Few historiographical debates have proved as durable—or as theoretically consequential—as the question of how feudalism gave way to capitalism. For more than half a century, historians, sociologists, and political economists have argued not merely about the timing and geography of this transition, but about whether the very categories can bear the analytical weight placed upon them. The stakes extend well beyond matters of periodization or regional emphasis.

What makes this debate so remarkably persistent is that its participants are rarely disagreeing about the same body of evidence. They are disagreeing about what constitutes a valid historical explanation. Whether one locates the engine of transformation in agrarian class relations, in the expansion of long-distance commercial networks, or in the coercive extraction of colonial surplus depends less on archival discoveries than on prior theoretical commitments about how large-scale historical change operates. The evidence underdetermines the interpretation.

Tracing the major fault lines—from Robert Brenner's landmark intervention in the 1970s, through the world-systems challenge mounted by Immanuel Wallerstein, to recent efforts to move beyond the feudalism-capitalism binary altogether—reveals something fundamental about the discipline of history itself. Historiographical disputes of this magnitude are never simply resolved by accumulating better evidence. They are transformed when the questions scholars bring to the archive, and the theoretical frameworks structuring their interpretation, fundamentally change.

When Robert Brenner published his two articles in Past & Present in 1976, he did not simply offer another account of Europe's economic transformation. He mounted a systematic critique of the two dominant explanatory models—the demographic-Malthusian framework associated with M. M. Postan and the commercialization thesis advanced in different forms by Paul Sweezy and others—and proposed a radically different alternative grounded in the structure of agrarian class relations.

Brenner's central argument was deceptively simple in its logic. If demographic pressure or expanding trade were sufficient to explain the dissolution of feudalism, then comparable conditions across late medieval Europe should have produced comparable outcomes. They did not. England developed agrarian capitalism. France reconsolidated peasant proprietorship. Eastern Europe witnessed a second serfdom. The same broad stimuli produced strikingly divergent results.

The explanatory variable Brenner identified was the balance of class power between lords and peasants, shaped by historically specific patterns of lordly organization and peasant communal solidarity. Where peasant communities were strong enough to resist seigneurial expropriation—as in much of France—they secured property rights that paradoxically inhibited capitalist development. Where lords successfully dispossessed the peasantry—as in England—the resulting structure of landlord, tenant, and wage laborer generated competitive pressures driving productivity improvement and deepening market dependence.

The response was immediate and international. Historians of France, Poland, Bohemia, and the Low Countries challenged Brenner's comparative framework on empirical grounds, while theorists debated whether his model was genuinely Marxist or had abandoned the classical emphasis on productive forces for a voluntarist account of class agency. The collection published as The Brenner Debate in 1985 crystallized these exchanges without resolving any of the fundamental disagreements they had exposed.

What Brenner accomplished, regardless of whether one accepts his specific claims about English exceptionalism, was to demonstrate that the transition question could not be answered by economic history alone. Any adequate explanation of capitalism's emergence necessarily involved claims about social power, institutional structures, and the contingent outcomes of class conflict—categories that required explicit theoretical defense rather than the tacit assumption that had characterized much earlier scholarship on the problem.

Takeaway

When identical conditions produce different outcomes, the explanation must lie in the structures mediating those conditions—not in the conditions themselves. This principle applies far beyond the transition debate to any historical comparison worth making.

Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System, whose first volume appeared in 1974, offered a fundamentally different architecture for understanding capitalism's emergence. Where Brenner insisted on the primacy of internal class relations within specific agrarian societies, Wallerstein argued that capitalism was from its inception a world-system—intelligible only at the level of the interstate division of labor that crystallized during the long sixteenth century.

For Wallerstein, the critical development was not the transformation of English agriculture but the construction of a hierarchical world-economy linking core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral zones through systematically unequal exchange. Western Europe's industrialization depended structurally on the coerced labor of Eastern European serfs and enslaved peoples in the Americas. Capitalism did not spread outward from a single point of origin. It was constituted by the global connections themselves.

The methodological implications were profound. Wallerstein's framework dissolved the unit of analysis most social historians took for granted—the national or regional society—and replaced it with the world-system as the fundamental totality. Explaining England's agrarian capitalism or France's peasant economy required understanding their respective positions within a global division of labor, not merely examining their internal class structures in isolation from one another.

Critics from the Brenner camp charged that world-systems theory confused the circulation of commodities with the capitalist mode of production itself. Andre Gunder Frank's earlier formulation—that Latin America had been capitalist since its incorporation into European trade networks—was taken as emblematic of this conflation. If any sustained participation in commodity exchange qualifies as capitalism, the concept loses the analytical precision needed to distinguish genuinely different forms of economic organization and the transition question becomes meaningless.

Yet the world-systems challenge exposed a real weakness in internalist accounts. Brenner's emphasis on English exceptionalism could not easily explain why capitalism, once established in one agrarian context, spread so rapidly and unevenly across the globe. The mechanisms of colonialism, forced labor, and imperial extraction that Wallerstein foregrounded were not incidental to capitalist development—they were central to the accumulation processes that made industrial capitalism materially possible. Ignoring them left the internalist narrative uncomfortably provincial.

Takeaway

Choosing your unit of analysis is never a neutral methodological decision. It predetermines which causes become visible and which remain invisible—and different scales of analysis can produce genuinely incompatible yet individually coherent explanations.

By the 1990s, a growing number of historians had grown impatient with the terms of the Brenner-Wallerstein exchange. Despite their fierce disagreements, both camps shared a foundational assumption: that feudalism and capitalism named coherent, distinguishable systems, and that the historian's task was to explain the passage from one to the other. A new generation of scholarship began to ask whether this binary framework was itself the primary obstacle to understanding.

Historians of South and East Asia pressed this challenge most effectively. The work of R. Bin Wong, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Prasannan Parthasarathi demonstrated that market economies, wage labor, and sophisticated commercial institutions flourished in China, Japan, and India well before the period conventionally assigned to the European transition. If these societies possessed many of capitalism's supposed hallmarks without undergoing a feudalism-to-capitalism shift, then the European narrative could not function as a universal template for economic transformation.

Within European history itself, scholars increasingly emphasized the persistence of non-capitalist relations well into the industrial age. Jan de Vries's concept of the industrious revolution highlighted how household labor strategies—not merely changes in production relations—drove patterns of economic intensification. Historians of gender and labor demonstrated that the categories feudal and capitalist obscured as much as they revealed about the actual organization of work, credit, and exchange in early modern communities.

The theoretical ground shifted beneath the debate simultaneously. Institutional economics, particularly the work of Douglass North and later Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, offered frameworks centered on property rights, transaction costs, and institutional path dependence rather than modes of production. Meanwhile, historians informed by postcolonial theory questioned whether the feudalism-capitalism narrative was itself an artifact of Eurocentric teleology—a story Europe constructed about itself to naturalize its global dominance.

These interventions have not produced consensus, but they have fundamentally altered what is at stake. The question is no longer simply how did feudalism become capitalism but whether that question, framed in those terms, can generate productive historical knowledge at all. The most innovative current scholarship tends to abandon the grand transition narrative in favor of tracing specific, situated transformations—in labor relations, legal regimes, fiscal systems, or ecological arrangements—without presuming they add up to a single coherent story.

Takeaway

When a debate persists for decades without resolution, the most productive move may be to question the assumptions both sides share rather than continuing to choose between them.

The feudalism-to-capitalism debate is not a puzzle awaiting its definitive solution. It is a mirror reflecting the theoretical commitments and political concerns of each generation that engages it. Brenner's intervention was inseparable from 1970s Marxist debates. Wallerstein's framework emerged from the politics of decolonization. The revisionist challenge drew energy from the global and cultural turns of the 1990s.

This does not mean the debate has been fruitless. Each intervention sharpened the analytical tools available to historians and exposed blind spots in earlier formulations. The cumulative effect has been not resolution but increasing sophistication—a richer understanding of what any adequate account of large-scale economic transformation must include.

The most productive direction forward likely lies not in choosing among these frameworks but in recognizing that each illuminates different dimensions of a process too complex for any single theoretical lens. The transition question endures because it forces historians to confront the relationship between evidence and explanation at the most fundamental level.