Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism [Hardcover]

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.

Introduction (Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post)

Chapter 1: Expropriation and the Political Origins of the Transition to Agrarian Capitalism in England (Spencer Dimmock)

Chapter 2: England/industry (Michael Zmolek)

Chapter 3: Traditional Farming in France until the Transition to Capitalism of the 1960s under de Gaulle (Stephen Miller)

Chapter 4: From Extra-Economic Class Relations to the Rise of Industrial Capitalism in Post-Revolutionary France  (Xavier Lafrance)

Chapter 5: Beyond the Brenner Thesis: The Origins of Capitalism in Catalonia (Javier Moreno Zacar?s)

Chapter 6: The American Road to Capitalism (Charles Post)

Chapter 7: The Peasantry and Tenancy-Market Dependence: Rural Capitalism in Meiji-Era Japan (Mark Cohen)

Chapter 8: The 100 Years of Transition: The (Geo)politics of CapitalilÓ%