Comment: Historical Materialism and Early Modern Studies
Holstun, James
Early Modern Culture, No. 4 (2004)
Abstract
An outsider might imagine that historical materialism would play a rather large role in the literary criticism of early modern Europe. The early modern transition from feudalism to capitalism is the subject of the only extended historical section of Capital, Marx’s conceptually and literarily brilliant discussion of “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation.”1 Moreover, the transition lies at the center of two remarkable multidisciplinary debates: the debate from the 1940s to the 1970s among marxist historians and political scientists over the nature of the transition, and the Brenner Debate of the 1980s. And the prodigious scholarly achievement of the British marxist historians, from Rodney Hilton’s studies of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 to Christopher Hill’s two-foot shelf of work on Puritanism and the English Revolution to E. P. Thompson’s studies of commoning and the making of the English working class in eighteenth-century England, focuses on class struggle and the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern England.
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