Name and Link	Type of Resource	Description

Marx, Karl [1887] Capital. Volume 1 Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation Chs 26-33 available on-line at this link.	Seminal Text - online	--
Perelman, M. (2000) The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. London: Duke University Press 2000 Link to bookseller Extracted article avilable here.	Specialist book on this topic and online article	The originators of classical political economy--Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others--created a discourse that explained the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism's creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this? Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labour. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labour and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy--to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land. This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold in the industrial age.
De Angelis, Massimo (2001) ‘Marx and Primitive Accumulation: the continuous character of capital’s “enclosures”’, The Commoner, no.2, Available online here	Paper on specific issue	----
Nancy Holmstrom and Richard Smith, The Necessity of Gangster Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation in Russia and China Monthly Review Feb 2000 available here.	--

Not Directly Relevant, but useful historical background reading:-
Hill, Christopher (1972) The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Link to bookseller	Background reading. Book covering the historical developments prior to the development of capitalism and the English Industrial Revolution.	Within the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic - the ideology of the propertied class - there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success 'might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic. In "The World Turned Upside Down" Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless' men, the outbursts of sexual freedom, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs.