“The tyrant feudalism must be declared once and for all deposed and its influence over students of the Middle Ages finally ended” (Elizabeth Brown, 1974)
Interesting. You get the same tedious taxonomical discussions around lots of other topics, fascism and the dark ages come to mind. Every such exercise will produce edge cases and even if the edge cases outnumber the interior ones, the labels must still contain important meaning otherwise they wouldn't stay in currency. For fascism you basically have just 2 bonafide interior cases, and most books on the topic I've read start with a long discursive over definitions that at least as a lay reader I'd rather they just skip. This obviously makes empirical work challenging and prone to p-hacking when you can monkey with the dummy variable by tweeking the definition. The irony is that empirical work should be more concerned with nailing down a functional definition than historiography, but that seems not to be the case. Anyhow. Nice post, bud.
That's the question I always have about these things. As he says above: "we argue that medieval Europe c. 1000-1300 did have a distinctive system of government and it makes sense to call that system of government “feudal”." That makes sense to me. A concept has a name and it is distinctive because it lets us describe something.
What would getting rid of the term get us? What would it let us understand more about the past? What would we learn or gain from saying "well it's a complex relationship of fiefs and vassals, NOT feudalism"? Okay? Where is the predictive power?
Western Europe diverged because Emperors didn't bring in nomadic light cavalry and so there was an armoured heavy cavalry instead. This meant that the nomadic mercenaries didn't turn themselves into Sultans. For three or four generations these dynasties or clans had esprit de corps. Then polygamy, the intrigue of eunuchs, and fratricide turned not just Imperial Courts but every other Satrap's fortress into a den of intrigue. Good people turned to Sufism which was less into paideia of a conventional sort than the Catholic Church.
In West Europe, poorer Kings- like Henry the Navigator- looked to the sea. The debauched Sultans, fearing only their brothers or sons, were least bothered with increasing their revenue by raising productivity or establishing new trade routes. The great divergence was between the Christian culture of monogamy, the younger brother supporting the elder brother rather than trying to kill him, and the Church teaching useful stuff. After the Church, it was the turn of the Inns of Court and then even Parliament turned out not to be useless.
Ultimately it was the working people of Western Europe who showed a genuine work ethic and desire to raise 'general purpose productivity'. In the 'Orient', there were always particular patches of territory which were similar but then they too would succumb to the general malaise of mysticism/debauchery as global trade routes and markets reconfigured. Still, Mexican silver did create a degree of enterprise and affluence in India and China etc. But the rotten habitus of the ruling class would always kill off enterprise and such productivity gains as had been made.
Interesting. You get the same tedious taxonomical discussions around lots of other topics, fascism and the dark ages come to mind. Every such exercise will produce edge cases and even if the edge cases outnumber the interior ones, the labels must still contain important meaning otherwise they wouldn't stay in currency. For fascism you basically have just 2 bonafide interior cases, and most books on the topic I've read start with a long discursive over definitions that at least as a lay reader I'd rather they just skip. This obviously makes empirical work challenging and prone to p-hacking when you can monkey with the dummy variable by tweeking the definition. The irony is that empirical work should be more concerned with nailing down a functional definition than historiography, but that seems not to be the case. Anyhow. Nice post, bud.
That's the question I always have about these things. As he says above: "we argue that medieval Europe c. 1000-1300 did have a distinctive system of government and it makes sense to call that system of government “feudal”." That makes sense to me. A concept has a name and it is distinctive because it lets us describe something.
What would getting rid of the term get us? What would it let us understand more about the past? What would we learn or gain from saying "well it's a complex relationship of fiefs and vassals, NOT feudalism"? Okay? Where is the predictive power?
Western Europe diverged because Emperors didn't bring in nomadic light cavalry and so there was an armoured heavy cavalry instead. This meant that the nomadic mercenaries didn't turn themselves into Sultans. For three or four generations these dynasties or clans had esprit de corps. Then polygamy, the intrigue of eunuchs, and fratricide turned not just Imperial Courts but every other Satrap's fortress into a den of intrigue. Good people turned to Sufism which was less into paideia of a conventional sort than the Catholic Church.
In West Europe, poorer Kings- like Henry the Navigator- looked to the sea. The debauched Sultans, fearing only their brothers or sons, were least bothered with increasing their revenue by raising productivity or establishing new trade routes. The great divergence was between the Christian culture of monogamy, the younger brother supporting the elder brother rather than trying to kill him, and the Church teaching useful stuff. After the Church, it was the turn of the Inns of Court and then even Parliament turned out not to be useless.
Ultimately it was the working people of Western Europe who showed a genuine work ethic and desire to raise 'general purpose productivity'. In the 'Orient', there were always particular patches of territory which were similar but then they too would succumb to the general malaise of mysticism/debauchery as global trade routes and markets reconfigured. Still, Mexican silver did create a degree of enterprise and affluence in India and China etc. But the rotten habitus of the ruling class would always kill off enterprise and such productivity gains as had been made.
"Why Lords Went for Luxuries: A Riff on Adam Smith and David Hume, 500–1600"
(a 20 minute scholarly YouTube video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBrQJL70i58