 70–85; Shaw-Taylor 2001b, 2004; Wrightson 2002, 314;
Muldrew 2011, 287). As in Germany, families turned increasingly to rural industry to supple-
ment their income from agricultural labour, with women’s spinning contributing about a
third of the total household income among many rural families (Wrightson 2002, 313–14;
Muldrew 2011, 233–46; Muldrew 2012). Increasing poverty also aided economic expansion in
some ways, by providing a pool of demand for cheap manufactured products and food
(Wrightson 2002, 197–8, 200, 317–20).
From the early eighteenth century, and especially after c.1750, we see the first major and
sustained rise in agricultural productivity in England and Germany since the fourteenth
century – even under the ‘second serfdom’ in eastern Germany. In the eighteenth century,
German seed-to-yield ratios often ranged between 1:8 and 1:16, and there is evidence for
ratios of as high as 1:20 or 1:30 in some east-Elbian regions by 1800 (Schlögl 1988, 140;
Schlögl 1992; Achilles 1993, 61; Enders 2008a, 161–2; Cerman 2012, 95–101). We lack data
for Germany comparable in scope to what is available for England, but it is plausible that
average German yields were still lower than English averages; and in England, a widespread
rise in productivity most probably predated that in Germany by some decades.16 Higher yields
clearly indicate higher productivity, though not necessarily the higher labour productivity so
important for Brenner: there was a significant increase in labour inputs in England in the first
half of the eighteenth century (Muldrew 2011, 260–97; cf. Brenner 2001, 171). High yields
can enable higher levels of market dependence, by allowing a greater percentage of the
population to be engaged in non-agricultural labour. Industrialization requires a pool of
labour available to work in industry, and thus requires higher levels of agricultural productiv-
ity; and England had a far larger percentage of such people than Germany even at the end of
the eighteenth century (Allen 2000; Dennison and Simpson 2010, 149).17 This does not, in
itself, say very much if we are looking for the causes of industrial capitalism: in the Nether-
lands, agricultural productivity was as high as, or higher than, in England, as was the percent-
age of the non-agricultural population – but it is not the Dutch who produced the Industrial
Revolution (de Vries and van der Woude 1997, 195–234, 227–34, 523–9; Allen 2000;
Dennison and Simpson 2010, 149–50).
When efforts are made to increase productivity, this is evidence at least of a desire or need
to increase profits, as well as of an increasing orientation to the market. It suggests, therefore,
either a compulsion to increase profits or an ideological shift in favour of greater profitability
16
Note, however, that the highly productive ‘English’ agriculture was found mainly in Norfolk, and the
‘widespread diffusion [of the Norfolk four-course crop rotation] must be dated to the first half of the nineteenth
century’ (Overton 1996, 120), making national averages an unreliable basis for comparison before c.1800.
17
Recall, however, that what is required to release labour for industry is a proportionately lower number of
people engaged in agriculture, which need have no relation to the numbers of hours and days these people
worked; thus although relatively fewer people worked in agriculture, since they worked longer and harder, this
does not actually equate to a genuine rise in labour productivity. The tendency to identify increasing labour
productivity with increasing profitability and the beginnings of capitalism can thus be misleading. For reasons of
space, it is not possible to go into these issues in any detail here, but note that total factor productivity is what
matters in terms of enabling market dependence, in that it means there is enough surplus produced to allow for
a larger population to be dependent on the market. In addition, if labourers are increasingly market-dependent,
this can allow for relatively low wages coupled with longer working hours (since the labourers have no other
means of meeting their subsistence needs), effectively leading to greater profits without implying any rise in
labour productivity in terms of output per unit hour worked. These aspects of proletarianization are discussed
further in the final section of this paper.

20 Shami Ghosh
– or both;18 it also indicates that there is a market, otherwise higher productivity would be
unable to create more profits. Furthermore, what is surely as important as absolute levels of
productivity is whether productivity is sufficient to attain and increase profits, and to feed a
growing non-agricultural population (if coupled with an infrastructure that allows the food to
get to this population); if it is, it is clearly sufficient to enable a structural change in the way
the economy functions, in that it both enables the market dependence of a far greater
proportion of the population and allows a larger percentage of the workforce to be employed
in industry or other non-agricultural occupations.
Regardless of how much lower eighteenth-century German yields might have been than
English yields, even in Germany we find both efforts to increase productivity, and the
evidence of their effects as described above. Productivity-raising innovations such as the
planting of legumes, the cultivation of fallows and more intensive crop rotations can be found
from c.1700, and in some cases even from c.1600 (Sabean 1990, 52–8, 148, 150–2, 433–52;
Walter 1990, 119–20; Achilles 1991, 21–2; Zimmermann 1995; Enders 2000, 966–9; Hagen
2002, 314–15; Enders 2008a, 156–7, 653–7; Enders 2008b, 483, 586–9; Rasmussen 2010;
Cerman 2011, 246; Cerman 2012, 102–5). As a result, Baden-Württemberg was a significant
exporter of rural produce (including wheat) by c.1760 (Walter 1990); on the estate of
Stavenow in Brandenburg, between 1694 and 1763, profitability more than doubled and
yields increased by 50 per cent by the end of the century (Hagen 2002, 321; Hagen 2005,
147); in Hohenlohe, specialized livestock production led to a fourfold increase in cattle stocks
between 1581 and 1663 (Robisheaux 1989, 247–55); and at Ottobeuren, although yields did
not rise significantly between c.1650 and c.1850, this prevented neither a great expansion and
diversification of the local economy nor a massive growth in grain exports (Sreenivasan 2004,
125, 309–10, 330–41, 346–50). The exports from southern Germany in turn fed northern
Switzerland, and enabled the expansion of that region’s rapidly industrializing population
(Walter 1990; Göttmann 1991a,b; Pfister 1992).
Clearly, German agrarian productivity was sufficient to fuel growing market dependence,
greater levels of profit, the expansion of the non-agricultural population and a growth in
manufacturing – developments shared with England, suggesting that differences with regard to
absolute yields are thus arguably not of such great significance. In addition, as in England, the
transformations in Germany were fuelled by a changing ideology, now geared towards profit.
Normative texts giving evidence of such an ideological shift are found in Germany only
slightly later than in England. Already in the 1760s, German writers were publishing works
advocating ‘English’ modes of agriculture, and referring to agriculture as business (‘Gewerbe’);
Arthur Young published his first very influential works in the 1770s, and his German coun-
terpart, Albrecht Thaer, presented his first writings on the adoption of English techniques in
the 1790s (Gray 2000, 97–104, 111, 174–80, 182–7, 260–70). As in England, the innovations
were introduced as a result of both ‘Enlightened’ theory and peasant pragmatism
(Zimmermann 1995).
Overall, therefore, despite differences in levels of productivity, it seems to be the case that
with regard to the growth of the mass market and the increase in market dependence, and
changes in the nature of market dependence, developments (and their chronologies) in
Germany and England are comparable. Market dependence is of crucial importance because
18
Such compulsion could arise from indebtedness among landowners or peasants/tenants requiring greater
profits; we find this in both eastern and southern Germany (Hagen 2002, 284–312, 334–41; Lubinski 1997;
Sreenivasan 2004, 293, 299–300, 303–4, 316–17, 320–22). In the east, furthermore, landlords began in this period
to hire estate managers whose retention of their position depended on increasing profits (Hagen 2002, 334–41;
Cerman 2011, 245–6; Cerman 2012, 102–7).

of the way in which it alters social and economic relationships, but also because it signifies an
increase in demand. One of the key aspects of capitalism, and a prerequisite for any transition
to it, is surely a growth in demand: if increasing profits are ultimately predicated on a rise in
productivity, this means that there is more stuff to be consumed; profits will therefore not rise
unless consumption does. Tracing a rise in consumption, and the causes for and kinds of
increases in consumption, is therefore of crucial importance in understanding how capitalism
can come into being. During the course of this period, there is evidence for increased
consumption of goods purchased through retail – not just subsistence commodities, though
given the predominance of non-self-subsistent peoples, there was of course an expansion of
this aspect of the market. In regions with a good deal of rural industry in particular, not just
urban, but also rural consumption patterns seem to have changed to include more animal
protein and utensils, different kinds of clothes, colonial wares and newspapers (Braun 1990;
Medick 1996, 379–446; on England, see Hudson 1996, 63–5). In England at least, some
households increased their labour inputs not because it was necessary for their subsistence, but
in order to augment their levels of consumption (Overton et al. 2004; Allen and Weisdorf
2011; Muldrew 2011, 177–207; Muldrew 2012). All this is possibly evidence of an ‘industrious
revolution’ (de Vries 2008).19 These issues have not been as well studied for Germany, but it
seems to be the case that even here, there was a growth in non-subsistence, non-luxury
consumption and the rural retail trades appear to have expanded (Beck 1993, 315–22, 357–
74; Ogilvie et al. 2011).20
Thus, in both Germany and England, we find between c.1600 and c.1850 rising productiv-
ity, a desire to increase profits leading to greater levels of market involvement, and increasing
social stratification and concomitant dependence on the market. More people were more depen-
dent on the market, since a growing number of people had less access to non-market means
of fulfilling their needs; and there was also (possibly more in England than Germany) more
consumption of more non-subsistence, non-luxury goods on the market. All these develop-
ments are combined with changing economic ideologies, and together bring about, in both
Germany and England, a significant enlargement of a mass market in subsistence commodities
and cheap consumer goods, as well as an increasing orientation of economic behaviour
towards profit maximization and productivity.
LATE PRE-CAPITALIST SOCIO-ECONOMIC FORMATIONS AND TRANSITIONS

TO CAPITALISM
The foregoing pages have demonstrated that Brenner’s definition of the feudal system is
inaccurate with regard to both England and Germany already by c.1300; and that it is
misleading to speak of ‘agrarian capitalism’ in England before c.1750. Access to land was not
yet primarily determined by the market; there was as yet no genuine rural proletariat; there
had already been a significant rise in productivity by c.1300, and levels achieved then were
not significantly exceeded until after c.1750. Economic differentiation had already increased
19
Sczesny finds an increasing number of Swabian peasants with full holdings turning to industrial work during
the eighteenth century; she concludes that the possibility for accumulation and profit (to which we should
add increased consumption), rather than just subsistence, were among the motivations for engaging in rural
industry (Sczesny 2002, 221–49, 328–50).
20
Ogilvie argues that because of restrictive institutional structures, there was no ‘industrious revolution’ in
Baden-Württemberg (Ogilvie 2010); but her own figures show both efforts to increase consumption, and a
growth of retail. An increase in legislation against various forms of consumption could suggest an increase in
such consumption (Howell 2010, esp. 208–60).

22 Shami Ghosh
greatly under ‘feudal’ conditions in England, and continued to do so, not just in England, but
also in – still formally ‘feudal’ – Germany; it was not dependent on processes of competition
between market-dependent leasehold farmers. Furthermore, the chronology of the many
transformations that we have noted was similar for both Germany and England, despite
significant differences in landlord–tenant relations and formal modes of exploitation. The
Brenner thesis is thus no longer tenable.
Most studies explicitly engaging with Brenner have, like Brenner himself, tended to focus
on landlord–tenant relations. But ‘sweeping theories connecting the rise of leasehold in any
particular century to advancements in farming techniques or the development of capitalism
are inaccurate and misjudged’ (Whittle 2008, 152). The changes in tenurial relationships were
more complex and less market-determined than Brenner supposed; and in any case, despite
differences in the nature of land tenure, the chronologies of market dependence, commercial-
ization, proletarianization and rising productivity are similar in the regions we have examined.
In the remaining pages of this paper, I argue that (a) the predominant focus on methods of
surplus extraction, modes of exploitation and tenurial relationships, while important, is insuf-
ficient, not least because (b) it can occlude from view a key element of transformation, which
is the growth of the sub-peasant classes – and from it, the beginnings of a proletariat. These
developments are crucial because (c) the changes in the mode of consumption that arose
along with the sub-peasantry – also ignored by analyses focused on modes of production –
were crucial for the development of capitalism. These are not, however, sufficient factors, as
capitalism could not evolve without (d) the rise of a profit-oriented ideology, which, however,
itself requires the existence of a consumer base to thrive.
Focusing on a transition from one form of exploitation (extra-economic) to another
(market-based) can distract from the fact that even the exploited in the former can comprise
a class of consumers: even though they are exploited, their consumption and production alike
can have an impact on and be influenced by the market. We have seen that this was the case.
Thus the agency of these exploited persons needs to be given due attention as a potential
motor of economic change. Furthermore, the sub-peasantry, lacking full holdings and fre-
quently lacking land altogether, was often less exposed to the forms of exploitation on which
theories regarding pre-capitalist socio-economic formations have concentrated, that of the
landlord on the tenant. Apart from being important because of their numerical dominance,
the sub-peasant classes are also crucial because of their place within structures of both
production and consumption. If it is the case that even in England, by c.1300, most of the
‘forced labour’ was in fact performed by wage labourers, with perhaps less than 10 per cent of
the work on demesnes being carried out by the servile fullholding peasant as his labour
service due (Campbell 2000, 3; Campbell 2005, 36–40), then the role of these labourers is
surely potentially of great importance (though it is also true that not all of them were
sub-peasants: fullholding peasants engaged in wage labour too). We have seen further that at
least by the eighteenth century, the (unfree, exploited) peasants in Prussia were themselves
involved in a form of ‘mediated exploitation’ (‘mittelbare Ausbeutung’) (Peters 1967, 285), and
functioned as ‘labor brokers’ (Melton 1988, 335–6); it has been suggested that a similar
situation might have obtained even in fourteenth-century England (Fox 1996; Campbell
2005, 38, 46, 55). Even though it is the case that a surplus was still being extracted from the
peasants, it was being extracted in a form that was not their own labour; this implies a
different set of value relationships between the person whose surplus is being exploited by the
landlord (the peasant or tenant) and the owner of that finished value (the landlord). The
sub-peasantry were, of course, also exploited; but this is a different form of exploitation, in
which the market plays a far greater, and increasing, role; as their numbers, and level of market

dependence, increased, so too did the significance of the market – and the sub-peasantry’s
role in it – within the dynamic of the economy.
Therefore, while the mode of production is a subject worthy of study in its own right, in
isolation, it is not necessarily the best means of understanding the economic dynamic of
pre-capitalist societies, nor the causes of transformation within them. Furthermore, in so far as
an increasing part of the burden of extra-economic coercion on the fullholding peasants was
extracted in coin, the conversion of surplus to coin means that at least some of the peasants’
own production was for exchange rather than use – which indicates at least the possibility of
a changing relationship to their production, as it was no longer a matter solely of use value,
but also exchange value, that was being produced. While it is certainly true that landlords may
not only benefit from the market but also use it as a means of exploitation within a system of
extra-economic coercion,21 exploitative relationships in which landlords benefit from the
market are only possible if there is a sufficiently large market. The exchange arising from the
existence of surpluses, the accumulation on the part of the surplus-producing peasants and
their own increasing consumption over the market of non-subsistence non-luxury goods –
these could only take place because people were consuming the surplus production of
subsistence commodities. These were people who did not, and presumably could not, produce
in such a way as not to need to consume this surplus – in other words, the townsfolk and the
(numerically more significant) sub-peasantry, who in turn also needed consumers for what
they produced. Thus it is crucial, whatever the prevailing mode of production, also to under-
stand the prevailing mode of consumption in order to comprehend the dynamic of the
economy.
The socio-economic transformations discussed above arose from within the feudal mode of
production in at least some of its manifestations, while feudal class structures still also obtained
(though not the only sorts of class relations present), and not as a consequence of the
wholesale replacement of feudal by capitalist class structures: serfdom was only formally
abolished in the German lands between 1781 and 1817. A market-dependent mode of
consumption coexisted with a mode of production that was, at least theoretically, feudal;
arguably, the mode of consumption contributed to the change in the mode of production.
For this reason, it is important that we shift our focus ‘from processes which were not entailed
by economic modernization – the destruction of the peasantry as a class – to processes which
were’, of which the most important, I suggest, is ‘the commercialization of their [the peas-
ants’] production’ (Sreenivasan 2013, 51; similarly Marfany 2012, 9). This is because agricul-
tural supply is best understood not as an independent variable determining the rate of growth
and the possibility of development but, rather, as ‘a dependent variable that could respond
elastically to changes in demand, subject to the opportunity costs of investment and trade’; for
this reason, ‘students of the transition from feudalism to capitalism need to pay more attention
to the conditions that made investment in agriculture profitable, rather than to the technical
or organizational characteristics of feudal agriculture itself ’ (Epstein 2007, 264). Profits in
agriculture – and, equally, manufacture – would only be possible in the presence of a market;
we need therefore to move away from the focus on production alone and, recognizing the
‘crucial role of rural consumer demand in capitalist development’ (Hagen 2011, 265), because
it could provide a powerful incentive to increase production and productivity, turn our
attention also to the growth, nature and dynamic of that demand.
21
Demade has recently proposed an extremely sophisticated explanation of how such an exploitative system
can function (Demade 2004b, esp. 280–420).

24 Shami Ghosh
The socio-economic formation that corresponds best to Brenner’s model of feudalism is

probably the one that obtained in many regions of Western Europe between c.800 and c.1100.
While market relations were in this period by no means uncommon, the majority of produc-
ers almost certainly had direct access to most of the means of subsistence without recourse to
the market (though not necessarily without recourse to exchange). At this point, ‘local
commerce was not yet a causal motor by itself ’; ‘the ultimate motor of the economy every-
where was landed and fiscal demand’ (Wickham 2005, 822, 823). To the extent that elite
demand itself became increasingly complex and dependent on monetary income between the
ninth and the fourteenth centuries, it was the primary motor of commercialization; a conse-
quence of this was that elite demand enabled the rise of non-agricultural populations of
specialized producers in towns, more complex exchange networks, increasing rural specializa-
tion of production and rising agricultural productivity. Growing commercialization also
enabled the expansion of a market-dependent population, which in turn meant an ever-larger
market, with an ever-increasing importance in the dynamic of the economy. Mass-market
demand was therefore, by the sixteenth century at the latest, a very significant factor in the
dynamic of the economies of both Germany and England; indeed, in England, as early as
c.1300, ‘the combined surplus of a million households would have exceeded the expenditure
of the approximately 30,000 wealthy lay and clerical households’ (Dyer 2011, 223).
Nevertheless, it is not self-evident that when the mass market quantitatively overshadows
elite demand, the economy is now ‘capitalist’. A crucial element in the greater importance of
the sub-peasantry within the dynamic of the economy is the changing nature and extent of
its market dependence, which is not the same as the significance of the mass market relative
to elite demand. It is possible for non-elite demand to be quantitatively more significant than
elite demand – the former may cumulatively exceed the latter – without necessarily entailing
the structural transformation of the economy that follows from the proletarianization of the
sub-peasantry. Even if non-elite demand surpasses that of the elites, this does not mean that
most non-elite households are completely dependent on the market: the market’s effect on
individual households need not be commensurate with their cumulative effect on the market.
In other words: the quality of market dependence is as important a factor as the quantity. The
quality of market dependence has quantitative implications as well, since full market depen-
dence implies a larger market, even without taking into account any growth in the numbers
of market-dependent persons; and, equally important, only full market dependence brings
forth the complete transformation of social structures that results from a proletariat compris-
ing the majority of the population, which must in turn be a crucial factor in any assessment
of whether or not an economy is capitalist.
We have seen that from within the feudal mode of production itself there arose a market in
which demand came not solely – probably not even primarily (in terms of both volume and
total value) – from the elite, but from not always clearly discrete non-elite groups: the urban
populations, who provided demand for both subsistence and non-subsistence non-luxury
goods; peasants who profited from the sale of their own surpluses, and who created a growing
pool of non-subsistence but also non-luxury demand; and the sub-peasant classes, increasingly
dependent on the market in some form because they lacked access to sufficient land for their
subsistence, and whose demand on the market for subsistence commodities thus presented an
increasingly important factor in the dynamic of the economy. Furthermore, although wage
labourers depended less on the market for their inputs when they were paid in kind and hired
on annual contracts, in both England and Germany, the large class of absolutely landless
servants paid in kind and housed was, until after c.1750–1800, most probably outnumbered by
those with access to some land, who may have worked for wages paid partly in kind, but who

also often engaged in growing crops for the market or working in rural industry (which most
often provided cash income), or both. Neither group was, as yet, fully proletarianized in the
sense of both having nothing but its labour to sell and being directly dependent on the
market for all its inputs; both groups were, however, significantly dependent on the market in
some manner, and the latter group in particular was a large and growing source of demand
for non-luxury commodities.22
The growth of rural industry and the expansion of intensive production of specialized
crops for the market together enabled the subsistence of a class of rural people without
sufficient land to feed themselves; these developments were also probably predicated on the
existence of such a class, as well as on sufficiently high agricultural productivity to feed both
them and the urban populations who consumed a good part of their output. This sort of
market consumption and demand were therefore enabled by and fed on the growth of both
rural markets and urban populations; they were made possible by, and in turn arguably aided
in the quickening of, the processes of social stratification and the entrenchment of networks
of exchange and regional specialization that, as we have seen, were common to Germany and
England alike.23 The people involved in these processes – smallholders, the landless, wage
labourers – represent a dynamic element in the economy, because, cumulatively, their demand
exceeded that of the elite, and (more importantly, perhaps) what they wanted was different
from the objects of elite demand. Equally important is the fact that as they became more
dependent on the market, their effect of their demand on the market also increased, not least
by providing greater inducements for producers to satisfy this demand. Occasional, or even
frequent, demand for non-subsistence commodities is likely to be quite elastic; permanent
dependence on the market for subsistence creates inelastic demand, and thus the growth of
this sort of market dependence provides a greater incentive for an increasing market orienta-
tion of production. Once the mass market is large enough – and, in particular, once enough
people are increasingly dependent on the market for their subsistence – it seems likely that this
market will become a primary factor in any dynamic of economic change. In other words,
once a market-dependent mode of consumption dominates, regardless of whether or not a
feudal mode of production prevails, the structure of the socio-economic system is likely to
change.
This is not, however, because the force of consumption somehow overpowers the class
dynamic: landlords can and did benefit from growing demand as well. At which point a feudal
landlord becomes a capitalist producer is a difficult question; but when the landlord’s produc-
tion is based more on waged rather than forced labour, and when the landlord’s income
derives more from sales than rents – and this was already the case for many Prussian landlords
by the second half of the eighteenth century, before feudalism was formally abolished – it
becomes at least worthwhile to consider the possibility of such a transformation. This being
so, to view simply as ‘feudal’ landlords whose production is primarily carried out by wage
labourers, but who also exercise extra-economic coercion on their tenants, seems an
incomplete manner of assessing their role in the economy; and given that market relations
22
It should be stressed that these groups among the sub-peasant classes (servants, labourers, smallholders,
workers in rural industry) were not static, as many people (and certainly many households) could fall into the
three last categories simultaneously; and servanthood was a stage in the life cycle normally succeeded by entering
into another category among the sub-peasantry (Kussmaul 1981, 70–85).
23
My arguments regarding rural industry have some elements in common with the hypotheses of Peter
Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm, but I do not follow their more elaborate claims regarding
‘proto-industry’ (Kriedte et al. 1981). Among the many useful critiques and more flexible analyses of rural
industry, see especially the studies of Marfany, Medick, Ogilvie and Pfister (Pfister 1992; Medick 1996; Ogilvie
1997; Marfany 2012; see also Ogilvie and Cerman 1996).

26 Shami Ghosh
(particularly with regard to the labour market) were increasingly mediated by people who
were not landowners (Prussian feudal and English non-feudal tenants alike), those benefiting
from and controlling the exploitation were also no longer just the feudal exploiters. More-
over, those directly exploited by the landlords – tenants or fullholding peasants – also ben-
efited from growing demand, while themselves exploiting the class below them, which was
increasingly dependent on the market for its subsistence inputs. Furthermore, even Prussian
peasants may have felt a compulsion towards profit maximization within the ‘feudal’ system,
arising not from competition, but from the ‘feudal’ rent. It is not clear that there is, in terms
of effect with regard to productivity or orientation towards profits and the market, any
significant difference between the pressures exercised by a Prussian landlord on a customary
tenant, and by an English landlord on a non-customary tenant. Edgar Melton’s study of
Holstein shows that while a freeholder would have had more disposable income, the custom-
ary tenant’s holding was twice as productive, brought more produce to the market, hired
more workers, and paid more wages (Melton 1988, 341–7). Thus the customary tenant
probably had more of an effect in terms of overall structural transformation than the
freeholder.
Nevertheless, it was still not the case before the later eighteenth century that most actors in
the changing economies of Germany and England were both fully dependent on the market
for all of their inputs and had nothing but their labour to sell. If capitalism means that
producers are separated ‘from direct, non-market access to their full means of subsistence’ and
thus ‘rendered dependent upon the market for their inputs’ (Brenner 2001, 173), capitalism
cannot be found predominant before c.1750 even in most of rural England. This is because
even English tenant farmers, while producing for the market, still also produced for use; and
they and their servants consumed mainly what they produced, rather than needing to turn to
the market. Of course wage labourers, servants and tenant farmers alike were dependent on
the profitability of the farm, and thus were indirectly dependent on the market; but this is not
the same as being directly dependent on it for all their inputs. Thus it is crucial to differen-
tiate between different sorts of market-dependent socio-economic formations, depending on
what kind of market dependence predominates.
But it is not the case that the existence of a mass market must in itself signify the presence
of capitalism. The example of the Dutch Republic shows that a society could reach a stage of
high productivity, greater occupational diversity than any other European region, high levels
of regional specialization and interregional integration, and complete market dependence; and
then begin to stagnate, with regard to both economic and demographic growth (de Vries and
van der Woude 1997). It is clear that beyond a point, technological revolution was essential
for further growth; and it is equally clear that the Dutch did not adopt new technologies
particularly early or effectively once they were available. By 1870, Germany and Switzerland
were far ahead of the Netherlands with regard to per capita industrialization, industry’s share
of GDP, regional share in European industry and relative per capita GDP growth (Broadberry
et al. 2010a, 61, 70; Broadberry et al. 2010b, 172–4; Carreras and Josephson 2010, 33–6).24
While technological progress is obviously essential for ‘modern economic growth’, it cannot
itself be explained by the latter (de Vries 2001, 180). In so far as the Industrial Revolution
was a process of introducing technologies that allowed for a growth in profits, we must recall
that this would only have happened because there was both a desire to use and a possibility of
using technology for such a purpose: in other words, because there existed both a capitalist
24
Germany and Switzerland should be considered at least partly together, given the kind of symbiosis that
arose between the agricultural and industrial sectors in those two countries.

ideology and a mass market. That the Dutch Republic took so long to industrialize, despite its
earlier lead in economic development, suggests that at least one of these components was
missing; and given that there certainly was a Dutch mass market, it seems possible that what
was lacking was the ideological motivation – the compulsion – for constant growth.
Thus even the rise of a proletariat does not necessarily signify the simultaneous dominance
of the economy by a compulsion for profit maximization and continuous growth. It is this
compulsion to increase productivity and profitability which is exercised by the market that
distinguishes capitalist market dependence from other forms of market dependence. It is only
in capitalism that ‘strategies for survival are identical with strategies for maximizing profit, at
least for producers’ and thus ‘competitive production and profit-maximization themselves become
survival strategies, the basic condition of subsistence itself ’ (Wood 2002b, 55). However, while
there is a difference between market dependence that arises from a need to sell in order to
survive and market dependence predicated on a need to attain an average rate of profit in
order to survive (Wood 2002b, 64), there is also a difference between a need to attain an
average rate of profit and a need for continuous profit maximization, particularly when by the
latter we mean a compulsion (arising from competition) for constant growth in the rate of
profit fuelled by increasing productivity. According to this definition, finding capitalism before
c.1750 is difficult; there is little evidence for a pervasive compulsion towards constant profit
maximization. Neither the English tenant farmer c.1650 nor German peasants in the same
year necessarily needed to increase productivity by lowering production costs in order to
survive; there is little evidence, in any case, that this is what either of them actually did to any
significant degree, and productivity did not rise significantly for another century. On the
other hand, both did already need to attain an average rate of profit in order to gain and
maintain access to their holdings by the end of the sixteenth century. That is not the same
thing as a compulsion to keep increasing growth, which need not arise, and most probably
does not arise, solely by some depoliticized economic logic of its own, but is conditioned by
ideological or cultural factors.
Jan de Vries has proposed that an ‘industrious revolution’ was the prerequisite for the
Industrial Revolution: families began to make more effort to raise total household incomes so
that they could consume more than they would earlier have thought they needed (de Vries
2008). We have seen that there is indeed some empirical evidence for such a development in
both England and Germany in the eighteenth century. De Vries’ theory is nevertheless
problematic, primarily because there is little evidence for widespread ‘industriousness’ of this
sort: those of the labouring classes who became more ‘industrious’ in de Vries’ sense – who
increased their labour output not in order to subsist, but in order to consume beyond what
they needed for subsistence – were the wealthier among the sub-peasant classes, and not the
majority (Overton et al. 2004; Allen and Weisdorf 2011; Muldrew 2011, 177–207; Muldrew
2012; and similarly, albeit regarding Catalonia, Marfany 2012, esp. 122–4, 146–8). There was
simultaneously a general rise in the numbers of those who were not among the better-off as
well, and were in an increasingly precarious and market-dependent situation with regard to
their subsistence; and this was caused not least because of the elite perception that access to
non-market means of subsistence was bad because it diminished the industriousness of labour-
ers (Kussmaul 1981, 22–3; Snell 1985, 67–103, 138–227, 170–4; Humphries 1990; Neeson
1993; Daunton 1995, 108–11, 398–400, 431–2; Overton 1996, 176–82; Shaw-Taylor 2001a;
Muldrew 2011, 218–33, 250–9). The sources for an ideological shift are almost exclusively
upper-class and prescriptive (and English, rather than Dutch); elite economic ideology cer-
tainly shifted from the notion of a ‘moral economy’ to one based on profit and growth, in
which, not least because of ‘the commodification of food supplies’, the protection of (poorer)

28 Shami Ghosh
consumers receded as a priority in favour of promoting the profits of producers (Ormrod

2013, 208–10, 214), which profits were themselves predicated on growing ‘industriousness’
and consumption. Although the matter has scarcely been studied for Germany, something
similar appears to have happened there as well (Blickle 1988, 1992; Gray 2000, 97–104, 111,
174–80, 182–7, 260–70; Meyer 2003, 75–8). It is important to recall, therefore, that an
element of coercion – ideological, market-based and even legislative, rather than ‘feudal’ –
inhered within the ‘industrious revolution’, a factor that de Vries ignores completely
(Kussmaul 1981, 22–3; Snell 1985, 170–4).
It was not just the demand for non-subsistence commodities among labourers that grew in
the eighteenth century, but also, as we have seen, demand for subsistence commodities. Larger
numbers of people were poorer, had less or no access to land and were paid in cash rather
than in kind, as farm service was converted to day labour. These people were thus completely
dependent on the market, and provided both a huge market for cheap subsistence goods as
well as a pool of labour that was compelled by market forces to be cheap, the use of which
would potentially cheaply increase production and productivity (and also enable the expansion
of manufacturing), by which means those subsistence goods could be produced in quantities
large enough for them to be sold at a low price but still obtain profits for the seller
(Wrightson 2002, 317–20; see also Humphries 2013; cf. Allen 2009). These people were also
more ‘industrious’ – as we have seen, labour inputs increased throughout the eighteenth
century; but this was an ‘industriousness’ born out of need rather than desire. The ideology of
‘industriousness’, while perhaps absorbed by some of the labouring classes – those who could
afford to do so – seems to have had less traction among the labouring poor, for whom the
notion of a ‘moral economy’ prevailed over the importance of profit well into the eighteenth
century, when these ideologies came into increasing conflict (Thompson 1971, 1972, 1991;
Snell 1985; Bohstedt 2010; Davis 2012, 410–59; Wrightson 2002, 202–15, 325–30; for
Germany, see Blickle 1992; Warde 2006, 326, 335–7, 350).
It is arguably the combination of both types of non-luxury demand – the demand for
non-subsistence goods on the part of those being ‘industrious’ in de Vries’ sense, and the
demand for subsistence commodities of the larger numbers of the emerging proletariat
(both of whom, in the eighteenth century, grew out of the sub-peasantry that had become
numerically dominant over the previous centuries) – that allowed for the rise of capitalism:
an economic system based on continuous growth, which must include continuous growth
in demand. Initially at least, demand for subsistence commodities was arguably of greater
importance. An increase in the total amount of demand for items needed for subsistence
stimulates growth in production because there is a market for the results of that growth.
The growth in size of the mass market is thus an incentive for production to be geared
even more towards exchange rather than use, and for people to try to increase productivity
because there is a greater possibility of profits resulting from increased productivity. (It is not
a coincidence that significant productivity increases in England – and Germany – roughly
coincide with demographic growth, increasing proletarianization and the expansion of the
mass market.) The growing market is also a prerequisite for sustained growth of the capital-
ist sort: ultimately, the kind of growth we see in the nineteenth century is predicated not
least on a massive expansion of the market in non-luxury subsistence and consumer goods.
Therefore, while an ‘industrious revolution’ – people wanting to consume more, and
working more so that they can increase household incomes in order to consume more –
may well have contributed to economic growth, increasing impoverishment and the loss of
alternative means of providing for subsistence were arguably more significant motors behind
the growth of the mass market and increasing productivity. Thus ‘industriousness’ born of

need, rather than in de Vries’ sense, was probably a more important prerequisite for the
transition to capitalism (Marfany 2012).25
Ultimately, however, even this is an insufficient condition for the sustenance of capitalist
growth: what was needed in addition was an ideological transformation from a ‘moral
economy’ of subsistence to an ideology predicated on the compulsion to make, and constantly
to increase, the profits that may be realized from one’s property (broadly defined). In the long
run, this ideology would need to be coupled with a further change in the mode of consump-
tion, to one that was no longer just market-dependent but also continuously aspirational, with
consumer desires constantly expanding and changing: the consumer society of today. In the
eighteenth century, the creation of non-subsistence desire was still in its nascent stage, and the
ideology of growth and profit was still in conflict with an older, subsistence-based ‘moral
economy’; their complete triumph only dates to the nineteenth century.26
The processes leading to the rise of industrial capitalism were manifold, complex and had
deep historical roots. I have concentrated here on transformations of rural social and eco-
nomic structures – the growth of a sub-peasantry, and from it the creation of a proletariat –
because, although there were certainly other elements involved in the evolution of capitalism,
these were also contingent on the changes in rural socio-economic structures discussed above,
as well as on the final crucial factor without which capitalism could not evolve: a capitalist
ideology, valuing profit, growth, increasing productivity and consumption.27 We have seen
both that the changes in rural society and ideology were present in southern and eastern
Germany as well as in England, and that the chronologies of these developments were
comparable. England’s uniqueness should not be exaggerated; and the development of capital-
ism in Germany was predicated not so much on an imitative process in response to develop-
ments in England (cf. Wood 2002a, 175–6), but rather arose, as in England, out of long-term
endogenous processes that had much in common with English developments. The real transi-
tion to capitalism was, moreover, late in both places; we should be hesitant about seeing a
linear path from the earlier evolution of a mass market and market-dependent classes to the
eventual triumph of capitalism. The economies of England and Germany c.1700 were on
paths towards full market dependence; but these need not necessarily, in either case, have led
to industrialized consumer capitalism, and there was not yet any pervasive compulsion to
create and/or adopt technologies for further growth. Capitalism as it came into being in
25
However, it is also true that how ‘need’ was defined also changed, and thus an increasing part of even
demand for subsistence commodities was met by imports, in particular by the calories provided by so-called
‘drug foods’ (de Vries 2008).
26
In this context, see also the very useful critique of de Vries provided by Alexis Litvine, who points out that
there were changes over time in the (multiple) discourses of industriousness; it was only by the late eighteenth
century that a coherent discourse of the sort de Vries adduces, valuing ‘improvement’ and consumption, really
predominated (Litvine 2014).
27
For reasons of space, the significance of urbanization and institutions cannot be discussed in detail here. It
may be said briefly, however, we should not overestimate the importance of cities. Rates of urbanization alone
are not good predictors of later development: the Mediterranean regions had higher urbanization rates than
north western Europe until at least 1750, and the Netherlands had a higher rate of urbanization than England
and Wales until 1800 (de Vries 1984, 28–40). In addition, there was no equivalent in Germany to the effect of
London on the English countryside, yet rural commercialization appears to have been similar; even for England,
Britnell and Dyer demonstrate that one should not overstate the significance of urban relative to rural demand
(Dyer 1994a, 283–303; Dyer 1995; Britnell 2000, 2–6). Finally, cities needed both the surplus population and the
surplus produce of their rural hinterlands in order to sustain themselves and grow; without rural transformation,
urban development would not have been possible. As for institutions, their importance might have been exag-
gerated: Germany lacked the institutional integration of England, but the nature and chronology of socio-
economic and ideological developments were comparable, including the symbiosis of agricultural and industrial
regions – albeit here, unlike in England, across a national boundary – in southern Germany and Switzerland.

30 Shami Ghosh
England and Germany in the early nineteenth century was perhaps not an inevitable conse-
quence of the way things were by c.1700; but it is equally important that capitalism as it
evolved in Germany (and German capitalism, in 1914 as in 2014, was not identical to its
British counterpart) was not simply a matter of Germany imitating England, but was condi-
tioned by prior developments in Germany and would not have been possible without them.
The period between c.1200 and c.1800 might be seen as a transitional phase, but it might
equally well represent a socio-economic formation that is not only neither really ‘feudal’ nor
‘capitalist’, but also not necessarily a way-station in the middle; before we can fit it into a
broader narrative stretching from feudalism to capitalism, it needs to be understood on its
own terms, leaving aside both any sense of a ‘feudal’ past and a ‘capitalist’ future. Only when
the internal dynamic of this longer period has been better understood can we fully compre-
hend the changes taking place in Europe between c.1750 and c.1900 – and at least partly
because of what happened in Europe, in the rest of the world.
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Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. •• No. ••, •• 2015, pp. ••–••.

Rural Economies and Transitions to Capitalism:

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COMMERCIALIZATION IN A ‘FEUDAL’ SOCIETY, c.1200–c.1400

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DIVERGING FORMS OF PRE-CAPITALIST MARKET DEPENDENCE,

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THE BEGINNINGS OF CAPITALISM? SUBSISTENCE, IDEOLOGY AND THE

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LATE PRE-CAPITALIST SOCIO-ECONOMIC FORMATIONS AND TRANSITIONS

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The socio-economic formation that corresponds best to Brenner’s model of feudalism is

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consumers receded as a priority in favour of promoting the profits of producers (Ormrod

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