Brenner debate

The Brenner debate was a major historical debate, characterised in 1985 by the historians Trevor Aston and C. H. E. Philpin as 'one of the most important historical debates of recent years'. The debate tested the thesis of Robert Brenner's article "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe", published in the seventieth issue of the academic journal Past & Present, and was given focus by a symposium in around 1977, several contributions to which appeared in the pagest of the same journal. Brenner's article and the discussions that followed it have a broad significance for understanding the origins of capitalism, and were foundational to the 'Political Marxism' movement.

The debate has been seen as a successor to the 'Transition debate', conducted in the journal Science & Society in response to Maurice Dobb's 1946 Studies in the Development of Capitalism. As with the Brenner Debate, these articles were subsequently collected and published as a book.

Postan and Hatcher characterised the debate as attempting to determine whether Malthusian cyclic explanations of population and development or social class explanations governed demographic and economic change in Europe. The debate confounded existing beliefs regarding class relations in the Economy of England in the Middle Ages and agricultural societies with serfdom in general, engaging twentieth-century historiography of the economics of feudalism in the West and the Soviet Union. It has remained influential in twenty-first century scholarship.

Brenner's original article, and the symposium on it, led to a series of publications in Past & Present:

These studies were republished with some additional material in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. by Trevor Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ISBN , which was to be reprinted many times.

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