Property and Progress: The Historical Origins and Social Foundations of Self-sustaining Growth

In writing these celebrated essays, Robert Brenner had an electric impact on the debate regarding the transition from feudalism to capitalism. His epochal 1976 essay in "Past and Present" launched what became known as the 'Brenner debate'. His 2007 lecture at the British Academy was an elegant synthesis of his views and has generated a new discussion. The magnitude of Brenner's contribution to the world of ideas can not be underestimated. This series of brilliant essay represent what is probably the most powerful single contribution from a materialist viewpoint to historical thought of the past half century."Property and Progress" brings these texts together here in a single volume for the first time. Intellectually audacious and academically rigorous, they vary in range, offering novel perspectives on the nature of pre-capitalist societies, socio-economic evolution in the medieval and early modern period through to the industrial revolution and a provocative comparison between England and the Yangtze Delta in China.