The Structure of Agrarian Capitalism — The ‘English Model’

Marx never made the mistake of treating ‘capitalism’ as if it were a creature of the nineteenth century, personified by cities, factories, railways and the proletariat which inhabited this new realm. While he suggested that ‘capitalist agriculture’ could only develop effectively on the basis of machinery, fertilisers and other products supplied to agriculture by advanced industrial concerns, he argued that the historical basis for industry was itself to be found in the development of capitalist relations in agriculture, assuming its classic form in England. The chronology that he gave to this process began in the sixteenth century with enclosures, which initiated the separation of producers from the land that was the pre-condition for the establishment of a wage-earning proletariat, the form of labour appropriate to capitalism. The consolidation of landholding and a transformation of independent ‘yeoman’ farmers into tenants of improving landlords completed the structure in which landlord, tenant and labourer were in the eighteenth century to find their place.