Robert Brenner's challenging article, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe”, published in issue no. 70 of Past and Present (February 1976), initiated a debate of intense interest, not only to historians, but to all concerned with the causes behind transitions between successive social formations. In some respects it might be regarded as a continuation of that other well-known debate concerning the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which had been sparked off by the criticism by the American economist Paul Sweezy of the analysis given by Maurice Dobb in his Studies in the Development of Capitalism. That debate, however, which began in the American journal Science and Society in 1950, was largely conducted between Marxists. And although it undoubtedly had a resonance beyond them, it was inevitable that it should be seen as a debate within Marxism rather than one addressed to a wider public. This so-called “Transition debate” is hardly referred to in the “Brenner debate”, even though there is considerable overlap in subject-matter, and even though Brenner himself, in a critique of Paul Sweezy, André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein, referred extensively to the Transition debate in the pages of the New Left Review in 1977. Nevertheless, those interested by the discussion in the pages of this volume would find much of interest in the Dobb–Sweezy controversy.

The responses to Brenner's article were of varying character. Since Brenner was attacking what he considered to be a form of demographic determinism in the interpretation of the development of the pre-industrial European agrarian economies (and to a lesser extent a commercial interpretation), some of the earliest responses were from historians whom he designated as “neo-Malthusians”.