Causes of Dualism in the Economic Development of Modern Europe (a Tentative New Theory)

Abstract

The formation of economic dualism in early modern Europe - the simultaneous rise of capitalism in the West and re-feudalization east of the Elbe river - has generated a vast historiographical debate. Previous theories treated the rise of capitalism and the rise of the manorial-serf economy as independent processes, which led to recurring deadlocks: factors proposed to explain re-feudalization were repeatedly shown to have operated in Western Europe as well, where capitalism developed instead.

This article proposes a new theoretical framework for explaining economic dualism. The author argues that both processes must be understood as two different outcomes of a single, more general process - the growth of the economic activeness of the gentry - and that a double-channelled explanatory structure identifying both common causes and special causes of each regional outcome is required.

The argument draws on the author's earlier studies on the rise of capitalism in Europe (Warsaw 1965) and on agrarian evolution in Central and Eastern Europe (Rivista di Storia dell'Agricoltura, 1967), supplemented by systematic analysis of the existing historiography from Fuchs, Grossmann, Rutkowski, Rusiński, Zientara, and others.

The analysis shows that the dwindling incomes of the gentry at the end of the Middle Ages constituted the common cause triggering economic activeness of the gentry across Europe. The specific form this activeness took - English enclosures, French metayage, or the manorial corvée system east of the Elbe - depended on three groups of special causes: the situation in man-power, the market situation, and natural conditions. In England, the absence of serfdom, the demand for wool, and favourable conditions for sheep breeding determined the enclosure movement. In Poland, conditions favourable for grain cultivation, improving terms of trade for the gentry, and the survival of statute labour forms made the manorial corvée system dominant. The proposed structure makes it possible to assign common and special causes to their appropriate explanatory place, resolving the previously irreconcilable theoretical deadlock in the historiography of European economic dualism.