Both Pirenne and Davies understood that the biological metaphor of a bourgeoisie emerging out of the Middle Ages, nurturing itself on the "mercantilisms" and administrations of the Absolute Monarchies of the traditional period between feudalism and the capitalism, and on the lands and titles of impoverished nobilities, then finally achieving political and economic maturity and thus constituting industrial capitalism, is largely unsupported by historical evidence. Rather it is a historical impression, a phantom representation largely constructed from the late eighteenth century to the present by the notional activity of a bourgeoisie as a dominant class.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 201