(Stefan Epstein)
This is a summary of a paper by Stephan Epstein presented in 2006, which critiqued the Maurice Dobb/Rodney Hilton thesis that a class struggle between serfs/peasants and feudal lords led to the transition to capitalism. Epstein’s paper provides substantial insights into the historical complexity of the transition to capitalism in agriculture, and argues that the contradiction between the rate of development of productive forces in agriculture and the institutional constraints of the feudal political economy was the primary one leading to the capitalist transition. The reader may observe the theoretical differences and resonances with Terence Byres’ paper summarized in this broadsheet.
Rodney Hilton’s name is synonymous with the ‘prime mover’ thesis. He was a founding member of the Historians’ Group of the British Communist Party, and the editor of Past and Present during 1942-68. Hilton was enormously influential in pre-1968 Marxist debate in extending Maurice Dobb’s thesis that the ‘class struggle’ between the serfs/peasants and the feudal lords was the ‘prime mover’ in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In the essay summarized here Epstein argues that the Dobb/Epstein framework is inadequate to analyze the temporal and spatial dimensions of capitalist transition in Western Europe. Transition to capitalism, Epstein argues, should also be placed in the context of complex political, social and technological changes that led to the undermining of feudalism and development of capitalist forces of production.
How did feudalism begin to fail in England/Europe?
Epstein begins with a critique of Maurice Dobb’s work that had a crucial influence on Hilton and most other British Communist historians. For Dobb feudalism faced a ‘general crisis’ in England in the 15th century as it was fundamentally an inefficient system that was destined to fail. That failure was caused by systemic disincentives to capital accumulation and technological innovation, and peasant over-exploitation, which in turn gave rise to a class conflict between peasants and feudal lords.
If feudalism is to be characterised as an inefficient mode, Epstein asks, how does one account for its success in expanding territorially, economically and technologically, for more than half a millennium before it is hit by the crisis; we do not find a positive theory of development of feudalism here. Dobb’s reading of pre-capitalist epochs, he argues, was mediated by the theories which argued that feudal societies were scarcity-driven and did not respond positively to price incentives and markets.
The second weakness of Dobb’s model, according to Epstein, was its overwhelming focus on English history. There were good reasons for this, including the paradigmatic nature of England in Marx’s narrative of the transition to capitalism and the state of historical research at the time Dobb wrote. Confining the transition debate to the English experience helped to mask the difficulties that a strictly Marxist class-based analysis will face in explaining the problematic of uneven development. Two critical questions were never posed. First, why did the transition to capitalism occur first in Western Europe, even though parts of Asia were previously economically more advanced? And, second, why was the English economy between 1400 and 1700 able first to catch up with, and then to forge ahead of, previously more advanced Continental European regions?
Hilton’s documentation of rural struggle and resistance against landlord exploitation was crucial in establishing feudalism not as a stable and static social order, but as an unstable social system riven with contradictions. The conflict between peasants and landlords led to the differentiation and transition; eviction of self-sufficient peasants to benefit a class of wealthy peasants who increasingly produced for market. This change generated large numbers of dependent wage earners who had to meet most of their living requirements through the market. For Hilton, Epstein notes, it was ultimately the class struggle that gave rise to agrarian capitalism and competitive capitalist markets of sellers and buyers. Class struggle was the prime mover, that ‘explained’ the transition to industrial capitalism. However, Epstein asks if the dispossession of economically self-sufficient peasants from the land is a necessary and sufficient cause for the rise of a technologically dynamic, fully commoditized, capitalist mode of production.
To answer these comparative historical questions, Epstein says, it would be necessary to introduce the two pillars of Marxian analysis that were either weak or missing from (Dobb’s and) Hilton’s account: a theory of technological development and a political economy of states and markets.
1. Both for Dobb and Hilton, Epstein notes, technological progress during feudalism was so primitive that it did not matter. Hilton had argued that the landlords invested at the rate of a mere 5 percent, which was insufficient to support 13th century productivity. Rather than invest in capital, the lords tended to invest in maintenance of a large retinue and army; to spend most income on personal display; to upkeep their social and political standing. The peasants, burdened by feudal rent – feudal exactions, ecclesiastical tithes, arbitrary royal purveyancing, and growing state taxation – and land fragmentation were deprived of the necessary surplus for investment in capital stock. But, Epstein points out that a net annual rate of capital accumulation of 5 percent in the 13th and 14th centuries is not too low for a preindustrial economy. Hilton’s subsequent emphasis on rising land-man ratio caused by the Black Death as leading to class struggle too, is inadequate as an explanation, because, he argues, the land-man ratio was also never stable or consistent due to wars and many other factors. Such endogenous factors did not matter for Hilton.
What about the exogenous factors? Epstein argues that Dobb and Hilton moved towards acknowledging growth of petty commodity production under feudalism and the active role played by the State in the growth of institutional framework, although they did not think their model through sufficiently.
2. The second important question was that of the role of trade in feudalism. Was feudal mode of production primarily a subsistence economy or did they produce for the markets too? Epstein notes that, even though such a possibility of peasant petty commodity production was not acknowledged by Dobb and Hilton (in the 1940s), they had to reconsider that position in the later years, in the face of the overwhelming evidence on monetisation of peasant production in the late medieval period. Growing trade enabled production for markets thus offering the producers, ‘both the means and the motive for improving cultivation’ and for engaging in petty commodity exchange. It led to class differentiation and capital accumulation within the economy of small producers.
3. Third is the role of the State in the growth of institutional frame work. Epstein notes that even though these factors were not important for Hilton initially, he did come round to a more positive view of this characteristic feature of feudal society, perhaps influenced by Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State (1976) which introduced Weberian definitions of feudalism based on ‘jurisdictional fragmentation’ into the Marxist canon. Eventually Hilton included three factors linked with decentralized power among European feudalism’s five principal characteristics: i) Decentralised power in feudalism as an essential aspect, not a weakness, of feudal society; ii) Landlord power for the purpose of surplus extraction as expressed through private jurisdiction; iii)‘Feudal rent’ that included payments for seigneurial monopolies (including, presumably, taxation of trade); iv) Peasant commodity production as central to feudalism and ‘provided the bulk of landlord income’; v) Merchant capital and large-scale urbanization denoting ‘a further development of this money element in the relations of production’.
Where do we go from there?
For Epstein, a theory of the feudal mode of production and of the transition to capitalism requires a clear definition of the historical beginning and end. He defined feudalism as a social-economic formation featuring a prevalence of:
1. Decentralised power to landlords, expressed through private jurisdiction;
2. ‘Feudal rent’ includes payments for seigneurial monopolies (besides commercial taxes);
3. Centrality of peasant commodity production to the economy and
4) Money element introduced in the relations of production by mercantile capital and urbanization.
For Epstein, any theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism must, at least, answer the following historical questions:
1.How did agricultural supply keep up with growing population (demand);
2.Second, how did exclusive property rights develop;
3.How did the wage-based, non-agricultural sector expand, such that the share of population employed in agriculture fell from c.90-95 per cent at the outset of feudalism (across Europe, c. 1100) to c. 30 per cent as the capitalist socio-economic formation was taking full shape (in England, c. 1800); and
4. How did technology in the energy and manufacturing sectors progress, as Marx put it, ‘out of the hand-mill into the steam-mill’?
Feudalism and trade – emergent contradictions
Epstein draws on the substantial body of research which demonstrated that agricultural supply in medieval and early modern Europe was far more elastic than either Marxists like Hilton or ‘Ricardo-Malthusian’ pessimists like Postan assumed. The major bottleneck to productivity gains in feudal agriculture was not technological, as Postan claimed, for the best technology of the times was already available to 13th century agriculturalists that was adequate to supply food to a growing population. The most notable feature of feudal agriculture was, by contrast, the astonishing inefficiency with which best practices were applied: feudal political and jurisdictional fragmentation and warfare; resulting failures in coordination; and lack of investment in public goods such as transport and commercial arrangements, credible and predictable justice and financial and political stability.
His method foregrounds feudal state and society on which economic aspects are seen as dependent. Here property rights are understood to include a broad set of institutional practices that make the right work rather than as a narrow idea of individualized ownership. Such methodological departures enable him to focus on all such conditions that made investment in agriculture profitable, rather than focus on the technical or organizational characteristics of feudal agriculture itself.
Epstein laid out his model of feudalism as follows. In the feudal-tributary mode of production, most rural producers owned their means of production and sold a portion of their produce on the market. Therefore, they responded positively to changes in supply and demand and relative prices. Feudal lords (who included the ruling elites in towns with jurisdictional prerogatives over the hinterland) extracted an agricultural surplus from the peasantry through decentralized legal compulsion backed by military threat; the surplus was extracted directly as rent in cash, kind or labour, and indirectly through taxation, levies on trade and the provision of justice. Although the relative share of income from different sources varied over time and space, the share from rights of jurisdiction (which sometimes also included compulsory labour services) was always substantial. The principal threat to feudalism thus did not come from trade – up to a point feudalism thrived on trade.
He argues that the main obstacle to agricultural growth in the feudal economy was the cost of trade, which was largely defined by institutional regulation and tariffs; by political and military stability; and to a lesser extent by developments in transport technology. The lords’ and towns’ main purpose in stimulating trade was to maximize rents from their jurisdictional rights. Those rights were a basic feature of their social and political power. As a result, the introduction of jurisdictionally ‘free’ trade did not just lower feudal and urban revenues – it also challenged the superiority of lord over peasant and town over country.
However, in the longer run, he points out that strong feudal and urban jurisdiction became incompatible with agrarian development. By the later Middle Ages, agricultural innovation was inversely correlated with the intensity of seigneurial rights, and rural proto-industrial growth was inversely correlated with the jurisdictional powers of towns. This brought the heart of feudalism’s central contradiction to the fore: the political economy of feudalism was necessary to establish markets and to coordinate economic activities during its first great phase of expansion (c.950-1250), but already by 1300 that same political economy – which combined market monopolies and the coordination failures arising from political and jurisdictional parcelization – had begun to fetter further growth. So, by 1300, the fundamental constraint on feudal agriculture came from feudal institutional constraints, rather than from technological inertia.
Moreover, Epstein notes that, beneath these overarching features, the political economy of feudal Europe displayed strong diversity. In most of Western Europe, the use of lordly powers of coercion to tax and monopolize trade, which kept the economy substantially below its full agricultural potential, was counterbalanced by the lords’ strategy of territorial expansion through localized war. Although the main goal of territorial expansion was to increase the total available political and economic resources, expansion also improved economic efficiency by increasing jurisdictional integration, reducing transaction costs within the new territory, reducing seigniorial dues, weaken or abolish rival feudal and urban monopolies, systematize legal codes and legislation, weights and measures, help coordinate markets and reduce opportunities for pillage and warfare, and restrict rulers’ opportunities to act as autocratic ‘stationary bandits’ against their subjects.
Thus, Epstein notes, gradual political centralization weakened decentralized mode of economic coercion. Property rights over commercial transactions now got sanctioned by a centralized state-induced economic coercion. From the 15th century, economic aspects began dominating political decision making. By embarking on the road to centralized, monopolistic jurisdiction, early modern states also laid the institutional bases of modern capitalism and capitalist class struggle.
In sum, Epstein notes, agricultural expansion in the feudal system was the result of two countervailing forces, one pressing for military and jurisdictional decentralization, which made trade and investment more costly, the other is the increased political and jurisdictional centralization, which reduced the costs of investment and trade. In the long run, the latter prevailed, leading to a reduction in transaction costs, stimulating commercialization and specialization. The ‘prime mover’ and the ‘contradiction’ within the feudal mode of production lay in the relations between lords, peasants, markets and the state.
Technological innovation in the transition to capitalism
Due to underdeveloped agricultural and botanical sciences and weather and market risks, technological innovation in agriculture was slow. But Epstein argues that industry could not have experienced a capitalist transition without the technological progress achieved by the pre-modern craftsmen and engineers. In fact, it explains why feudal Europe was able to catch up with and forge ahead of its Eurasian peers.
Epstein tracks technological progress in feudal Europe as follows: such knowledge was largely tacit and experience-based and it was not possible to reproduce it in different places in the absence of codification. Movement of individual experts was quite costly and made transfer of such customary knowledge quite slow under feudalism.
From the late 11th century, however, a distinctive ‘feudal’ craft-based apprenticeship training through guilds emerged, along with the demand for skilled workers. Membership in these guilds was non-ascriptive which enabled skilled workers to move from city to city with few restrictions or penalties; inter-state competition for technology and high-status consumer goods were held due to which such specialized knowledge could circulate and cross-fertilize; such technicians could move where their skills were most required. The costs of such technical dissemination fell over time in response to growing inter-state competition for skilled workers, and due to urbanization.
Urbanization, especially the development of regional and national metropolises after the late medieval crisis in 15th century, offered improved opportunities for exchange of knowledge; higher average quality of labour, a greater likelihood of matching skills to demand, and stronger incentives for knowledge modelling and codification. Migration of skilled artisans from central and northern Italy (1200-1450), to the southern Rhineland and southern Netherlands (c.1450-1570), to the Dutch Republic (1570-1675) and finally to Britain after c. 1675 helped to draw on the accumulated knowledge of its predecessors, recombine it with local experience, and develop the knowledge pool further. This gave rise to a sharp, secular increase in the rate of technical innovation and diffusion across western Europe. A second marked increase in the rate of innovation followed the ‘seventeenth century crisis’, when coordination within states and competition between states increased sharply.
A considerable growth of manufacturing in the urban and countryside since 14th century resulted in an unusual absorption of labour in proto-industrial activities in England. The rising rural proto-industry threatened traditional urban occupations and the urban tax base, and was frowned upon by town rulers. It also had to be careful not to absorb displaced peasants overnight that could anger the landlords. Gradual alienation of labourers from means of production, which made them footloose, and find employment in non-agricultural sector eventually undermined feudal coercion.
In conclusion, the underlying, unifying factor of the two great ‘feudal crises’ of the Marxist canon, is the rate of development of the productive forces.
Note
1. Stephan R. Epstein (1960- 2007), was a British economic historian, and a professor at the LSE. This is a summary of his paper titled “A Critique of Rodney Hilton: on ‘the Prime Mover’ in the Transition Debate” published by Department of Economic History London School of Economics, 2006, as a working paper ( No. 94/06 ),
References
Epstein, SR 2007 ‘ Rodney Hilton, Marxism and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’ in C. Dyer, P. Cross, C. Wickham (eds.) Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages, 400-1600 Cambridge UP 2007.
M.H. Dobb, Studies in the development of capitalism (London, 1946.
R.H. Hilton (ed.) The transition from feudalism to capitalism (London, 1976), with an ‘Introduction’ by Hilton. 8 See R.H. Hilton and H. Fagan, The English rising of 1381 (London, 1950).
R.H. Hilton, Bond men made free. Medieval peasant movements and the English rising of 1381 (London, 1973); Hilton, Class conflict and the crisis of feudalism. Essays in medieval social history, rev. 2nd ed. (London, 1990).
R. H. Hilton, ‘Introduction’, in T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds) The Brenner debate. Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985).