⁷ See T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-lndustrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985).

⁸ See Post-structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).

⁹ Slavoj Zizek, ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!’, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), 90–135, 93. On the universalization of capitalism as commercialism, see Wood, Origin of Capitalism, 11–33. For a useful, if technically narrow, critique of the term ‘feudalism’, see Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994). The now-classic rejection of capitalism as an essentializing concept is Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985; rpt. New York: Verso, 2001).