ABSTRACT
The republication after 40 years of T. H. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class signifies a revived interest in sociolegal historical approaches to citizenship rights. For decades students have been guided by Marshall’s clas-sic treatise. But can Marshall’s argument for the causal power of the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” continue to provide an adequate grounding for sociolegal approaches to citizenship and rights formation? Building on Marshall’s path-breaking expansion of the concept of citizenship, I use institutional analysis and causal narrativity to present an alternative explanation. I argue that modern citizenship rights are a contingent outcome of the convergence of England’s medieval legal revolutions with its regionally varied local legal and political cultures, not of the emergence of capitalist markets.
