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I too would like to thank Anthony Waterman for his clarification,  
though I don't think the differences between Michael Perelman and me  
were mainly due to confusion over the words hunting and shooting. There 
are several issues involved.  
 
(1) Did the game laws, by prohibiting the taking of game for food by  
poor people, play a significant role in the development of capitalism  
in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? I think not, on  
the grounds that game could not have been a significant food source in  
a densely populated countryside, and on the grounds that making life  
worse for the rural poor would not have helped capitalism (see below).  
 
(2) Were the game laws a sufficiently important issue for the silence  
of many classical economist on the issue to be a sinister sign of their 
collaboration in oppressing the rural poor? This seems to be where the  
damage done by game and by hunting comes in. I don't know how  
significant the damage really was, but I argue that the classics, given 
their concern for food supplies and diminishing returns in agriculture, 
could not have thought damage to agriculture to be other than a bad  
thing. My guess is that either they didn't think it significant or they 
took it as a given of rural life. I don't think the game laws can be  
used as evidence against the classics in the way Michael does.  
 
(3) Lying behind these differences is a deeper one, which surfaces in  
Anthony's comment that Marx's bourgeois is an urban being. It seems  
that Michael thinks of capitalism as essentially urban, and of  
primitive accumulation as forcing the rural poor into the towns. I  
don't think Marx saw it quite that way - as I read the chapters on  
primitive accumulation in Capital, he was much concerned with the  
replacement of feudal relations with capitalist farming. Be that as it  
may, the classical economists clearly saw capitalist farming as the  
norm, with a farmer who paid rent to a landlord and employed wage  
labour. There is a lot of evidence that wage labour was widespread in  
the countryside in England from the later middle ages onwards. This  
debate, as I see it, is ultimately about the position taken by the  
classical economists, and it is over that that I disagree with Michael. 
 
Tony Brewer 
 
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