Treating the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism as a Shared Exemplar for Teaching Marxist Theory

3.1. Economic level of English feudalism: The social relations of production ⁴

The key economic relationship was between lords and serfs. The serfs were bound to the land. They were obligated to work a certain number of days per week on the lord’s estate, based roughly on the tradition of the manor. They were also burdened by numerous special levies and fees (such as payments for the license to marry). There were sometimes tensions over the level of serf obligations, creating fault lines for potential class conflict. The lords were obligated to protect the serfs from bandits and other feudal lords. The serfs had guaranteed access to farmland (for growing subsistence crops), to the commons (for grazing animals), and to local forests (for harvesting wood). The land was not treated as the lords’ alienable private property. The lords and serfs were knit together, but the thread was one of mutual obligation, not market exchange.

3.2. Political level

The feudal lords were a military ruling class. The sons of feudal lords underwent a long apprenticeship (about 14 years) to learn how to fight and act as armored knights. This apprenticeship typically began at age seven and helped to cultivate a knight’s sensibility and class identity, as well as his martial skills.

The political system in feudalism was decentralized. Although there was a paper hierarchy with royalty at the top, real sovereignty was at the local level. Legal proceedings, economic investment, and military power were all largely handled at the local level.

3.3. Ideological level

The key ideological institution in English feudalism was the Catholic Church. It promoted a hierarchical vision of the world. People were urged to accept the ascribed obligations and privileges associated with their station whether in the Church, on the manor, or in the family. The Church’s teachings also elevated spiritual over secular concerns, fostering a fear of markets, greed, and the selfish pursuit of material possessions.

While the manorial economy was basically a localized, self-sufficient subsistence economy, there were a small number of tradable goods. Prices were not set by supply and demand. Consistent with Church teachings and craft guild practices, prices were governed by the principle of the “Just Price,” the price that would maintain the seller at his traditional station.

3.4. Familial level

The familial level of a mode of production involves how a society raises children, manages population, addresses intergenerational issues (such as transfers of wealth), handles gender issues, and similar topics. English Feudalism was a patriarchal mode of production. Its formal political order was defined by a series of hierarchical relationships among men (the vassalage system). The all-male priesthood of Christianity and celebration of God the Father reinforced this imagery. The authority of fathers over wives and children served as a model for many feudal relationships (Folbre 1994: 135). There was a highly gendered division of labor that excluded women from many desirable positions.

The patriarchal feudal family also served as the basic cell of the manor. Land use was organized around customary family plots. Labor obligations on the lord’s land were assigned per household. Craft production was carried out in the home. Within the feudal family, inheritance rules followed the principle of primogeniture, which dictated that all land be left to the oldest son. Kin networks, especially in villages with mechanisms encouraging within-village marriage, reinforced community solidarity, as did the tendency for some (perhaps many) young people to work in domestic service in other families’ homes (Seccombe 1992: 94; Whittle 2013).

3.5. Ecological level

Several aspects of Western Europe’s ecological “niche” also influenced aspects of the feudal pentagon. Especially important was the rich soil of Northern Europe, which encouraged the development and use of the heavy iron plow instead of the scratch plow often associated with Mediterranean soils. The iron plow required as many as eight oxen to pull it and, in collaboration with other dimensions of the feudal pentagon, led to the unfenced, open-field system. This system seems to have been widely used by 1000 CE. The shared use of draft animals and common cropping encouraged by the open-field system further contributed to village solidarity.

4.1. Economic level

A key driver of change was the expansion of the social surplus. This expansion reflected both a large increase in agricultural productivity and a decline in warfare on European soil. Agricultural productivity was stimulated by the slow accumulation of technological changes. Conventional discussions estimate that agricultural productivity increased two and a half to four times from 800 to 1200 in Western Europe (Anderson 1988: 190). Geopolitical stabilization had two causes. The first was a decline in the destructiveness of foreign invasions of Western Europe. The second was a successful effort by the Catholic church to reduce inter-feudal lord violence.

The key question is what happened after agricultural productivity increased and foreign attacks declined. How did feudalism “digest” the expanding surplus? The first results were almost automatic outcomes: both population and trade increased. The population in Western Europe doubled from about 20 million in the year 950 to 54 million in 1348 (Anderson 1988: 190). What happened next was more contingent and reflected the historical conjuncture in Western European feudalism. The number and size of towns increased.

While initially nurtured by feudal authorities, the towns quickly sought and gained significant autonomy, reflecting the fragmented political level of feudalism. In the countryside, the lords responded to increasing population by encouraging the serfs to cut down forests and drain swamps in order to create new farmland. To incentivize these practices, the lords replaced the serf’s obligation to labor a certain number of days on the lord’s land with an “in-kind” product or monetary payment. This was called “commutation.” While this potentially transformed the serf-tenant into a kind of independent producer, it was probably not seen that way by the feudal lords. Conceptually, they probably still conceived of the serf’s payment as a reflection of their subordinate status and personal obligation. Increasing population also allowed the lord to replace some serf labor on the lord’s land with “cottagers” or “cotters,” peasants who subsisted as a kind of guest workers on the manor, without permanent claims to strips of farmland.

4.2. Ideological-Political level

From approximately 1100 to 1300, armies mobilized by the papacy went on the offensive against their non-Christian (and in some important cases, Christian) neighbors. The Crusades disrupted European life while greatly enriching the Italian trading cities, who played a key role in the subsequent growth of world markets and global capitalism.

4.3. Familial level

Patriarchy, normalized by tradition and sanctified by religion, had deep roots and staying power. When the first universities emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from Church schools, monasteries, and guild traditions, for example, they excluded women as teachers or students. The most significant demographic development in England (and some other parts of Western Europe) was the emergence of an arguably unique marriage pattern that, among other related changes, increased the age of women at first marriage. This new pattern was weakly present 1200–1400 (Seccombe 1992: 94–95) and appears more widespread by 1500. This change in familial practices eventually helped enable England and parts of Western Europe to loosen Malthusian constraints.

4.4. Ecological-Political levels: The feudal crisis

As the feudal economy expanded, it began to encounter ecological constraints. Beginning in the early fourteenth century, population growth caught up with expanding agricultural output (Anderson 1988: 197–98). Yields per acre may have fallen by one-third in England from 1200 to 1400 (Moore 2002: 305). The number and severity of famines and malnutrition increased (Dobb 1984: 48). These were preludes to the great demographic shock of the bubonic plague. From 1347 to 1351, the “Black Death” killed one-third to one-half of the European population (DuPlessis 1997: 14).

Many feudal lords found they did not have enough laborers to till the land they controlled. In response, they tried to reverse commutation and return to the old system of required labor services. They also tried to increase other forms of serf obligations. These assaults triggered peasant rebellions throughout Europe. While most English peasants did not gain free holder status and were obliged to pay rent on the land they farmed, they were now treated more like independent producers than serfs.

4.5. The Great Divide

These developments contributed to the “Great Divide” in Europe. In much of Eastern and Central Europe, the lords won more complete victories and precipitated what has been called the “second serfdom.” In Russia, for example, serfdom lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century. By contrast, serfdom in the West basically disappeared.

What caused the different outcomes in Western and Eastern Europe? Two factors seem especially important: the greater strength of the towns in Western than Eastern Europe (Anderson 1988: 213–64), ⁵ and the greater level of village solidarity in the West (Brenner 1988: 40–45; Moore 2002: 307).

5.1. Introduction

The direct producers in the Petty Commodity Mode of Production (PCMOP) owned or controlled their own means of production. They sold the products of their labor, not their labor time, as in capitalism. There has been a reluctance among many Marxists to treat petty commodity production as a separate mode of production. ⁶ This is partly due to expectations that widespread petty commodity production is a short-lived economic arrangement, often thought to be unstable, and expected to dissolve into a capitalist mode of production. Until this happens, it is often difficult to reach a consensus on the identity of the ruling class, a situation that some Marxists find problematic.

Critics ask, why add an intermediary step between feudalism and capitalism in Western Europe? The answer is that petty commodity production does not always lead to capitalism, and understanding why it does or does not can be helpful in understanding Western European history 1350–1750. The treatment of petty commodity production as a separate mode of production also helps organize English economic history in ways that illuminate basic Marxist categories, thereby facilitating the use of European history as a shared exemplar for learning Marxist theory. Finally, emphasizing the difference between petty commodity and capitalist production helps avoid treating all market societies as capitalist societies, and prevents the misuse of petty commodity metaphors to describe our current capitalist society.

5.2. The Economic level of the PCMOP

As noted above, the English PCMOP had a large market-based sector but, unlike a capitalist mode of production, most producers were not wage laborers. There continued to be modest technological change during the PCMOP. Advances in navigation and shipbuilding helped spur the “age of exploration” along with European colonization and exploitation of the “New World.”

5.3. The Political level

Perhaps the most consequential technological changes took place in the area of weaponry. The development and spread of the crossbow, longbow, pike, and gunpowder (enabling cannons and handguns) ended the feudal lords’ monopoly on advanced means of violence. The new technologies enabled the national monarchs to challenge the independence of the feudal lords with a mercenary army, equipped with weapons that did not require the nobles’ equine skills or cooperation.

The politics of the consolidating nation states were now shaped by a town-crown alliance. The merchants and artisans in the towns sought to escape feudal dues and to replace the feudal legal system (a tapestry of customs and traditions) with a private property–oriented, contractual legal system that often harkened back to Roman law. The towns also looked to the monarch to ensure transportation safety for trade. In return for helping with these objectives, the town served as a cash cow for the monarchs. The kings used tax money from the towns to finance modern military forces.

During the European PCMOP, there was no clear ruling class. The relative independence of the monarchy was probably a product of the relatively balanced distribution of power among the rising commercial classes and declining feudal classes. The English monarchs pursued a policy of nation building and market building, intertwining the two objectives. One of the major projects of the new monarchs was overseas expansion. The European economy enjoyed an enormous inflow of stolen wealth from New World plunder. The New World also helped Western Europe to transcend Malthusian limits. The colonies acted as a catchment for excess population and a new source of supply for land-intensive agricultural products, such as timber and some food products. This safety valve helped England avoid the kind of ecological crisis that had crippled Europe in the fourteenth century.

5.4. The Ideological level of the PCMOP, the Renaissance, and Reformation

As people’s lived experiences changed, their worldviews changed. As the towns expanded and more people experienced market exchange relationships, for example, notions of individualism and secularism became more widespread. The growing disparities in economic outcomes among different families reinforced this tendency. The most consequential development on the ideological level for the later development of capitalism was the Protestant Reformation. The individualistic spirit that infused the Renaissance also animated the Reformation. It was amalgamated, however, with many other sentiments, like the growing authority of reason, and joined to many other projects, like nation building and capital accumulation, leading the Reformation in directions that would have alarmed its initial champions. Theologically, Reformation thinkers argued that individuals could have direct relationships with God without intermediation by representatives of the Catholic Church.

From an economic history point of view, John Calvin (1509–1564) was probably the most important reformation figure. He argued that business activities could be considered a “calling,” much like the priesthood or monastic life. The most serious sins were sloth and idleness rather than greed (though the latter remained immoral). The economic implications of Calvinism and other Reformation ideas were termed the Protestant Ethic by Max Weber. While not intended to be an economic program, Weber argues that three aspects of Protestantism turned out to be an engine for capital accumulation. These beliefs were (1) the elevation of business activity to a religious calling, implying that economic success was pleasing to God; (2) the elevation of reason over tradition, which facilitated innovation and increased productivity; and (3) the injunction to be frugal and save the fruits of economic success rather than consume them.

5.5. Familial level

The petty commodity mode of production strengthened the peasant family, reinforcing its role as a cohesive unit of production. In the aftermath of the plague and Europe’s sharp drop in population, women’s social position improved. After the stabilization of the economy (1380–1400), however, many newly opened occupations were reclosed to women (DuPlessis 2001: 16).

5.6. Ecological level (Malthusian echoes)

As suggested earlier, the birth of the PCMOP was encouraged by the expansion and then contraction of population in the fourteenth century. For a while, the drastic fall in population caused by the plague relaxed ecological constraints. Subsequent population growth and economic expansion helped transform serfs into independent, yeoman farmers. Economic expansion also increased the towns’ demand for craft labor. By the 1500s, however, Europe began to re-encounter Malthusian constraints. Population growth led to higher people/land ratios, rising land rents, and falling real wages. These developments undermined in complex ways the reproduction of the PCMOP.

6.1. Economic level

There are greater tendencies in the petty commodity mode of production than in feudalism for peasant differentiation. Differences in abilities and personality, the erosion of village solidarity, and random events can create winners and losers. Market expansion can also lead to the accumulation of large sums of financial capital in the hands of some powerful families and corporate entities. Without offsetting institutions, such peasant differentiation and financial accumulation can be amplified by positive feedback, creating creditors and debtors, landlords and landless, and eventually the kinds of concentrated economic and political power that challenge the underlying structure of the petty commodity mode of production itself.

In England, the reorganization of land use in the countryside reduced the economic viability of small peasant holdings. Some feudal lords shifted from growing grain to raising sheep to supply wool for the growing textile market. This reorganization pushed some customary tenants off the land. A number of feudal lords, sometimes in conjunction with richer peasants, began using their political and coercive power to privatize and enclose the commons. These land grabs increased in importance over time. The loss of access to formerly shared land for grazing animals undermined small holders’ ability to maintain their petty commodity producer status, as did attempts to deny peasants access to the manor’s woodlands for gathering fuel and building materials. While the enclosures, as these practices were called, began as early as the 1200s, the first big surge occurred in the 1500s.

Population pressures added to the pool of potential workers needing wage labor employment. Village communities also began to fragment. Richer peasants increasingly allied with landlords. This weakened village solidarity and collective resistance to land use changes unfavorable to small peasant households (Seccombe 1992: 165; Hilton 1988: 135).

While urban craftsmen strongly resisted merchant and guild master efforts to transform them into employees, they were unsuccessful. The strategy that ultimately crushed the guilds and proletarianized their members was the putting-out system.

6.2. The Political level

The transition to a capitalist mode of production also involved major changes on the political level. These changes were not simply an automatic reflection of changes in an “economic base” or totally independent developments, outside of history. They were in-context aspects of the emerging logic of a capitalist mode of production. As such, they were both causes and effects of the interactive logic of the emerging capitalist pentagon.

Capitalism requires a facilitating state, which protects private property and encourages accumulation. Absolute monarchs can undermine the rule of contracts and market forces, and can raise concerns about the security of private property. The civil wars that consumed England from 1642–1689 were fought between Parliament and the monarchy over control of the state. While there were complicating issues—many of them related to religious conflicts—the battle between Parliament and the King was primarily about the consolidation of political power (exercised through Parliament) by a coalition of landowners and wealthy urban interests, with the latter serving as the junior partner. Social movements calling for expanded democracy and policies to reduce economic inequalities, like the “Leveller” campaigns, were defeated. The so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–1689 protected wealth holders from both the expropriating grasp of the monarchy and the moral claims of the working class and the poor (Dillard 1967: 164).

In addition, the state also facilitated colonial expansion. While English capitalism was initially rooted in the English countryside, it was watered with raw materials, overseas markets, and profits from abroad. England’s island geography helped predispose its economy to international commerce. By 1750, London was Europe’s most important port.

From 1500 to 1800, European trade policies would best be termed militarized mercantilism. Trade was governed more by comparative military strength than by comparative advantage, as illustrated by the naval battles between England and the Dutch Republic. One of the major goals of English mercantilism was to create a division of labor that reserved high-profit stages of production for English capital. This often implied a division of labor where the colonies produced raw materials and England produced manufactured goods. This division of labor was imposed through policies like the Navigation Acts.

The mixing of private capital and public power is manifest in the English East India Company. The firm was a highly profitable shareholding company chartered in 1600. It was given plenipotentiary powers by King Charles II—including the right to mint money, build fortresses and command troops, form alliances, make war and peace, and exercise judicial authority in its territories—all in pursuit of profit maximization. It eventually ruled significant parts of the Indian subcontinent for a hundred years.

England’s violent colonization of Ireland (Anderson 2013: 132) reflected a capitalist version of imperialism quite different from Spanish and Portuguese colonialism (Wood 2002: 152–61). Instead of the extractive character of Iberian colonialism, which prioritized the use of forced labor to extract gold and silver, the English sought to reorganize access to land and agricultural production in Ireland in the image of England’s emerging agrarian capitalism (Wood 2002: 154). Traditional peasant access to the land and communal use of significant portions of the countryside were replaced by notions of alienable private property and economic competition for access to the means of production. In effect, the English focused on controlling (and reorganizing) the means and organization of production, rather than simply seizing output from the existing organization of production.

The English were active in buying, transporting, selling, and employing slaves—a history that undermines claims that capitalism brings with it commitments to human rights, freedom, and democracy. Over three million enslaved Africans were loaded onto British slave ships (1640–1807). Four hundred thousand died in those ships during the voyage across the Atlantic (National Archives, n.d.). There was surprisingly little organized opposition to slavery in England until the last quarter of the eighteenth century (Pettigrew 2013; Williams 2013: 49–50; James Walvin 2008: 189).

The main threat to slavery in England’s American colonies was a potential alliance between poor whites and enslaved Africans. After Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677), the authorities strove “to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt” (Morgan 2003: 328). Several steps were taken to build this divide. The policy became known as the “racial bribe.” About a hundred years after Bacon’s Rebellion, Marx drew analogies to the relationship between poor English and Irish workers (Marx and Engels 1975). New World slave societies eventually evolved a set of institutions and beliefs that “othered” enslaved Africans, leading Eric Williams to famously conclude: “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery” (Williams 2013: 7).

6.3. Ideological level

The most important ideological movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the Enlightenment, which celebrated the powers of reason and undermined the authority of tradition. It is fascinating to see how the gravitational pull of emerging capitalist production bent ideas about science, human rights, democracy, and human nature in ways compatible with the needs of capitalist accumulation. John Locke’s life and work are emblematic of the contradictions of the Enlightenment. He wrote or inspired some of the most eloquent prose about human rights. He also offered moral justifications for the enclosures, the tolerance of enormous economic inequalities, the violent seizure of Irish land by the English, and the dispossession of native peoples in the New World.

Locke appeals to the productivity of capitalism as a moral justification for redistributing land into the hands of those who will improve it, that is, capitalist landlords or capitalist tenant farmers. Echoing ideas from the Protestant Ethic, he argued that the worst economic sin is waste rather than greed. The enclosing landlord who improves the land’s productivity while dispossessing surplus tenants is heroic not villainous. Locke similarly justifies English seizure of Irish and native American lands in the name of economic efficiency.

Enlightenment thinkers prided themselves on discovering natural laws. In the social sciences, the most famous examples are the law of supply and demand and Malthus’s laws of population. The eighteenth century’s interpretation of natural law provided an ideological justification for capitalism and laissez-faire economics that was just as absolute and inviolable as the Divine Right of Kings’ legitimation of the monarchy. For Malthus, there was no point in trying to assuage the hardship of the poor, as this would only lead to increased population growth and eventually even worse starvation.

Justifications for slavery shifted over time from theological to “scientific” arguments. The Enlightenment’s celebration of reason gave birth to “Scientific Racism” in the second half of the 1700s (Curtin 1960: 41). Blacks were “discovered” to be significantly less intelligent than Whites, and this deficit invited White management of Black lives for the alleged benefit of both races.

Many of these ideas of the Enlightenment conducive for the emergence of capitalism came together in Classical Liberalism.

6.4. Familial level

Developments on the family level in England also contributed to expanded capital accumulation and consolidation of political power in the hands of groups supportive of capitalist projects. Charles Reid, a legal scholar, ties together England’s family structure, property law, and class structure, highlighting the importance of primogeniture. He finds large landowners striving to maintain their political authority as well as their economic wealth:

Land represented not merely wealth, but stability and continuity, a fixed interest in the state which conferred the right to govern.. . . [It also]. . . established a family constitution, the character of which is summed up in three words: patrilineal, primogenitive, and patriarchal. (Reid 1995: 278–80)

While not initially a capitalist ruling class, landed gentry families developed a strong class consciousness. Once turned in the direction of colonialism and industrialization, this consciousness was able to organize and accelerate capital accumulation.

As noted above, by 1600 (and probably much earlier), parts of Western Europe, including England, had developed a distinctive marriage regime. The so-called European Marriage Pattern (EMP) involved late, and non-universal, marriage, few births out of wedlock, relatively weak kinship networks, and nuclear families. Transgressors “were subject to public humiliation” (Levine 1977: 148). While this characterization of the English family was widely accepted by historians from around 1965 to 2005, subsequent empirical studies have muddied the waters (Dennison and Ogilvie 2014; Carmichael et al. 2016). Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that the most important impact of the EMP was its potential to regulate population growth. By raising (or lowering) the socially accepted age of marriage and/or the amount of land and other resources that villagers thought young people should accumulate prior to marriage (Seccombe 1992: 154), communities could informally respond to changing demographic conditions.

During the 1500s, village communities in Europe began to polarize (Seccombe 1992: 162). There was increasing social distance between households holding different amounts of land. Eventually, richer peasants began employing land-poor or landless villagers as wage laborers. This polarization was accompanied by marriage patterns that rigidified class differences. Seccombe reports:

The polarization of the village community was both reflected and reinforced through marriage patterns of class endogamy. . . . [L]andowning parents took great pains to prevent their children from making “unsuitable” contracts. (Seccombe 1992: 165; see also Hilton 1988: 135)

As noted previously, market expansion initially increased women’s economic opportunities. Some scholars link the witchcraft craze to a backlash against this rebalancing (Ben-Yehuda 1980: 24–25; Folbre 1994: 138). Women’s equality appears to have been first debated politically during the English Revolution (Zaretsky 1986: 28). These stirrings were “sufficient to call forth a countermovement among preachers and others that stressed female subordination within the family” (Zaretsky 1986: 28).

The most significant reorganization of the family (and some would add “of daily life”) accompanying capitalist development was probably the creation of the proletarian family (Tilly and Stinchcombe 1997: 293). The emerging capitalist system of production shifted labor from the home to the factory. The home became a site primarily for raising the young, taking care of the elderly, and nurturing family members returning from the workplace. Eventually this transformation was linked to more rigid gender roles that anchored women in the home and limited their access to work outside the home.

6.5. Ecological level

To borrow Jason Moore’s characterization, from a Marxist perspective, “classes make history. . . but not in eco-geographical situations of their own choosing” (Moore 2002: 311). In the 1600s, England faced a potential Malthusian crisis because of its rapid population increase and diminishing returns in agriculture (North and Thomas 1973: 102–3, 115, 149). While England was relatively better prepared to deal with these pressures than most of Europe, because of its late and nonuniversal marriage customs, more productive agricultural sector, and more efficient markets (North and Thomas 1973: 115), the standard of living still fell for most people in England during the 1500s (North and Thomas 1973: 149). The novel factor that eventually relaxed Malthusian constraints was access to New World resources (Wolf 1982: 109). Technological advances that lowered oceanic transportation costs and the exploitation of European colonialism made the New World available for European expansion. By 1640, England had 14 permanent settlements in the New World. By 1700, more than half a million Englishmen, nearly 10 percent of the population, lived abroad (North and Thomas 1973: 149). Between 1535 and 1680, the land area under European control increased from 3 to 7 million square kilometers (Wallerstein 1974: 68). Besides absorbing population, the New World allowed England (and Europe more generally), to replace land-intensive crops and industries with colonial imports. Northwestern Europe also benefited from the emergence of a new enlarged global division of labor. This network integrated the Baltics to the north and Poland to the east into expanded trade and credit relationships with western Europe. As Kenneth Pomeranz concludes, Western Europe “was able to escape the proto-industrial cul de sac. . . because the exploitation of the New World made it unnecessary. . . to use Europe’s own land. . . to keep ahead of nineteenth century population growth” (Pomeranz 2000: 264). Ultimately, coal was England’s wild card. It replaced labor and land, and of course fueled the industrial revolution. But that is part of a later story.

6.6. Summary

By 1750, the basic pieces were in place for the circuit of capital to guide England’s future. Private property and wage labor organized much of the economic level. Much of the surplus was used to expand the capital stock. The state was in the hands of interests favorable to capitalist expansion. Classical liberalism and other ideas normalizing and legitimizing capitalist practices were deeply rooted. The New World provided mechanisms to avoid Malthusian constraints, and the English family adjusted to the needs of capitalist production.

8.1. Introduction

From the eighth to twelfth centuries, parts of China experienced an economic expansion analogous in striking ways to the economic expansion in England from 1100 to 1350 (Wright 2007: 401). During the Song dynasty (960–1279), China’s per capita income grew by about 33 percent (Maddison 2007: 29). Increases in productivity, especially in agricultural productivity, expanded the social surplus (Lippit 1987: 35–36). This expansion stimulated local markets, spurred long distance and foreign trade, increased population and urbanization, and helped nurture new outlooks on the world. Parts of the country seemed to be moving toward a market society, and perhaps toward capitalism, at a pace far ahead of Western Europe. Sometime between 1100 and 1300, however, the expansion began to stall. Economic output generally kept pace with significant population growth, but not in a fashion that produced self-sustaining growth in per capita GDP.

8.2. Ecological level

China has had a high population to arable land ratio for millennia. Because most of China’s water resources are in south China, very large public works projects have moved food northward for more than a thousand years. The construction and maintenance of these enabling arteries was also designed for flood control and irrigation for China’s wet rice agriculture. These complex geoengineering projects encouraged the early emergence and persistence of a centralized state (Huang and Needham 1974: 381–82). Southern China’s wet rice agriculture also encouraged labor-intensive development paths.

The geography of China’s northern borders (arid grasslands) has supported nomadic pastoralists with warrior cultures. These horsemen often threatened their sedentary agriculturalist neighbors—sometimes eliciting protectionist tribute, sometimes taking over the state.

8.3. Economic level: Forces of production

From the beginning of the common era to at least 1300, and probably as late as 1600, China had the most advanced forces of production in the world. This leadership continued and perhaps expanded during the Song period. The development and diffusion of new drought-resistant wet rice seeds with shorter growing seasons that permitted double (and sometimes even triple) cropping helped spur large increases in agricultural productivity over the 700–1100 period.

China also enjoyed a broad set of technical advances outside of agriculture during the late Tang, Song, and early Yuan dynasties, including advances in shipbuilding, use of the magnetic compass for ocean voyages, and the deployment in 1024 of what some observers have called the world’s first government-issued paper money.

8.4. Economic level: Social relations of production

There is debate over how to characterize Chinese social relations of production during the Song Dynasty. On the one hand, there were lively petty commodity markets for agricultural and craft goods (Dieter Kuhn 2009: 216). On the other hand, “Upper-class families dominated Chinese life so much that sociologists have called China a gentry state” (Fairbank 1992: 101). China’s gentry class was a hybrid ruling class, with members enjoying surplus from land rents, merchant profits, usury, and office holding. While often tapping several of these sources, the experiences and world view of landlords tended to infuse behavior.

Crucially, these gentry-officials were not under competitive pressure to reinvest the social surplus in capital accumulation, and generally did not do so (Huang and Needham 1974: 395). They consumed liberally. They lived in cities as absentee landlords, not in the countryside as “agricultural improvers” (Huang and Needham 1974: 395). They generally did not invest in projects that organized production.

8.5. Ideological level

The most influential belief system, from a political-economic perspective, has been Confucianism. In some ways, the economic impact of Confucianism on Chinese society was similar to the impact of the Catholic Church on English society (Bodde 1991: 201). Confucianism was skeptical about prioritizing material pursuits. The cultivation of character held a higher priority than the accumulation of capital. Merchants had a low status, and trade was seen as disreputable and parasitic (Fairbank 1992: 100, 129). The military had even lower status in Confucianism than merchants.

As in Catholic teachings about social roles during feudalism, Confucian teaching portrayed economic relationships as part of a system of mutual obligation, rather than exchange. For Confucius, a good society, one with social harmony, was a society where everyone fulfilled the duties of their particular station. The emperor’s exercise of the Mandate of Heaven resembled, in some ways, the divine right of kings in Europe.

Confucianism became institutionalized in China’s state bureaucracy. A significant percentage of officialdom was selected on the basis of their score on a civil service exam based on the Confucian classics. Use of the exam for selecting key government personnel became dominant during the Song dynasty. As public office was a means to private wealth—perhaps the most lucrative source of great wealth (Lippit 1987: 79)—the use of Confucian credentials to appoint government officials reinforced the influence of Confucian beliefs.

China’s medieval economic revolution influenced Chinese thought and culture. The ideological implications of increasing market experience and urbanization were similar in many ways to the cultural shifts that accompanied the development of the petty commodity mode of production in England. Mark Elvin finds that “increased contact with the market made the Chinese peasantry into a class of adaptable, rational, profit-oriented, petty entrepreneurs” (Elvin 1990: 167). Kracke finds “a genuine alteration of Chinese social patterns accompanied the rise of the great city.. . . The merchant. . . expanded his influence” (Kracke 1955: 487). Joel Mokyr adds, “Between ca. 1000 and ca. 1200. . . China went through a period of economic and intellectual flourishing. . . that we tend to associate with the European Enlightenment” (Mokyr 2017: 307).

Economic expansion and the growth of market experience also helped spur a backlash celebrating tradition and inviting renewal of past practices. This movement contributed to the rise of neo-Confucianism and the work of scholars like Zhu Xi to update Confucian practices. The neo-Confucian revival joined several other quotidian ideological and political movements to limit the cultural impact of economic growth. The broader sustained transformation of urban consciousness that occurred in the West did not happen in China (Ebrey 1996: 161; Elvin 1990: 177).

The institutionalization of Confucian beliefs in the state bureaucracy, and the reinforcement of social hierarchies and traditional behaviors by the emotional life cultivated within the Confucian family and lineage, all added to the political pressures bounding China’s medieval economic revolution.

8.6. Political level

One of the distinctive features of Chinese history is the persistence of centralized political authority ever since 221 BCE. In China, the centralized state preceded the market and retained authority over it. In England, the centralized state (initially in the form of the absolute monarch) grew up with the market. The town-crown alliance and mercantilist project of state and market building in England eventually resulted in a level of independence for the market and its nerve centers (major cities) that was never achieved in China. The emperor’s national authority was delegated at the local level to the gentry who exploited the economic opportunities of public office.

The Chinese state was able to control, and eventually curtail, the growth of foreign trade. The state was also able to prevent coastal trading cities from becoming independent sources of power. ⁷

8.7. Family level

Developments on the family level provided critical ballast for China’s class structure and centralized state. The expansion of commodity production during the Song dynasty initially gave women and young people greater freedom and new economic opportunities (Gates 1989: 830–31; Ebrey 1996: 159–60). The changes helped trigger a counter revolution reaffirming traditional hierarchies. Hill Gates finds that the Song “is a period in which women’s freedoms came under the severest attacks. The emergence of foot-binding. . . is the most vivid and the most material of the disabilities that increasingly constrained women” (Gates 1989: 821). There were also tendencies “toward stricter seclusion of women” and a “clear separation of the men’s and women’s quarters in the house” (Ebrey 1996: 161).

Underlying these developments were neo-Confucian reservations about the cultural effects of market activities and commercial values. The pressure to bear sons to maintain lineages also encouraged sustained population growth (Gates 1989: 817–18). Little cites Kang Chao’s argument that “a culturally-determined tendency for population to increase” constitutes the main driver of China’s economic history (Little 1990: 4).

8.8. The road not taken

In this section we pull together threads mentioned above for why the medieval revolutions in England and China turned out differently. Despite having weak feudal constraints, widespread private property, well-developed markets, a good internal transportation system, a relatively high level of urbanization, a significant social surplus, and a centralized state with a well-organized public bureaucracy—conditions that led to the slide of the PCMOP into the CMOP and the industrial revolution in England—China remained a gentry-controlled PCMOP-oriented society. Why? We use the pentagon framework to try to answer this question.