ABSTRACT
Rodney Hilton’s name is synonymous with the ‘prime mover’ thesis. He was a founding member of the Historians’ Group of the British Communist Party, and the editor of Past and Present during 1942-68. Epstein begins with a critique of Maurice Dobb’s work that had a crucial influence on Hilton and most other British Communist historians. The conflict between peasants and landlords led to the differentiation and transition; eviction of self-sufficient peasants to benefit a class of wealthy peasants who increasingly produced for market. Epstein draws on the substantial body of research which demonstrated that agricultural supply in medieval and early modern Europe was far more elastic than either Marxists like Hilton or ‘Ricardo-Malthusian’ pessimists like Postan. Epstein tracks technological progress in feudal Europe as follows: such knowledge was largely tacit and experience-based and it was not possible to reproduce it in different places in the absence of codification.
