| The Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism confronts the historical issue of how western European society was transformed from feudalism to capitalism. In England this supposedly ended with the Glorious Revolution (1688) and in France with their famous Revolution (1789). The market based approach to historical change, including economic history, was shaped by Adam Smith, who devoted a chapter to mercantilism, as the social form that stood between feudalism and capitalism. In his palimpsest, feudal society was broken down by irrepressible market forces. As feudal society decayed, the merchants came to exercise influence over the Crown and in exchange for support, the Crown granted them monopoly and other rights. This made mercantile society increasingly stagnant and regressive.;This created a reaction, in which a progressive bourgeoisie evolved and was finally driven to lead a revolution against the old monarchy and merchant elite and establish capitalist social relations. This economistic depiction of historical progress was accepted by most historians, including Marx and many of his disciples, including, with reservations, Lefebvre and the Annales School.;We believe these images should be replaced by the formulation of change developed by Brenner, Wood and Comninel. For them, history was and is shaped by political relations, meaning the full range of forces and relations that have advanced or constrained change and bound society's primary classes together. To investigate these ideas we produced an overview of mercantilism and the transition to capitalism and found that despite superficial similarities, England and France were organized on different forms of political economy.;To illustrate these differences, the merchant and Chartered companies which operated in France and England and the triangle trades were evaluated. We compared the social values related to commerce, production and private finance and discovered major deviations in social relations. To cross check, we evaluated the same set of conditions that existed in Ireland, where Arthur Young had recorded agrarian observations that measured progress toward capitalist development. We rejected Smith's economism with images of historical change that led us to believe that, what Brenner called politically constituted property, was the most effective way to evaluate systemic change. |
