My paper underscores the theoretical contribution of an early essay by Henry Bernstein, ‘Notes on Capital and Peasantry’, published in 1977. It uses the ideas in that essay to construct a general argument about the ways in which capitalism dominates household producers. The first section summarizes the arguments of Bernstein's essay and relates them to key passages of A.V. Chayanov's work. The second section builds a model of how commercial capitalism worked in the produce trades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The third section proposes a wider taxonomy, where the differences between commercial and industrial capital and their respective forms of domination of the countryside are laid out. The key category here is vertical integration as a form/strategy of accumulation chiefly characteristic of the latter. The fourth section suggests that we need to take merchant capitalism more seriously as a historical category as well as one of theory, rejecting the idea that merchant's capital ‘exclusively inhabits the circulation sphere’.