the transition from slave society to feudalism

[Manic Impressive]

How did it happen and what prompted the change?




What were the different classes within slave societies?




How did these societies differ in different parts of the world?


sorry for the short first post

[the last donut of the night]

bump, curious

[mrmikhail]

How did it happen and what prompted the change?




What were the different classes within slave societies?




How did these societies differ in different parts of the world?


sorry for the short first post

I'll try to answer this as best I can with European society, although there was the period of the Dark ages ( after the fall of the Roman Empire before the 1060s or so) where there was pre-feudalism and post-slavery that can't really be defined as either.

In Europe the main cause behind the switch was the first stagnation of the Roman Empire and then the later fall there of. You can think of slaves to the Roman Empire as oil is to us, they/it is/was the driving force behind the economy. During the earlier and middle years of the Empire it was constantly expanding, with new military conquests and with it, a ready and cheap supply of slaves, however, when the Empire peaked it had no easy conquests to be had, it had literally taken over pretty much everything within reach, and while the good emperors did manage to expand slightly (such as into Dacia) it was realised that there was no where else to go. Thus with it the economy began a slow and inglorious decline as the supply of slaves deminished, paid labour could not make up for the shortfalls of the lack of slaves. With this economic decline came the fact that the political system became incredibly unstable and they could no longer afford to maintain the military that had conquered the known world, with that decline Germanic and other tribes from the East took advantage and set about conquering the empire, eventually destroying it all.

So that would answer, in Europe at least, why Slavery ended. Now I'll skip forward to feudalism, with a small note of the in between.

After the Roman Empire fell with it went most of slavery, peasants classes instead took their place and large landowners hired them on the cheap. Militaries were now much smaller and mostly in possession of the various Kings that came about in the wake of the Roman Empire's fall. The money being made was rather terrible, Europe was vary splintered and little in the way of progress was made, until the idea came about of Feudalism.

With the rise of feudalism, the kings of Europe realised they could form large countries, by merely granting lesser titles to underlings, allowing them to govern whatever lands with little oversight from the king aside from taxation, and an obligation for the vassals to give military aid to the King when requested. This gave rise to very productive vassals/kingdoms/ect. and the new class of nobility, Knights, as the vassals could now afford to hire their own smaller armies, not having to worry about anyone overpowering them due to the King's (and thus other vassal's) protection, serfs became the new slaves who worked for basically subsistence and protection in virtual slavery and thus, for the time, a new system was founded which got rid of the limitations of the Roman mistakes of slavery.


On the matter of classes, the Roman Empire had at the bottom slaves, above them the free men, then citizens (plebs) , then the Patrician (essentially merchants/nobility)

With feudalism we had the rise of the much more known serfs at the bottom, free men, lower nobility, upper nobility, royalty.

I hope I answered at least some of your questions here, the Roman Empire and Europe after is probably the best example of the situation you have set out.

[Ismail]

The History of Albania: A Brief Survey has a bit of text on how feudalism came into the Albanian lands. Here they are (pp. 36-38):

By settling down on arable lands, the Slavs ejected definitely the proprietors of big estates and constrained them either to take refuge in cities or to migrate from Albania, thus destroying the slave-ownership institutions. With their cancellation the slaves and tenants returned to be independent peasants. At the same time, the Illyrian tribes, who had been enslaved in the mountainous districts inland, were also liberated from the slave-owners' pressure....

In the 8th century the overwhelming majority of the population which dwelt in the territory of Albania was organized in communities partly of peasants and partly of cattle raisers. Each community comprised a certain number of families, which in some of the cases had tribal relations between them, and in others only neighbourly relations. Initially the fields, pastures, woodlands, watercourses, gardens were all kujri, i.e. property of the whole community. The arable lands were allotted and re-allotted from time to time to each family. Each single family itself produced almost all the necessaries of life – agricultural, dairy and industrial products. They felt scarcely any need for bartering. In cases of necessity they exchanged between them through bartering – product for product. The circulation of money was extremely limited. They had practically no relations with the town.

Thus, by the disappearance of the slave-ownership system, Albania turned back to natural economy. On account of this, the towns that were ruined during the barbarian invasions could not recover. They remained either demolished or diminished in size. With the exception of Durrës, they possessed neither craftsmen, merchants or cultural institutions. They had principally an agricultural feature, with a certain amount of importance as military and administrative centres.

In the time, during the 7th-10th century, a part of the grounds of the community, the fields, gardens and vineyards became private property of the family, while the kujri began to diminish.

With the strengthening of private proprietorship on land, the member of the community, when he got impoverished, began to sell his land and to remain without it. In order to secure the means to live, these impoverished peasants were constrained to labour on the fields of others, as leaseholders, paying the landlord one-tenth of the produce (morte). From the term used morte to designate what was due to be paid, these peasants came to be called mortite. After the emergence of the mortites, the community began to dissolve.

The lands of the impoverished peasants were acquired by the religious institutions, by military officers and by wealthy landlords, who constituted a special class, the class of dinati. The Byzantine emperors themselves bestowed on dinats vast tracts of land. On the other hand also the dinats, particularly clerical dinats, began to encroach on the lands of the peasants and, in some cases, on those of the entire communities.

After acquiring economic and political power, the dinats in due course extended over the mortites the feudal system. Thus during these centuries in Albania emerged feudal relations. These relations in the 8th-10th entury were considerably limited. We find the first mortites turned into serfs (parike), juridically in bondage, mentioned in written documents only in the beginning of the 10th century.

[Thirsty Crow]

Ismail, this excerpt you posted does not explain why there was a rise in private proprietorship on land, it seems to lack an explanation of the underlying factors of this development. It could be assumed that what is stated, that impoverished members of the community who were forced to sell their land represents such a factor - poverty and being forced to give up the land, but the excerpt seems to state that this was a result of the strenghtening of private property on land. Or am I misinterpreting the text?

[Ismail]

Ismail, this excerpt you posted does not explain why there was a rise in private proprietorship on land, it seems to lack an explanation of the underlying factors of this development.The problem seems to stem from the fact that detailed information on the rise of feudalism in Albania is generally lacking. The very first known sentence in Albanian only came about in 1462, and relatively little is known concerning the Illyrian language which preceded it.

That book was written in 1964, so I decided to consult The History of Albania: From Its Origins to the Present Day, written in 1981. It's not much better. Here is a bit more info from the 1981 work (pp. 34-35):

The number of peasants deprived of their lands rapidly grew, and consequently, in the same way there was an increasing number of men working as tenants (mortites) and daily workers (mistotes) on the lands of the rich landowners (dynates). Indirect data suggest that the military dynates took greater profits than the civilians, and the foreign dynates more than the local ones. This was the effect of the policy of the Byzantine emperors and the Bulgarian czars, who endowed their military officials with domains and privileges in order to count on their support and consolidate their own political power. For the same reason, the ecclesiastical institutions were zealously restored by the Byzantines, then by the Bulgarians. The concessions due to the military, civil and ecclesiastical dynates from their right to share with the state the rent which they had been entrusted to levy on the peasant community or on a particular region, reinforced their economic and political standing and invested them with feudal prerogatives. Later still, seeing the right of immunity accorded to them by the Byzantine emperors and the Bulgarian czars, the ecclesiastical dynates first, and then the lay dynates gradually subdued the mortites, making them paroikoi, or pariques, that is to say, serfs. Two Byzantine diplomas at the beginning of the eleventh century signed by Emperor Basil II have revealed the fact that the dioceses of the Albanian regions began to include pariques among their population at the latest in the reign of the Bulgarian Czar Samuel (977-1014).

The feudal relations did not however reach certain mountain regons which were unaffected by this process, even in the following centuries.It then goes on to note peasant revolts against high taxes and how Albania could not escape the laws of history. Fin.

Basically it seems that the rise in private proprietorship came from the fact that the communal land was not productive enough (both lacking in productive forces and each community acting in isolation from one-another) to withstand the economic forces of feudalism. I can't think of any other text that deals with the rise of feudalism in Albania. Those two I have just quoted from were written under the aegis of the Albanian state and thus had to adhere to historical materialism. Bourgeois histories of Albania basically just ignore how feudalism came about.

Edwin E. Jacques (a bourgeois historian) in his The Albanians: An Ethnic History From Prehistoric Times to the Present states that feudalism came from the Normans. Thus (p. 163): "In Albania alone, however, their institution of feudalism remained for centuries." He then proceeds to give a generic definition of feudalism with no analysis of how it actually came about other than the fact that the Normans ruled parts of Albania for a while.

[ComradeOm]

With the rise of feudalism, the kings of Europe realised they could form large countries, by merely granting lesser titles to underlings, allowing them to govern whatever lands with little oversight from the king aside from taxation, and an obligation for the vassals to give military aid to the King when requested. This gave rise to very productive vassals/kingdoms/ect. and the new class of nobility, Knights, as the vassals could now afford to hire their own smaller armies, not having to worry about anyone overpowering them due to the King's (and thus other vassal's) protection, serfs became the new slaves who worked for basically subsistence and protection in virtual slavery and thus, for the time, a new system was founded which got rid of the limitations of the Roman mistakes of slaveryI'd agree, more or less, with your post but this is not entirely accurate

Feudalism did not develop from the top down, as your post suggests, but from the bottom up. The monarchy as a powerful institution in its own right is largely a product of late feudalism. During the emergence of feudalism kings were typically no more powerful than their vassals; some, such as the Kings of France, were quite economically and militarily weak

The basic building block of feudalism (and the emergence of this can be tricky to isolate) was the mounted warrior. By the 10th C the rise and decay of the Carolingian Empire had created a caste of such soldiers over which there was no real oversight. These proto-knights were little more than armed bandits but, in the absence of any state authority, they were able to effectively translate their military superiority in land ownership. Most obviously this came about through the construction of castles/fortifications which saw the emergence of the first castellans and fiefdoms

The emergence of kingdoms was not so much due to protection as a need to regulate and legitimise this emerging ruling class. Local warlords were slowly converting themselves into a stable state by moving beyond stabbing anyone who opposed them. The likes of vassalage, a closed nobility, homage ceremonies, etc, were tools to achieve this. Particularly important was the idea of the king - note: not the king himself - which provided a link back to Rome and was an ultimate form of legitimacy. The king himself wouldn't typically become a centre of real power until a few centuries into feudalism

[Rafiq]

The History of Albania: A Brief Survey has a bit of text on how feudalism came into the Albanian lands. Here they are (pp. 36-38):

Opportunism at it's best, right here.

[Ismail]

Opportunism at it's best, right here.What on earth are you talking about?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Albania probably isn't the best example of changes in social structure, since it didn't experience the organic change from serfdom/feudalism (or serfdom to feudalism, as was more the case in the UK, where we did our 'slave' bidding overseas) to capitalism/market integration via a whole mountain of other things.

Manic, I suggest you read Robert Brenner's article, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe" (1976). In academic Marxist circles it's pretty much known to be the most authoritative text regarding the changes in social structures over the medieval/early-modern period.

Of course, keep in mind that different geographical areas had sharp differences. For example, as I note above, the UK did not really have a massive culture of serfdom, it exported such pleasures. Compare this to France, where there was a more ingrained culture of serfdom, of family farming and so on.

Aside from Brenner, you may want to read the work of others such as Bob Allen. His conclusions are reactionary as fuck, but his actual commentary on the early-modern period, and why feudal societies gave rise to Capitalism and industrialisation, is sound. Check his 2009 paper in particular, can't remember the name but shouldn't be too hard to find.

I'm actually working on a similar topic at the moment, so PM me if you want to chat about this further.

[Die Neue Zeit]

On the matter of classes, the Roman Empire had at the bottom slaves, above them the free men, then citizens (plebs) , then the Patrician (essentially merchants/nobility)

With feudalism we had the rise of the much more known serfs at the bottom, free men, lower nobility, upper nobility, royalty.

Serfs existed before European feudalism, such as the Greek helots.

[mrmikhail]

Serfs existed before European feudalism, such as the Greek helots.

Helots were more or less slaves rather than serfs, to be a serf you must be bound to the land you work, from my understanding Helots could be sold freely which would make them slaves.

[Tommy4ever]

Helots were more or less slaves rather than serfs, to be a serf you must be bound to the land you work, from my understanding Helots could be sold freely which would make them slaves.

No, Helots were in a rather different situation to slaves.

The most well known Helot populations were two groups of Greeks - one in Laconia and the other Messenia. These populations were ruled by the Spartans and were for intensive purposes serfs. They basically worked the land and gave a large portion of their produce to the Spartans, they were tied to the land and were under the complete subjigation of the state. The main difference with Medieval serfs is that whilst in the Middle Ages serfs were tied to an individual who was their master, in ancient Greece these Helots were tied to the state.

But the more common form of slavery in ancient Greece was chattel slavery. These slaves are more in line with the picture you have.

[Blake's Baby]

Right, I'll wade in here.

The aristocratic class that essentailly ran feudalism did not come 'from the bottom up'. But ComradeOm is right it wasn't created by the monarchies either. I think it's arguable that the origins of the feudal aristocracy can be found in the class of 'equites' in the Roman Empire. These were men who were of the lower class of Roman nobility. They had both military power and increasingly land; they also merged as a class with the barbarian leaders to form a new military-politcal class in the late (Western) Empire. They became the petty kings of the years between AD400-800, being granted or seizing military and political control of cities or districts, to become 'counts' (from Latin 'comes', 'companion' - the 'comites' (plural) were the Emperor's retinue) or 'dukes' (from 'dux', leader) and pass their power on to their descendents. They were the beginnings of the European aristocracy.

If we think that the economy of the late Roman Empire (at least in the West) was pretty much shattered, or maybe more properly exhausted - the social forms of the old Empire had become a fetter to the productive forces - what starts to become clear was that, far from feudalism (whether in its barbarian or Roman military form) being the thing that sees of Antique Slavery, what we see is 'ruination of the contending classes'. Masters and Slaves may have been the classes at odds but it was the equites who were the new revolutionary class (in that they were the class who embodied a new form of production). The slaves did not make their own revolution; they society they were part of collapsed and out of the chaos a new exploitative epoch emerged, administered by a new ruling class who had a different relationship to the means of production. A new exploited class emerged too. Slaves were not the same as peasants or serfs, even though the word 'serf' comes from the latin 'servus' meaning slave. Of course, there's a difference between peasants and serfs too, but never mind.

[Luís Henrique]

I find this book (http://books.google.com/books?id=sP_2-y9zKfgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Passages+from+Antiquity+to+Feudalism&hl=en&ei=E-jDTrn1BKnv0gHs6qQX&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) quite valuable on the subject.

Luís Henrique

[A Marxist Historian]

Albania probably isn't the best example of changes in social structure, since it didn't experience the organic change from serfdom/feudalism (or serfdom to feudalism, as was more the case in the UK, where we did our 'slave' bidding overseas) to capitalism/market integration via a whole mountain of other things.

Manic, I suggest you read Robert Brenner's article, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe" (1976). In academic Marxist circles it's pretty much known to be the most authoritative text regarding the changes in social structures over the medieval/early-modern period.

Of course, keep in mind that different geographical areas had sharp differences. For example, as I note above, the UK did not really have a massive culture of serfdom, it exported such pleasures. Compare this to France, where there was a more ingrained culture of serfdom, of family farming and so on.

Aside from Brenner, you may want to read the work of others such as Bob Allen. His conclusions are reactionary as fuck, but his actual commentary on the early-modern period, and why feudal societies gave rise to Capitalism and industrialisation, is sound. Check his 2009 paper in particular, can't remember the name but shouldn't be too hard to find.

I'm actually working on a similar topic at the moment, so PM me if you want to chat about this further.

The best work on this is Perry Anderson's books, "Passages from Antiquity" and "Lineages of the Absolute State." Ultra-briefly, the slavery based system of Rome and ancient Greece collapsed when the Roman Empire collapsed, and feudalism gradually evolved out of the wreckage.

Feudal societies do create the *purely economic* basis for the birth of capitalism, as of all the myriad different pre-capitalist social systems, it has the highest agricultural productivity. (The classic "M-L" breakdown into slavery then feudalism then capitalism grossly oversimplifies things, even if you toss in Marx's interesting but incorrect notion of an "Asian mode of production.")

But only the economic and that is not enough, which is why capitalism evolved in Europe and *did not* evolve in thoroughly feudalist Japan, but had basically to be imported.

The classic bourgeois historians who argued that the Renaissance was necessary for "modernity" as they nowadays misname it were actually quite right. Capitalism required the scientific revolution, which required as Anderson put it the "concatenation" of the ideological reflections of the Greek and Roman slavery systems with the material basis generated by feudalism.

Britain by the way continued to have slavery until the Norman Conquests, when the slaves became serfs. According to the Domesday Bok, something like a third of the population of Anglo-Saxon England were slaves.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I find this book (http://books.google.com/books?id=sP_2-y9zKfgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Passages+from+Antiquity+to+Feudalism&hl=en&ei=E-jDTrn1BKnv0gHs6qQX&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) quite valuable on the subject.

Luís Henrique

Ah yes! Same book. The second volume is just as good if not better.

-M.H.-

[Jose Gracchus]

You don't care for the "Asiatic mode"? I do agree that it was a concept of Marx's (sadly, like many others) he had neither the time, inclination, or data to develop thoroughly. Still, clearly there's a some meaningful difference in pre-capitalist modes of production. India, China, the Dar-al-Islam, to say nothing of the pre-Colombian Amerindian social formations on one hand, and classic European (and highly European-esque Japanese) feudalism.

Russia itself, of course, in many ways was a hybrid formation of 'Asiatic' features and European ones. On the Asiatic side, the extreme power of the autocratic state and its apparatus, and the complete lack of landed gentry independence from it--Russian landlords gained their land, wealth, and power, by virtue of their service and integration into the Tsarist state, not the reverse as was the case for Western feudal nobilities vis-a-vis the monarch and state. Also there was the survival and assimilation of communal, collective, and redistributionist forms based on the Russian village and peasantry, which had long been dissolved by private property in the West. To the extent it resembled the West, serfdom was actually imported deliberately and consciously via the state (like capitalism and industry after it).

[NormalG]

What about the transition in Asian and African countries ? Anybody?

[mrmikhail]

What about the transition in Asian and African countries ? Anybody?

Well I believe in Africa it was mostly a tribal society, with a few select states being a more modern society comparable to Europe in northern Africa, mostly of Muslim origin. The Arabs were known to be engaged in enslaving the black Africans for centuries, so they never really left slavery stage to enter feudalism, they essentially went from slavery to colonialism to modern states.

[Jose Gracchus]

I do not think the Arab slave trade was built on a social formation very much like the prototypical 'slave mode' a la the Mediterranean societies of Classical Antiquity. I think it 'piggy-backed' off other social forms, the same way African slavery in the American colonies did.

[A Marxist Historian]

You don't care for the "Asiatic mode"? I do agree that it was a concept of Marx's (sadly, like many others) he had neither the time, inclination, or data to develop thoroughly. Still, clearly there's a some meaningful difference in pre-capitalist modes of production. India, China, the Dar-al-Islam, to say nothing of the pre-Colombian Amerindian social formations on one hand, and classic European (and highly European-esque Japanese) feudalism.

Russia itself, of course, in many ways was a hybrid formation of 'Asiatic' features and European ones. On the Asiatic side, the extreme power of the autocratic state and its apparatus, and the complete lack of landed gentry independence from it--Russian landlords gained their land, wealth, and power, by virtue of their service and integration into the Tsarist state, not the reverse as was the case for Western feudal nobilities vis-a-vis the monarch and state. Also there was the survival and assimilation of communal, collective, and redistributionist forms based on the Russian village and peasantry, which had long been dissolved by private property in the West. To the extent it resembled the West, serfdom was actually imported deliberately and consciously via the state (like capitalism and industry after it).

Anderson's critique was *not* that Marx thought that Asiatic modes of production were different from feudalism. It was the opposite, that Marx didn't realize that the modes of production in India, China and the Ottoman Empire were as different from each other as they were from feudalism or Greek-Roman slavery.

Plus he went down all the features of Marx's AMP and demonstrated that they were not in fact correct for any of these different systems. He did say that the mode of production in the Khmer empire out of which Cambodia sprang did fit Marx's stereotype fairly well.

-M.H.-

[Luís Henrique]

Ah yes! Same book. The second volume is just as good if not better.

Yes, it is excellent, too, but doesn't deal with the transition from slavery to feudalism.

Luís Henrique

[Luís Henrique]

Anderson's critique was *not* that Marx thought that Asiatic modes of production were different from feudalism. It was the opposite, that Marx didn't realize that the modes of production in India, China and the Ottoman Empire were as different from each other as they were from feudalism or Greek-Roman slavery.

Not to even talk about older societies of Babylon and Ancient Egypt, or the pre-Columbian empires of the other continent, which fit even worse into the scheme, nevermind how much we admire Godelier's work.

Plus Anderson deals in some detail with the mode of production of nomadic shepherds, which is a subject much less discussed.

Luís Henrique

[Nox]

Well I believe in Africa it was mostly a tribal society, with a few select states being a more modern society comparable to Europe in northern Africa, mostly of Muslim origin. The Arabs were known to be engaged in enslaving the black Africans for centuries, so they never really left slavery stage to enter feudalism, they essentially went from slavery to colonialism to modern states.

That's pretty much correct.

Sub-Saharan Africa was mostly ruled by small tribes using slavery, and there were a few small empires that also used slavery. This is because no African empire grew large enough to realise the problems with slavery.

[OhYesIdid]

This is fascinating, you guys, thanks a lot. Ive added those "Passages" to my holiday reading list. I've always been interested in history, but the only proper history books I've read are a couple volumes of Toynbee's "Study" and Carrol Quigley's "Evolution of Civilizations" and that's just because the local library had really old editions of them.
Oh, and "on the origins of the family" (Marxists.org edition). What else should I read? What important developments have taken place in the field of historology in recent years?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The best work on this is Perry Anderson's books, "Passages from Antiquity" and "Lineages of the Absolute State." Ultra-briefly, the slavery based system of Rome and ancient Greece collapsed when the Roman Empire collapsed, and feudalism gradually evolved out of the wreckage.

Feudal societies do create the *purely economic* basis for the birth of capitalism, as of all the myriad different pre-capitalist social systems, it has the highest agricultural productivity. (The classic "M-L" breakdown into slavery then feudalism then capitalism grossly oversimplifies things, even if you toss in Marx's interesting but incorrect notion of an "Asian mode of production.")

But only the economic and that is not enough, which is why capitalism evolved in Europe and *did not* evolve in thoroughly feudalist Japan, but had basically to be imported.

The classic bourgeois historians who argued that the Renaissance was necessary for "modernity" as they nowadays misname it were actually quite right. Capitalism required the scientific revolution, which required as Anderson put it the "concatenation" of the ideological reflections of the Greek and Roman slavery systems with the material basis generated by feudalism.

Britain by the way continued to have slavery until the Norman Conquests, when the slaves became serfs. According to the Domesday Bok, something like a third of the population of Anglo-Saxon England were slaves.

-M.H.-

I'm surprised that you conclude that 'Capitalism required the scientific revolution'. I'm really not sure that was correct, especially if you consider that the seeds of Capitalism (proto-industrialisation, the rise of enclosures, more integrated capital markets yadda yadda yadda), in England at least, were sown far before the likes of Newton came onto the scene.

More likely, the change in social structures, allied to the accumulation of physical capital (after capital markets emerged as serious arenas for the funding of large-scale capital-intensive projects), allied with advances in technology which made capital-intensive projects viable (spinning jenny for the Lancashire cotton industry, steam engine for pretty much everything!) led to the development of Capitalism as an economic phenomenon. There were of course other important factors, such as the plentisome availability of coal in England, and higher average wages in NW Europe (London, Amsterdam, Vienna) as opposed to Southern/Central Europe and the Far East, which allowed/encouraged for more capital- and energy-intensive projects, as it was possible to pay higher wages (obviously still comparatively low!) and remain competitive. [Bob Allen, 2001].

[A Marxist Historian]

I'm surprised that you conclude that 'Capitalism required the scientific revolution'. I'm really not sure that was correct, especially if you consider that the seeds of Capitalism (proto-industrialisation, the rise of enclosures, more integrated capital markets yadda yadda yadda), in England at least, were sown far before the likes of Newton came onto the scene.

More likely, the change in social structures, allied to the accumulation of physical capital (after capital markets emerged as serious arenas for the funding of large-scale capital-intensive projects), allied with advances in technology which made capital-intensive projects viable (spinning jenny for the Lancashire cotton industry, steam engine for pretty much everything!) led to the development of Capitalism as an economic phenomenon. There were of course other important factors, such as the plentisome availability of coal in England, and higher average wages in NW Europe (London, Amsterdam, Vienna) as opposed to Southern/Central Europe and the Far East, which allowed/encouraged for more capital- and energy-intensive projects, as it was possible to pay higher wages (obviously still comparatively low!) and remain competitive. [Bob Allen, 2001].

The steam engine was invented in ancient Rome, and promptly forgotten, as industrialization was utterly impossible under the Greek/Roman slavery mode of production. The scientific revolution, closely tied to the Renaissance, began well before Newton who just capped it. Already in the 15th Century scientific advances made crossing the Atlantic possible, the key event in the rise of Europe to world domination.

For reasons well explained by Perry Anderson, the Greek/Roman mode of production created a ruling class utterly divorced from production spending its time meditating on the world, and a worldview that was essentially nonreligious and indeed antireligious beneath its "pagan" disguise, uniquely anywhere.

So it generated, in the abstract, modern mathematics, philosophy and science. Stuff from Aristotle etc. is fully on the same plane with modern thought. Reading stuff from the ancient Romans is shocking, it often sounds so contemporary. Marx started as a classics scholar, and some Marxist concepts have definite classic roots. But in ancient Rome, applying any of this to the real world was completely impossible.

Feudalism generates the *material* basis for capitalism, but the thought of Greece and Rome provided the ideological basis for social transformation, something the Japanese didn't have, which is why Japan essentially got stuck in late feudalism till Admiral Commodore knocked down the barriers to capitalism.

Science by the way was only part of the package. Roman law, abstractly, was perfectly suited for capitalism, not that that mattered, unlike feudal law. The rediscovery and reintroduction of Roman law was absolutely critical to capitalist development on the continent. Though the English got along without it. Capitalist legal reform was not the least important conquest for capitalism of Crowmwell and the other English bourgeois revolutionaries.

-M.H.-

[Jose Gracchus]

The steam engine was invented in ancient Rome, and promptly forgotten, as industrialization was utterly impossible under the Greek/Roman slavery mode of production. The scientific revolution, closely tied to the Renaissance, began well before Newton who just capped it. Already in the 15th Century scientific advances made crossing the Atlantic possible, the key event in the rise of Europe to world domination.

Wrong. The steam engine as developed under the Greeks was utterly useless for later technological applications. Even if the theoretical principles had been stumbled upon the metallurgy was just not up to muster and wouldn't be for a thousand years


For reasons well explained by Perry Anderson, the Greek/Roman mode of production created a ruling class utterly divorced from production spending its time meditating on the world, and a worldview that was essentially nonreligious and indeed antireligious beneath its "pagan" disguise, uniquely anywhere.

A broad overgeneralization. Many more Greek citizens were basically family farmers than say, the Roman patrician class with their latifundia. Your version definitely cannot be taken as a general rule. Socrates was basically a vagrant.


So it generated, in the abstract, modern mathematics, philosophy and science. Stuff from Aristotle etc. is fully on the same plane with modern thought. Reading stuff from the ancient Romans is shocking, it often sounds so contemporary. Marx started as a classics scholar, and some Marxist concepts have definite classic roots. But in ancient Rome, applying any of this to the real world was completely impossible.

I think you are underestimating to what extent at a level of pure technological primitivism that this was the case.


Feudalism generates the *material* basis for capitalism, but the thought of Greece and Rome provided the ideological basis for social transformation, something the Japanese didn't have, which is why Japan essentially got stuck in late feudalism till Admiral Commodore knocked down the barriers to capitalism.

I hate to say it, but this sounds to me just like a left version of special pleading for the exceptionalism and awe of "Western Civilization", with possible a homoerotic white-nationalist showing of 300 at 10.

Quite frankly, I think it is much more the case that exceptional European geographical factors encouraged the sea-change to capitalism from high-producitivity pre-capitalism, where the Dar al-Islam, Late Rome, and Ming China could never have hoped for.


Science by the way was only part of the package. Roman law, abstractly, was perfectly suited for capitalism, not that that mattered, unlike feudal law.

Now you have gone way off the rails. A lot of medieval law and jurisprudence is directly traced to late Roman code (particularly Petrus Sabbatius Iustinianus' Corpus Juris Civilis) and Roman provincial practices. I generally despise the CPGB, but I do agree with Michael Macnair in his discussion on Jairus Banaji's book that legal records can be "false friends" (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004237):


The shifting fashions have an ideological aspect. But the absence of a clear, settled view is also partly due to the severe limitations of the historical sources for the shape of the Mediterranean and European economies before the central middle ages, when tax and judicial records, etc begin to survive in sufficient quantities to be plausibly representative.

In addition, the sources we do have may be analogous to the words linguists call ‘false friends’, where the same word is used in two languages with different meanings. The reason for this is that (as Marx observed in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) Europeans down to the 19th century were very prone to ‘copying’ classical antiquity. Words and forms may therefore be the same in appearance, but very different in content when read in context.

This is intensely true of legal sources. The same limited body of Roman legal texts was read from the 11th-12th century down to the 18th as the basis for medieval law; from the 16th-19th century as the basis for overthrowing medieval law in order to ‘return’ to an imagined ‘law of business Rome’ - ie, create law fit for capitalism; and from the 19th onward as evidence for scholarly interpretations of the Roman society and economy, whether ‘modernist’ or ‘primitivist’.

Hence, legal sources cannot be read as transparently expressing current economic practices.

The rediscovery and reintroduction of Roman law was absolutely critical to capitalist development on the continent. Though the English got along without it. Capitalist legal reform was not the least important conquest for capitalism of Crowmwell and the other English bourgeois revolutionaries.

-M.H.-

Given at least Brenner and others think England was quintessential to the emergence of capitalism as such, so it seems quite absurd to seperate in principle the emergence of capitalism and England's particularities.

I do not think you have given sufficient cause to read the Continental reintroduction of Roman law as a cause, as opposed to a possible symptom, of capitalism.