2. The Rise of the Bourgeois City

Only in western and central Europe, did the rise of urban life yield a lasting domination of town over country — not as a special Case in the Crevices of the ancient world, but as the general feature of a continental society, Europe’s development closely recapitulates the evolution of agrarian society through the social phases we have discussed in connection with Greece and Latium; but while the development of urban life in antiquity led to a cul de sac, in Europe the towns developed capitalism and established the bourgeois city.

The striking social advances scored by European cities can be explained by many factors unique to the continent itself, although what stands out as the principal one Is again the influence of geography on agrarian relations. Wherever the forest cover was removed, the agriculturist found large areas: of arable land — a notable contrast with the Near East and North Africa, where substantial surpluses of food could be gleaned only from narrow strips of alluvial land While the river valleys of the Near East and North Africa were Surrounded by inhospitable wastes and mountains, European rivers flowed into the depths of vast forests in which new communities could be founded without interference from an all-encompassing centralized state, Indeed, m the absence of any need for extensive irrigation works, no need existed for the elaborate bureaucratic and monarchical apparatus which drained the commercial life of the ancient world. The very extent of the land, of its mountains and forests, vitiated any tendency toward centralization that might have been a political heritage of the Mediterranean civilizations. Classical European feudalism was nourished by the geography and climate of the continent with the result that European urban communities achieved a degree of independence unknown, apart from Greece, to ancient society.

Fortunately, too, for the cities, European feudalism remained at chronic war with itself. This not only promoted further decentralization but often provided urban communities with a wide latitude for Independent growth. By the tenth century, the mutual pitting of French baronies against each other had divided the country into some ten thousand political units. When European cities began to emerge, they found an agrarian society incomparably less unified and materially weaker than the domineering and Wealthy Asian land systems of the Near East and North Africa. Given time and the steady settling of the continent, many medieval cities freed themselves from the control of the feudal lords and achieved a modest dominance over agrarian interests.

To understand the uniqueness of the medieval commune (as these towns and cities were called in France), it would be useful to distinguish them from their urban antecedents in Indian America, the Near East, and Asia. Although ah cities emerge in varying degrees from the division, of labor among food cultivation, crafts, and commerce, the extent to which they rest on this division of labor often distinguishes one city from another. Quite often, functions other than economic activities determine the nature and development of an urban entity. Tenochtitlan’s size and population, for example, are not easily explained by its commercial and craft activities. In fact, as we have already seen, the city’s principal functions were ceremonial, military, and administrative. Administrative needs were important to the growth of many Near Eastern and Asian cities: in Egypt and Mesopotamia as well as in India Lind China. Which is not to say that crafts and trade were unimportant in these communities, but merely that they occupied an ancillary position with respect to political and religious activities.

By contrast, the medieval commune was devoted almost entirely to handicrafts and local trade. The towns of the high Middle Ages were primarily marketplaces and centers for the production of commodities. Only in a few instances in European history do we encounter cities that expanded for reasons other than economic ones — notably, Aix-la-Chapelle, a city that grew or regressed With the political fortunes of the Caroiingian kings, and of course Rome, which increased owing to the tribute collected by the papacy from dioceses throughout Europe. For the most part, however, medieval communes furnished the skills and products which could not be acquired from the manorial domestic economy. Thus these towns never suffered from any confusion about their functions or about the factors which determined their destiny. They had a reasonably dear self-understanding of their commercial and craft interests. Far from being distorted like their antecedents into pliant instruments of agrarian classes, they jealously guarded their autonomy and provided a hospitable environment for independent traders and handicraft workers — the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie.

Yet the medieval commune was a feudal, not a bourgeois, city. Essentially, its economy was based on simple commodity production — a mode of production in which craftsmen use the marketplace to satisfy their needs, not to accumulate capital. Although goods were produced for exchange, that is, as commodities (to use Marx’s conception of the term), the owner of the means of production remained the direct producer rather than a bourgeois “supervisor” of productive activity. To be sure, a master craftsman was aided by apprentices, but the latter could realistically aspire to become master craftsmen in their own right once they acquired the skills to do so. In typical feudal fashion, guilds regulated economic activity down to almost the smallest detail; the output, quality, and prices of goods that found their way to the marketplace were carefully supervised by craft associations of master workmen. The atomization of labor and the chaos of the marketplace that are so indelibly etched into the modern capitalist system were unknown to the medieval commune Each individual had his secure position in the economy of the community, a position carefully defined by a system of rights and duties, and each fulfilled his responsibilities with dignity, artistry, and a deep pride of workmanship.

In so self-contained and self-fulfilling a society, then, how did it come to this that these simple commodity relations were supplanted by bourgeois ones and the beauty of the medieval commune by the blight of the bourgeois city?

Our own age tends to answer this question on its own terms, notably in technological ones — such as the advent of the steam engine and large-scale machinery — as though even an economic interpretation of historical changes does not include the totality of man’s social relations. Doubtless, European feudalism was not devoid of technological achievements of its own; indeed, the traditional image of the Middle Ages as a technologically stagnant era has since undergone considerable revision in the face of recent research. Feudal society scored significant advances in agricultural technique, the development of new sources of energy, and the discovery of new mechanical devices. Yet there is a real sense in which medieval technology did not go much beyond the millennia-old domestic economy of the neolithic period — the basic arts of manual plowing, broadcast sowing, horticulture, hand construction of dwellings and small-scale weaving, pottery, and smelting. This was an economy of tools and skills, not machines and industrial administration. To the techniques prevalent, say, in ancient Egypt, medieval Europe did not add appreciably more than the adaptations of a traditional technology to its own soils and climate. Indeed, in some respects, European skills and crafts were inferior to those of Asia, which accounts for the centuries-long attraction that Eastern goods had for medieval traders. European agricultural techniques would have been useless, even harmful, in many areas of the world. What Europe primarily achieved, during the Middle Ages, was to advance her own continental economy. The most important material step performed by feudal society was not the discovery of any single corpus of new inventions that presumably made capitalism possible, but rather the opening, clearing, and settlement of the European continent itself and adaptation of the Mediterranean technology to the heavier soils, climatic rigors, and sparser populations of the north. And the greatest social advance scored by Europe was the development of commodity production in towns founded without decisive interference by agrarian interests — that is, urban centers with their own law of life, a law of life that found its expression in the development of commodity production.

With the growth of international trade, commodity relations began to subvert the entire fabric of European feudalism, undermining traditional relations in the countryside as well as in the towns. From the thirteenth century onward, European society became the theater of social and economic developments hitherto unprecedented in history, In northern Italy, and throughout central and western Europe, the communes began to ally with each other to establish federations against local territorial lords. The first breezes of German unification wafted across the land when in 1256 the towns of the Rhine valley established the Rhenish League of Cities,; and although the League soon fell apart, it found more or less permanent successors in the Hanseatic League of the Baltic region and the Swabian League. Nor was this remarkable stirring of the cities confined merely to Germany. The Swiss cantons emancipated themselves from Austria; Flemish towns rose in revolt against Count Louis in the first of a series of civil conflicts in the Lowlands; and Paris, under Etienne Marcel, look up arms against the French dauphin. Although many of the urban revolts were premature and unsuccessful, their failures were more than compensated for by the success enjoyed by the Italian cities. In northern Italy, town after town managed not only to subordinate or assimilate the territorial lords to its commercial interests but each, in almost every vital respect, was now a bourgeois city.

What is of paramount importance, hero, is that urban life was developing on its own authentic mainsprings. In the past, the land had in some sense beleaguered the city — if not always by dominating or circumscribing its evolution, then at least by distorting and finally undermining it. In late medieval Europe, by contrast, the commodity system developed by the towns began to reach into the countryside itself and transform the land into a social image of the city. Trade, by creating new needs within the manor, slowly dissolved the old self-sufficient agrarian economy and even the parochialism of the medieval commune itself, Increasingly, feudal relations were replaced by exchange relations and the traditional estate system — a hierarchy ossified in a time-honored nexus of mutual rights and duties — by the mediation of commodities between independent and sovereign producers. By the fourteenth century, serfdom began to disappear from much of western Europe. The emerging free farmer and yeoman became the rural counterpart of the master craftsman in the town, Although much the same development had occurred in Greece and Latium centuries earlier, Europe’s evolution was favored by the fact that its commerce was continental rather than merely local, its agrarian system weaker and more resilient with the result that its commercial development was not blocked by the great Asian land systems which had detoured Roman society from an authentic bourgeois development into parasitic alternatives Primarily, the European merchant princes of the late Middle Ages sought commercial wares from the East rather than tribute — although they certainly pillaged wherever they could — and they acquired these wares for continental markets rather than for local consumption Indeed, the discovery of new wares abroad served to widen the market at home and, with the colonization of America, provided a sharp stimulus to commercial and industrial development.

To form a reasonably clear idea of how the bourgeois city emerged, we must pause, here, to cleat with the dialectic of the commodity relationship and the modes of labor it yields — a dialectic to which Marx’s work forms an indispensable guide. To say that capitalism represents the most advanced Form of commodity production is now a truism, but the sense in which this statement is true requires some comment. The abstract treatment that Mars gives to the dialectic of the commodity relationship — the successive development of its potentialities from the accidental to the expanded and finally to money forms — tends to conceal a living historical process. As Marx demonstrates, the inner logic which yields these-forms is largely quantitative; given the fertile ground For expanding exchange, almost every aspect of the productive process, including labor power itself becomes a commodity, an object of exchange, hi the ancient worlds the expansion of trade was obstructed by the wealth and power of a strong agrarian society; indeed, so compelling were agrarian values that the merchant’s social ideals centered not on capital accumulation, but rather on the ownership of landed property. Tn Europe, this obstacle did not exist to a significant degree. Trade increasingly became an end in itself and, by the late Middle Ages, so too did capital accumulation. Feudal society lacked the viability needed to contain the continental percolation of commodity relationships. Once the exchange process became widespread enough, it simply engulfed the older order of relationships. Exchange created new divisions in the labor process and, simply by the process of continual division and subdivision, demolished the self-contained domestic economy of the manor. From a marginal source of goods and services, the market moved to the center of economic life.

No major technological innovations were needed to achieve this profound transformation. Although the capitalist system later produced the most Far-reaching technological advances known in history, the bourgeoisie initially used the tools and materials of the craftsman to promote the new mode of production Capital simply altered the traditional labor process by hiring workmen to produce for exchange without appreciably changing the industrial practices of the time. Labor-power was converted into a commodity. AH the decisive technological advances achieved by the capitalist system thenceforth centered around the adaptation of natural Forces and energy to this mode of labor, Technology became an extension of labor conceived not merely as a human activity, but as wage labor, a resource for economic exploitation. Economic activity began to subordinate the satisfaction of concrete human needs to the abstract goals of exchange and capital accumulation. Production, in effect, occurred for its own sake. This marked a fundamental change in all the values of previously existing societies, however exploitative their natures.

We must focus more sharply on this unique economic transformation and its social consequences. Whatever else may be the principal functions of the early city, certainly in an advanced urban society the authentic nexus of the city is the marketplace — the arena in which the necessities of life are exchanged and in which urban contact has its. workaday center. The nature of the marketplace in any given period of history depends largely on the prevailing mode of labor. There is no mystery about this characteristically Marxian formulation. As we have already noted, tire marketplace of Tenochtitlan was primitive by virtue of the fact that Aztec trade never developed to the level of the money Form, Concrete labor — such as the specific skills of the food cultivator, mason, weaver, potter, or sculptor — more or less determined the way in which marketable goods were viewed in be marketplace, Although each object found its “reflection”, during the exchange process in another exchangeable object, the labor time involved in production did not reach the degree of quantification, abstraction, and generalization required for the development of money, Exchange was guided primarily by material need and by the quality of the objects to be exchanged, Labor, like the object, retained its qualitative, human, concrete features: it did not dissolve into a mere aggregate of muscular or mental energy and lose its identity as an expression of human powers. That the utility or use-value of an object retained its primacy over exchange value is demonstrated clearly enough by the fact that many use-values in primitive society were inalienable. Land in Indian America s For example, was never a “salable item”; it could not have been denatured into “real estate” until the coming of the white man.

With the development of the money form under conditions of simple commodity production, labor, to be sure, does reach a fairly high degree of abstraction, but rarely does it lend itself to the degree of quantification attained under capitalism. The alienation of commodities still retains key human features, Trade remains an individual act in which the direct producers meet face to face in order to exchange the products of their own n labor. The mutual satisfaction of needs retains its preeminence over the mindless accumulation of commodities and capital Concrete labor prevails, as it were, over quantified, generalized, abstract labor, A large area of human needs is still satisfied outside the marketplace — that is, by the domestic economy — and even those who may depend upon the market for their existence are not so much its victim as its creators. They have individually mastered the conditions of production and they exchange their products under conditions tn which the needs of the community, the identity of producers and consumers, and the number of commodities required by the market can be determined with a lair degree of precision. However much such communities may compote with each other, there is little competition within the community itself, And there is no production For the sake of production. The value of a commodity is determined primarily by the workmanship and talent involved in its production and by Factors such as its durability and quality — in short, by concrete labor, hence the extraordinary beauty of the simplest objects produced by many noncapitalist communities.

Although all trade is alienation, in the medieval commune it was also relation. Inasmuch as this was an explicit fact of daily life owing to the prevailing mode of labor, the medieval commune created remarkable forms of association not only in civic life but in the economy itself. Lewis Mumford remarks that

the workshop was a family, likewise the merchant’s counting house. The members ate together at the same table, worked in the same rooms, slept in the same dormitory, joined Ln family prayers, participated in common amusements.[16]

The intimacy between labor and life was revealed by the fact that “The family pattern dominated industry.” Urban lire was intensely, even artistically collective. The marketplace was a center not only for trade but also for

public ceremony for if is on the porch of the cathedral that the miracle plays were enacted; it was within the square that the guilds set up their stages for the performance of their mystery plays; it was here that great tourneys would be held. It was not merely acropolis but amphitheater.[17]

Yet even these remarks do not recapture for us the democratic ambiance of many medieval communes, at the high point of their development. Nearly all communes were policed by their own citizens, who rotated to form the night watch and filled the ranks of the city militia. Commonly, mayors and town councils were elected by the guilds or by public-assemblies of the populace reminiscent of the Athenian Ecclesia. Indeed, the the polis, these towns Formed a complete and rounded totality. As Mumford notes:

Prayer, mass, pageant, life-ceremony, baptism, marriage, Dr funeral — the city itself was stage for these separate scenes of the drama, and the citizen himself was the actor. [18]

Perhaps no account of the commune more dramatically reveals the solidarity which welded this urban way of life together than Albrecht Dürer’s description of a religions ceremony held in Antwerp as late as the sixteenth century:

I saw the Procession pass along the street, the people being arranged in rows, each man some distance from his neighbor, but the rows close behind the other. There were the Goldsmiths, the Painters, the Masons, the Broderers, the Sculptors, the Joiners, the Carpenters, the Sailors, the Fishermen, the Butchers, the Leatherers, the Clothmakers, the Bakers, the Tailors, the Cordwainers — indeed, workmen of all kinds and: many craftsmen and dealers who work for their livelihood....A very largo company of widows also took part in the procession. They support themselves with their own hands and observe a special rule They were ail dressed from head to foot in white linen garments made expressly for the occasion....[19]

To which Mymford adds:

Note the vast number of people arrayed in this procession. As in the church itself, the spectators were also the communicants and participants: they engaged in the spectacle, watching it from within., not from without: or rather, feeling ii from within, acting in unison, not dismembered beings, reduced to a single specialized role.[20]

During the Great French Revolution, the Parisians replaced the feudal nomenclature by the single word citoyen to express their newly discovered national solidarity, Later events were to reveal that beneath the apparent unity of the nation lay profoundly divergent and antagonistic social interests. The medieval commune for its part used the more organic term “brother.” “Unus subveniet alteri tamquam fratri suo — ‘let each hold the other like a brother’ — says a Flemish charter of the twelfth century, and these words were actually a reality,” observes Henri Pirenne,

As early as the twelfth century the merchants were expending a good part of their profits fur the benefit of their fellow citizens — building churches, founding hospitals, buying off the market-tolls. The love of gain was allied, in them, with local patriotism. Every man was proud of his city and spontaneously devoted himself to its prosperity, This was because, in reality, each individual life depended directly upon the collective life of the municipal association. The commune of the Middle Ages had-, in fact, all the essential attributes which the State exercises today. It guaranteed to ail its members the security of his person and of his chattels, Outside of it he was in & hostile world, surrounded by perils and exposed to every risk. In it alone did he ha Ye a shelter, and for it he felt a gratitude which bordered on love, He was ready to devote himself to its defense, just as he was always ready to bedeck it and make it more beautiful than its neighbors. Those magnificent cathedrals which the thirteenth Century saw erected would not have been conceivable without the joyous alacrity with which the burghers contributed, by gifts, to their construction. They were not only houses of God; they also glorified the city or which they were the greatest ornament and which their majestic towers advertised afar. They were for the cities of the Middle Ages what temples were for those of antiquity.[21]

Yet, even these generous lines by Pirenne fail to do adequate justice to the attitude of the medieval urban dweller toward his city. The commune provided not only security to its populace but also a deep sense of community. It offered not only protection but the comfort of sociality and a human scale the burgher could comprehend and in which he could find a uniquely individual space The commune was home — not merely an environment that surrounded the home. The concrete nature of the labor process, the directness, indeed, familiar character, of nearly all social relations, and the human scale of civic life which Fostered a high degree of personal participation in urban affairs — all, combined to retain a natural core to social life which the cosmopolises of the ancient world had dissolved with the passing of the polis. One might say that the natural core of the medieval commune was not unlike the sexual division of labor which underpinned the economic life of tribal society. Marx, with considerable perception, notes that

Castes and guilds arise from the action of the same natural laws that regulate the differentiation of plants, and animals into species and varieties, except that, when a certain degree of development has been reached, the heredity of castes and exclusiveness of guilds are ordained as a law of Society. [22]

Just as the guilds speciate the commune, so commune and manor could be said to speciate feudal society. As to the commune, a natural civic nucleus mutes the externalizing and disintegrative forces latent in trade. Even the prevailing technology retains this natural or organic characters toots are adapted to the proficiency of the craftsman, to his skills, talents, and physiology. The notion that a man is merely an adjunct of an impersonal machine that determines the tempo and nature of his work would have surely horrified members of a medieval guild.

Contrast this mentality with that of bourgeois society — a society that dissolves the natural basis of civic life by transmuting the fraternal relations of the medieval commune into harsh commodity relations — and we are perhaps better equipped to judge the enormous psychic as well as economic changes that were to he introduced by the capitalist mode of production. The commodity, like a mysterious external force, now seems to rise above men and determine their destiny according to suprahuman autonomous laws. With the increasingly problematic abstraction of labor from its concrete forms, all relations, objects, and responsibilities acquire a monetary equivalent. Natural life shrinks from the community to the individual; the city becomes a mere aggregate of isolated human monads — a gray featureless mass, the raw materials of bureaucratic mobilization and manipulation. The guild, which once formed the spontaneous arena of authentic human fraternity, finds its caricature in the industrial and commercial corporation, with its smoothly engineered ambiance of “togetherness” and “team play.” The procession described by Dürer becomes the parade; the spiritual ceremony, the reified spectacle. With the emergence of a highly monetized economy, human beings become interchangeable with the very wares that are the result of their human powers. They too become commodities, the passive objects — whether as workers or spectators — of economic laws.

If the mere extension of commodity relations can be said to have transformed the medieval commune into the bourgeois city, the factory may be singled out as the agent which gives this city its structural form and its social purpose. By the word “factory” I mean more than an industrial enterprise: the factory is the locus of mobilized abstract labor, of labor power as a commodity, placed in the service of commerce as well as production. Accordingly, the term applies as much to an office building and a supermarket as to a mill and a plant. Once the factory becomes an clement of urban life, it takes over the city almost completely. Here, a very important historic contrast must be emphasized. In the medieval commune, the workshop was a homo: it was the locus not only of highly individuated technical activities, but also (as Mumford has already stressed) of complex personal and cultural responsibilities. With the emergence of the factory, home and work place are separated. The factory is. a place to which the worker goes in order to expend his human powers — powers that are steadily degraded to the degree that they are abstracted and quantified as mere “work lime” — in the service of increasingly anonymous owners and administrators, The factory has no personal or cultural functions; it is merely the collecting and mobilizing center for alienated depersonalized labor.

If these significant differences are viewed from a broader perspective, they reveal crucial differences between the very nature of the medieval commune and the bourgeois city. The guild, which unites homes that are also workshops, imparts a distinctly domestic character to the commune: it turns the city into a home, into an authentic human community that graduates personal affiliations and responsibilities to a social level Conversely, the factory transforms the city into a commercial and industrial enterprise. It negates the role of the city as a personal and cultural entity, and exaggerates its economic functions to the point of urban pathology. The medieval commune was primarily a place in which to live; the bourgeois city is primarily a place in which to work. The guilds made the city into a center of human solidarity, religious communion, and cultural vitality; although work was necessary to achieve these goals, it became the medium for artistry and the expression of creative human powers, not an end in itself. The factory degrades the city to a center of production for the sake of production and consumption for the sake of consumption. That people must live” in a city in order to work is obviously necessary to the existence of the factory, but the fact that they occupy dwellings is secondary to the fact that they work in office buildings, supermarkets, plants, and mills.

We will examine the unique characteristics of the bourgeois city in a later section, but at this point, we must ask how tine medieval commune was transformed into the bourgeois city, The factory’ requires the separation of the small independent producer From the means of production: the alienation of the producer’s labor and the reduction of his labor power to a commodity. Generally as the market begins to expand beyond the environs of the commune, considerable differences in wealth emerge between members of the same guild and between individual members of the same community. In time, wealthy master craftsmen, traders (who are often organized into guilds of their own), and eventually the guilds themselves tend to become an exclusive stratum within the community with interests of their own that are set apart from and often opposed to those of the community as a whole. Such guilds begin to exclude apprentices and journeymen from becoming masters, turning them into authentic proletarians who must work for others in, order to survive, In some areas of Europe, this process of proletarianization occurred so slowly that it did not visibly upset the stability of the commune. The Swiss cities are a case in point. There, the transformation from the guild workshop to the factory was so organic that Swiss communities, nearly to the present day, could be cited as models of civic balance, stability, and the integration of craft skills with mass production.

But in other areas, the expansion of the market from a local Or regional to an international Stale occurred at a tempo that gravely disrupted the harmony of the commune. As early as the thirteenth century, Flanders provides us with a not uncommon example of cities, based largely on international trade, in which the guilds developed into an oppressive hierarchical stratum that grossly exploited a large mass of dispossessed artisans. Nor did this change occur with tranquility. in 1280, nearly all the Flemish communes exploded into a bloody class war between proletarianized artisans and wealthy masters who were organized into exclusive guild monopolies. This conflict was not decisively resolved. Before either side could definitively vanquish the other, the territorial lords shrewdly used the occasion to intervene and hold both classes in check. Indeed, it may welt be that, owing partly to the fact that this struggle was never fought out to its logical conclusion and partly to the later subordination of the Lowlands to English commercial hegemony, civic life in Holland and Flanders retained the medieval charm that has turned their cities into the museum pieces of the modern world.

We must turn to England to find the area in which the transformation of small producers into proletarians ran its full, perhaps most savage, course. And, ironically, this transformation first occurred in the countryside and only later in the cities. In the English countryside, the bourgeois development followed two distinct although complementary paths; more and more acreage was removed from food cultivation and village pasturage and devoted to raising sheep for the wool market of Flanders; and, capitalist entrepreneurs, blocked by guilds and merchant monopolies in the cities, turned to the villages to avail themselves of cheap unregulated labor for the domestic production of textile products. In both cases, this development was marked by the steady degradation and eventually dispossession of the English peasantry and yeomanry, a development in which the landed aristocracy and textile merchants dramatically transformed the social nature of the countryside and finally the cities

By the sixteenth century, the English aristocracy — its appetite for riches whetted by rising world prices of wool — began ruthlessly to expropriate and enclose the traditional common pasture lands of the villages, even the private holdings of tenants whose plots had been tilled for generations. These lands were simply turned into sheep runs and their occupants dispossessed. The story is told in a scathing manner by Thomas More in the opening pages of Utopia. More’s principal character; Raphael Hythloday, declares:

Your sheep which are normally so gentle and need so little food ... have begun to be so ravenous and wild that they even eat up men. They devastate and destroy fields, houses and towns. For in whatever parts of the kingdom line and therefore more precious wool is produced, there the nobles and gentlemen, and also some holy abbots, are not content with the rents and annual profits that their predecessors used to get from their farms. They are not satisfied to live in luxury and idleness and be of no use to the state; they even harm it. they leave nothing for arable land, enclose everything for pasture, destroy houses, tear down towns and leave only the church to house the sheep; and as if the forests and parks lost yon too little ground, those good men turn all houses and cultivated land into a desert.[23]

An increasingly capitalist form of agriculture, in effect, had become the pacesetter in England For capitalist industry.

Even more significant for the long run development of English capitalism, “free” capital, seeking escape from the fetters of guild restrictions and merchant monopolies in the towns, began to colonize the countryside along industrial lines. Again, one finds in this development no remarkably new technological advances; rather, an entrepot sort of merchant-capitalist, traveling from cottage to cottage, provides village spinners with wool, weavers and knitters with yarn, and dyers with doth. Materials and, where necessary, machines were formed out and worked for tho barest subsistence wages instead of the higher guild-regulated town rates. With this putting-out system, the capitalist could easily undercut the urban standard of living and deliver his wares at such highly reduced prices that urban masters and journeymen were simply wiped out by the thousands. The entire family of the cottager, including his infant children, were put to work to meet the ravenous demands of the new economy. The factory system was born when the capitalist, finding it more profitable to mobilize rural labor and intensify its operations under close supervision, housed It in a single structure. English capitalist manufacture emerged primarily in the countryside rather than the cities and, in contrast to Flanders, essentially demolished the guild system From without rather than from within.

With the spread of capitalist manufacture, all that remained of the traditional guild structure collapsed. And with the passing of the guilds went the last integrating forces of the medieval communes and Renaissance towns. Thereafter, a new basis for city life developed in the urban centers of the industrialized western world, changing qualitatively all preexisting social and economic relations within the towns and between town and country.