Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism

by Xavier Lafrance (Editor), Charles Post (Editor)

Overview

This edited volume builds and expands on the groundbreaking work of Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood on the origins of capitalism. Whereas Brenner and Wood focused mostly on the emergence of capitalism in the English countryside (agrarian capitalism), this book utilizes their approach to offer original, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically informed accounts of transitions to capitalism – both agrarian and industrial – in a wide range of countries in order to provide within a single volume a diverse collection of relatively brief yet detailed case studies of the historical transition to capitalism distributed across three continents. Offering a new and highly original analysis of the global spread of capitalism, this book will be a unique contribution to the longstanding debate on the transition to capitalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030070786
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	12/21/2018
Series:	Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2019
Pages:	355
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

Xavier Lafrance is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Québec in Montréal, Canada

Charles Post is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York, USA

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.- 2. Expropriation and the Political Origins of Agrarian Capitalism in England.- 3. ‘Compelled to sell all’: Proletarianization, Agrarian Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.- 4. Peasant Farming in Eighteenth-and-Nineteenth-Century France and the Transition to Capitalism under Charles de Gaulle.- 5. The Transition to Industrial Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century France.- 6. The Transition to Capitalism in Catalonia.- 7. The American Road to Capitalism.- 8. Colonialism, Racism, and the Transition to Capitalism in Canada.- 9. The Peasantry and Tenancy-Market Dependence: Rural Capitalism in Meiji-Era Japan.- 10. Rural Property Relations and the Regional Dynamics of Brazilian Capitalism.- 11. The Political Economy of the Transition to Capitalism in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey: Towards a New Interpretation.- 12. Uncertainty, Contingency, and Late Development in Taiwan.- 13. Rethinking the Rules of Reproduction and the Transition to Capitalism: Reading Federici and Brenner Together.- 14. Conclusion.