The transition from feudalism to capitalism is one of the most important debates in Marxist historiography because it seeks to explain how medieval European society, based primarily on feudal relations of production, gradually gave rise to a capitalist economy. The debate is not simply about when capitalism began, but about the forces that produced the transformation. Maurice Dobb and Guy Bois offered important interpretations of this transition, although they belonged to different phases of the wider Marxist debate. Dobb emphasized contradictions within feudalism, especially the changing relations between lords and peasants, while Bois focused more closely on the structural crisis of feudalism and the limits of feudal production, particularly in medieval France. Maurice Dobb was one of the major Marxist economic historians of the twentieth century. In his influential work *Studies in the Development of Capitalism*, published in 1946, Dobb challenged interpretations that explained the emergence of capitalism primarily through the expansion of trade, markets, and long-distance commerce. According to him, capitalism could not be understood simply as the result of merchants accumulating wealth through trade. The crucial transformation occurred within the relations of production themselves. Therefore, the internal contradictions of feudal society were central to explaining the transition. Dobb argued that feudalism contained contradictions that gradually weakened the system. The feudal economy was based upon the extraction of surplus from peasants by landlords through rents, customary obligations, labour services, and other forms of extra-economic coercion. Lords depended on the surplus produced by peasants, while peasants attempted to preserve as much of their product and labour as possible. This created a fundamental conflict between the feudal ruling class and the peasantry. According to Dobb, pressures imposed by landlords upon peasants could become excessive and undermine the productive capacity of the countryside. The growth of population and the expansion of cultivation during the medieval period initially strengthened feudal society. However, from the thirteenth century onward, the system increasingly encountered difficulties.