CAPITALISM IN HISTORY 17 most typical form of production.9 In other words, peasant and artisanal production, not capitalist production, was still the dominant form. There is no sanction in Marx, or in historical facts, to classify such non-capitalist commodity production as 'feudal', and so, by a sleight of hand, as it were, bridge the entire gap of three and a half centuries between c.1450 and c.1750, whereafter the industrial revolution began. This extension of feudalism is achieved by Dobb essentially by taking the term 'serfdom' to cover not only a peasant tied to the land and rendering labour service or paying rent-in-kind, but also a legally free tenant paying money-rent to the landowner. The two categories of forms of labour-process represented are so different in nature that to class them together does the greatest violence to any coherent conception of a mode of production. Contrary to Dobb's claim that Marx supposes money-rent to be feudal rent 'by manifest implication',10 Marx states expressly that money-rent 'presupposes a considerable development of commerce, of urban industry, of commodity production in general.'11 One must come to grips with the reality that during the period between the aftermath of the feudal crisis and the onset of the industrial revolution it was the rent-receiving landowners within a system of commodity production who formed the economically dominant class as well as the ruling class. It is this post-feudal system to which Marx gave the name 'Petty Mode of Production': it was the mode out of which capitalism originated, and by destroying which capitalism triumphed.12 Marx's statements in respect of the nature of this mode are fairly clear-cut: Of course this petty mode of production exists also under slavery, serfdom and other states of dependence. But it flourishes, it lets loose its whole energy, it attains its adequate classic form, only where the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour set in motion by himself.13 Only when this stage was achieved in Western Europe by the sixteenth century, was the road cleared for the emergence of capitalism, since commodity production is a necessary pre-requisite for its existence. Prosperous artisans and peasants could now grow 'into small capitalists', by engaging hired labour. But, as Marx recognised, this could give no more than a ^snail's pace' to capitalist development.14 In fact, the limits of profits out of hiring more labour were soon reached: Prosperous farmers, thereafter, moved into positions of squires, buying up lands, so as to 'charge the rent, when custom allows, which a farm will stand', and engaging in trade—Tawney's 'agricultural capitalism' (but not Marx's), which Tawney sees as the bedrock of the rise of the gentry in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.15 Others, from amongst artisans, after extending their own domestic craft production, would invest their larger incomes not in engaging more hired hands under their roofs, but in 'putting-out' their funds to make