The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and
Modern States
by Ellen Meiksins Wood
(Verso Books, £14.99)

ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD is the ultimate historical guide in trying to understand how the transition from feudalism to capitalism came about and, as importantly, what legacy this has left us with today.

Extraordinarily well-informed and replete with hard-hitting rhetorical flourishes, this book is as original and exciting a thesis now as it was when first published in 1991.

Meiksins Wood examines the Marxist-influenced writings of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, who pioneered the idea that Britain’s bourgeois revolution was effectively short-circuited and by no means as developed as it was, say, in France.

In consequence, so the argument goes, we continue to suffer from a lack of democracy, a distorted economy that prioritises the financial sector, a reactionary culture that celebrates the monarchy rather than citizenship and a narrow-minded left that has failed to develop socialist theory and practice.

From the right, she looks at the works of JCD Clark and Alan Macfarlane, historians who argue that what occurred was less a definitive break or revolution and more a maturation of social, political and economic trends present in British society for centuries.

Meiksins Wood accepts neither of these arguments and earlier chapters see her locating the origins of change in the emergence of an agrarian capitalism, with its triad of landlord, capitalist tenant and wage labourer. She insists that primitive and polarised notions of bourgeois versus aristocrat and town versus country should be abandoned.

What’s necessary — and Wood views this very much as a genuinely Marxist approach — is a concentration on the historical specificity of capitalism and its laws of motion.

A written constitution, for example, does not in itself make a country more democratic, while notions of citizenship are by no means always populist and egalitarian. Countries which had more “classical” bourgeois revolutions have often been far more centralised and absolutist than supposedly backwards “Ukania.”

Modern, efficient and productive capitalist systems emerged in countries like Germany and Japan, societies with much more archaic social forms than Britain, and Meiksins Wood notes that many of the problems British society faces are simply because it was the first capitalist society and, in many respects, remains one of the most developed ever.

Controversial stuff but a convincing and no-holds-barred argument nonetheless.

The author marshals evidence of how massive the moves to capitalism were and how they can only be understood on a qualitative rather than merely a quantitative basis.

Underpinned by the relationship between exploiter and exploited, she exposes the violence, coercion and expropriation that Clark and Macfarlane chose to ignore in their depiction of capitalism’s emergence as peaceful, natural and immutable and emphatically argues that such theses owe more to cold war triumphalism and Thatcherite ideology than they do to objective assessment.

If only they’d taught us history like this in school.

Review by Steve Andrew