In his Theories and Narratives Alec Callinicos submits this critique of Robt Brenner's historical investigation on the transition from feudalism:
"Brenner, by seeming to treat as the sole genuine case of full blown capitalism English commercial agriculture, involving as it did the exploitation of free wage labor, occludes the role played by transitional forms, such as the putting out system...and the production of cash crops in the slave plantations...[However]Brenner...dilineates, in the new merchants, a cohesive and politically active group of capitalists with interests at odds with those of Stuart Absolutism rooted in their participation i what looks like a transtional form, the exploitaiton of unfree slave and the indentured labor in the plantations of the New World...One conclusion suggested by these reflections is that it is necessary to distinguish between the abstract model of the capitalist mode of production outlined by Marx in *Capital*--of which Brenner's account of capitalist property relations is a development--and more concrete *kinds* of capitalism.
"The first is intended to isolate the essential features of capitalism, common to all its variants; the second seek, within the limits set by these features, to identify historical forms they have assumed. This distinction is well established in Marxist theoretical writing. Lenin's theory of imperialism, for example, aims to identify a particular phase of capitalist development...possessing a combination of characteristics which set it apart from earlier phases. While it is insufficient to seek to acocunt for particular variants of capitalism by situating them historically, so that they correspond to a specific phase of capitalist development since different forms may coexist, Lenin's approach seems basically sound. Models of the variant forms of capitalism represent an intermediary stage between the most abstract levels of analysis of capitalism represented by *Capital* and the empirical accounts of the behavior of definite capitalist societies. "Brenner's failing as an historian of early modern Europe might then be that, by equating cpaitaism with the economic form corresponding most closely to the abstract model of *Capital*--English commercial agriculture--he evades the necessity of constructing a model of capitalism as it took shape in the 16th and 17th centuries. Such a model would have to account for the way in which certain forms of mercant capitalism (in particular those involved in proto industrialization and plantation slavery) constituted the framework whithin which a transition was effected to capitalism proper, itself prefigured by the social relations crystallizing in the English countryside." (p.133-35)
best, rakesh