Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition to Industrial Capitalism in England by Michael Andrew Žmolek (review)

Idon’t know how many times this book fell out my hands and tumbled from the couch to the floor. Physically holding up this text by Michael Andrew Žmolek which weighs in at perhaps six kilos and nearly 900 pages is no easy task for those who still enjoy reading hard copy. Indeed wading through this enormous tome from time to time I found myself wondering why on earth someone would write such a gigantic work let alone why Brill’s Historical Materialism Series decided to publish. It certainly isn’t going to be a money maker. Moreover its essential thesis is relatively easily stated. But after several weeks of persevering, I have to say the effort of reading through this tome has been worthwhile. An attempt to apply the Brenner thesis to the development of capitalist industry the work is in fact an impressively erudite and up-to-date Marxist review of English economic and political history from the 14th to the 19th century.

A PhD thesis prepared under the supervision of George Comninel at York University who is an unbending proponent of political Marxism, it dutifully reiterates many of the principle themes of this school: the exclusively English origins of capitalism, the importance of late medieval changes in social property relations to the initiation of agrarian capitalism, the significance of relative exploitation spurred by competition in improving productivity, and the overall downgrading of the role of the rural and urban bourgeoisie as against the landlord class as agent of economic and political change. It is the 14th century class struggles and not, as Marx had it, Tudor enclosures which were decisive to capitalist development. The 16th century enclosures are an after-effect of the changes in the relations of production brought about by the class struggles of the 14th century as is the 17th century English Revolution. The materialist dialectics of Marx – “bullshit” (according the analytical Marxists with whom Brenner associated) – are replaced by the syllogistic and deductive logic of capitalist social relations in markets presumed rational. It then follows in determinist fashion that the enclosure and improvement of agriculture based on capitalist agriculture increased the size of the wage-labour force and cut the cost of food to sustain such labour. Increases in the supply of food at affordable prices in turn spurred population growth generally and especially the growth of the proletariat. While these changes increased market dependence and widened the internal market, they eventually forced the introduction of machinery as a creative response to rising food prices in the late 18th century. The introduction of machinery, in turn, brought on the Industrial Revolution and accelerated the trend from the formal to the real subsumption of labour enforcing discipline on the producers while spurring gains in productivity. As the author rightly stresses, manufacturers turned to machinery in an effort to effect savings faced with competitive pressures based on rising costs especially for food. The Brennerite insistence on the importance of competition in driving innovation is certainly vindicated. But to what degree Brenner himself might have rather anachronistically applied this competitive model of the genesis of the Industrial Revolution to the nascent capitalist agriculture of the 16th century is another question.

The above is the barest outline of the author’s argument. But it is unfolded across an immense narrative which includes an introduction and fourteen chapters and ends in a conclusion which summarizes the whole story from 14th to the 19th century. The first chapter is devoted to the pre-history of industry and successive chapters then deal with the inception of the agrarian capitalism, the consequences of the agrarian revolution, the role of capital and technology in the making of industrial capitalism, the social origins of the factory and factories and machinery. But in sharp distinction to political Marxism, there is an enormous weight put on the role of the state in clearing the way for the development of both agrarian...