This is a fascinating book. It makes a very strong case that England created capitalism not through the industrial revolution, as most histories from the left and right of the political spectrum assert, but in an earlier period of agrarian land conflict.

As Ms Meiksins Wood says, we cannot navigate our exit from capitalism if we are not aware as to the method of our entry thereinto.

Some of the author's assertions are at odds with Marxist views as well as, naturally, being unrepresentative of neoliberal views. This makes it easy for large blocks to gainsay her claims: that doesn't mean that they are wrong and I, for one, can see their merit. ( )

Rather more in-crowd than I'd expected; this should be subtitled 'What previous analyses have got wrong', rather than 'a longer view.' But the central insight is crucial: our society is not something that happens naturally when you get rid of barriers to us doing what comes naturally. It's something that was created by forcing people to do capitalist things. ( )

This is a short, dense and rewarding book. Although highly analytical I do wish the book somehow was even more clear in its arguments. To give but one example: "capitalist exploitation is characterised by a division of labour between the 'economic' moment of appropriation and the 'extra-economic' or 'political' moment of coercion." In this case, since this is a book about capitalism, the use of "division of labour" in the abstract sense is misleading. Here, Wood is not talking about labour at all, but about the means of capitalist control, or about the institutional structure of capitalism. Why not just write "...a division between..."? This lack of sharpness and clarity piles on, so that stretches of genius are intersperesed with unexpectedly bewildering paragraphs that require re-reading. One has very few points of disagreement with the author of this fantastic text - but one does wish that she might have had a more activist editor. ( )