ABSTRACT
Most narratives of the transition to capitalism, Brenner contends, focus on demographic fluctuations and the growth of trade and markets to explain modern economic growth. For example, market exchange has existed for millennia, and therefore by focusing on the market, there's little the authors can learn about the specificities of capitalism as this dimension of the world-economy stays relatively constant with changes in the mode of production. However, she argues that proponents of what she calls the commericialization model are the most Eurocentrist of all. By assuming that primitive accumulation could occur solely through trade, the commercialization model implicitly must argue that all world regions had a similar capacity to develop a strategy for primitive accumulation; but Europe was first to do so because of its immanent virtues.
