Costa pitches his tent firmly in the camp of the economic historian Robert Brenner, who fifty years ago initiated what came to be known as the Brenner Debate with “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” an essay he published in the journal Past & Present. With that paper, the young Brenner became a gadfly to several academics, at whose rival theories he took calculated aim by arguing, controversially, that capitalism originated in the English countryside. Out of a feudal system of coercive extraction of peasants’ economic surplus by nobles and the crown, a new class of tenant farmers emerged. This new class of capitalists competed with one another to pay rents to landlords by investing to increase the productivity of agriculture. Mother of Capital advances and popularizes this long-running debate, defending the position of its namesake.

In his “Agrarian Class Structure” paper, Brenner dismissed what he termed the “secular Malthusianism” of thinkers who explained capitalism’s emergence by appealing to what he called the demographic model. According to these historians, large populations created cheap labor, which could be easily yoked during the feudal period. But the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century reversed this condition, strengthening the hand of peasants and allowing them to bargain for greater compensation from their lords. This reversal resulted in a decline in agricultural profits for the lords and higher incomes for their peasants.