Mother of Capital: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity

By Matthew CostaRecorded Track
Length10h 46m

About this audiobook

Rent, or unearned income, is a pervasive concept in contemporary economics. Economists see today's global economy as riddled with harmful rents, but most deny these are intrinsic to capitalism, and insist they can be eliminated with the right policies. Why is rent theory so critical of the present but so optimistic about the future? Costa delves into the intellectual and social history of rent to solve this puzzle. Centring rent as the engine of capitalism's historical emergence in medieval Europe, he offers a groundbreaking, systematic history of rent and rent theory. The book traces the history of resistance to rent from below, and unearths a neglected body of critical rent theory. Weaving complex strands of social and intellectual history into a vivid, lively, and original explanation of how the society we live in came to be, Costa makes a bold intervention into contemporary debates about the origins and future of capitalism, the nature of social change, and of history itself.

Audiobook details

Rating★★★★★ 5.0 (1)
GenreBusiness and Economics, Politics and Government
Length10 hrs 46 mins
Narrated byRecorded Track
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateApr 11, 2026
LanguageEnglish

Table of contents

1Front Matter
2Acknowledgements
3Introduction
41. Capitalism and the engine of history
52. The tributary rent relation
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63. Tributary tendencies and contradictions
74. Tributary ideology, resistance, and critique
85. From tributary to capitalist rent
96. Resistance and critique in transition
107. The political economy of capitalist rent
118. Resistance to rent under capitalism
129. The critical social theorists
1310. The critique of differential rent
1411. Capitalist rent as proletarianisation
1512. Rent and capitalist domination
1613. The ideology of capitalist rent
1714. Proletarian imaginaries
1815. Deproletarianisation
19Conclusion: Capital, mother of what?
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