Editing Capitalism (section)

=== Agrarianism ===
The economic foundations of the feudal agricultural system began to shift substantially in 16th-century England as the [[manorial system]] had broken down and land began to become concentrated in the hands of fewer landlords with increasingly large estates. Instead of a [[serf]]-based system of labor, workers were increasingly employed as part of a broader and expanding money-based economy. The system put pressure on both landlords and tenants to increase the productivity of agriculture to make profit; the weakened coercive power of the [[aristocracy]] to extract peasant [[Excess supply|surpluses]] encouraged them to try better methods, and the tenants also had incentive to improve their methods in order to flourish in a competitive [[labor economics|labor market]]. Terms of rent for land were becoming subject to economic market forces rather than to the previous stagnant system of custom and feudal obligation.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Brenner |first1=Robert |title=The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism |journal=[[Past & Present (journal)|Past & Present]] |date=1 January 1982 |issue=97 |pages=16–113 |doi=10.1093/past/97.1.16 |jstor=650630}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://monthlyreview.org/1998/07/01/the-agrarian-origins-of-capitalism |title=The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism |access-date=17 December 2012 |date=July 1998 |archive-date=11 December 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191211183143/https://monthlyreview.org/1998/07/01/the-agrarian-origins-of-capitalism/ |url-status=live}}</ref>