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Forum: Debate on the "Feudal Mutation"
The Feudal Mutation: Military and Economic Transformations of the Ethnosphere in the Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries
R. J. Barendse
Leiden University/Royal Dutch Academy of Science
| This essay will argue for a renewed appreciation of the importance of feudalism in world history. It will argue that many of the Europe/Asia distinctions in which Europe is feudal and Asia is not are really cases of mistaken identity. What feudalism in Europe was about is often not what is seen as such in the writing of comparative history or comparative sociology. |
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The ascent of feudalism in Europe in the tenth century (the "feudal mutation") in this light can well be perceived as part of a wider process of military and economic changes in the much larger ethnosphere of which Europe was part. Realizing this, however, necessitates departing from normal historical concepts. The feudal mutation should be understood as a dialectic process and as a "real type" rather than an "ideal type." Process signifies that the various linked elements cannot be arbitrarily separated to isolate the defining element in feudalism; dialectic entails that the various elements are linked and influence each other. They thus cannot be arbitrarly separated to distinguish the defining process. Real type implies that such a process is not constructed by linking a kit of metahistoric concepts in the researcher's mind, applicable to any place or any time—the common procedure in comparative studies—for these concepts are not things but relationships between people that can be found only in a concrete historical period.1 |
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And while denying links between areas in the same period the anticomparativists all too often instead take recourse to a similar set of abstract metahistoric or ontologic concepts (the state, the law) proposed to be transcendent rather than questioning the concepts themselves, which they use as conceptual tools. The use of such metahistoric concepts is a major obstacle to the study of world history, I would argue. |
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Feudalism
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| The words "feudal" and "feudalism" are essentially late seventeenth to eighteenth century inventions, coming into the English language in the late eighteenth century from the German "Feudalismus." |
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It had two functions. In Germany the word Feudalismus was invented by the lawyers connected to the imperial diet, where it served as a historic precedent to defend the sovereignty of the small German princes (the Landeshoheit) against the centralizing impetus of the Roman law in sway in the Empire, in Bavaria, or in Prussia. In France the word came in use in the early eighteenth century to serve the so-called "noble reaction": an attempt of clergy and nobility to reassert their patrimonial rights against the centralizing impact of local lits de justice. Many of the philosophes strongly opposed the noble reaction, so the words "feudal" and "feudalism" began to signify much more than merely a bundle of patrimonial rights connected to the noble "allodium." Instead it began to cover a system of seigniorial landownership and seigniorial dues on the peasantry in general and, in the widest sense, anything thought contemptible in the ancien régime in general.2 The word "feudalism" in this philosophical use was then enshrined through the proclamation of the abolition of feudalism by the Assemblée National on 5 August 1789. |
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