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Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 13 No. 2, April 2013, pp. 310–329.

Historical Materialism and Agrarian History

HENRY BERNSTEIN

Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, by Jairus Banaji. Leiden and
Boston: Brill, 2010. Historical Materialism Book Series Volume 25. Pp. xix+406. €101 (hb).
ISBN 978-90-04-18368-1

The collection provides an opportunity to assess Jairus Banaji’s original and provocative
contributions over more than three decades. This review tries to chart a path across the
range of the essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible
disconnections: what constitutes modes of production; modes of production before capitalism
and their histories; and characterizing and periodizing capitalism. Banaji’s emphatic
arguments for long histories/trajectories of commodity production, exchange and accumula-
tion across different times and places, especially in estate agriculture and the circuits of
merchant capital, traverse these three themes.
Keywords: agrarian estates, capitalism, commercial capitalism, materialist history,
modes of production

INTRODUCTION
Jairus Banaji has long been a contributor of original and powerful articles and review essays
to the Journal of Peasant Studies (Banaji 1976a, 1980, 1990, 1995, 1996/7) and to the Journal of
Agrarian Change (Banaji 2002, 2009), as well as co-editing a recent special issue on Aristocrats,
Peasants and the Transformation of Rural Society, c.400–800 (Sarris and Banaji 2009). Readers,
therefore, will welcome this collection of his essays, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deut-
scher Memorial Prize in 2011, awarded annually for ‘a book which exemplifies the best and
most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition’.
Two seminal essays in the book were first published in 1977: ‘Modes of Production in a
Materialist Conception of History’ (Chapter 2) and ‘Capitalist Domination and the Small
Peasantry: The Deccan Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century’ (Chapter 10). In many
respects, the first provides the framing statement of the volume, suggesting the continuity of
its author’s intellectual project. The second was in part a response to influential views that
colonialism established ‘semi-feudalism’ in India or otherwise suppressed the development of
capitalist relations of production. It took the form of a detailed examination of agrarian
change in the late-nineteenth-century Deccan districts, and argued that peasant labour was
subjected to formal subsumption by various forms of capital, both more and less directly, and
hence incorporated in capitalist relations of production.
After these two essays there was a hiatus until Banaji resumed scholarly work in the late
1980s with his study of agrarian change and its location in broader economic processes in late
Roman Egypt (fifth and sixth centuries), the principal terrain of his research as a professional

Henry Bernstein, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Univer-
sity of London, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK. E-mail: hb4@soas.ac.uk

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 Historical Materialism and Agrarian History 311

historian. Early products of that research are reflected in two essays from 1992 and 1997,
respectively: ‘Historical Arguments for a “Logic of Deployment” in “Pre-capitalist” Agricul-
ture’ (Chapter 3) and ‘Agrarian History and the Labour-Organisation of Large Byzantine
Estates’ (Chapter 6).
The other essays, some published here for the first time (Chapters 1, 4, 11 and 12), are
from the past decade: an Introduction to this volume on ‘Themes in Historical Materialism’
(Chapter 1), over half of which is devoted to sketching a theory of tributary modes of
production; ‘Workers before Capitalism’ (Chapter 4), which manifests his interest in the
organization of labour on commercial agricultural estates across different places and times
from late antiquity to the twentieth-century Third World, also evident in Chapter 3; Chapter
7 on ‘Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: What Kind of Transition? (A discussion of
Chris Wickham’s magnum opus)’, and Chapter 8 on ‘Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing
of the Early Middle Ages’, which proposes an alternative to Wickham’s interpretation
(Wickham 2005); and Chapter 11 on ‘Trajectories of Accumulation or “Transitions to Capi-
talism” ‘ (first presented at a Journal of Agrarian Change workshop in 2008). Chapters 5 and 9
are also recent essays, first published in Historical Materialism. Chapter 5 on ‘The Fictions of
Free Labour: Contract, Coercion and so-called Unfree Labour’ restates and develops one of
the central points of the 1977 article on ‘Modes of production . . .’, and Chapter 9 on ‘Islam,
the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism’ provides an explicit and concentrated state-
ment of Banaji’s position that long histories of merchant capital/commercial capitalism are
integral to the development of modern (industrial) capitalism, notably through the formation
of a world market. The final Chapter 12 on ‘Modes of Production: A Synthesis’ (an expanded
version of an entry in Fine et al. 2012) summarizes some of the themes and arguments central
to Banaji’s work from the 1970s.
Listing their titles alone gives some indication of the extraordinary range of these essays,
which present a distinctive, sometimes overwhelming, blend of forceful statements on materi-
alist theory and its proper method, derived from immersion in the work of Marx; extensive
reference to primary sources in Greek and Latin, and to literatures in all the major modern
European languages and more recently Arabic too; cascading juxtapositions of historical illus-
trations from different times and places in a single paragraph; and a sometimes aggressive
polemical edge. That combination of erudition and polemic, together with great intellectual
energy, expresses a passionate commitment to advancing materialist explanations of history in
all its complexities, against intellectual deformations established by Stalinism but extending
beyond it: formalism, abstractionism, evolutionism and the like, associated with tendencies to
teleological reasoning, ‘reading history backwards’, Eurocentrism, disregard of major work by
non-Marxist historians, and insufficient engagement with evidence (pp. 7–8, 52, 61–5, 65–6
and passim).1
I reflect on aspects of Banaji’s work as a general reader long stimulated, provoked, and
sometimes perplexed, by it since the late 1970s, and try to chart a path across the range of
essays as a whole, marked by three themes and their connections and possible disconnections:
what constitutes modes of production; modes of production before capitalism and their
histories; and characterizing and periodizing capitalism. Banaji’s emphatic arguments for long
histories/trajectories of commodity production, exchange and accumulation across different
times and places, especially in estate agriculture and the circuits of merchant capital, traverse
these three themes.

1
Page references without any other citation are to the text of Banaji (2010).

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312 Henry Bernstein

MODE OF PRODUCTION
The 1977 essay distinguished two distinct meanings of mode of production in Marx: Produk-
tionsweise as ‘labour process’ and as ‘epoch of production’. Recurring conflations of the
different ‘levels of abstraction’ of the two appear to represent the single most important
expression (or source?) of the failure to generate ‘a specifically materialist history’ that Banaji
asserts (pp. 46, 275).
‘Mode of production’ attached to the labour process (or immediate process of produc-
tion) and the specific forms of its organization and exploitation of labour is a more limited
concept, whose generalization to characterize historical epochs – ancient society as aristo-
crats + slaves, feudalism as aristocrats + serfs, capitalism as capitalists + wage-labourers
(Banaji 2001, 217) – is the source of many errors and problems. Labour process, in fact,
is properly investigated through the ‘enterprise’ as the basic cell or unit of production
(p. 59) rather than being abstracted to give the mode of production in its second fuller
meaning.
In that second meaning, Marx used ‘modes of production’ to refer to
. . . forms of domination and control of labour bound up with a wider set of class-
relations expressive of them and of the social functions implied in them. He saw
these general ‘forms’ and the class-divisions grounded in them as ‘historically created’,
that is, specific to the period they belonged to, yet capable of subsuming often much
earlier forms as an intrinsic part of their own (form of) development . . . Marx
also believed that these general configurations (‘totalities of production relations’)
were defined by an inherent dynamic that worked itself out in the eventual dis-
solution of existing relations. How this happened, or could happen, was, of course,
best described in his description of capitalism and its general ‘laws of motion’.
(p. 1)
In effect, how Capital is read and deployed is key to analysing the emergence and devel-
opment of capitalism, and by extension of other (prior) modes of production. This is elabo-
rated in various ways. First, Banaji emphasizes the necessity of all three volumes of Capital
to any adequate theorization of the laws of motion of capitalism, beyond the focus of
Volume 1 on the immediate process of production and the individual capitalist enterprise.
This is necessary to establish, inter alia, ‘the level of the social totality of enterprises’ (pp.
59–60). Capitalist relations of production cannot be read from any specific form of the
immediate process of production, specific form of exploitation or type of enterprise, but are
constituted by the laws of motion of the mode of production as a whole: ‘the immediate
process of production can be structured in all sorts of ways, even under capitalism’ (p. 4).
More generally:
Relations of production are simply not reducible to forms of exploitation, both because
modes of production embrace a wider range of relationships than those in their imme-
diate process of production and because the deployment of labour, the organisation and
control of the labour-process, ‘correlates’ with historical relations of production in
complex ways. (p. 41)
Second, Banaji criticizes those who take the analysis of merchant capital in the (developed)
capitalist mode of production theorized by Marx – that is, with subordinate or secondary
functions in the overall circulation and distribution of value – to apply it retrospectively to
the early and crucial (preindustrial) histories of capitalism, which consequently they fail to

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recognize as capitalist,2 hence ubiquitous (and indeed residual) notions of the ‘pre-capitalist’.
Here the pivotal idea, reinstating the historic importance of merchant capital, is (preindustrial)
‘commercial capitalism’ (pp. 255–8 and passim).
Third, for Banaji wage labour is initially, in both a theoretical and a historical sense, a
simple abstraction or simple category; that is, common to several modes of production. It thus
long predates capitalism, in which it assumes its centrality as an effect/function of the laws of
motion of capital. In capitalism, wage labour is essentially ‘capital-positing, capital-producing
labour’ (p. 54),3 with two further arguments attached. One: that it need not take the form of
‘free’ wage labour but has also existed in the epoch of capital in, for example, New World
slavery (pp. 10–11, 43, 67–71, 144, 351–3) and the relations of production of the nineteenth-
century Deccan peasantry (Chapter 10), both of which therefore should be regarded as
capitalist. Two:
Under capitalism, all workers are subject to some form and degree of domination and it
is profoundly misleading to forge categories like ‘unfree labour’ in some diffuse sense
that implies the construction of free labour as its alleged opposite, thus undermining the
basis of Marx’s critique of wage-labour and its legal mystification. (p. 15)
In more recent essays, Banaji has developed his analyses of the second and third motifs in
particular – merchant capital/‘commercial capitalism’ and forms of labour regimes, labour
processes and exploitation, especially on agrarian estates – as integral elements of his work as
a professional historian of late antiquity and in relation to much contested issues of the
emergence and development of capitalism.4

MODES OF PRODUCTION BEFORE CAPITALISM

Slavery
This can be disposed of briefly; indeed, even the index entry builds in a question mark thus:
‘slave mode of production?’ (p. 404). Banaji draws on Marx to distinguish ancient slavery and
‘modern plantation-slavery‘ as a particular form of capitalist production (pp. 67–71, 351–3).
On the former, he notes that ‘slavery was widespread and entrenched in the post-Roman
West’, and asks rhetorically ‘does the persistence or revival of slavery mean that a slave mode of
production dominated the class-relationships of this period?’ (p. 181). On the latter, he registers
his agreement with Patterson’s view (1979) of the ‘essentially capitalistic nature’ of modern
slave plantations, and that ‘no such thing as a slave mode of production exists’ (p. 10).5

Feudalism
Banaji notes the complexities and disputes attached to characterizing and periodizing feudal-
ism, which continue to exercise both Marxist and non-Marxist historians. Perhaps because of
those disputes and the uncertainties they express, he appears reluctant more recently to use
the term ‘feudal mode of production’.

2
Maurice Dobb is used as an exemplar of this pervasive problem (pp. 55, 88, 256–7).
3
Quoting Marx (1973, 463).
4
Surprisingly, there is almost no overt reference in Banaji’s essays to class struggle as a dynamic of change,
especially class struggle ‘from below’.
5
The final (‘Synthesis’) essay, however, states that ‘there clearly was a transition from slavery to feudalism’ in
Western Europe and then asks ‘how or at what level do we grasp that?’ (pp. 353–4), a question that remains
unanswered.

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314 Henry Bernstein

His discussions of feudalism are located principally within European history ‘from 300 to
800, grosso modo’ (p. 181), slightly extending the period covered by Wickham’s magnum opus,
and before ‘a fully articulated feudal economy . . . emerged in the central or even later middle
ages’ (p. 183). In short, this is the much contested terrain of any ‘transition’ to feudalism. It is
impossible to summarize his dense and rich interpretations, from which I only select several
themes and issues of broader significance in the framework of the essays as a whole.
Central to his analysis of the period 300–800 is the (changing) nature of agricultural estates
and a strong argument that effectively landless ‘servile labour . . . formed the backbone of
élite-agriculture down to the feudal reaction of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and the
imposition of serfdom’ (p. 237); a ‘substantial part of the rural labour-force of the sixth to
eighth, or even ninth, centuries . . . were more proletarian than peasant-like’ (p. 200). Banaji thus
rejects ‘the half-baked conception of late antiquity as a precursor of feudalism’ (p. 182) and
contests Wickham’s thesis of the emergence of a largely independent peasantry as the princi-
pal form of rural labour in this period (p. 236).
In feudalism, the ‘consumption-requirements of the nobility’, and satisfying those require-
ments from the exploitation of peasant labour, were the motor force. It drew ‘both lord and
peasant into production for the market’ (p. 75) from two distinctive forms of enterprise: (i)
estates with little demesne and hence based in ‘small peasant production’ – importantly,
allowing for peasant differentiation – and with ‘the rate of feudal exploitation [via rent, HB]
. . . not immediately evident in the ratio of the two arables’; and (ii) ‘the more developed
form’ (p. 74) of demesne cultivation in which the ‘peasant-holding was a “subsistence plot” or
“wage in kind” ‘ (Lenin’s formulation), and hence the ‘distribution of the peasants’ necessary
and surplus labour-time would tend to coincide directly with the distribution of arable’
(pp. 73–4).
Banaji problematizes the relation of these two forms of feudal estate production in order to
undermine any simple polarity between them (e.g. p. 157), and to examine historical shifts
that did not follow any ‘evolutionary’ progression of forms of rent and labour (labour-service,
rent-in-kind, money-rent, wage labour; pp. 106–7), and indeed were often shaped by ‘broader
economic factors’. Thus it was only when ‘a world-market was already in process of forma-
tion’ that the ‘second serfdom’ of Eastern Europe generated ‘commodity feudalism as the pure
form’: the ‘primitiveness and barbarity of [its] . . . social relations were an expression of the
maturity of feudal relations of production, of their relative purity’ – in pointed contrast to the
high Middle Ages of western Europe (say the thirteenth century) as the site of ostensibly
‘classic’ feudalism, but where the dominance of demesne production worked with serf labour
occurred ‘only sporadically; and then only rarely in its pure form’ (pp. 82–3).
Banaji also injects feudalism into the process of formation of a world market, first at the
‘level’ of laws of motion/historical epoch:
To put the argument in its crudest form: the initial impulse which sustained the vast
network of world commodity-exchanges before the eighteenth century derived from
the expanding consumption-requirements of the lords. Moreover, at its inception the
colonisation of Latin America was a feudal colonisation, a response to the crisis of feudal
profitability which all the landowning classes of Europe were facing down to the latter
part of the sixteenth century. (p. 93)
Second, at the ‘level’ of enterprises/labour processes, Banaji distinguishes two distinct forms of
European colonial enterprises from the sixteenth century onwards. One was feudal, character-
istic of Latin America and South-East Asia: ‘estates . . . which, in their external attributes [my
emphasis], resembled capitalist enterprises’ as they produced commodities for national and

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international markets. The other, characteristic of ‘the West Indies, most of Africa and large
sectors of Asia’ was ‘capitalist firms operating mainly through archaic (“precapitalist”) modes
of labour-organisation’ (p. 62; also pp. 94–101 on peasantry, to which I return).6 This encap-
sulates and reverses the positions of the Frank–Laclau debate: contra Frank (1969), colonial
commercial estates that were (initially) feudal, not capitalist; contra Laclau (1971), forms of
colonial enterprise that were capitalist, not ‘pre-capitalist’, even though based in ‘coercive
forms of exploitation’ (pp. 62–3).
However briefly summarized, these connected examples – of the second serfdom as the
‘pure’ form of feudalism, its timing, and the distinction between feudal and capitalist colonial
enterprises – convey something of Banaji’s distinctive approach. They also start to overflow
the usual boundaries of histories of pre-capitalist formations and of the emergence and
development of capitalism – a central intent of his project, in effect. I come back to this later,
after noting Banaji’s more recent interest in the theory of a tributary mode of production and
his notion of a ‘peasant mode of production’.

The Tributary Mode of Production

A ‘recast version of the tributary mode . . . can help resolve the problem of the Asiatic mode
of production, both vindicating Marx’s sense of history’s peculiarities and superseding his own
obsolete model’ (p. 356). In the tributary mode of production, ‘the state controls both the
means of production and the ruling class, and has “unlimited disposal over the total surplus labour
of the population” ‘ (p. 23).7 State control of the ruling class departs from discussions of the
state in capitalism typical of Marxism. The
tributary mode . . . involved both the control of peasant-labour by the state (the state
apparatus as the chief instrument of exploitation) and the drive to forge a unified
imperial service based on the subordination of the ruling class to the will of the ruler
. . . The autocratic centralism of the tributary mode and its backbone in the recruitment
of a pliant nobility were not just ‘political superstructures’ to some self-contained eco-
nomic base; they were essential moments of the structuring and organisation of the
economy (of the relations of production). (pp. 23–4)
Discussion of the tributary mode is prominent in Chapter 1 (pp. 15–40; see also pp. 354–6),
which sketches some of its different historical configurations: in Byzantium, China8 and
Russia, the one tributary regime with widespread serfdom; and in India, with its exceptional
juxtaposition of a service-élite with powerful regional aristocracies (pp. 25–37). The proposal
for a tributary mode of production and its elaboration stem from the extension – both
analytically and geographically – of Banaji’s research on late antiquity. It represents a signifi-
cant attempt to reconsider a long tradition of contrasting the differentia specifica of agrarian
civilizations of West and East in which, of course, the nature and role of the state has been a
central theme and to which Marx’s contribution centred on the discredited ‘Asiatic mode’.

6
West Indies slave plantations were ‘commodity-producing enterprises characterised by speculative investments
. . . in the production of absolute surplus-value on the basis of landed property . . . Accumulation in this form of
speculative capitalist enterprise asserted itself only in the long run, as a relatively slow and mainly sporadic
tendency dominated by feudal modes of consumption.’ (pp. 69–70) ‘[M]ost of Africa and large sectors of Asia’
refers to the formal subsumption of peasant labour to capital through prevailing labour processes as the basis of
household reproduction.’
7
Quoting Bahro (1978).
8
China appears a candidate for its own transition to feudalism in the 1977 essay (p. 86), but later is included
among tributary modes of production.

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316 Henry Bernstein

Contra Haldon (1993; see also Berktay 1987), Banaji thus aims to (re-)establish ‘a Marxist
characterisation of ‘ “Asiatic” regimes’ (p. 15) within the framework of tributary modes of
production versus feudalism.

A Peasant Mode of Production?

Finally, the ‘peasant mode of production’ is a very different object that featured strongly in
both the seminal essays of 1977: on modes of production in which it provides the last section
(pp. 94–101), and on the late-nineteenth-century Deccan districts, in a compelling analysis of
the formal subsumption of peasant labour by capital (Chapter 10):
The historical roots of all varied forms of simple-commodity production lie in the
patriarchal-subsistence mode of production based on small-scale parcellised property and
the exploitation of family labour. (p. 94)
. . . As a pure form, simple-commodity production is a form of economy of a purely
subordinate and transitional character . . . (p. 95)
Some comments on this follow. First, notions of a ‘peasant mode of production’ are associated
with Aleksandr Chayanov (1888–1937), the great Russian agricultural economist (and popu-
list) and his followers rather than with the materialist tradition.9 Second, the designation
‘mode of production’ in this case surely refers to the more limited sense of Produktionsweise as
‘labour process’, and hence cannot designate an ‘epoch of production’. Third, it seems thus to
be a ‘simple category’, common to different modes of production qua historical epochs,
signalled by its ‘purely subordinate and transitional’ character. Fourth, I am confused by the
observation that ‘Feudal economies of a purer type have always presupposed . . . “the primacy
of peasant economy” ’ (p. 157), when an opposite conclusion is implied by Banaji’s descrip-
tion of the estates of the second serfdom, based in servile labour service, as the ‘pure form’ of
‘commodity feudalism’ (above). Fifth, his principal concern is to investigate and explicate how
peasant production is integrated in capitalism to arrive at the conclusion of the ‘simple-
commodity producer as wage-slave’ (p. 95), the (formal) ‘subordination of [peasant] labour to
capital’ (p. 277). This belongs then to Banaji on capitalism, which I consider further below.10

CHARACTERIZING AND PERIODIZING CAPITALISM

Banaji’s keen interest in capital and labour before (modern) capitalism is evident in his many
illustrations of merchant and money capital, including their role in mining and manufactur-
ing, and of agrarian commercial estates and their organization. Chapter 4, on ‘Workers before
Capitalism’, concludes

9
In particular, Chayanov (1966). Banaji (1976b) proposed a ‘synthesis’ of Chayanov, Kautsky and Lenin
on peasant economy that he later seems to have discarded.
10
In this volume, Banaji has little to say about peasant class differentiation – that classic Leninist preoccupation
– with the exception of a section of Chapter 10 on the late-nineteenth-century Deccan districts (pp. 317–23).
While lack of attention to or denial of differentiation is associated with, in some instances entailed by, notions of
a peasant mode of production, I suspect that here it is due more to Banaji’s concern with the sources of labour
supply, including by ‘peasants’, to commercial estates from late antiquity to colonial capitalism, on which more
below. Elsewhere, he has written powerfully about peasant differentiation in India in the colonial period (Banaji
2002) and today (Banaji 1990).

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. . . by late antiquity, both wage labour and capital (the basic elements of the capitalist
mode of production) were fully formed but . . . their conjunction was much less
obvious. It took another five centuries before something like a capitalist system began to
emerge in the Mediterranean. (p. 130)
What does ‘conjunction’ mean here? Does it mean that while wage labour and capital long
predated capitalism as ‘simple categories’, what ‘conjoins’ them uniquely in capitalism is the
operation of the laws of motion of the capitalist mode? The emergence of those laws of
motion then becomes the central issue, and one that remains elusive.

The Agrarian Estate

Chapter 3 proposes a ‘logic of deployment’ of labour in commercial agrarian estates – that is,
a form of (commodity) enterprise, and hence a ‘mode of production’ in the narrow sense – that
is found in different historical epochs, and hence different ‘modes of production’ in the broad
sense.11 On the management of labour in large commercial estates, Banaji concludes that
. . . behind the apparent determinisms of economic life, the inflexible evolution of
whole forms of economy, were countless concrete decisions about the use of labour (p.
108) . . . against the classical vision of agriculture fluctuating violently between modes
of production, I have repeatedly assumed that the evolution of the categories of labour
reflects decisions on employment . . . [that] express a ‘rationality’ which is common to
different historical periods. (p. 116)
Just as the social relations of production in any given mode cannot be reduced to a single
(definitive) form of labour process and exploitation, the obverse is also true: similar forms of
enterprise/labour process/exploitation can exist in different historical epochs and conditions.
Moreover, Banaji’s specific interest here is the long existence of widespread (rural) wage
labour in forms of economy conventionally classified as ‘precapitalist’ (as signalled in the title
of Chapter 3). Several instances have been noted so far: the (European) rural labour force of
the sixth to eighth centuries as ‘more proletarian than peasant-like’, the peasant holding in feudal
demesne production as a ‘wage in kind’. Here, Banaji observes that
Large reserves of free labour were available to employers in the ancient Mediterranean
. . . Roman employers . . . [behaved] exactly as employers tend to behave – adapting the
use of their labour to their requirements and to the conditions of the local labour-
market. (pp. 105–6)
Similarly, Chapter 6 asks who and what was a ‘peasant’ in the context of Byzantine large
estates in late antique Egypt? The answer is an argument for the widespread existence and
long-term expansion of permanent wage labour deployed by the estates, which is further
‘correlated’ with evidence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt to suggest their ‘fun-
damentally similar’ organization.12 Banaji concludes that the large estates of the sixth century
were ‘in some sense . . . a curious prefiguration of something intrinsically modern’ in late-
nineteenth-century Egypt (p. 178).

11
Chapter 6 makes explicit that it is ‘not intended to characterise the agrarian economy as a whole but only
the organisation of aristocratic estates’ in Byzantium (p. 168).
12
Also, ‘permanent labour was the structural basis of large-estate agriculture in numerous and diverse historical
settings until the agrarian restructuring of the late nineteenth century and the massive casualisation of rural labour-
markets’ (p. 162; my emphasis and see section following).

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318 Henry Bernstein

Do such parallels (and prefigurations), for all their interest, tell us anything more about the
contributions of older, sometimes ancient, forms of commercial agriculture to the emergence
and generalization of capitalism qua historical epoch/mode of production? Or, put somewhat
differently, if ‘fundamentally similar’ forms of enterprise (and labour organization) can exist
in different historical epochs, how do we know whether their earlier appearances provide
mechanisms or ‘drivers’ of transition to subsequent epochs/modes of production?

Agriculture and the Development of Capitalism

The short response is that these questions are not answered by Banaji. Chapter 6 concludes
thus:
Agriculture was history’s first theatre of capitalism, but because our notions of the latter
have been irreducibly shaped by modern large-scale industry, and the profound analysis
that Marx developed in Capital, we only seem to be able to grasp the history of agrarian
capitalism through a sort of palimpsest. (pp. 178–9)
Clearly, Banaji’s analyses of the large commercial etates of late antiquity help to illuminate this
observation, as do his warning against any notion of a single and ‘pure’ agrarian capitalism (p.
335), and his elaboration of the variables that later shaped different and ‘hybrid’ forms of
agrarian capitalism, including the uses of coerced labour throughout the nineteenth century
(p. 346). They do not, however, indicate answers to the questions posed above. When we
fast-forward historically, so to speak, the late nineteenth century ‘was the watershed of agrar-
ian capitalism, the first age of discernibly modern forms of agriculture and their rapid
evolution’ (p. 333). Argentina, Italy (Ferrara), the specialized intensive horticulture of Califor-
nia in the 1880s and 1890s, and the restructuring of sugar production in late-nineteenth-
century Cuba, were among
the most advanced forms of capitalist agriculture c. 1900, heavily capitalised enterprises
owned by the biggest landowners, and by banks and companies, that used substantial
volumes of migrant-labour or even dispensed with labour to a very large degree.
(p. 334)13
Banaji’s position on the ‘hybridity’ of forms of capitalist agriculture is convincing, and the
illustrations of his argument concerning large commercial estates of the sixteenth to nine-
teenth centuries (pp. 162–4, 170, 178, 337–46) are most fruitful. I agree too with his des-
ignation of the late nineteenth century as ‘the watershed of agrarian capitalism’, but this
bears some elaboration beyond Banaji’s focus on the ‘rapid evolution’ of the form of the
‘discernibly modern’ capitalist agricultural enterprise and its labour regimes.14 First is a dis-
tinction between farming (and farming enterprises) and agriculture established by ‘modern’
(industrial) capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. By ‘agriculture’ or ‘the
agricultural sector’ in modern capitalist economies, I mean farming together with all those
economic interests, and their specialized institutions and activities, ‘upstream’ and ‘down-
stream’ of farming that affect the activities and reproduction of farmers. ‘Upstream’ of
farming refers to how the conditions of production are secured before farming itself can

13
When he further points out that ‘the agricultural watershed of the late nineteenth century had been
preceded by more sporadic and gradual histories of capitalism in the countryide’, the examples are from
Prussia, southern Italy and Tuscany during ‘most of the nineteenth century’ (pp. 334–5), not from (much)
earlier ‘prefigurations’of large farm enterprises; see also Chapter 11 passim.
14
Here, I draw on Bernstein (2010) and various papers that preceded and followed it (e.g. Bernstein 2012).

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begin, including the supply of instruments of labour or ‘inputs’ – tools, fertilizers, seeds – as
well as markets for land, labour and credit. ‘Downstream’ of farming refers to what happens
to crops and animals when they leave the farm – their marketing, processing and distribu-
tion – and how those activities affect farmers’ incomes, necessary to reproduce themselves.
Powerful agents upstream and downstream of farming in capitalist agriculture today are
exemplified by ‘agri-input’ capital and ‘agro-food’ capital respectively, in the terms used by
Weis (2007).
Agriculture in this sense was not given immediately by the origins of capitalism but, rather,
emerged in the subsequent course of the development of capitalism on a world scale. I suggest
that a systemic shift from farming to agriculture consolidated from the 1870s. Its markers include: (i)
the emergence of the ‘second industrial revolution’, based in steel, chemicals, electricity and
petroleum (the first was based in iron, coal and steam power), which vastly accelerated the
development of the productive forces in farming, as well as in food processing, storage,
transport and so on; (ii) the first international food regime (IFR) from 1870 to 1914, based in
wheat: ‘the first price-governed [international] market in an essential means of life’ (Fried-
mann 2004, 125); and (iii) the sources of supply of the first IFR in vast frontiers of mostly
virgin land, sparsely populated and little cultivated previously – in Argentina, Australia, Canada
and the United States (USA) – now dedicated to specialized production of ‘essential means of
life’ for export to a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing Europe. In this conjuncture,
Chicago and its agrarian hinterland became the key locus of emergent agribusiness and its
institutional innovations, both upstream and downstream of farming; for example, futures
markets (Cronon 1991).
A global division of labour in agricultural production and trade emerged from the 1870s,
comprising:
(i) new zones of grain and meat production in the ‘neo-Europes’ (Crosby 1986) established
by settler colonialism in the temperate Americas, as well as parts of Southern Africa,
Australia and New Zealand;
(ii) more diversified patterns of farming in parts of Europe itself (together with accelerating
rural out-migration, not least to the Americas); and
(iii) specialization in tropical export crops in colonial Asia and Africa and the tropical zones
of the former colonies of Central and South America (whether grown on peasant or
capitalist farms or industrial plantations).15
Thus while debate of agrarian transitions from feudalism to capitalism (see further below)
is rooted in the historical experiences of ‘old’ Europe (England, France, Germany, the Low
Countries) from the late medieval/early modern periods onwards, and was then extended to
other countries and regions such as late-nineteenth-century Russia and India following inde-
pendence, the formation of modern capitalist agriculture is rooted in developments in the
world economy from the last third of the nineteenth century, intimately linked with the

15
Adapted from Friedmann and McMichael (1989). The new ‘industrial plantation’ of this period provides a
tropical and colonial counterpart to the shift from farming to agriculture pioneered by the American Mid-West.
What distinguished the ‘industrial plantation’ from earlier forms of plantation (typically worked with slaves and
other forms of coerced labour) was the connections between its organization and methods of production, its
ownership structures, and its close linkages with finance capital, shipping, industrial processing and manufacturing
– aspects of a ‘worldwide shift towards agribusiness in the late nineteenth century’ remarked by Stoler (1985, 17)
in her study of plantations in Sumatra and which connects closely with Banaji’s ‘watershed’. Like the prairies of
the ‘temperate grain–livestock complex’, many zones of industrial plantation production were also new agricul-
tural frontiers, in this case established by clearing vast areas of tropical forest.

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dominance of industrial capitalism, as proposed here. Jairus Banaji would no doubt agree,16
but modern capitalist industrialization is a strategic lacuna in his essays, as I will try to show
next. Further, if his proposal of ‘trajectories of accumulation’ of commercial agricultural estates
does not meet the standard of explanation claimed by other materialist accounts of ‘transi-
tions’ to capitalism, of which he is sceptical (or dismissive), then this leaves his arguments
about merchant capital as the principal, or sole, candidate to explain the emergence of
capitalism.

Capitalism as World Market and Merchant Capital

Banaji explores the histories of merchant capital, liberated from its secondary and derivative
function in the developed (industrial) capitalist mode of production, which is anachronistic
when applied to earlier periods and dynamics:
[T]he contrast between capitalism as a ‘commercial system’ and capitalism as a ‘mode of
production” is schematic and overstated, and a major reason why Marxists have paid so
little attention to merchant-capital. (p. 273)
. . . we need a model of commercial capitalism that allows for the reintegration of
production and circulation. (p. 257).
This is pursued in two ways. The first is to provide a wealth of illustrations from ‘numerous
and diverse historical settings’ of merchant capital integrating production and circulation (or,
better, circulation and production?) within phases of dynamic expansion of trade and money,
not least in tributary modes of production: ‘class-régimes characterised, in their developed
forms, by a powerful monetary economy and considerable economic dynamism’ (p. 37).
Does this amount to ‘commercial capitalism’? Were the historical epochs of the East
characterized by tensions between the laws of motion of tributary modes and an emergent
capitalism?17 Does the fact that tributary modes did not evolve further towards ‘modern’
capitalism imply the old thesis of civilizational differences of West and East: that there was
something about feudalism that facilitated the development of capitalism and something about
tributary (‘Asiatic’) modes that inhibited that development? Or was the latter a result of
Western imperialism and its impact on the East, cutting off possibilities of indigenous transi-
tions to capitalism?18
It is not clear whether Banaji believes that ‘commercial capitalism’ did exist in tributary
modes of production or in late antiquity, as distinct from, and more than, variously designated
capitalist ‘elements’, ‘sectors’, ‘tendencies’ and so on, combined (‘articulated’?) with pre-

16
For example, ‘. . . what the world-economy of the nineteenth century threw up was an articulation of forms
of capitalism more than a combination of modes of production, in other words, economic changes driven by the
gigantic expansion of industry [my emphasis] and the rapid growth of demand for cotton, tobacco, silk, indigo, and
so on. The gravitational pull of European and American industry [my emphasis] wrought changes in the distant
countrysides they drew on through local trajectories of accumulation and dispossession’ (pp. 359–60).
17
Some clues are provided, for example, on India: ‘If the eighteenth century saw the final dissolution of central
power behind the façade of autocracy, this was due not to stagnation but to the forces of economic expansion
unleashed by tributary regimes themselves from longer cycles of demographic and commercial growth to the
evolution of indigenous networks of commercial capitalism dominated by commercial classes at every level
starting with the great banking houses’ (p. 37), while ‘Much of the political economy of [medieval] Islam might
be seen as an unstable equilibrium between the fiscal supremacism of the state and the capitalist tendencies of
members of the elite . . .’ (p. 240).
18
This is a common Third Worldist position. The official line in Chinese historiography posits the impact of
imperialism on the mounting ‘internal contradictions’ of China’s (‘feudal’) society by the late eighteenth century.

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capitalist laws of motion/relations of production. For example, ‘We can posit a more broad-
based “capitalistic sector” in Rome almost as much as we can in Islam’ (p. 129, note 54); ‘a
type of Roman industrial slavery’ (p. 188) that, together with its agrarian equivalents, might
sensibly be termed ‘slave-capitalism’ (p. 189); ‘the capitalist tendencies of members of the
[medieval Islamic] élite’ (p. 240); and so on. However, one can infer that Banaji would reject
the notion of civilizational differences between West and East, or of the intrinsic qualities of
feudalism and tributary modes of production, to explain the emergence of capitalism from the
former and not the latter. Rather, his explanation seems to centre on how commercial
capitalism in the West, itself shaped by significant borrowings from Islamic societies (and
indeed legacies of late antiquity), generated a world market.
This process unfolded from ‘at least the late twelfth century to the late eighteenth’, Marx’s
‘initial stages’ of the emergence of capitalism (p. 357). There were three principal phases
within this long period. First, the twelfth century saw the beginning of ‘something like a
capitalist system’ (p. 130, my emphasis), and the twelfth to fifteenth centuries ‘the growth of
capitalism in Europe’. This was a ‘Mediterranean’ [merchant] capitalism’ centred in northern
Italy (pp. 257–8) – and hence connected with the trajectories of feudalism? – which absorbed
and adapted methods of commercial organization from the great Arab trade empire, resting on
a tributary mode of production:
Islam made a powerful contribution to the growth of capitalism in the Mediterranean, in part
because it preserved and expanded the monetary economy of late antiquity and inno-
vated business techniques that became the staple of Mediterranean commerce (p. 267).19
[The] ‘forms’ thrown up by the early capitalism of the Mediterranean were essentially
those that continued to drive global history down to the expansion of large-scale industry
and the revolutionary mode of production in the nineteenth century. (pp. 43–4)
My question here, following from those above, is whether ‘the growth of capitalism in the
Mediterranean’ from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries was essentially different to the
economic dynamics that characterized contemporary (and later) tributary modes of produc-
tion to the East.
This question is highlighted by the description of the second phase – the formation of a
world market in the fifteenth century, marked by the shift from the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic – as ‘the true watershed’ (p. 358). Banaji quotes approvingly the historian Veiga-
Simões (1932), who says that ‘the whole of the new commercial life and even the capitalist
system stem fundamentally from Portuguese economic policy at the end of the 14th and
beginning of the 15th centuries’, especially following the ‘political victory of the [Portuguese]
bourgeoisie in 1440’ (p. 253). This is one instance among many of the highly conjunctural
within the broad scope of Banaji’s account of the emergence of capitalism – and one at odds
with his view, quoted earlier, of the initially ‘feudal colonisation’ of Latin America?
Third, and following the Portuguese ‘opening’ of the Atlantic economy, the sixteenth to
eighteenth centuries were characterized by the overseas ‘company capitalism’ of the British
and Dutch that ‘embodied the new kind of (commercial) capitalism’, and its logic of accumu-
lation ‘in its pure forms’ (p. 270), above all through ‘the advance system’ (p. 276), as well as
generating its intense competition. This adds a further element to the centrality of merchant

19
Note also that ‘The legacies of late antiquity were retrieved in different ways by Islam and the Italian city
republics, and the dynamics of European capitalism are incomprehensible without some attempt to understand
those totalisations’ (p. 254).

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capital in integrating circulation and production: ‘The stronger the competition of commercial
capitals, the greater is the compulsion on individual capitals to seek some measure of control over
production’ (p. 271).
Thereafter, ‘large-scale industry and the revolutionary [capitalist] mode of production’ is
presented as a shift from the ‘company capitalism’ of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to
corporate capitalism: ‘The institutional framework of industrial capitalism only emerged
towards the end of the nineteenth century with the so-called “corporate revolution” ’, a
change described primarily in legal terms (p. 258).

Characterizing and Periodizing Capitalism: Some Issues

Clearly, so much hinges on the distinctions and connections between the long histories of
merchant capital/commercial capitalism and the much shorter and accelerated period of devel-
oped capitalism. While Banaji insists that ‘modern’ capitalism is ‘only a historically developed
form of capitalism in the more general sense’ (p. 358, my emphasis), the 1977 essay on ‘Modes
of Production . . .’ lists more central and recognizable features of the laws of motion of the
developed, industrial or ‘modern’ capitalist mode of production, which comprise and connect
the production and accumulation of surplus value, the revolutionisation of the labour
process, the production of relative surplus-value on the basis of a capitalistically-
constituted labour-process, the compulsion to increase the productivity of labour, etc.
(p. 60)
On one hand, the production and accumulation of surplus value within modern capitalism
can take ‘backward’ forms based in ‘coercive forms of exploitation’; that is, through formal
subsumption of labour and absolute surplus value, the modalities and significance of which
Banaji’s work has done so much to illuminate. On the other, it is only in ‘modern’ capitalism
that the production and accumulation of surplus value through the real subsumption of labour
and relative surplus value (pp. 280–1) generates the systemic development of the productive
forces. That development of the productive forces, and what drives it, is absolutely central to
the uniquely world-historical character of ‘modern’ capitalism and how it forges its global
reach. It does not, and could not, feature in the many instances of merchant capital/
commercial capitalism that Banaji provides.20
Again, and connected, while Banaji argues forcefully throughout these essays against the
notion of ‘free’ wage labour as a precondition or definitive feature of ‘capitalism in the more
general sense’, this is ‘not to deny the centrality of “free labour” to the accumulation of capital
in the modern economy (modern forms of capitalism)’ (p. 128). The statement in Chapter 1
that ‘the self-expansion of value is intrinsically indifferent to the forms in which it dominates
labour’ (p. 12), is later qualified by the question
whether we can sensibly visualise the accumulation of capital being founded on unfree
labour (in the strict sense just noted) at the level of the expansion of the total social

20
This is not to deny important developments of the productive forces before (modern) capitalism, especially
since the Neolithic Revolution, a concept established by the brilliant Marxist archaeologist Gordon Childe
(1936). However, developments in technical culture and productive capacity in commercial capitalism were
‘sporadic’, to borrow one of Banaji’s terms (see note 6 above), rather than systemic and hence more rapid. The
increasing dominance of industrial capitalism from the nineteenth century registered an ‘acceleration of history’
on which Banaji does not comment.

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capital. And the obvious response is, no, since the mobility of labour is essential to the
mechanism of capital at this level . . . [while] individual capitals are indifferent to the
nature of the labour force . . . (pp. 140–1)
Even the highly fluid boundaries that he recommends between the ostensibly ‘pre-capitalist’
and the capitalist – or between commercial and ‘modern’ capitalism – sometimes seem to
dissolve altogether, to the detriment of his incisive contributions on diverse forms of wage
labour in capitalism, including ‘unfree’ (coerced) estate labour in Latin America and South
Africa as well as in plantation slavery and in peasant production in the nineteenth-century
Deccan districts and colonial Africa. In short, while knowledge of prior historical forms of
organization of labour processes and labour regimes informs the apparently ‘pre-capitalist’
‘external attributes’ of colonial capitalist enterprises,21 Banaji’s central argument about the
latter, expressed so powerfully in the two essays of 1977 – that their capitalist character
derives from their subjection to the laws of motion of capitalism, at the level of the total
social capital – is more convincing for the period of ‘modern’ (industrial) capitalism, in
effect, rather than stretching from the inception of a world market constituted by commer-
cial capitalism.22
There is no suggestion at all in these essays why industrial capitalism first emerged when
and where it did, how and why; moreover, Banaji’s references to its timing require some
further probing. Most important is the question of whether the ‘watershed’ (a term he uses
for key historical moments or turning points) of the modern or developed (‘revolutionary’)
capitalist mode of production is to be located in the nineteenth century, and a fortiori the
late nineteenth century and the emergence of ‘corporate capitalism’ (above); that is, the
moment of Lenin’s Imperialism. In effect, a great deal of history is ‘missing’ in his schema of
a shift from ‘company capitalism’ as the last phase of commercial capitalism and the world
market it created, especially given long-standing debates among economic historians about
the ‘first industrial revolution’ and what produced it, a ‘watershed’ conventionally located in
the mid-eighteenth century, whether in England or in a somewhat larger zone of north-
west Europe.23

BACK TO THE BEGINNING . . .

Schematically, there are two approaches in Marxist and marxisant debate of the origin of
capitalism. One locates it in the emergence of a ‘world system’ from the fifteenth or sixteenth
centuries, as argued, among others, by Gunder Frank (1969), Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989)
and Arrighi (1994).24 Evidently, this is the approach Banaji identifies with, but he comments

21
For example, forms of peasant production.
22
Also note that Banaji’s interpretation of Marx on plantation slavery – ‘the American slave-owners are
capitalists because they are part of the total social capital’ (p. 143) – refers to Marx’s observations about the
contemporary USA; that is, in the period of industrial capitalism. Is it equally viable to talk of a ‘total social capital’
of the (mercantile) world economy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that incorporated the slave
plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil at that time?
23 There is a broadly Smithian current that locates the divergence of modern West and East principally from

the onset of the industrial revolution in Europe; for example, Goody (2004) and the different accounts of
eighteenth-century China by Pomeranz (2000) and Arrighi (2007). One wonders if Banaji would have some
sympathy with this position.
24 For Wallerstein, the ‘long sixteenth century’ (1450–1640) established a ‘European world-economy based upon

the capitalist mode of production’ (1974, 67).

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only on the problem of Frank’s version: that the ‘concrete processes by which capitalist
relations evolved in various parts of the world economy are simply dissolved in the abstract
identity of world-capitalism’ (p. 332).25
The other approach is that of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in north-
west Europe from the fourteenth century or so, the object of Dobb’s Studies in the Devel-
opment of Capitalism, first published in 1946 – at which time it stimulated a celebrated
debate – then published as a collection in 1954 and later republished with additional con-
tributions in 1976 (Dobb et al. 1954; Dobb 1963; Hilton et al. 1976). A central element of
that debate was the search for the ‘prime mover’ in the transition, subsequently treated in
an original way by Brenner, whose seminal essay (Brenner 1976) also sparked debate
among (mostly non-Marxist) historians (Aston and Philpin 1985). Banaji is wholly silent
about Brenner who, we may take it, hovers anonymously (alongside Dobb) in such obser-
vations as ‘the widespread dogma that locates capitalist origins in a largely English
and agrarian context’ (3); a ‘canonical model of agrarian capitalism many Marxists still
adhere to . . . a formalist orthodoxy that homogenises both capital and labour’ (p. 346); ‘a
specifically Marxist historiography of capitalist origins [that] is so mesmerisingly Anglocen-
tric’ (p. 347).
Brenner’s position directly confronts Banaji’s arguments for commercial capitalism as the
source of the (eventual) emergence of modern capitalism in the West:
I have taken the ‘merchant capitalism’ of medieval and early modern Europe as the
indispensable point of departure, the necessary precondition, for economic development . . .
But I have conceived of its urban-based industry and commerce as a natural outgrowth
of feudal society . . . and as far from sufficient to catalyze economic development. This is
all the more the case, since instances of (at least roughly) the same sort of trade-based
division of labour – involving the exchange of agrarian surpluses extracted from the
peasantry by the dominant class for luxury textiles and military goods produced by
urban (or sometimes rurally based) artisans, mediated by merchants – repeatedly arose in
world history from the rise of settled agriculture, but before the early modern period
had always failed to trigger a process of dynamic growth characterized by the increase of
per capita output – and even in that epoch did so only in highly restricted regions.
(Brenner 2001, 171)
For Brenner, only capitalism was able to generate ‘a process of self-sustaining economic
development characterized by rising labour productivity in agriculture’ that overcame two
great prior obstacles: the long-term tendency of population to outrun the food supply and
the inability of urban population, and non-agricultural labour, to grow beyond a highly
limited proportion of total population, in effect phases A and B of the Malthusian cycle
(Brenner 2001, 171–2).
Some observations follow. First, Brenner’s ‘rules of reproduction’, applied to the feudal and
capitalist modes of production, fulfil the same kind of purpose in his theoretical framework as
‘laws of motion’ do in Banaji’s, and indeed in this respect they share a very similar view of
feudalism. Moreover, it can be argued that Brenner’s analytic combining ‘rules of reproduc-
tion’ and ‘social-property relations’ avoids the problem of conflating mode of production and

25
One would like to know Banaji’s view of Arrighi, the most sophisticated exponent of this approach,
especially given the historical and geographical framework of Arrighi’s ‘regimes of accumulation’, which parallel
the shifts highlighted by Banaji from Southern to Northern Europe and from Mediterranean- to Atlantic-
centred trade, and given Arrighi’s emphasis on the centrality of money capital.

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specific forms of exploitation.26 Second, Brenner’s explanation why the original breakthrough
to capitalist farming occurred in sixteenth-century England, and not in France or Germany
(or anywhere else), is highly contingent, an ‘unintended consequence’ of the pressures of
reproduction on feudal lords and peasants, and class struggle between them, in specific and
peculiar conditions (Brenner 2001, 186). Once established, however, for Brenner this agrarian
transition explains England’s subsequent Industrial Revolution. Third, and responding to the
Malthusian challenge, Brenner pays close attention to farming techniques and the productivity
of land and labour, in his work on England, France and Germany, the Low Countries, and the
comparison of England and the Yangzi delta (Brenner 1976, 2001; Brenner and Isett 2002, a
critique of Pomeranz 2000). Banaji touches only occasionally on these staple and highly
material topics of agrarian history: productivity, ecology, population.
Finally, does Brenner adhere to a ‘canonical model of agrarian capitalism’? He is explicit
that the scale of farms in capitalism (their increasing enlargement being a central tenet of the
‘canonical model’) varies as an effect of the subjection of all farmers – including petty
commodity producers – to the disciplines of ‘market dependence’ and competition in specific
social and ecological conditions.27
Brenner provides the strong, indeed limiting, case of an ‘internalist’ problematic (Bernstein
1996/7) in identifying the agrarian origin of capitalism; that is, as a result of class struggle
internal to the countryside, between exclusively agrarian classes of landed property and labour
(the peasantry) in a particular society, outside of any international dynamics including those of
primitive accumulation, and virtually outside any prior history other than (i) the ‘ “merchant
capitalism” of medieval and early modern Europe as . . . the necessary precondition’ (Brenner
2001), and (ii) the particular and contingent conjuncture in which agrarian capitalism then
emerged from the contradictions of feudalism in England.28
Do Banaji and Brenner – the most incisive clashing accounts we have today of the
origin of capitalism based, on one hand, in the long evolving ‘chain of interrelated sites’29 of
(European) commercial capitalism from the Middle Ages and, on the other, in the unique-
ness, self-sufficient isolation and rupture of an original English transition – hold up a mirror
to each other’s strengths and weaknesses? For Brenner, the first transition from feudalism to
agrarian capitalism led inexorably to England’s Industrial Revolution some two centuries or
more later, with no significant effect of anything that was happening elsewhere.30 Banaji, on
the other hand, has a fine sense of the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity that chal-
lenges historians, that class relations specific to a particular historical period are ‘capable of

26
Other historical analyses deploying Brenner’s concept of social property relations include Chibber (1998) on
precolonial South India; Kaiwar (1992) on the colonial Bombay Presidency, which has a strong demographic
focus; and the outstanding contributions by Post (1995, 2003, 2009, 2011) on the agrarian origins of capitalism
in the USA.
27
Although Brenner is taken to task by Byres (2006) for neglecting peasant differentiation in transitions to
capitalism.
28
Anderson remarks of Brenner that ‘The idea of capitalism in one country, taken literally, is only a bit more
plausible than that of socialism. For Marx the different moments of the modern biography of capital were
distributed in a cumulative sequence, from the Italian cities to the towns of Flanders and Holland, to the empires
of Portugal and Spain and the ports of France before being “systematically combined in England at the end of
the seventeenth century” . . . In this story, the role of cities was always central’ (2005, 251; quoting Marx 1976,
915).
29
Anderson quoted in note 28 above.
30
While overseas traders feature in Brenner’s monumental and subtle historical work on England’s mid-
seventeenth-century revolution (1993), it is for their political role in that revolution and not for their world
market activities. The revolution occurred when the transition to capitalist farming on England was complete, in
Brenner’s account.

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subsuming often much earlier forms as an intrinsic part of their own development’ (p. 1), a
proposition that he demonstrates with great power and subtlety in some of his historical
analyses.
But there is also the problem, to put it in caricatured fashion, of infinite regress: everything
that happens is affected, in one way or another, to some degree or other, by everything that
happened before; all histories indeed must have their ‘prehistories’. Could Banaji’s epic com-
mitment to detecting and tracing the histories of merchant capital extend, in principle, back
before late antiquity, perhaps to the ‘rise of settled agriculture’ in world history (Brenner
2001) some 12 millennia ago?

CONCLUSION: MODES OF PRODUCTION AND MATERIALIST HISTORY

Banaji’s project to treat modes of production historically as the basis of a ‘specifically materi-
alist history’ took off at a particular moment of structuralist Marxism, of excessively theoreti-
cist constructions that hardly connected, if at all, with the practices and findings of historical
research (and indeed any historical sensibility). That is reflected in his dissatisfaction with such
symptomatic ideas of the time as the distinction between ‘mode of production’ and ‘social
formation’ and its uses (p. 92), and the concept of ‘articulation of modes of production’ (pp.
359–60).
Such ideas can be seen, at best, as inadequate solutions to real problems of theory and
method;31 and at worst, in their most abstracted and formalist expressions, as leading nowhere.
Banaji is committed to confronting real problems of theory and method, but is not immune
to difficulties intrinsic to the foundational concept of mode of production itself. He (rightly)
rejects a tradition of materialist interest in the feudal ‘mode’ solely as the precursor of
capitalism, hence the problem of ‘reading history backwards’ (pp. 65–6), but I suggested his
unease with available versions of a feudal ‘mode of production’ (and its periodization) and
preference for terms such as ‘feudalism’ and ‘feudal economy’.
A further question that can be asked of Banaji’s work as a historian, and a question of
wider relevance, is whether the rich and detailed interpretations of his specialist period
intrinsically require, or are enriched by, the concept of mode of production, apart from
dealing with – in order to criticize – claims for modes of production established in the
materialist historiography.32
The problems of applying modes of production historically are also manifested in an
unease with the idea of ‘transition’ between modes of production established in an older
materialist tradition, often with teleological associations (Chapter 11). One possible expression
of this is the extraordinarily long periods of ‘transition’ in his account: from the Europe of
late antiquity to feudalism, six centuries or so; sharing the same chronology, from late antiq-
uity to the initial emergence of ‘something like a capitalist system’ (p. 130, quoted earlier),

31
But possibly valuable for all that; for example, the contributions of the French theorists of the articulation of
modes of production in modern African history (Bernstein 2004) – and theorists who were steeped in the
historical/empirical study of their field.
32
Wickham, one of the great Marxist medieval historians of his generation, comes unstuck, according to
Banaji, in his understanding and application of modes of production: his ‘stark opposition between the slave mode
and tenant-labour’ (p. 198), thereby ignoring ‘intermediate agrarian organisations’ and other complexities in the
centuries before the emergence of feudalism (pp. 198–9); an ‘unrepentantly structuralist’ characterization of
the feudal mode (p. 212). Banaji’s critique of Wickham also hinges on major differences in interpretation of the
historical evidence.

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five centuries; from feudalism to ‘modern’ capitalism via the development of ‘commercial
capitalism’, some seven centuries.33
Is it also significant that Banaji uses tributary modes of production to refer to various
historical configurations, while the capitalist mode of production can only be used in the
singular? Even if historical investigation can admit ‘several European capitalisms’ of the six-
teenth century, ‘each with its zone and its circuits’ (p. 6), can suggest a range of ‘hybrid forms
of agrarian capitalism’ (p. 345) and then, in the epoch of modern capitalism, leads to the
conclusion that ‘the world-economy of the nineteenth century . . . was an articulation of forms
of capitalism more than a combination of modes of production’ (pp. 359–60)34, none of this
warrants talking of capitalist modes of production.
The issue here is whether it is the uniquely world-historical nature of the ‘modern’ capitalist
mode of production that allows it to be theorized in the way pioneered by Marx – that is, at
a higher ‘level of abstraction’ than any other ‘mode of production’/form of society that
preceded it – and an issue independent of whether its origin is located in the formation of a
(mercantile) world economy or, more or less contemporaneously, in a first agrarian transition
in England, or later in the period of industrial capital.
This connects with another problem: that the ‘level’(s) at which observations and analyses
are pitched is often elusive, and sometimes seem almost interchangeable – Mode of produc-
tion as labour process or historical epoch? Individual enterprises/capitals or the social totality?
The difficulty is compounded by Banaji’s more general lexicon of ‘levels of abstraction’ and
the (relative) ‘purity’ of ‘forms’, examples of which have been cited, and by formulations such
as ‘some form and degree of domination’ of wage labour (p. 15, and quoted earlier) as ubiqu-
itous in (constitutive of?) capitalism – Which forms and degrees, and what explains them?35
Restoring complexity to properly historical investigation requires a series of determinations
beyond stereotyped notions of ‘relations of production’, as Banaji demonstrates so well, but if
‘the concrete . . . is the concentration of many determinations’ (Marx 1973, 101), there must
be some hierarchical ordering of determinations to provide a control on the problem of
infinite regress in historical investigation, noted earlier, and to inform the task of identifying
and explicating key ‘watersheds’ or turning points, or indeed ruptures. This is an area in which
Banaji is also sometimes elusive or appears exaggerated, for example, in emphasizing elements
of continuity – of monetary economy, practices of estate organization – from late antiquity, or
business techniques from Islamic trade and investment to Mediterranean capitalism to a mer-
cantile capitalist world economy from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. He gives a similar
prominence at certain points to legal norms and practices (Chapters 4, 5 and 7), and to
institutional forms: thus the shift from ‘company’ to ‘corporate’ capitalism to characterize the
momentous changes within the world economy during the nineteenth century. The point is
not that law, types of business organization or institutional forms are unimportant (nor indeed
‘merely’ superstructural) but, rather, how they interconnect with other (more fundamental?)
determinations, above all the laws of motion of modes of production.
For this reader, it is always a struggle to read Banaji, and to assess what one reads. That is a
tribute to the ambition, richness and range of reference of his scholarship, and the dialectical

33
And despite his observation that ‘It scarcely makes sense to see a transition between modes having a longer
shelf life than the mode it supersedes!’ (p. 342). Why?
34
But an articulation of modes of production in the formation of a capitalist world-economy from, say, the
fifteenth to eighteenth centuries? And more generally, in the dynamics of commercial capitalism embedded in
feudalism and tributary modes qua historical epochs?
35
Strangely, any (relative) ‘freedom’ of wage labour, it seems, is only ‘the contingent outcome of struggles to
shape the law and the social relations behind it’ (p. 13, my emphasis).

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328 Henry Bernstein

power of his arguments, as well as the need to identify their lacunae and tensions, to confront
their marks of struggle and indeed their idiosyncrasies. Is the difficulty compounded by his
appetite for ‘vigorous iconoclasm’ (p. xviii), how he deploys polemic, and his manner of
leaving readers to fill in notable gaps for themselves? For example, consider his deafening
silence on Brenner’s work; the lack of any indication of where industrial capitalism (and its
origin) fits in his framework, both historically and theoretically, other than to castigate those
who confuse developed capitalism with capitalism tout court; and the almost complete absence
of reference to class struggle.
For all that, the provocations of Jairus Banaji and the questions that they raise remain
central to his entirely distinctive and creative contributions to materialist history. There are
very few scholars today so deeply rooted in the spirit of Marx’s work, and so committed to
using it to explore ‘the continent’ of history and its complexities across so remarkably wide a
range of times and places.

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