The Beginnings of Capitalism in Central Europe

Front matter

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi About the Author and This Book by Cyril Levitt xiii Preface: Krader in Context by David Levine xix Reply to Krader in Context by Cyril Levitt XXV Translator's Foreword XXxxi Acknowledgements Xxxvii Author's Foreword xli Author's Introduction xlii Part |

Chapter One: The Beginnings of Modern Bourgecis Society in Central Europe: The Bourgeois Revolution from the 15th-17th Centuries 3 Chapter Two: Theoretical Conceptions of the Transition from Feudalism to the Modern Era in the History of Central Europe: Marx, Weber and Troeltsch, Sombart and Kulischer, Schumpeter 15 2.1 General Remarks 15 2.2 The Transition from Feudalism to Modern Bourgeois Society According to Karl Marx 17 vi THE BEGINNINGS OF CAPITALISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Part II 2.3 Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism

2.4 Sombart, Kulischer, von Below, Strieder, Brentano, Janssen, Pareto, Braudel

2.5 Schumpeter

2.6 The Capitalist System and Modern Bourgeois Society

2.7 Social Form and Substance 2.7a Form and Substance of Freedom: Faust’s Last Words

2.8 On the Theory of Labour and Technique as Part of the Labour Process in the Period of Early Capitalism

Chapter Five: 3.1 The Population and Its Numbers

3.2 The Condition of the Peasants

3.3 Labour Processes in the City General Considerations Concerning Harmony and Struggle

3.4 The Guild System, the Putting-Out System and Manufacture

3.5 Merchants, Trade and Calculating Skills [Rechenkunst] 3.5.1 Arithmetic, Calculating Skills [Rechenkunst] 3.5.2 Merchants and Trade

4.1 Mechanical Clocks and the Consciousness of Time 4.1.1 Mechanical Clocks

4.1.2 The Measurement and Consciousness of Time

4.3 Labour and Society, Public and Private Interests

5.1 Mining Freedom

5.2 Structuring of Labour in Mining During the 14th and 15th Centuries

5.3 Labour and Processing in Mining

5.4 The Iron Industry in Central Europe in the 15th and 16th

Centuries

4.2 Wage Labour and Wage Policy in the Early Capitalist Period

TABLE OF CONTENTS | vii

Europe in the World 261 Capitalism and Developed Culture 275 From the Social Contract to the Concept of Society 277 Bibliography 279 Illustrations 291

Index 311

Eight illustrations from the “Ständebuch” by Hans Sachs and Jost Amman Illustrations are found on pages 292-309

1. Der Bauwr — The Peasant

2. Der Müller - Ihe Miller

3. Der Bierbreuwer — Ihe Beer Brewer

4. Der Buchbinder — The Book Binder

5. Der Kauffman - The Merchant

6. Der Krämer — The Shopkeeper

7. Der Bergknapp — The Miner

8. Der Beutler — The Bag Maker

Albrecht Diirer Instructions

Albrecht Dürer Knight, Death and the Devil

Albrecht Dürer Melencolia I

Georg Reisch

Jakob Köbel Title pages of two mathematical textbooks Rühlein von Calw Probierbiichlein (title page)

Georg Agricola Four illustrations from books 6 and 8 from De Re Metallica

Tables

Table 1: The Population of Europe, 1300-1700 (in Millions) 80 Table 2: Population of Cities in England, France, Italy, Spain, and the

Netherlands, 1300-1700 City Year (Population in Thousands) 81 Table 3: Population of Some Cities in Central Europe in the 14th-17th

Centuries 83 Table 4: Number of Textile Guilds and their Independent Members

around the Year 1440 108 Table 5: Ship Cargo (on Average), Hansa and Venice, 1300-1700 134

Table 6: Mechanical Clocks in Europe in the 14th and 15th Centuries 165 Table 7: Annual Expenditures of Knight Hans von Hosperg in Clöden

(Saxony) in 1474 175 Table 8: | Wages (in Pennies) for Unskilled Labourers, Journeymen and

Masters, in Construction in Nuremberg by Selected Years 176 Table 9: Summer and Winter Wages in Construction in Nuremberg by

Classification at the End of the 16th Century 176 Table 10: Number of Mine Shares by Category of Holders in

Joachimsthal 197 Table 11: German, Latin and English Names of Manual Labourers in

Mining 206

Table 12: German and Latin Names of Administrators in Mining 207 xii | THE BEGINNINGS OF CAPITALISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Table 13: German and Latin Names of District Administrators

in Mining 208 Table 14: Number and Types of Mining Workers in the 16th Century 214 Table 15: Weekly Wages (in Pennies) of Mining People in Schemnitz and Hoderitzsch in 1527 215 Table 16: Amounts of Iron in Europe in the 16th Century (in Tons) 225 Table 17: Europe: Wrought Iron Production in 1500 226 Table 18: Number of Seasonal Workers in Mining (Average) 229 Table 19: "Ihe Number of Workers, Iron Industry of the Upper Palatinate,

1475 232 Table 20: Number and Types of Seasonal Mining Workers at the End of

the 16th Century in Sulzbach 234

Table 21: Number, Type of Mine Worker, and Weekly Wages for One Pit 1595/1596 235

About the Author and This Book

CYRIL LEVITT

Lawrence Krader (1920-1998) was an American philosopher and anthropologist whose fields of interest included ethnographic and ethnological studies of Central Asia including those of the Altaic-speaking peoples of the Steppes. He was the world’s leading expert on the ethnological notebooks of Karl Marx, which he transcribed from the original notes and published under the same title in 1972. As a philosopher he studied with Morris Raphael Cohen at the City College of New York (CCNY) and at the University of Chicago, served as a research assistant to Alfred Tarski at CCNY and, while in Chicago, studied for a year with Rudolf Carnap. Before his enlistment in the US Merchant Marine during World War II he was influenced by Franz Boas and his students at Columbia University and developed an interest in anthropology. He received his doctorate in that discipline from Harvard University in 1954. From 1972 to 1982 he was the Director of the Institut für Ethnologie at the Freie Universitat zu Berlin."

The focus of this book concerns an aspect of the question of periodization in human history. There have been many attempts to classify stages, epochs, cultures and civilizations from the time of the ancient Greeks down to the present in Western thought and in many indigenous non-Western traditions as well. Krader’s interest in this issue can be traced back at least to the time in which he worked as an assistant to Karl August Wittfogel at the Far Eastern and Russian Institute at the University of Washington in the late 1940s.* Wittfogel had been concerned xiv | THE BEGINNINGS OF CAPITALISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE with the specific configuration of ancient Chinese society as an Oriental despotism which he argued was centred around the state control and management of hydraulics, irrigation and the supply of water. Wittfogel also believed the concept of Oriental Despotism applied to Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, classical Greece and Rome, the Moghul Empire and the Incas in Peru before the Spanish conquest. And he argued that contemporary Soviet and Chinese communist regimes conformed in many ways to the paradigm of Oriental despotism. Krader preferred to follow a line different from both that of Wittfogel and of orthodox Marxism with its fixed stages of human development. Through his empirical work on the Altaic-speaking peoples of the Central Asian Steppes and his prodigious efforts in transcribing, editing and introducing Marx’s ethnological notebooks, Krader counterposed the concept of the Asiatic mode of production (to which Marx had turned his attention in the 5 or 6 years prior to his death) to Wittfogel’s notion of Oriental or hydraulic despotism.’ It can be argued that Krader was no less critical of Marxist orthodoxy than Wittfogel but he used Marx as the basis for his critique of Marxism, not unlike Karl Korsch, another one of his senior colleagues whose work, Marxism and Philosophy, employed the same critical approach. But Krader’s use of the concept of the Asiatic mode of production was more developed and nuanced than that of Marx as it was informed by a century of empirical work, including his own. He was able to apply the concept to most of the societies which Wittfogel had seen as hydraulic despotisms. But his focus was not primarily on the state’s totalitarian control and management of vital resources but rather on the movement from the communal to the civil condition, which includes the formation of a division of the community into social classes, the very beginnings of a parcelling out of the private and public spheres and of the formation of the state. In doing this he called attention to the question of the form and substance of labour as a key element in the transitional communal-social form of production, a label which removes the ethnocentric and geocentric focus of Marx’s original concept.*

Krader’s extensive work on the Asiatic mode of production was related to the problem of the periodization in human history in an important way, for it represented the transition from a communally organized mode of life without systematic class distinctions, with the means of production in common, with a rudimentary division of labour based on age and sex, without a state and hence without a separation of a private and public sector. In other words, it was not a civil condition of society.

Having spent several decades elucidating features of the Asiatic mode of production, in this current book he addressed the beginnings of capitalism in Central Europe. If the transition from the communal to the communal-social formation of society represented a major break in human history for Krader, the development of

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THIS BOOK BY CYRIL LEVITT | XV capitalism in Europe represented a transition from feudalism, arguably a uniquely European phenomenon (with the possible exception of Japan), to capitalism with its beginnings in Europe but its ultimate extension to the international economic order. Krader knew his Marx and he appreciated Marx’s work even as he recognized deep contradictions, false steps and incomplete thoughts, which Krader increasingly took up in his various publications. His first posthumously published book Labor and Value (Krader, 2003) was an ambitious attempt to reconcile objective theories of value from Aristotle to Marx, with the subjective theories of the British and Austrian schools. The reader of this current work will appreciate Krader’s recognition and critique of Marx’s understanding of the beginnings of capitalism in Europe, as indeed he also recognized and criticized the contribution of the other great writers on the origins of capitalism. And here and there Krader ventures into the territory of those who looked more broadly at the origins of capitalism from the 14th to the 16th century in Europe. But his true focus was narrower than all of Europe.

In writing this book he was primarily interested in the beginnings of capitalist development in the mostly German-speaking areas of Central Europe. The argument that he has made in the pages that follow is based on the writings, illustrations, drawings, engravings and other evidence from that early time. Furthermore, he provides a substantial review of most of the leading 19th and 20th century thinkers who occupied themselves with the question of the beginnings of capitalism in Europe. Krader was also careful to distinguish sporadic appearances of capitalist elements from their later systematization from the 14th to the 16th century. With regard to his primary focus, that is, the beginnings of capitalism in Central Europe, he elaborated in some detail on specific areas of economic life—mining, metallurgy, metal working and smelting, coinage, clock-making, shipbuilding and maritime navigation, printing and publishing, as well as trade, commerce and credit. These branches of industry and commerce were strongly influential in German-speaking Central Europe in the beginnings of capitalism, at first sporadically, and then systematically. But even in these few industries and in trade and commerce, the development and systematization of capitalist forms and relations were complicated and mediated. No one individual, no one theory, no one element can encompass the beginnings of development of which Krader writes: “We consider the historical course of this development as complicated and take a position against those who have tried to simplify it.” At the same time, the thinkers whom Krader extensively cites contributed something to our understanding of the complexity of the beginnings of capitalist development and systematization.

‘There is an odd symmetry between this work on the beginnings of capitalism in Central Europe and his numerous books and articles on the Asiatic mode of xvi | THE BEGINNINGS OF CAPITALISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE production. The development of the Asiatic mode of production, or the communal-social form of economic formation, constituted the foundation for civil society almost everywhere. In this sense it was a series of indigenous developments among indigenous peoples in different parts of the world largely unconnected with one another in time and space. The beginning of the development of capitalism in Central Europe was part of what was later to become a global phenomenon, originating first in Europe.°

In the Festschrift in honour of his 75th birthday, Krader (1995) denied that he had ever been a Marxist. His criticisms of Marx, especially in his first two posthumously published works, Labor and Value (2003) and Noetics (2010) are more sharply critical of Marx in different ways. In Noefics especially, his reconsideration of the theory of nature in relation to the human order, represents a break with materialism, or rather a reformulation of the relation of the material order to other orders of nature.’ In this current book, reference is made to the advancement of Krader’s thinking regarding nature and materialism in his 2010 posthumously published work in comparison to the position taken in this volume.

In addition to the problem of periodization in human history to which this book is a contribution, it has also taken up the matter of the form and substance of freedom from the tradition of Goethe, Hegel, Marx, and other classical thinkers. For Krader, as for these other thinkers, the advance of capitalism as a system related to the development of formal freedom, concretely with political freedom and equality in law, in the freedom of the individual and the class of social labour to contract with the agents of capital for the sale of their labour power, in the freedom to move from location to location, from one employer to another. In the development of these formal freedoms, the forces pushing for their realization encountered resistance not only from the feudal authorities, the Church and other institutions tied to the old order, but from the organizations of labour themselves—the guilds in their various forms and constellations. But Krader refers to the question of the substance of freedom which had not been realized in the course of capitalist development but does not speculate further about it. He simply follows Goethe who lamented that it had not been attained in the new order and allowed himself to dream about its realization by millions at the conclusion of Faust. One of Krader’s achievements in this volume is to have clearly distinguished between form and substance with regard to the freedom of social labour. It is a book that can be appreciated and enjoyed as a clarification of our understanding of the complexity of the beginnings of capitalism in Central Europe, by extension to Europe as a whole and ultimately to the contemporary international order.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THIS BOOK BY CYRIL LEVITT xvii

1. For further biographical information on Krader please consult: D. Schorkowitz (1995, pp. xixxiv) L. Krader (2010, pp. xi-xxiii); S. Sander, C. Levitt, and N. McLaughlin. 2017; C. Levitt and S. Sander (eds.) (2017, pp. 3-53); and ‘Reply to Krader in Context’ in this volume.

2. Although his interest in evolution in general can be traced back to his many trips in his youth to the Museum of Natural History in the City of New York.

3. “The history of the formation of the civil society and the state among the ancient Aztecs and Incas, the Yoruba and Asanti, the ancient Greek, Slavic and Germanic peoples, Mongols and Turks, follows the same course, which at first led to the development of the Asiatic mode of production among them. The opposition of the interests of the individual and the collectivity is the means of dissolution of the latter. Civil society and the state issue forth not from the dissolution of the ancient gentes, clans and village communities, but from the opposition between the class-individuals and the communal forms, which continue to exist long after civil society and the state have been formed.” L. Krader (1979), A Treatise of Social Labor, p. 184. On the notion of class-individuality see Marx’s interpolation to Henry Sumner Maine’s ‘Lectures on the Early History of Institutions’ in Krader (1972, p. 329).

4. In his book, The Asiatic Mode of Production, Krader (1975, p. 114) explicitly criticized Wittfogel’s identification of the Oriental society with modern communist states on account of the state’s ownership of the land as follows: “The argument is based upon the identification of the relation of ownership and the mode of production. This is the error of taking pars pro toto, the part for the whole. The fact that the State owned all the land in the Oriental society and in modern socialist countries is a superficial analogy; the modes of production of the two systems are totally different: in particular, the relations between labor and capital.” He continued his critique of Wittfogel in along footnote on the following page of that same book: “K. A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, made the hydraulic interpretation of the Oriental society into the central one; thereby he focused his attention on the category of the despotism, the political side of the problem, as opposed to the category of the society as a whole ... He further made the categories of despotism and totalitarianism into economic structures ... He proceeds from the State to the society and thence to the political economy.” (op. cit., p. 115n)

5. Itshould be noted that the Asiatic mode of production is an economic formation and not a society. For Krader, a large variety of different societies have been identified with this organization of production. Nevertheless, those societies in which the Asiatic mode of production prevails are those in which we can discover the beginnings of the parceling out of social classes, the formation of the state and the first appearances of the elaboration of a public and private sphere, however weak the latter development might be. For Krader, it has to be emphasized, the focus on the so-called Asiatic mode is justified insofar as it represents the transitional form of economic organization in those societies which are in the process of development from the primitive communal to the civil condition of the humankind.

6. Max Weber’s thesis developed out of a concern with regard to capitalism's geographical home in Europe rather than in China which in the 16th century was more advanced in science and technology than Europe. This led Weber to look for a ‘spiritual’ impetus for capitalist development in the Protestant Reformation, more narrowly, in the psychological impact of Calvinist theology on its followers which in turn greatly impacted their economic behavior. Krader did not xviii | THE BEGINNINGS OF CAPITALISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE gainsay Weber’s thesis but he did not consider it the major force in the beginning of capitalist development.

7. For further discussions of these matters please see: C. Levitt and S. Sander (eds.). Beyond the Juxtaposition of Nature and Culture: Lawrence Krader, Interdisciplinarity, and the Concept of the Human Being. Peter Lang Publishers New York 2017.

Preface

Krader in Context

DavıD LEVINE

Historians—and their historical studies—are products of their own time. This is, of course, a truth universally acknowledged. Lawrence Krader’s study of the beginnings of capitalism in Central Europe is very much a work of mid-century scholarship even though it was first published in German in the 1990s. Readers of Krader’s essay will come to appreciate what has been gained as a result of academic scholarship concerned with early-modern German capitalism and industrialization. What they will mostly learn is that the results of archival research “in the field”—provide us with a complicated understanding of the uneven development of early-modern capitalism and industrialization. But, perhaps most significantly, the results of this new research shift the focus away from formal documentation and towards the wider context of social relations.

Reading this manuscript gave me a sense of déjà vu—it was eerily reminiscent of Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism.’ Both works concentrate on the origins of capitalism in the formal relations between capital and labour; neither work gives much credence to the agricultural origins of industry, consumer demand, urbanization, historical demography, transportation, technology, and, in particular, energy sources. Indeed, Krader’s essay—like Dobb’s—is remarkable for the way in which a 21st century student of “the transition” recognizes the absence of the gigantic historiography which is pertinent to this subject. It could be said

XX | THE BEGINNINGS OF CAPITALISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE that contemporary studies render Krader’s vision almost unrecognizable or, at the very least, anachronistic.

At the heart of this difference is the way in which the “transition debate” spawned an almost entirely new subject—social history. Nowhere, perhaps, is this difference made clearer than in a simple comparison between the sources and references in Krader’s essay and those provided by the more than three dozen authors whose essays have been collected in the three volumes of Germany: A New Social and Economic History.” Each of these essays is buttressed by dozens and dozens of footnotes, almost-all of which refer to studies published in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when the series itself was published. One can only imagine how much denser, wide-ranging, and intensive the bibliography would be in a revised publication.

Capitalism—buying low and selling high—was hardly a novel invention of the post-feudal, early-modern period. What was new about early-modern capitalism was the ability to harness labour-power in a systematic fashion to the production of both goods and services. Of course, there were precursors to the factory system—the famous (and perhaps apocryphal) workshop organized by Jack of Newbury or the Venice Arsenal (and its English, Spanish, French and Dutch contemporary competitors) are pertinent examples of pre-modern, large-scale, integrated works—but what was new and revolutionary was the way in which inanimate energy made it possible to replicate these methods spreading across the economy into new sites of production, from brewing to publishing.

Moreover, the very nature of the questions asked by the “post-Krader” generations of scholars has changed. Perhaps the foremost difference can be neatly summarized as follows: a modern industrial economy required not only abundant supplies of cheap energy but also a method of transporting coal from its point-of-production to its point-of-use. The key to this issue is that the substitution of inanimate energy for other sources—wind and waterpower as well as human- and animal-power—opened vast new horizons for production.’

Bulk commodities were liable to extra-ordinary transportation surcharges. In the South Tyneside coal industry, for example, there were radical and revolutionary technological innovations before the Industrial Revolution—first, in place of carriages, wooden waggon ways and then iron-flanged wheels and rails criss-crossed Whickham parish, the centre of production; next came the advent of steam-powered engines—used for draining pits from the 1690s.* These early machines were built according to the design of Thomas Newcomen. ‘Then, in the third quarter of the 18th-century, the internal combustion models vastly increased efficiency while constant tinkering with the Boulton/Watt design led to massive increases in efficiency—three-fold in the next thirty years. Yet, it was only in the 1820s that

PREFACE: KRADER IN CONTEXT BY DAVID LEVINE | xxi these transportation and energy systems were married in the most characteristic technology of the Industrial Revolution—the railways.’

From the 1500s onwards, the north-eastern English coal-economy grew largely as a result of innovations which were built upon factor endowments of cheap, water-based transportation from the mines to their primary markets. Statistics portray a stark difference between English and German experiences of substituting inanimate energy from coal. In the early 19th-century, the English mined 30,000,000 tons of coal; German mines produced 1,700,000 tons. German mines did not reach the English 1830s-level until the last quarter of the 19th century. It was only around 1900 that German production equalled the output of English mines. What began as a gigantic divergence which was crucial in the beginning decades in the third quarter of the 18th century converged—but only after more than a century into the Industrial Revolution.

The key point here is that Germany—like China, today’s largest coal-producer—had vast supplies of coal but lacked the wherewithal to move that resource to market. The result was that in early-modern Germany—just as in Imperial China and, more generally, continental Europe and the USA—production was not modernized or, to put it more succinctly, “revolutionized”. ‘The Industrial Revolution came to Germany in response to English competition that threatened local, proto-industrial producers with technological obsolescence—this threat was altogether modern because these traditional entrepreneurs had to innovate or die. And the Germans did innovate—and, in comparison to the English, their primary innovation was to apply engineering studies (largely based in new educational institutions) to production routines.

In the earlier “proto-industrial” economy of the early-modern period, capitalists had access to an almost-unlimited supply of under-employed labour which could be used to undertake repetitive processes. There is now a vast literature on this subject which began with the publication of Franklin Mendels’ pioneering, 1971 essay.° While his original argument has been repeatedly contested, the relevant point in relation to Krader’s essay is that Mendels drew attention to the linkages between the labour supply of under-employed cottagers—men and women, girls and boys—and the demands of urban producers who “put-out” materials to cottagers in the “Verlagssystem”. Mendels argued that “proto-industry” (perhaps more accurately described as “cottage industry”) was the first phase of industrialization but critics of his thesis have cited numerous examples that this was not the usual route—in fact, a great many rural industries rose and fell in the unredeemed time of “the transition”.’” With regard to Krader’s arguments, Mendels’ thesis is significant because it points to a blind-spot—Krader relied heavily on urban, guild xxii | THE BEGINNINGS OF CAPITALISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE documentation whereas cottage industries were usually set up to side-step the conservative labour regulations of these institutions.

Krader’s reliance on formal, urban documentation—as opposed to the informal and largely unregulated evasions of their surveillance mechanisms—significantly narrows the scope of his vision of capitalist enterprise in early-modern Germany. Even in the evidence he has consulted regarding mining—gold, silver and copper—in the south-eastern Saxon Erzgebirge borderland with Bohemia, his primary source of documentation comes from formal sources and, of course, the famous contemporary writings of Georgius Agricola [Georg Bauer] (De re Metallica) or the business dealings of the Fugger Bank. Yet in the thirty years before its publication in 1993, there were numerous scholarly works which delved into the particularities of the social history of mining but none of these found their way into Krader’s essay. Indeed, the comparison with English economic historiography on this subject is quite notable by its absence.

The significance of these omissions is that for a 21st century reader, this essay is incomplete. Whether it’s labour organization or, even more significantly, labour supply, the micro-variations in experience are largely outside the scope of Krader’s research. In a sense, this narrow scope gives his work its anachronistic flavour. But it also gives the reader a sense of what an earlier generation of library-based scholarship overlooked because it did not attend to the particularities of early-modern capitalist industries. Learning about these particularities and exceptions has been the province of social historians whose scholarly output can be likened to a tsunami which has overwhelmed the earlier historiography that privileged progress over regression or industrial involution. To be sure, some local success-stories provided the lineage of later developments—especially in regard to capital accumulation and marketing. What better example of this point are the family histories of Max Weber and Friedrich Engels? In Weber’s family there were connections with proto-industry, their wealth had been based on putting-out thread to the cottagers in the Westphalian textile industry while Engels was the child of a Barmen/ Wuppertal industrialist who was a partner in a Manchester spinning factory. Did the Engels’factory-spun yarn supply raw materials for the Weber’s cottage weavers? Of course, neither Weber nor Engels is remembered today for these connections but their ascent into the upper bourgeoisie was founded upon wealth accumulated in the transition from early-modern to modern capitalist industrialization. Yet for every Weber or Engels who successfully benefitted from the inheritance of cultural capital in this way, there were countless others whose experiences were less remarkable—many (most?) experienced downwards mobility as their businesses were overwhelmed by the revolutionary changes of the transition from localized production to international competition.

PREFACE: KRADER IN CONTEXT BY DAVID LEVINE xxiii

1. M. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism. Routledge London 1946. B. Scribner, ed., Germany: A New Social and Economic History. Volume 1, 1450-1630. London Arnold 1996. S. Ogilvie, ed., Germany: A New Social and Economic History. Volume 2, 1630-1800. London Arnold 1996. S. Ogilvie and R. Overy, eds., Germany: A New Social and Economic History. Volume 3, Since 1800. London Arnold 1996.

3. E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2010.

4. D. Levine and K. Wrightson, Wickham: An Industrial Society in the Pre-Industrial World. Oxford University Press Oxford 1991.

5. M.W. Flinn and D. Stoker, The History of the British Coal Industry. Volume 2, 1700-1830. Oxford University Press Oxford 1985.

6. F. Mendels, “‘Proto-industrialization: the first phase of the industrialization process”, Journal of Economic History, 31, 1971, 241-261.

7. J.Schlumbohn, “Proto-industrialization as a research strategy and a historical period—a balance sheet”, in S. C. Ogilvie and M. Cerman, (eds.) European Proto-Industrialization. Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1996, 12-22.

Reply to Krader in Context

CYRIL LEVITT

In the Authors Foreword to The Beginnings of Capitalism in Central Europe Lawrence Krader describes the focus of his work as follows: “The present work concerns the beginning of the capitalist system and of modern bourgeois society in Central Europe, primarily in the German-speaking region and is presented as a contribution to the solution of an essential part of the question of periodization in human history. Yet, this book is not offered as a history text.” In spite of this specific focus, I thought it would be interesting to ask a scholar of late medieval and early-modern Europe for his views on Krader’s work. Since Dr. Levine and I have been colleagues and friends for decades now and share similar views on freedom of expression and attempts within the academy to limit the same, and, recognizing his pre-eminence as a historian in this field of work, I offered him a platform to assess Krader’s work in English translation, a first draft of which he read and extensively commented upon. I am grateful for his input. I did not expect his work, or the work of any single historian, to present a full picture of this narrow field of history and it may be that his comments may not in fact be representative of this area of the discipline. And yet in the spirit of debate and principled criticism which he and I both respect and encourage, I will take this opportunity to respond to some of his comments in relation to the present work.