Re: Brenner is simply wrong!

["Ricardo Duchesne" <rduchesn@xxxxxxxx>]

> In place of Weber's anachronistic "theory," I recommend Robert
> Brenner's & Ellen Wood's non-Eurocentric accounts of the origin of
> capitalism.

Interesting that you say this considering that Blaut dedicates a
whole chapter to Brenner's "eurocentrism". What matters to me,
however, is that  the available historical sources are flatly,
indisputably against Brenner's views, particularly those on the
peasantry, as I started to demonstrate here last month.  Let's read
what he says:


> *****   In England, as throughout most of western Europe, the
> peasantry were able by the mid-fifteenth century, through flight and
> resistance, definitively to break feudal controls over their mobility
> and to win full freedom.  Indeed, peasant tenants at this time were
> striving hard for full and essentially freehold control over their
> customary tenements, and were not far from achieving it.  The
> elimination of unfreedom meant the end of labour services and of
> arbitrary tallages.

This story is misleading. What B has in mind
is the change from villein tenure to copyhold and freehold tenures.
Before 1400, a sizable number of peasants were villein tenants with
'unfree' tenures holding their land 'at the will of the lord', and
performing labor services. By the 1500s, most cases of villein
tenure had ended and almost all direct labor services and
payments in kind had been commuted. But note that B says that
peasants did not quite achieve freehold tenure; and if you keep
reading his article, you will find that he thinks they really attained
copyhold tenure, which simply means that when the land had been
transferred from father to so, the son now had a copy of the
transaction which was recorded in the manorial court, so the
land was no longer held 'at will' but 'by copy'.
But copyholders were not all alike. Some were still 'unfree'
because they were subject (on alienation) to arbitrary fines
'at the will of the lord', but others were nearly free
because they were subject to specific fines which
were usually small.

Brenner continues (thanks Yoshie for the appropriate passages):

Moreover, rent _per se_ (_redditus_) was fixed
> by custom, and subject to declining long-term value in the face of
> inflation.

Which brings me to the next crucial point. B gives the impression
that all peasants in post-1500 England  held their land 'by custom
of the manor' and that their land was subject to common property
rights.

B continues:
There were in the long run, however, two major strategies
> available to the landlord to prevent the loss of the land to peasant
> freehold.

you see, they had not yet achieved full freehold tenure (freehold
means land subject to private property rights, land
which is not governed by custom)

> In the first place, the demographic collapse of the late fourteenth
> and fifteenth centuries left vacant many former customary peasant
> holdings.  It appears often to have been possible for the landlords
> simply to appropriate these and add them to their demesnes.  In this
> way a great deal of land was simply removed from the "customary
> sector" and added to the "leasehold sector", thus thwarting in
> advance a possible evolution towards freehold, and substantially
> reducing the area of land which potentially could be subjected to
> essentially peasant proprietorship....

I have to thank Yoshie again as this passage really clarifies
Wood's strange argument that leasehold tenures  were "imposed"
on the peasantry. I was confused because she acknowledged  it
was the "yeomen" (richer peasants) who became leasehold
tenants (and the yeoman, for me, were mainly freeholders outside
the "customary sector") but now I know she has in mind yeomen
who were part of the "customary sector". She needs to make this
argument because the origin of capitalism  had to be something
that was imposed, and it was imposed only insofar as  it came
through leasehold tenures imposed against customary peasants.


> In the second place, one crucial loophole often remained open to
> those landlords who sought to undermine the freehold-tending claims
> of the customary tenants who still remained on their lands and clung
> to their holdings.  They could insist on the right to charge fines at
> will whenever peasant land was conveyed -- that is, in sales or on
> inheritance.  Indeed, in the end entry fines often appear to have
> provided the landlords with the lever they needed to dispose of
> customary peasant tenants, for in the long run fines could be
> substituted for competitive commercial rents.


See what I mean; he's referring to the copyholders against whom
landlords could still impose arbitrary fines. Note, too, that he thinks
that competitive commercial rents (leasehold tenures) were
imposed on customary peasants.

This whole argument is simply wrong. In the early sixteenth
century, about a quarter of all tenants were freeholders...and the
argument I made using Tawney follows.