ABSTRACT
Transition debates are a product of classical Marxist conceptions of economy, social totality, and history, which can be summarized as follows. Marx provided a taxonomy of modes of production: primitive communist, ancient, slave, Asiatic, feudal, capitalist, and communist. Modes were distinguished by their social relations of production, performance, and appropriation of surplus, and were arranged in a teleological time line. Transition debates in the context of development, then, entailed figuring out whether the transition from feudalism to capitalism had taken place yet, especially in agriculture. Postcolonial theorists, by contrast, have been particularly concerned with the ways in which History came to be understood as Europe's history, and Europe's history became the model for understanding contemporary non-Western societies. But one can no longer invoke the singular trajectory of capitalist development and transition. A different way of thinking about causality, transition, and development becomes necessary.
