Spencer Dimmock

I am a historian specialising in the history of medieval and early modern England and Wales, although for comparative purposes I draw heavily on research on other countries. I am mostly interested in transitions to capitalism past and present.

My recent book, The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400-1600 (Leiden, 2014), aims to defend Robert Brenner's thesis on the transition from feudalism to capitalism from the numerous critiques of historians and historical sociologists. Its approach is both theoretical and historical, and it presents a broad range of studies that provide a strong empirical foundation for Brenner's thesis, including an historical case study of my own which began as my doctoral thesis and is now entirely reworked with new material.

I am currently nearing completion of two volumes on the role of forced expropriation in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England c. 1400-1650. The second volume is a collection of sources that I have translated on the royal commissions into depopulating enclosures in 1517-18 and other related evidence. The title is England's Second Domesday and the Expulsion of the English Peasantry. The publisher is Brill, Leiden.