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Forum: Debate on the "Feudal Mutation"
A "Feudal Mutation"? Conceptual Tools and Historical Patterns in World History
Stephen Morillo
Wabash College
| Was there a "feudal mutation" in world history, a common process that affected much of the Eurasian "ethnosphere" between approximately 900 and 1200? R. J. Barendse says there was, and argues in addition that "feudalism" is a useful term for world historical analysis. I argue, first, that "feudalism" is not a useful term and concept in analyzing any aspect of world history, and, second, that the mutation Barendse describes, whatever we call it, did not actually happen. |
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"Feudalism"
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Barendse's Claims
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| Barendse makes three sets of broad claims about what he variously calls the "feudal mutation" or "feudalism as a process": claims about peasant production, about warriors and horses, and about the results for sociopolitical structures. First, the feudal mutation was an internal transformation caused by an upsurge in agricultural productivity, colonization, and trade between 900 and 1200. Second, a "warhorse revolution" brought a new class of rural warrior aristocrats, bound together by oaths, to power across Eurasia at the expense of both peasant freedoms and central authority. The result? He claims that "The feudal process can be perceived as a specific world historic juncture in which peasant societies were subjugated by an aristocracy of mounted warriors that became more powerful than any central institution and increasingly appropriated the jurisdiction over the peasants, and thus the land revenue." Thus, "the feudal mutation" consisted of changes in peasant production and in warhorses and warrior roles, the combination producing societies that had "certain common economic [and by inference sociopolitical] characteristic that makes them different from capitalist societies, from hunter-gatherer bands, or, indeed, from the societies in late antiquity, such as the Roman, Sassanid, Harsha, or the Gupta empires."1 |
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Two questions stand out from this summary. First, did changes in peasant production create the "horse revolution" and the resulting dominance of warriors over peasant society? If so, how? This question is particularly pressing when one considers the central role of steppe nomads in many of the areas Barendse discusses. How did changes in peasant production affect the motives and actions of these nonagrarian societies? Second, what exactly was the result, and can we describe it as "feudal societies," the linguistic implicand of the "feudal mutation" as a process? |
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"Feudalism" in Medieval Historiography
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| This last question is especially pressing since the term is in rapid decline among specialists in medieval European history, especially military historians,2 because "feudalism" is a term that is paradoxically both too vague and too precise. Though based on the medieval word "feudum," the Latin for "fief," the word "feudalism" was coined by reformers in the eighteenth century to describe (unfavorably) the system of rights and privileges enjoyed by the French aristocracy, especially with regard to landholding and their peasant tenants. This broad socioeconomic meaning was taken up and extended by Marxist historians, for whom the "feudal mode of production" succeeded the classical mode and preceded the capitalist mode.3 For military historians, this has always been far too broad a definition, for if a privileged landholding class and a subject peasantry constitutes feudalism, then most civilizations before the industrial revolution were feudal and the term loses any real analytic usefulness. |
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