wrote this last week: Gil, I am hoping Albritton will reply to you; still haven't figured out why you went after Albritton rather than Zmolek since the former seems to attach the same importance to putting out mfg as an early form of surplus value production that you do?! Albritton obviously does not think only fully commodified labor power can produce surplus value, so he seems to agree with one of your major theses. Hopefully this will all be clarified. Albritton does not question the existence of agrarian capitalism only because of the low percentage of workers who were free wage workers. Nor does he deny that surplus value was produced in the English countryside. He gives several reasons to qualify any claim of agrarian capitalism (now off the top of my head)--limited size of the market for agricultural produce, impetus for commercialization coming from London rather than being endogeneous to agrarian capitalism itself, several use value impediments to capital being used for maximal valorization, limited commoditization of inputs, patriarchal relations between tenants and servants in husbandry, several customary restrictions on truly capitalist landlord-tenant relation and tenant-servant in husbandry relation (also as a friend reminds me: copyholders, far from being without protection against arbitrary action in manorial courts, were actively protected in Chancery- with the earliest records in the early 16th century - & the common law courts in competition with chancery began to protect copyholders *from the middle of the 16th century*), etc. You just didn't systematically criticize his grounds for skepticism (of course I would like to show that such impediments to true capitalist relations did not on the whole hold in the case of plantation slavery, e.g., slaves could be arbitrarily sold, rented out, shifted from one task to another). So I must disagree that your critique was carefully constructed. You also missed the strategic thrust of his argument. Which was not to deny that nascent or proto capitalist relations in the English countryside played an important role indeed in why capitalism developed first in England. As for agrarian capitalism, there was a steadying of yields per acre in England between 1750-1840, according to Pomeranz, citing Clark. So while labor productivity may have risen as a result of the tenant's continued capitalist behavior, it does not seem that England would have been able to overcome the shortage of land intensive goods on which the development of industrial capitalism would founder in China and elsewhere. So it's not clear to me that agrarian capitalism opened the door to fully developed capitalism in the sense that once one it was achieved the emergence of fully developed capitalism was a fait accompli. That is the sense one gets from Ellen Wood however. I don't think the theory of agrarian capitalism justifies the extreme rural Anglocentrism in the historiography of capitalism--the importance of the colonization of the Americas cannot be reduced to a single sentence! At any rate, I think Albritton is pretty persuasive about how the putting out system had more of the dynamic which made industrial capital possible than agrarian capitalism, though again there was no guarantee of such a transition given the serious ecological constraints on growth. His focus is also in my opinion overly Anglocentric. You know for example the importance I put on the plantations. Do note that you had very little to say however about this major part of his argument. Which was simply that putting out mfg was less a qualified kind of capitalism than agrarian capitalism. At any rate, I have not been able to make sense of your one sided criticism of Albritton given your shared focus on the role of merchant capitalists in the appropriation of surplus value in early capitalism. All the best, Rakesh
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