The Brenner Debate

The Brenner debate was a major historical debate on the origins of capitalism, 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.

In the summary of Shami Ghosh, Brenner's thesis 'proposed an explanatory framework for the evolution in England, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of what he defined as "agrarian capitalism" ':

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, 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. Thus the transformations of agrarian class structures lay at the root of the development of capitalism in England.

Brenner's ideas were the focus of a symposium in around 1977, several contributions to which also appeared in the pages of Past & Present. 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.

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