Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism was published in 1946. Karl Polanyi, who reviewed it very critically in the Journal of Economic History, 1948, nevertheless described it in the foll6wing terms: 'a scholarly and original volume on the decline of feudalism, on mer cantilism, the industrial revolution and the nineteenth century, the period between the two wars, in effect the whole history of western capi­ talism short of the Marshall Plan.'