What social forces lay behind the rise of capitalism?
Capitalist society is a relatively recent development. For Marx, while markets have existed for millennium “the capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century.” [Capital, vol. 1, p. 876] As Murray Bookchin pointed out, for a “long era, perhaps spanning more than five centuries,” capitalism “coexisted with feudal and simple commodity relationships” in Europe. He argues that this period “simply cannot be treated as ‘transitional’ without reading back the present into the past.” [From Urbanisation to Cities, p. 179] In other words, capitalism was not a inevitable outcome of “history” or social evolution. Bookchin went on to note that capitalism existed “with growing significance in the mixed economy of the West from the fourteenth century up to the seventeenth” but that it “literally exploded into being in Europe, particularly England, during the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries.” [Op. Cit., p. 181] The question arises, what lay behind this “growing significance”? Did capit
