Alternatives to expropriation: rent, credit and peasant landholding in medieval Europe and modern Palestine

[...]this was neither a universal process nor one that was dependent upon unique sets of prevailing conditions; instead, the persistence of, or introduction of, new institutional and economic structures and practices (such as seigneurial expectations, communal or familial convention, governmental legislation, the relative fluidity of capital, and the exercise of local norms of dealing) may all have combined, jointly or severally, to affect the degree to which land was retained by a diminished tenantry or wholly appropriated. While expropriation is not a term confined to Marxist dialectic it has, since Marx wrote Capital and discussed the expropriation of the agricultural population from the land, been closely associated with the English later middle ages and the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism.2 The essential components for expropriation were the diminution of a pre-existing mode of production, namely feudalism, and an effective abandonment of a peasant tenantry to a new mode of production, capitalism, founded on new economic principles, including greater specialisation and market production. [...]the confiscation and legal sale of the debtor's goods in order to pay the creditor and settle the debt gave rise to a wide circulation of effects and properties in two circuits: a very dynamic second-hand market, only recently attracting the attention of historians and important for historical awareness of material culture and consumption patterns, and an equally very active peasant land market, both of plots and holdings, which has been a significant research focus for historians for a number of years.8 The way in which the land was seized and sold judicially, the role of brokers and judicial agents, the sale prices in relation to market prices, buyers, and so on are all potentially relevant in this respect. Before there is capitalism, according to Brenner, there can be no process of proletarianization for the reason that, under feudalism, much of the economy is protected by institutions and a non-market foundation to the economy which rejects processes that will defeat the essential function of that pre-capitalist economy, namely for peasants to hold on to land as ‘the foundation for their economic reproduction’.9 Brenner describes a ‘safety first’ approach on the part of peasants which suggests that morcellisation or parcellisation was more likely to occur than was accumulation or agglomeration under feudalism; the lack of sufficient marketin