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Marx's account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England has been appropriately called the "home territory" of his theory of history (Miller, 1984, 237; Cohen, 1978, 169-170, 175-180). Not only did it constitute the main source of Marx's own theory of epochal change; it has also provided the crucial test of its conceptual innovations and controversial claims. Indeed, the most fruitful recent debates in Marxist historiography address the nature of the historical processes which gave rise to capitalism.
A central question in these debates concerns the dynamic of the feudal mode of production. The original controversy, argued in Science T' Society (now compiled in Hilton, 1976), turned on the role of markets in promoting and dissolving the feudal economy. Defining it as "a system of production for use," Paul Sweezy maintained that feudalism lacked an internal prime mover capable of explaining its historical evolution. He looked to the growth of production for exchange, to the development of long distance trade and the rise of towns, as the external stimulus that fostered feudal growth and its eventual supersession by capitalism. An opposing view, argued by Dobb, Hilton, Takahashi and others, located the emergence of markets within the feudal economy and looked to the sphere of production to account for feudalism's dynamic.
The subsequent history of the debate turned on the role of production in determining epochal change. The controversy owes much to G. A. Cohen's restoration of an orthodox version of historical materialism. On this view, the fundamental cause of social evolution lies in "an autonomous tendency for the productive forces to develop. . . . The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces" (Cohen, 1988, 84; also Laibman, 1984, 262-263, 291). Cohen maintains that capitalist relations of production, including its characteristic markets, arose when and because they were most apt to promote material progress, given the existing level of development of the forces of production. The most promising alternative to Cohen's thesis is one that awards primacy to the relations of production and the process of class struggle. The best treatment of this thesis is Robert Brenner's historiography (1986; 1985a; 1985b; also Hilton, 1990; 1985). Brenner replaces the logic of production...