Diggers, Levellers and Agrarian Capitalism Radical Political Thought in 17th Century English
Geoff Kennedy

This book situates the development of radical English political thought within the context of the specific nature of agrarian capitalism and the struggles that ensued around the nature of the state during the revolutionary decade of the 1640s. In the context of the emerging conceptions of the state and property—with attendant notions of accumulation, labor, and the common good—groups such as Levellers and Diggers developed distinctive forms of radical political thought not because they were progressive, forward thinkers, but because they were the most significant challengers of the newly-constituted forms of political and economic power.

Drawing on recent re-examinations of the nature of agrarian capitalism and modernity in the early modern period, Geoff Kennedy argues that any interpretation of the political theory of this period must relate to the changing nature of social property relations and state power. The radical nature of early modern English political thought is therefore cast in terms of its oppositional relationship to these novel forms of property and state power, rather than being conceived of as a formal break from discursive conventions.

'This impressive study takes on a major challenge. Geoff Kennedy not only offers a clear and persuasive account of political ideas in their historical context, but also engages in methodological debate with other historians of political thought and explores the controversies among scholars of this much contested period in English history. He manages to interweave these different strands with commendable clarity and in accessible prose, suitable to a wide audience from specialists to students and the intelligent general reader.'
Ellen Meiksins Wood - York University, Canada"

More Info: Lexington Books 2008

Chumbawamba - The Diggers' Song 

The Digger's Song - Leon Rosselson

World Turned Upside Down - Leon Rosselson

Great English singer songwriter, Leon Rosselson, sings his own tribute to The Diggers and to Thomas Paine.

Dick Gaughan - world turned upside down

dall' album Handful of Earth del 1981.

1. 
   
2. 
   

   2:33

   The world turned upside down - Billy Bragg

Attila The Stockbroker - March of the Levellers/The Diggers' Song

Levellers and ranters and diggers - Permanent Culture Now

https://www.permanentculturenow.com/a-common-peoples-history-of-the-uk-part-3-l...

Aug 25, 2012 - A common peoples history of the UK part 3: Levellers and ranters and diggers. ... In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and a small band of Diggers occupied a patch of waste land on St George's Hill in Surrey, to 'work together, eat bread together', in the belief that 'the Earth ought to be a common Treasury to all'.

A common peoples history of the UK part 3:Levellers and ranters and diggers. ... In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and a small band of Diggers occupied a patch of waste land on St George's Hill in Surrey, to 'work together, eat bread together', in the belief that 'the Earth ought to be a common Treasury to all'.Aug 25, 2012

The Ranters - Spartacus Educational
https://spartacus-educational.com › The English Civil War › History of Socialism
A detailed account of The Ranters that includes includes quotations and the ... Lilburne and the Levellers and described the Diggers as the "True Levellers".

The World Turned Upside Down - Levellers, Diggers,  Ranters, 14th April 2019

 Published on Apr 15, 2019

Attila the Stockbroker and John Rees celebrate the radical movements at the heart of the English Revolution, Levellers, Diggers and Ranters. Event in East Oxford Community Hall.

An afternoon of discussion, poetry and song to celebrate the legacy of the most radical movements of the 1640s. Co-hosted by Oxfordshire Refugee Solidarity (ORS), Oxford Momentum and Attila the Stockbroker to raise funds for the work of ORS supporting refugees and local charities in northern France.
Two very different commentators on the role of Levellers, Diggers and Ranters during and after the English Revolution.

ALSO SEE ATLANTIC HISTORY  REVIEWS OF THE MANY HEADED HYDRA 

THE_BRENNER_DEBATE._Agrarian_Class_Structure_
and_Economic_Development_in_Pre-Industrial_Europe

 BOOK PDF

Capitalism - Bibliothèque et Archives Canada PHD THESIS FULL PDF 

www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk4/etd/MQ89460.PDF

This article was published in ANTIPODE: A RADICAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHY, 26,4,(1994):351-76.

ROBERT BRENNER IN THE TUNNEL OF TIME

J.M. BLAUT University of Illinois at Chicago

Euro-Marxism

Robert Brenner is a Marxist, a follower of one tradition in Marxism that is as diffusionist, as Eurocentric, as most conservative positions. I cannot here offer an explanation for this curious phenomenon: a tradition within one of the most egalitarian of all socio-political doctrines yet a tradition which, nonetheless, believes in the historical superiority (or priority) of one community of humans, Europeans, over another, non-Europeans. Eurocentric Marxists are not racist, nor even prejudiced, although most of them believe that Europeans have always been the leaders in the forward march of history; that Europe is the fountainhead of civilization, the main source of innovative social change. For these scholars, the origins of capitalism are European. Capitalism's further development consisted of an internally generated process of improvement within its classic homeland, the European world. The impact of capitalism on the rest of the world has been, on balance, progressive. Colonialism and (today) neocolonialism are not significant for capitalism, are rather a marginal process, a temporary aberration or diversion or side-show, not a vital need of the system as a whole, which evolves in response to internal laws of motion.

This is the accepted version of Anievas, Alexander and Nisancioglu, Kerem (2013) What’s at Stake in the Transition Debate? Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 42 (1), 78-102. Published version available from Sage at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0305829813497823Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/20673/

Robert Brenner on political accumulation and the transition to capitalism

Ricardo Duchesne*

University of New Brunswick, Saint John, P.O. Box 5050, Saint John, New Brunswick, E2L 4L5, Canada

Received 20 September 1998; accepted 23 July 1999

The Brenner Debate

The Dobb-Sweezy debate is often considered an intra-Marxist debate insofar as the questions and issues that were posed during it were mostly of interest to those already convinced of, or working within the Marxist theoretical tradition of historiography. The discussion charted below, “the Brenner Debate,” discusses many of the same issues, and its eponymous exponent Robert Brenner, argues indeed from a Marxist informed theoretical position. Nonetheless, the central issues in this debate were much more wide-ranging owing in part to the focus of the debate on long-term economic development in Europe. This pulled historians from various traditions into discussing the inherent orthodoxy of ‘the demographic approach’ for this problem. It is the strength of Brenner’s position, and its significance for historically informed theory that provided the groundwork for ‘Political Marxism’ (what was originally an epithet coined by Guy Bois in the contribution below, and later reclaimed in a positive sense by Ellen Meiksins Wood (1981)).

The "Brenner Thesis"

INTRODUCTION

I suppose most people who got their Marxist education in Marxist parties share certain basic assumptions about how First World economic and political hegemony over the so-called Third World has been achieved. It was a function of economic exploitation going back to the discovery of the New World and the several hundred years of advantage this gave the First World, as it expanded its control over countries to the East as well. Gold and silver mined by indigenous peoples, colonial plantations, disruption of local handicrafts in places like India all worked together to give nascent capitalist institutions in Europe the "supercharging" they needed to leapfrog over other countries where similar institutions were also gestating.

So I was surprised, if not shocked, to discover that Robert Brenner, a leader of the left-wing American group Solidarity, wrote a series of articles in the 1970s denying such connections. Brenner's critique was directed against a group of thinkers who, like Paul Sweezy, viewed themselves as operating in the Marxist tradition, and others, like Andre Gunder Frank, who rejected Marxism altogether. What they all had in common was a perspective that development in the core countries is a cause of underdevelopment in the so-called periphery. The prosperity and global power of nations like the United States was a function of the poverty and weakness of countries like Vietnam, Nicaragua and Angola.

But in Brenner's words (New Left Review, 104, 1977), these thinkers "move too quickly from the proposition that capitalism is bound up with, and supportive of, continuing underdevelopment in large parts of the world, to the conclusion not only that the rise of underdevelopment is inherent in the extension of the world division of labour through capitalist expansion, but also that the 'development of underdevelopment' is an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself."

I will argue that the 'development of underdevelopment' is indeed an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself, but before doing so it will be necessary to provide some historical background into Marxist thinking on these questions. Since Brenner claims to be defending classical Marxism against newfangled, neo-Smithian deviations, it would be useful to now review what Marx and Marxists have written.

The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism

www.unsa.edu.ar/histocat/haeconomica07/lecturas/lawcountries.pdf

by RP BRENNER - ‎2001 - ‎

Keywords: Brenner debate, economic development, Netherlands agrarian ... standing debate on the transition to capitalism, with respect to earlier stages of.

In the most recent phase of the discussion on the historical conditions for economic development, or the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the town-dominated Low Countries have been neglected, because the focus has been to such a large extent on agrarian conditions and agrarian transformations. This article seeks to make use of the cases of the medieval and early modern Northern and Southern Netherlands, the most highly urbanized and commercialized regions in Europe, to show that the rise of towns and the expansion of exchange cannot in themselves bring about economic development, because they cannot bring about the requisite transformation of agrarian social-property relations. In the non-maritime Southern Netherlands, a peasant-based economy led to economic involution. In the maritime Northern Netherlands, the transformation of peasants into market-dependent farmers created the basis for economic development.

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 2 No. 1, January 2002, pp. 88–95. Charles Post © Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres 2002.

SUGGESTIONS AND DEBATES
 Capitalism, Merchants and Bourgeois Revolution:Reflections on the Brenner Debate and its Sequel 
ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD
 The "Brenner Debate" launched by Past and Present in 1976 was about "agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe". Robert Brenner's recent book, Merchants and Revolution, has opened a new front in the debate by introducing merchants and "commercial change" into the equation.1 Although the book's massive Postscript carefully situates Brenner's analysis of commercial development in the context of his earlier account of the agrarian transition from feudalism to capitalism, this is unlikely to foreclose debate about how, or even whether, his more recent argument about the role of merchants in the English revolution can be squared with the original.Brenner thesis. What is at issue here is not just divergent interpretations of historical evidence but larger differences about the nature of capitalism. The following argument has more to do with the latter than with the former, and it will be concerned with Brenner's work and the debates surrounding it not just for their own sake but for what they reveal about the dominant conceptions of capitalism, in Marxist and non-Marxist histories alike.

 Comments on the Brenner–Wood Exchangeon the Low Countries 
CHARLES POST 

The exchange between Brenner and Wood on the Low Countries in the early modern period raises a number of theoretical and historical issues relating to the conditions for the emergence of capitalist social-property relations and their unique historical laws of motion. This contribution focuses on three issues raised in the Brenner–Wood exchange: the conditions under which rural household producers become subject to ‘market coercion’, the potential for ecological crisis to restructure agricultural production, and the relative role of foreign trade and the transformation of domestic, rural class relations to capitalist industrialization. Keywords: Brenner debate, economic development, 

Is there anything to defend in Political Marxism?

By Neil Davidson

Issue #91: Features

At the conclusion of their article, “In Defense of Political Marxism” (International Socialist Review #90, July 2013), Jonah Birch and Paul Heideman note that: “Advocates of Political Marxism like Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Charles Post share a tremendous amount with their critics like Jairus Banaji, Neil Davidson, and Ashley Smith in their common perspective on the necessity for revolutionary socialism from below.”¹ It is certainly true that members of Solidarity like Brenner and Post are revolutionaries who have made significant contributions to issues of central importance to the Left, many of which are perfectly compatible with the International Socialist tradition.² Others from the same organization, like John Eric Marot, have critically engaged with aspects of that tradition such as our attitude to the Left Opposition, but in comradely ways that helped to develop our collective understanding.³ 

One of the difficulties with Political Marxism, however, is its political indeterminacy. Not all proponents are revolutionaries: Wood inhabits a position close to that of Ralph Miliband and his successors on the editorial board of The Socialist Register, although she too has made important theoretical contributions, above all in relation to the nature of democracy under capitalism. Other Political Marxists, however, inhabit an almost exclusively scholastic universe in which ferocious declarations of adherence to what they take to be the Marxist method are completely detached from any socialist practice, resulting in a kind of academic sectarianism.

The uneven relationship of Political Marxists to socialist practice is not however the main problem with this theoretical tendency. If it was simply a provocative historical argument about the emergence of capitalism then it would have no necessary implications for contemporary politics—and several Political Marxists have produced historical works which contain important findings independent of how persuasive or otherwise one finds the Brenner Thesis, notably Brenner’s own Merchants and Revolution and Post’s The American Road to Capitalism. 

The Brenner debate revisited

THE BRENNER DEBATE EXPLAINED 

 The Brenner Debate The agricultural revolution Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England witnessed an agricultural revolution which involved massive changes in land tenure, the organization of production on farms, the techniques employed in farming, and the productivity of agriculture. Thus the sixteenth century represented a sharp change in English rural life: the emergence of the capitalist farm in place of small-scale peasant cultivation, the intensification of market relations, increase in population, and eventual breakthrough to capitalist development in town and country. The social consequences of this revolution were massive as well: smallholding peasant farming gave way to larger capitalist farms; hundreds of thousands of displaced peasants were rapidly plunged into conditions of day labor, first in farming and then in manufacture in towns and cities; higher farm productivity permitted more rapid urbanization and the growth of an urban, commercialized economy; and higher real incomes provided higher levels of demand for finished goods which stimulated industrial development. Thus the agricultural revolution was the necessary prelude to the industrial revolution in England. [1] “It was the growth of agricultural productivity, rooted in the transformation of agrarian class or property relations, which allowed the English economy to embark upon a path of development foreclosed to its Continental neighbours. This path was distinguished by continuing industrialization and overall economic growth through the period when `general crisis' gripped the other European economies” (Brenner 1982:110). It was indeed, in the last analysis, an agricultural revolution, based on the emergence of capitalist class relations in the countryside which made it possible for England to become the first nation to experience industrialization [through higher levels of grain productivity and higher income to stimulate demand for industrial goods]. (Brenner 1976:68) This process poses at least two problems for historical explanation. First is an historical question: why did breakthrough occur in England in the sixteenth century and not the fifteenth or the nineteenth? And the second is geographic: why did this process of agricultural development occur in England but not on the Continent? In particular, why did agrarian life in the French countryside remain relatively unchanged throughout this period? And why did eastern Europe slide into a “second feudalism”? [2] A variety of explanations have been advanced for these developments. Some economic historians (e.g., M. M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie) have maintained that the cause of this process of change was an autonomous increase in either population or commerce or both. Robert Brenner argues, however, that these explanations are inadequate, since these large-scale factors affected the whole of Western Europe, while capitalist breakthrough occurred only in Britain. Brenner holds that the determining factor is the particular character of social-property relations in different regions of Europe (particularly the conditions of land-tenure and associated forms of surplus extraction), the interests and incentives which these relations impose on the various actors, and the relative power of the classes defined by those relations in particular regions. Brenner's explanation of these developments is thus based on “micro-class analysis” of the agrarian relations of particular regions of Europe. The processes of agricultural modernization unavoidably favored some class interests and harmed others. Capitalist agriculture required larger units of production (farms); the application of larger quantities of capital goods to agriculture; higher levels of education and scientific knowledge; etc. All of this required expropriation of small holders and destruction of traditional communal forms of agrarian relations. Whose interests would be served by these changes? Higher agricultural productivity would result; but the new agrarian relations would be ones which would pump the greater product out of the control of the producer and into elite classes and larger urban concentrations. Consequently, these changes did not favor peasant community interests, in the medium run at least. It is Brenner's view that in those regions of Europe where peasant societies were best able to defend traditional arrangements--favorable rent levels, communal control of land, and patterns of small holding--those arrangements persisted for centuries. In areas where peasants had been substantially deprived of tradition, organization, and power of resistance, capitalist agriculture was able (through an enlightened gentry and budding bourgeoisie) to restructure agrarian relations in the direction of profitable, scientific, rational (capitalist) agriculture. <!--[if lt IE 6]> <![endif]

Saturday, January 2, 2010

The Brenner debate revisited

One of the defining controversies in the field of economic history in the past 35 years is the Brenner debate.  Robert Brenner published "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" in Past and Present in 1976 (link) and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" in 1982.  In between these publications (and following) there was a rush of substantive responses from leading economic historians, including M. M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.  (Many of the most significant articles are collected in Aston and Philpin's The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe.)  Brenner's theories injected important new impetus into the old question: what led to the advent of capitalism?  (Maurice Dobb had stimulated a similar burst of scholarship on this topic with his 1963 Studies In The Development Of Capitalism (link).  Brenner's discussion of the Dobb debate can be found in his essay, "Dobb on the transition from feudalism to capitalism" here.)

The core issue of the debate is large and important: what were the social factors that brought about the major economic transformations of the European economy since the decline of feudalism?  Feudalism was taken to be a stagnant economic system; but in the sixteenth century things began to change.  There was something of an agricultural revolution in England, with technological innovation, changes of cropping systems, and significant increase in land productivity.  There were the beginnings of manufacture, leading eventually to water- and steam-powered machines.  There was a population shift from the countryside to towns and cities.  There was industrial revolution.  (Marx describes much of this process in Capital; here's an earlier post of his concept of "primitive accumulation.")  So what were the large social factors that caused this widespread process of social and economic change?  What propelled these dramatic changes of economic structure?

The great economic historian M. M. Postan offered a simple theory: “Behind most economic trends in the middle ages, above all behind the advancing and retreating land settlement, it is possible to discern the inexorable effects of rising and declining population” (Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages, p. 72).  Against this view, Brenner writes: "Under different property structures and different balances of power, similar demographic or commercial trends, with their associated patterns of factor prices, presented very different opportunities and dangers and thus evoked disparate responses, with diverse consequences for the economy as a whole. Indeed, . . . under different property structures and balances of class forces . . . precisely the same demographic and commercial trends yielded widely divergent results" (Brenner 1982:16-17).  Key to Brenner's argument is the fact that agricultural change was substantially different in England and France; so he insists that an adequate causal explanation must identify a factor that varies similarly.

From the distance of several decades, the dividing lines of the Brenner debate are pretty clear.  One school of thought (Postan, Ladurie) attempts to explain the economic transformations described here in terms of facts about population, while the other (Brenner's) argues that the central causal factors have to do with social institutions (social-property relations and institutions of political power). The demographic theory focuses its attention on the factors that influenced population growth, including disease; the social institutions theory focuses attention on the institutional framework within which economic actors (lords, peasants, capitalist farmers) pursue their goals.  The one is akin to a biological or ecological theory, emphasizing common and universal demographic forces; the other is a social theory, emphasizing contingency and variation across social space.

A voice that doesn't come into the debate directly but that is highly relevant is that of Douglass North. His book (with Robert Paul Thomas), The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, offers a theory of modern economic development that falls within the category of "social institutional theory" rather than demographic theory.  But whereas Brenner finds primary causal importance in the institutions that define local class relations (a Marxian idea), North argues that property relations that create the right kinds of incentives will stimulate rapid economic growth (a Smithian idea). And North finds that this is the innovation that took place in England in the early modern period.  It was the creation of capitalist property relations that stimulated economic growth.

This schematic representation of the strands of argument in the Brenner debate suggests competing causal diagrams:

• population growth => economic activity => sustained economic growth (Postan)
• weak peasant farmers, strong capitalist farmers => enclosure and farming innovations => rapid agricultural growth (Brenner)
• enhanced protections of property rights => incentive for profitable activity => sustained economic growth (North)

But it seems clear in hindsight that these are false dichotomies. We aren't forced to choose: Malthus, Marx, or Smith.  Economic development is not caused by a single dominant factor -- a point that Guy Bois embraces in his essay (Aston and Philpin, 117).  Rather, all these factors were in play in European economic development -- and several others as well.  (For example, Ken Pomeranz introduces the exploitation of the natural resources, energy sources, and forced labor of the Americas in his account of the economic growth of Western Europe (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy).  And I suppose that it would be possible to make a climate-change argument for this period of change as well.)  Moreover, each large factor (population, prices, property relations) itself is the complex result of a number of great factors -- including the others on the list.  So we shouldn't expect simple causal diagrams of large outcomes like sustained economic growth.

Not all the heat of this debate derives from a polemic between a neo-Marxist theorist and the Malthusians; there is also a significant disagreement between Brenner and another important Marxist economic historian, Guy Bois.  Bois' Crisis of Feudalism appeared in 1976 -- the same year as Brenner's first paper in the debate.  The crisis to which Bois refers is an analogy with a classic Marxist claim about capitalism: where Marx discerned a crisis in capitalism deriving from the falling rate of profit, Bois found a crisis in feudalism deriving from a falling rate of feudal levy.  (Here is an interesting review by Chris Harman of another of Bois' books, The Transformation of the Year One Thousand: The Village of Lournard from Antiquity to Feudalism.)  Bois criticizes Brenner's account for being excessively theory-driven.  He argues that Brenner begins with a commitment to class struggle as a fundamental explanation, and then forces the facts of French and English rural life into this framework.  Better, he argues, to let the complexity of the historical situations emerge through careful evaluation of the evidence.  "Brenner's thought is, in fact, arranged around a single principle: theoretical generalization always precedes direct examination of historical source material" (Aston and Philpin, 110).  And Bois argues that the evidence will suggest that it is the declining feudal levy rather than the capacity for resistance by French peasants that best explains the course of events in France.

In short, one important consequence of the Brenner debate was the renewed focus it placed on the question of social causation.  Brenner and the other participants expended a great deal of effort in developing theories of the causal mechanisms that led to economic change in this period.  And in hindsight, it appears that a lot of the energy in the debates stemmed from the false presupposition that it should be possible to identify a single master factor that explained these large changes in economic development.  But this no longer seems supportable.  Rather, historians are now much more willing to recognize the plurality of causes at work and the geographical differentiation that is inherent in almost every large historical process.  So the advice that Bois extends -- don't let your large theory get in the way of detailed historical research -- appears to be good counsel.

A web-based text for the philosophy of social sciences

• Foundations
• What is a social science?
• Ontological questions
• Social science disciplines
• Some debates about methodology
• Social explanation
• Social cognition
• Agency and collective action
• Identity and culture
• Causal mechanisms
• Structures and processes
• Institutions
• Power
• Materialism
• Historical explanation
• China

A WEB-BASED RESOURCE
The philosophy of social sciences raises a series of foundational questions having to do with how we can arrive at empirically and theoretically supported understandings of social and individual behavior. What is involved in explaining social outcomes and patterns? How do agents cause outcomes? What roles do social entities such as structures, organizations, or moral systems play in social causation?
My blog, UnderstandingSociety, addresses a series of topics in the philosophy of social science. What is involved in "understanding society"? The blog is an experiment in writing a book, one idea at a time. In order to provide a bit more coherence for the series of postings, I've organized a series of threads that link together the postings relevant to a particular topic. These can be looked at as virtual "chapters". This list of topics and readings can serve as the core of a semester-long discussion of the difficult philosophical issues that arise in the human sciences. It roughly parallels the topics I cover in the course I teach in the philosophy of social science at the University of Michigan.
Look at this web document as a web-based, dynamic monograph on the philosophy of social science; and look at this list of threads as one possible route through some foundational issues in the philosophy and methodology of social science.

© Daniel Little 2011

--> -->

THE PRE BRENNER DEBATE

The Agrarian Problem In The Sixteenth Century

by R.H. Tawney

Publication date 1912

CONTENTS 

Introduction 1 

PART I.—THE SMALL LANDHOLDER 

The Rural Population— (a) 

The Classes of Landholders . . .19 (5) 

The Freeholders 27 (c) 

The Customary Tenants . . . 40

 II. The Peasantry — (a) The Variety of Conditions . . . .55 

( b) The Consolidation of Peasant Holdings . 57

 (c) The Growth op a Land Market among the Peasants 72 

III. The Peasantry { continued)— 

{d) The Economic Environment of the Small Cultivator ....... 98 17. 

The Peasantry {continued)— {e) Signs op Change 136 

The Growth of Competitive^ Rents on New Allotments 139 

{g) The Progress of Enclosure among the Peasantry 147

 PART II.—THE TRANSITION TO CAPITALIST AGRICULTURE

 I. The New Rural Economy — (a) Motives and Causes 177

 {b) The Growth op the Large Leasehold Farm 200

 (c) Enclosure and Conversion by the Manorial Authorities 213 

II. The Reaction of the Agrarian Changes on the Peasantry —

 (a) The Removing of Landmarks. . . .231

 (b) The Struggle fob the Commons . . .237

 (c) The Engrossing of Holdings and Displacement OF Tenants . *. . . .253 

(1) The Agrarian Changes and the Poor Law .,^266

 III. The Question of Tenant Right — 

(a) The Tenants at Will and the Leaseholders 281

 (b) The Copyholders 287

 (c) The Undermining of Customary Tenures . 

PART III.—THE OUTCOME OF THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION

 I. The Agrarian Problem and the State — 

(a) T^ Political and Social Importance op the Peasantry 313

 (b) Legislation and Administration . . .351

 (c) Success and Failure of State Intervention 377

 II. General Conclusions 401 

Appendix I 410 

Appendix II 422 Index 437

Richard Henry "R. H." Tawney (/ˈtɔːni/; 30 November 1880 – 16 January 1962) was an English economic historian,^[1][2]social critic,^[3][4] ethical socialist,^[5] Christian socialist,^[6] and an important proponent of adult education.^[8][9]

The Oxford Companion to British History (1997) explained that Tawney made a "significant impact" in all four of these "interrelated roles".^[10] A. L. Rowse goes further by insisting that "Tawney exercised the widest influence of any historian of his time, politically, socially and, above all, educationally".^[11]