Wood's Marxist approach originates from Karl Marx's critique of political economy in his works Das Kapital and Grundrisse.

Wood argues that past historians have tended to see capitalism as a natural and even inevitable human behaviour, which came into being when barriers to trade and commerce were removed: essentially, in their understanding, people were waiting for the opportunity to become capitalists.

However, she also finds that even commentators who were critical of this account tend to argue that the transition to capitalism entailed farmers seizing new opportunities to switch from subsistence to commodity production as the constraints of feudalism were loosened.

Building particularly on the arguments made in the Brenner Debate and on the work of E. P. Thompson, Wood argues that 'we need a form of history that brings this specificity into sharp relief'.

[5] In part II, Wood argues that capitalism emerged in the unique conditions of late medieval and early modern English agrarian society, basing her argument firmly on Robert Brenner's ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’.

This gave aristocrats relatively limited powers to extract wealth directly from their feudal underlings through political means (not least the threat of violence).

This led to a cascade of effects whereby successful tenant farmers became agrarian capitalists; unsuccessful ones became wage-labourers, required to sell their labour in order to live; and landlords promoted the privatisation and renting out of common land, not least through the enclosures.

She argues that English capitalism did not cause England's imperialism, noting that neighbouring non-capitalist economies like Spain and France also built overseas empires.

Finally, she emphasises that if capitalism is a historically specific and unusual development, it is not inevitable or the only way that humans might organise themselves.