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E. THOEN / E. VANHAUTE
among economic historians. He argued that the medieval European town had
a special "generative" character, based on its corporative, communal organi-
sation, which made it a capitalist nucleus with the capacity to dissolve feudal
social relations (Merington, 1975). Thus the European towns' corporative
autonomy and relatively open communal structure allowed them to "develop
as autonomous worlds according to their own propensities" (Sweezy, 1978,
172). Just as the closing of the Mediterranean trade routes had been the key
factor in the shift to an agrarian economy in the seventh through the ninth
centuries, the reopening of long-distance trade in the 11th century – the
counter-attack of Christianity against Islam – revived towns and markets (in
Italy and Flanders) and broke down the rigid manorial system. Urban markets
attracted agricultural production towards the towns. For this reason, long-
distance trade and the new class of long-distance merchants did not originate
from the local, rural economy (Polanyi, 1944, 60-65).
Analysing these theories, some historians still see Pirenne as a follower of
Adam Smith (e.g., Green, 1993), as both shared the idea that commerce was
important for the development of capitalism. However, we have seen that
Pirenne himself disagreed with Adam Smith (see above). Why was this?
Pirenne believed that the commercial shift to the West and the origin of
towns was not merely the consequence of a 'universal' pattern of supply and
demand. Nor was the origin of towns produced by market mechanisms. Cities
did not owe their origin to market places, because markets also developed
outside of the towns (cf. the Champagne fairs) (Pirenne, 1898). For the same
reason the countryside did not play a fundamental role (e.g. for demand) in
his theory of urban origins, but long-distance trade was rather the crucial core
of urban development in the medieval period. In other words, merchants –
not trade – made the towns. These merchants were escaping from the feudal
(non-free) structures and sought free structures for activity and protection. In
her evaluation of the debates on this transition, Ellen Meiksins Wood, fol-
lowing Brenner, places Pirenne's theory at the root of the "commercialisation
model" (Meiksins Wood, 1999, 11-13 based on Brenner, 1976). In this
model, capitalism emerged when the market was liberated from age-old
constraints and opportunities for trade expanded. By arguing that commerce
revived with the growth of cities and the liberation of merchants, Pirenne
assumed that the embryonic cities were capitalist.
"This liberation of the urban economy, of commercial activity and mercantile
rationality, accompanied by the inevitable improvements in techniques of
production which evidently followed from the emancipation of trade, was
apparently enough to account for the rise of capitalism" (Meiksins Wood, 1999,
13).
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Pirenne actually analysed the merchant class itself as an 'institution' in the
current sense of the word. The evolution towards freedom and democracy
was embedded in the evolution of institutions. Institutions, such as merchant
guilds, tolls, or mercantilism, played a huge role, either positive or negative,
in the development of capitalism. We will later return to this anachronistic
'institutional' approach of Pirenne, another debt he owed to the German
Historical School.
2.2. Pirenne, the origin and development of capitalism,
and his alleged inspiration by Marxism
Pirenne's rather 'institutional' approach (more or less in the sense as the word
is actually used today in the New Institutional Economics, see below) to
commerce led some Marxists to integrate his theories into their class struggle
analyses, while other Marxists rejected Pirenne's ideas because of his
emphasis on commerce. The split is especially clear in the well-known debate
between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy during the 1940s and 1950s (and
trailing off in the 1970s). Marxist scholars such as Maurice Dobb and
Rodney Hilton denounced the 'external' model, and attributed the rise of
capitalism to the primary feudal relationships between landlords and peasants
and the introduction of market mechanisms into the British countryside.
24
Conversely, Paul Sweezy reiterated and extended the Pirenne thesis, by
arguing that establishment of localised urban trading and trans-shipment
centres based on long-distance trade set a process in motion that encouraged
the growth of production for exchange, which existed in tension with the
feudal principle of production for use. The debates took on a new intensity in
the 1970s after Robert Brenner wrote articles defending a more extreme
version of Dobb's approach (Aston & Philpin, 1987). He accused followers of
Pirenne's commercialisation model, such as Sweezy, André Gunder Frank
and Immanuel Wallerstein, of being "neo-Smithean" (an epitaph Pirenne
would have hated!). Henri Pirenne's theories about the fate of the European
economy after the Roman era have continued to be extremely tempting to
historians with a structural and long-term focus. Fernand Braudel followed
Pirenne's path as Braudel sketched capitalism perpetuating itself "through the
24.
Michael Postan made a similar evaluation of Pirenne's thesis of commercial expansion:
"His thesis was, however, confined to trade, and trade, important as it may have been, was not
the main economic activity of medieval men and women" (Postan, 1973, 4). In fact Pirenne
was more concerned with (professional) traders than with trade.