THE CRADLE OF CAPITALISM: THE CASE OF ENGLAND

For Marx, Weber and many others it has been evident that capitalism is a peculiar social formation. Its birth place was in western Europe. Within this region, there was a particular area which was precocious in its development, where the new social formation emerged in its purest and earliest form. Marx noted that in the early dissolution of the preceding 'medieval ' property system 'England (was) in this respect the model country for the other continental countries...'(1). It was, as Brenner puts it 'classically in England ' that we have 'the rise of the three-tiered relation of landlord/capitalist tenant/free wage labour, around which Marx developed much of his theory of capitalist development in Capital'(2). For Max Weber also, England was 'the home of capitalism'(3). It was in England above all that the Puritan outlook 'stood at the cradle of the modern economic man'(4). Since England was the cradle and nursery of capitalism, it is not surprising that later writers have concentrated on that country. For instance, Polanyi takes England's history as the central example of the 'Great Transformation'(5). It is not unreasonable to suppose that if we could explain why capitalism emerged and developed in England, and specifically what differentiated it from other parts of Europe and allowed this growth, we would have moved some way towards understanding the 'European miracle'. We may look at some of the more outstanding attempts to solve this problem. Marx's treatment o