Studies in the Development of Capitalism

by Maurice Dobb

This is a new release of the original 1947 edition.

Genres: Economics, History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Maurice Herbert Dobb was a British economist at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is remembered as one of the pre-eminent Marxist economists of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turns out Dobb makes a lot more sense when his is the 195th book you’ve read for grade school rather than the first

[Pete Dolack · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is regarded as a classic, and justifiably so. It is a thorough summation of the gradual foundation and development of the capitalist system. Professor Dobb presents that formation, a most important topic if we are to grasp the dynamics of our present-day capitalism, in full complexity. Unlike many historians, he does not stress one particular aspect as a dominant moving cause, but rather discusses multiple causes and developments, and how they impacted each other and drove forward tendencies already beginning to mature, to provide a fuller and necessarily more complex picture.

The weakness of the book is that it is almost totally focused on England, with only brief, intermittent discussions of developments, even when parallel, on the European continent. But this is not necessarily a fair critique, as to have broadened his book to take in other nations would have taken him outside the scope of his book; we really can't criticize an author for staying within their stated parameters.

Professor Dobb concentrates on developments in England for the basic reason that England is where capitalism began. So although this book by itself (as would be the case for any other book concentrating on England only) can't provide a full picture of the rise of capitalism as feudalism slowly broke down, it is an important contribution.