Review copies of Ellen Wood's new book

Dear Reviewer:

Monthly Review Press has a new title available. If you wish to receive a
review copy, please contact: Renee Pendergrass at mreview@igc.apc.org,
Monthly Review Press, 122 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001, Tel:
1-800-670-9499; Fax: (212) 727-3676.

THE ORIGIN OF CAPITALISM
by Ellen Meiksins Wood

"In most accounts of capitalism and its origin, there really is no origin.
Capitalism seems always to be there, somewhere, and it only needs to be
released from its chains—for instance, from the fetters of feudalism—to be
allowed to grow and mature. Typically, these fetters are political: the
parasitic powers of lordship, or the restrictions of an autocratic state.
Sometimes they are cultural or ideological—perhaps the wrong religion. These
constraints confine the free movement of economic actors, the free
expression of economic rationality. The `economic' in these formulations is
identified with exchange or markets, and it is here that we can detect the
assumption that the seeds of capitalism are contained in the most simple
acts of exchange, in any form of trade or market activity. That assumption
is typically connected with the other presupposition, that history has been
an almost natural process of technological development. One way or another,
capitalism more or less naturally appears when and where expanding markets
and technological development reach the right level. Many Marxist
explanations are fundamentally the same—though they add attention to
bourgeois revolutions to help break the fetters."—from the Introduction

Few questions of history have as many contemporary political implications as
this deceptively simple one: 
How did capitalism come to be?

In this incisive study, Ellen Meiksins Wood refutes most existing accounts
of the origin of capitalism, which, she argues, fail to recognize
capitalism's distinctive attributes as a social system, making it seem
natural and inevitable.

Wood begins with searching assessments of classical thinkers ranging from
Adam Smith to Max Weber. She then explores the great Marxist debates among
writers such as Paul M. Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, Robert Brenner, Perry
Anderson, and E.P. Thompson. She concludes with her own account of
capitalism's agrarian origin, challenging the association of capitalism with
cities, the identification of "capitalist" with "bourgeois," and conceptions
of modernity and postmodernity derived from those assumptions.

Only with a proper understanding of capitalism's beginning, Wood concludes,
can we imagine the possibility of it ending.


C O N T E N T S

Introduction
Part I: Histories of the Transition
1.	The Commercialization Model and its Legacy
2.	Marxist Debates
3.	Marxist Alternatives

Part II: The Origin of Capitalism
4.	The Agrarian Origin of Capitalism
5.	From Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism: A Brief Sketch
6.	Modernity and Postmodernity

Conclusion
Notes
Index

ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD is co-editor of Monthly Review and the author of
numerous books including The Retreat from Class (1986, winner of the Isaac
Deutscher Memorial Prize), The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (1991), and
Democracy Against Capitalism (1995), co-author with Neal Wood of A Trumpet
of Sedition (1997), and co-editor of In Defense of History (1997),
Capitalism and the Information Age (1998), and Rising from the Ashes?: Labor
in the Age of "Global" Capitalism (1999).


March 1999
ISBN: 1-58367-000-9 paper/$13.00
ISBN: 1-58367-007-6 cloth/$30.00
138 pp./economics/history