During the revolutionary period from 1350 to 1500, elites suffered what historians have described as a crisis of ‘chronic disaccumulation’.11 As national income was shared more evenly across the population it became more difficult for elites to pile up the profits they had enjoyed under feudalism. This is an important point. We often assume that capitalism emerged somehow naturally from the collapse of feudalism, but in fact such a transition would have been impossible. Capitalism requires elite accumulation: piling up excess wealth for large-scale investment. But the egalitarian conditions of
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