1 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 883. [BACK]

2 Throughout this work I shall use the modern spelling of Boisguilbert and not the version (Boisguillebert) used by Marx. It should also be noted that Petty, although born in England, spent much of his adult life in Ireland. Even there, however, he was in every sense an Englishman, working for many years on behalf of Cromwell's régime in its conquest and settlement of Irish lands. [BACK]

3 Michael Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975) 194. For discussion of the notion of a feudal crisis see Rodney Hilton, "A Crisis of Feudalism," Past and Present, 80 (1978): 3. Marc Bloch's view can be found in his French Rural History, trans. Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). Two other attempts to assess the crisis of feudalism are worthy of note. They are Edouard Perroy, "A l'origine d'une économie contractée: les crises du XIVe siècle," Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 4 (1949) and Rodney Hilton, "Y eut-il une crise générale de la féodalité?" Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 6 (1951). [BACK]

4 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans L. A. Manyon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 1: 69-71; Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), 71-80. [BACK]

5 See for example Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe: 1300-1460 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969),25. [BACK]

6 Duby, 298-300; Guy Bois, Crise du féodalisme (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1976), pt. 1. [BACK]

7 Robert Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism," Past and Present 97 (1982): 29, 34-35; idem, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," Past and Present 70 (1976): 49; Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: New Left Books, 1976), 29-39, 102-5; Michael Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General

Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 15; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 236. [BACK]

8 Rodney Hilton, The Decline of Feudalism in Medieval England (London: Macmillan and Co., 1969), 36; idem, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Methuen and Co., 1973), 156-63; Christopher Day, "A Redistribution of Incomes in Fifteenth-Century England?" in Peasants, Knights, and Heretics, ed. Rodney Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 49-52. [BACK]

9 Hilton, Decline of Feudalism, 39, 43. [BACK]

10 Postan, The Medieval Economy, 158. [BACK]

11 William Lazonick, "Karl Marx and Enclosures in England," Review of Radical Political Economics 6 (1974): 20; Eric Kerridge, "The Movement of Rent, 1540-1630," Economic History Review 6 (1953): 28-29. [BACK]

13 Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman Under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), 104. [BACK]

14 Tawney, 152. [BACK]

15 David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985),26. [BACK]

16 On this point see Rodney Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 168. [BACK]

17 On rising rents see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, abridged ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 153-59. The estimate on the amount of enclosure to have taken place by 1700 comes from Eric Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), 24. [BACK]

18 For a useful discussion of the economics of the new husbandry see C. Peter Trimmer, "The Turnip, the New Husbandry, and the English Agricultural Revolution," Quarterly Journal of Economics 83 (1969): 375-95. [BACK]

19 These are the dates suggested by F. M. L. Thompson, "The Social Distribution of Landed Property in England since the Sixteenth Century," Economic History Review, 2d ser., 19 (1966): 510-11, although Thompson himself remains sceptical about such a redistribution of property. On this point and on the sales of church lands see Gordon E. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (London: Longman, 1976), chaps. 2 and 3. [BACK]

20 On these points see Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 92; and G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors, 2d ed. (London: Methuen and Co., 1974). [BACK]

21 The phrase ''committee of landlords" was coined by Barrington Moore, Jr., in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy . (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 19, in reference to the eighteenth century. [BACK]

22 Among the best accounts of the revolution from below during the 1640s are Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) and Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). See also idem, The Experience of Defeat (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984) and H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (1961; reprint, London: Spokesman, 1976). For an important study which qualifies the overall picture of popular politics in terms of regionally-based popular cultures see Underdown. [BACK]

23 On this period see Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (1961; reprint, London: Cardinal-Sphere Books, 1974), 174-76 and 202-9; J. R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678-1683 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968); and K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). [BACK]

24 Lois G. Schwoerer, "The Bill of Rights: Epitome of the Revolution of 1688-89," in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), interprets the Bill of Rights as an essentially radical document. For views which emphasize the more moderate and conservative character of the bill see W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714-1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 12-15; and Hill, Century of Revolution, 237-40. [BACK]

25 Gordon E. Mingay, "The Size of Farms in the Eighteenth Century," Economic History Review, 2d ser., 14 (1961-62): 481; and idem, English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 20. On the overall importance of landed investment at this time see also Barry Holderness, "Capital Formation in Agriculture" and the subsequent "Comment" by F. M. L. Thompson, in Aspects of Capital Investment in Great Britain, 1750-1850, ed. J. P. P. Higgins and Sidney Pollard (London: Methuen and Co., 1971) and J. D. Chambers and Gordon E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1850 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1966), 84. [BACK]

26 Barrington Moore, Jr., 29. [BACK]

27 Charles Wilson and Geoffrey Parker, eds., An Introduction to the Sources of European Economic History, 1500-1800, vol. 1 (London: Methuen and Co., 1977), 121; Lazonick, 26-27. [BACK]

28 One of the more sophisticated versions of this argument can be found in Chambers and Mingay. [BACK]

29 Hoskins, 255. [BACK]

30 Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1: 875-76. [BACK]

31 See, for example, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 32. [BACK]

32 E. P. Thompson, "The Peculiarities of the English," in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 42; see also 44. On the victory of property rights over customary rights see idem, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975). [BACK]

33 E. L. Jones, "Agricultural Origins of Industry," Past and Present 40 (1968): 58-71; W. H. B. Court, The Rise of Midland Industries, 1600-1838 (1938; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 36-38; and E. L. Jones, editor's introduction to Agriculture and Economic Growth in England, 1650-1815 (London: Methuen and Co., 1967), 37. See also Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), chap. 5. [BACK]

34 A. H. John, "Agricultural Productivity and Economic Growth in England, 1700-1760," Journal of Economic History 25 (1965): 19-34; and idem, "Aspects of English Economic Growth in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century," Economica 28 (1961): 176-90. [BACK]

35 For a provocative argument about the timing of the industrial takeoff see John, "Aspects of Economic Growth," 189. [BACK]

36 Marx, "Immediate Results of the Process of Production," Capital, 1: 1021, 1024, 1054-55. [BACK]

37 J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (1975; reprint, London: Methuen and Co., 1979), 30, 40-41; see also Le Roy Ladurie, 94; and Bois, 141-43. [BACK]

38 Salmon, 291-92. For the overall context of the rise of absolutism see Robin Briggs, Early Modern France 1560-1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Max Beloff, The Age of Absolutism, 1660-1815 (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1954). [BACK]

39 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), 18. [BACK]

40 Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen, trans. Ann Carter (New York: Vintage, 1970), 107. It should be noted that a sizable share of revenues came from the sale of offices. For data on price levels during this period see Wilson and Parker, 178-80. [BACK]

41 See Boris Porshnev, "The Bourgeoisie and Feudal Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century France," in France in Crisis, 1620-1675, ed. and trans. P. J. Coveney (London: Macmillan and Co., 1977), 124, 128-29. On lords encouraging peasant resistance to the Crown see Hubert Methivier, "A Century of Conflict: The Economic and Social Disorder of the 'Grand Siècle,'" in France in Crisis, 75. [BACK]

42 Brenner, "Agrarian Roots of Capitalism," 81. [BACK]

43 Julian Dent, Crisis in Finance: Crown, Financiers, and Society in Seven-

teenth-Century France (Newton Abbot, England: David and Charles, 1973), 39, 43, 51; Goubert, Louis XIV, 114-39; Boris Porshnev, "Popular Uprisings in France before the Fronde, 1623-1648," in France in Crisis, 164; Roland Mousnier, "The Financial Officiers during the Fronde," in France in Crisis, 203. [BACK]

44 George V. Taylor, "Types of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France," English Historical Review 79 (1964): 479.

45 Ibid., 491; see also Taylor, "The Paris Bourse on the Eve of the Revolution, 1781-1789," American Historical Review 67 (1962). [BACK]

44 George V. Taylor, "Types of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France," English Historical Review 79 (1964): 479.

45 Ibid., 491; see also Taylor, "The Paris Bourse on the Eve of the Revolution, 1781-1789," American Historical Review 67 (1962). [BACK]

46 Bloch, French Rural History, 134.

47 See, for example, ibid., 221-28; and Robert Forster, The Nobility of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Economic History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), 77-82. [BACK]

46 Bloch, French Rural History, 134.

47 See, for example, ibid., 221-28; and Robert Forster, The Nobility of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Economic History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), 77-82. [BACK]

48 Beloff, 75. [BACK]