Epilogue

Abstract

Since the completion of this manuscript (in early 1974) there has been a great upsurge of debate in the English speaking world concerning the theoretical analysis of pre-capitalist modes of production. The stimulus for this upsurge has largely come from abroad — new theories of imperialism and underdevelopment on the one hand, and the methodological innovations of the Althusserian school of Marxism on the other. The former has given rise to the much-debated hypothesis of a ‘colonial mode of production’, in which production of commodities for a world- market is structurally tied to the continuance of a subsistence agriculture and pre-capitalist social relations within the colonial economy.¹ The methodological innovations have given rise, inter alia, to the two volumes published by Perry Anderson in 1974, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, and the single volume Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production published by Barry Hindess and Paul Q. Hirst in 1975. It is the Anderson and Hindess and Hirst books which I wish to discuss here, as they have been the focus of much attention and both, though for very different stated reasons, deny the usefulness of the AMP concept.