The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective

by Henry Heller

In the light of the deepening crisis of capitalism and continued non-Western capitalist accumulation, Henry Heller re-examines the debates surrounding the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and elsewhere. Focusing on arguments about the origin, nature, and sustainability of capitalism, Heller offers a new reading of the historical evidence and a critical interrogation of the transition debate. He advances the idea that capitalism must be understood as a political as well as an economic entity. This book breathes new life into the scholarship, taking issue with the excessively economistic approach of Robert Brenner, which has gained increasing support over the last ten years. It concludes that the future of capitalism is more threatened than ever before. The new insights in this book make it essential reading for engaged students and scholars of political economy and history.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Politics

320 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 2011

About the author

Henry Heller is a Professor of History at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Heller is a historian whose primary interests are the French Renaissance and Reformation, as well as early modern Europe.

Reviews

[Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. Very comprehensive introduction to the contours and complexities of 'The Transition Debate' within (and without) Marxist historiography. Heller does a good job rebuffing the 'Political Marxists'. He doesn't just confine himself to the English Countryside; the transition from feudalism to capitalism was a protracted affair, involving the whole of Europe over three centuries; so we also get a look into the 'revolution from above' in Scotland, the upheavals in England, Holland, Germany, France and Italy, the role of colonial slavery, the Bourgeois revolutions, Japan during the Meiji period and the debates on the causes, and significance of, the Industrial Revolution. He concludes, rather poignantly, with a note on the future of Capitalism.

More depth and a much wider scope than the fairly Eurocentric and functionalist account of Ellen Meiksins Wood in 'The Origin of Capitalism'.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The intellectual war on the origins of capitalism whose greatest battles had been fought between 1960 and 1980 has proven itself to be a fertile ground for Marxist thought. Dobb, Brenner and Wood on one side and Sweezy, Wallerstein, A. G. Frank, Amin on the other, this debate around the true origins of capitalism, whether its origins must be sought within the internal dynamics of England or outside in the colonial machinery of the West, gave us Marxist trends like ‘Political Marxism’, ‘Dependency Theory’, ‘World Systems Analysis’ and a new movement of global history.

In this excellent book, Heller reviews the debates of the last 50-60 years with a Marxist filter and attempts to combine and synthesize the most robust elements of various theories on the origins of capitalism. He is authoritative and makes it clear that his foremost concern is less to defend or bury any Marxist current in a partisan way than to contrive a theory that can account for the internal and external factors involved in the formation of capitalism.

Heller is a good teacher, the book is well-written and incrementally building up the reader’s knowledge. A section on the colonial/peripheral/third-world forms of capitalism and about their origins could really be helpful.

[sube · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a literature overview of the transition/brenner debate specifically and its predecessors in the sweezy-dobbs debate. It is quite erudite and cites quite well - which at times makes it hard to follow, instead of focusing on the main point. Nonetheless, it was quite interesting overview; but its value it is my view is largely in reading this *after* having read the initial books starting the debate, then it is useful to help review it and go see where to research further.

This is the content for the first 3 chapters; the fourth and fifth chapter criticising political marxism, first on the topic of its rejection of the category of bourgeois revolution and then of some wider arguments of political marxism which was quite interesting even if I'm unsure I agree regarding bourgeois revolutions' coherency as category.

At last, there are two chapters which are mostly attacks against eurocentrism but feel somewhat disjointed from the wider corpus which made its effect lacking. It does not help the book is quite obsessed with the usage of Trotskyist terminology - the first three chapters especially are full with the usage of 'combined and uneven development' as if the world circles around it.

Nonetheless, I found it quite informative.

[ernst · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heller fasst die zwei großen Übergangsdebatten um Brenner und Dobb über den Übergang vom Feudalismus zum Kapitalismus im Lichte der neuesten Forschung zusammen. Mehr noch erweitert er dieses Programm um den positiven Beitrag einer eigenen Übergangstheorie, die er in der Auseinandersetzung mit den verschiedenen Polemiken entwickelt. Dabei ist er bemüht, mit Erfolg, einen prinzipiell marxistischen, internationalistischen Standpunkt aufrechtzuerhalten.

Das Buch zeugt von großer Gelehrsamkeit und Souveränität im Umgang mit dem reichen Stoff. Die Form der Aufarbeitung der Debatten lässt allerdings keine Lesefluss aufkommen. Der Text ist dicht und arbeitet sich thematisch-punktuell durch das Material. Eine historische Darstellung ist aber bei dem Programm nicht möglich gewesen. In jedem Fall erhält man hier eine solche Fülle an Informationen, eine so sicheren Überblick über die Debatten, die zugrundeliegenden Probleme und Gefahren, dass es sich unbedingt lohnt, sich durch das Buch zu arbeiten.

Einzig das abschließende Kapitel, in dem sich Heller mit dem Eurozentrismus befasst, ist etwas schwächer. Das liegt zum einen daran, dass er wichtige frühe Beiträge (z.B. Ho, Césaire, Amin, Rodinson, Biel, Bryan S. Turner) ausblendet und so unnötige Zugeständnisse an die Poststrukturalisten macht. Seine Darstellung streicht zwar hervor, dass Lenins Imperialismustheorie, die Arbeit um die Sowjetunion und die Dritte Internationale der theoretischen Kritik lange vorläuft, auf dass die antikolonialen Befreiungskämpfe vor allem von Marxist:innen geführt worden, aber die explizite theoretische Kritik war eben auch schon vor den Poststrukturalisten da. Er kommt dabei auch zu einem etwas verkürzten Urteil, dass der Anti-Eurozentrismus erst ab den 1980ern im Kontext der Erholung des Kapitalismus und vor allem im neuen dynamischen Zentrum Asiens groß wird. Das stimmt historisch nicht, weil die marxistische Kritik viel weiter zurückreicht (die monografischen Auseinandersetzungen beginnen im Grunde in den 50ern mit Césaire). So ist es zwar richtig, dass es diesen Zusammenhang zwischen poststrukturalistischer Ideologie und Neoliberalismus gibt, aber der ist vermittelter, als es die Kritik Hellers vermuten lässt. Zum anderen scheint er sich auch nicht so gut im Stoff zu befinden, wie bei den großen Übergangsdebatten. So verweist er in den Fußnoten wiederholt darauf, dass er die eine Seite der Polemik nur aus der Zusammenfassung der anderen kennt.

[Gabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very detailed historiographical overview of the transition from feudalism to capitalism with a brief ending note forecasting the pessimistic near future of capitalism given current extreme levels of commodification and privatization of intellectual property, with advice on solidarity and unity of the working class to counteract concentration of wealth.

Feudalism --> increased nobility greed and extraction of profit --> increased reliance on the marketplace, decrease of serfdom, increase in selling one's labor --> concentration of human capital --> innovation, industrial revolution --> capitalist development, separation from means of production, deskilling of laborers --> intense commodification, private property increases, financialization increases --> today.

Heller does a great job of reviewing tons of relevant literature and comparing various competing views on the history of feudalism and capitalism and the transition between them. However, he cites other authors so often that I feel that not much of his own opinion comes through. I suppose that's fair when studying history, but I had a hard time keeping track of all the names and debates and wanted to hear more from Heller directly.

The text is very dense at times which makes for a difficult read, but I have to give a solid four stars for the sheer amount of reading the author had to do in order to boil a vast amount of literature and history down into a single book. A lot of detail is given and I feel I have a better understanding of the birth of the capitalist economy.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a history buff one of my favorite topics is the origins of capitalism, or what you could call the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It's something I have been reading about for a couple of decades, mostly involving one of those famous debates within Marxism (i.e. the Transition Debate). There is a lot of literature out there on this topic, this book is a relatively recent addition. Heller has a definite position in the debate (more on that below), but he also includes a valuable and contextualizing history of the debate itself.

On one of the main topics: contra such historians as Robert Brenner and the late great Ellen Meiksins Wood, Heller posits capitalism was not a social relation indigenous to England, but laid in prototype form in pockets all over the globe. On this point I had been agnostic for a long time, but after reading Wood's The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View I was persuaded by her arguments that capitalism flowered indigenously in the English countryside. But in this work Heller has changed my mind; not only is the preponderance of evidence heavier, overall it better aligns with my current focus on both imperialism and Marx's method.

[Seahorse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best book this year. Historiographically universalist, methodically Marxist, with a brilliant style almost reading like a chronological narrative.

It begins with an introduction to the contours of the debate, some explanation of the theoretical basics, and then a journey beginning in 14th century Italy, to the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries, to the 80 years war in the Netherlands, with the Anglocentric Brennerite account of the transformation of the English economy during the whole period constantly in the background. Then we go to the particulars of the Dutch, English and French revolutions, before moving further along to the Prussian, Japanese and Russian transformations. Finally we look at China's rise in the present day, and confront questions about potential sites of socialist transformation.

What is even more brilliant is biographical commentary on the scholars involved in the debate, and their intellectual and political backgrounds. The book further enriches the debate with non-Marxist anticolonial perspectives. If you want to know how capitalism was born, and what are the differing explanations for it and why they have certain framings, this is the book for you.

[John Franklin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Is very confusing to read. This book complicates events far more then it needs to, and if you need to use this book to answer questions for an assignment, good luck. Information is far more complex then it needs to be and the fact that as a First year university student I was forced to use this is very unfortunate. I’m sure the information is there and is correct but you need an IQ 2657 and need to solve the de vinci code ti get a simple answer. Would not recommend for anyone who is not an expert in this field or a genius.

[Shiran · Rating 4 out of 5]

good intro from a marxist perspective to the basic academic debates regarding the transition from feudalism to capitalism. while the writer tries to grapple with euro-centrism it feels half-hearted. overall worth a read for anyone interested int he subject matter.

[J. Moufawad-Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have given this five stars if it had demonstrated a slightly better grasp of the tradition upon which it was drawing from to critique the eurocentric tradition of transition theories, particularly Political Marxism. That is, it uses a lot of people inspired by Samir Amin's political economy but barely touches on Amin even though this would have made the book stronger. This is a weak point, particularly because it ignores a non-European political economist but still reaps the benefits, through people influenced (either directly or through a system of academic echoes) from Amin's ground-breaking understanding of transition and imperialism.

Despite this blind-spot, however, Heller does a good job of taking down the so-called "Political Marxists."

[Iosef · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuck my future but at least it makes sense now 💔

[Yuzhang · Rating 5 out of 5]

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