Primitive accumulation and land ownership

[Kill all the fetuses!]

I've read Marx's depiction of primitive accumulation in volume 1 of Das Kapital and I also read Perelman's the Invention of Capitalism, among various articles on the subject. I understand the dynamics of primitive accumulation, however, for the sake of absolute clarity, I would like to ask those of you who are more knowledgeable about the land ownership before emergence of capitalism.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but under feudalism the whole land was owned by the King and then the King leased it to the lords who then leased it to vassals, right?

I know that before clearances and enclosures there were common land, land owned by lords (?) and parcels of land owned by peasants. How exactly that ownership was determined? Considering that it used to be the King owning all the land and leasing it to the lords, how come that there were some land held in common and some owned by peasants? How did such an ownership structure originate?

Any answer or reference to a source would be highly appreciated!

[Dodo]

Your assumption in your first question is wrong. The aristocrat class, various nobles had claims to the land they owned, claim by blood. The king had his own lands by blood, the difference was that he was the most powerful of them all and other have pledged loyalty to him making a feudal kingdom.
However later on, especially in Marxism, word feudal got a bit larger. The instiutional framework of land-owners was not identical to Europe in rest of the world.
What you say for instance was in Ottoman Empire, where the sultan leased the land to someone(mostly with military power), making him act as a landowner agent. But land's ownership ultimately belonged to sultan.

Due to this "variation" on how feudalism works, there is a bit of a debate among Marxist's regarding the transition and nature of feudalism. I mentioned the exact same thing in my thread "political marxism, robert brenner" and "driving force of history" in theory section.
You could read some of the work mentioned there by Sweezy, Dobb and Brenner(The Origins of Capitalist Development:a Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism) Also look for Brenner-Wallerstein debate on the internet and its "analysis" papers as well.

Enclosures as far I know are a later thing which trigger the agricultural transformation. Classic feudalism is a bit different than that.There were landed smallholder peasants in England which were a minority(yeomans ?). But they could rarely hold their independent position. This free peasant class was not that common. Most rural workers were serfs who did not own the land but worked it.

The nature of land-reforms are a massive subject in economics today. It happened very differently all over the world, so once you establish a better understanding of feuldalism you should look into land-reforms.

[Kill all the fetuses!]

Enclosures as far I know are a later thing which trigger the agricultural transformation. Classic feudalism is a bit different than that.There were landed smallholder peasants in England which were a minority(yeomans ?). But they could rarely hold their independent position. This free peasant class was not that common. Most rural workers were serfs who did not own the land but worked it.

The nature of land-reforms are a massive subject in economics today. It happened very differently all over the world, so once you establish a better understanding of feuldalism you should look into land-reforms.

Thanks for you reply. I will certainly look into the material you referenced. It doesn't really matter all that much for this question who exactly owned the land, but rather how that ownership originated in the first place? I.e. what does it mean to have a claim on land by blood?

More importantly, how did the peasants get to own the land? When enclosures happened, the land was divided among the lords and peasants who worked the land and peasants' claim to land was recognized in many cases, but that's the core of my question - how did peasants get to claim ownership of the land if it was initially mostly owned by the whatever ruling class there was?

[Dodo]

Thanks for you reply. I will certainly look into the material you referenced. It doesn't really matter all that much for this question who exactly owned the land, but rather how that ownership originated in the first place?

You are looking for a lot deeper history then :) It has its roots in formation of first classed societies, birth of surplus/storage, control of surplus and formation of private property, followed by state entities to protect existing relations.
There is no standard to how this progressed all over the world. For Europe it is crucial to understand Roman Empire and its fall, rise of Christianity and formation of feudal kingdoms. If we are to simplify it greatly though, some warlord took over some land and following generations later were regarded as "nobles" who have ancestral claims to the land they own.



I.e. what does it mean to have a claim on land by blood?Lets say I am a noble an have an ancestral/blood claim to a land. It means that the land and everything on it will always be inherited by my heirs and their heirs and so on.


More importantly, how did the peasants get to own the land?Again depends. Small-holder peasants were not the case everywhere. You should read on history of peasants and their struggle with their lords. You could look more into "yeomanry" in England.

I would very strongly suggest you to read the parts here one by one
http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/a-marxist-history-of-the-world?start=100
Or you could just skip to the parts related to feudalism, but it is better to have a holistic view, especially if you are a Marxist.



When enclosures happened, the land was divided among the lords and peasants who worked the land and peasants' claim to land was recognized in many cases, but that's the core of my question - how did peasants get to claim ownership of the land if it was initially mostly owned by the whatever ruling class there was?I am not well read on enclosures so I do not want to get ahead of myself. I am assuming that they might have noticed that if the land is owned by a peasant, it is a lot more efficient as aristocracy also changed its role due capitalist change.
Mainly however, it probably has a lot to do with the historical struggle of serfs to claim something they have worked all their lives. The change might have occured in a "reformist" way as a result of a lot of quantitaive changes prior to that. As far as I know there were a lot of peasant rebellions where they demanded rights, lands...etc

[PhoenixAsh]

I am not sure about the Marxian view.

I do however know that there is not one feudal system but a collection of feudal systems throughout Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Africa and subsequently in the overseas colonies....which all used different systems to divide and establish landownership in a very complex manner.

Traditionally speaking European feudal systems were based on tenure and title. In which the crown owned most but not all of the land and subsequently gave this in tenure to others. The nature of the tenure could vary but more often than not it was given in such away the nobility could sub tenure its land and would hold it as long as the bloodline continued. This of course in exchange for services, payment, or simply for the promise of maintaining it.

Aside from tenure there was a rare situation of allodial title. In which land was held free of any form of tenure and sovereign....or in other words...free from feudal obligations. Land could also become allodial when it fell for one reason or the other outside the feudal system.

There is a whole range of different forms of tenure by the way. Varying in rights and obligations. In some cases somebody could simply be the hereditary owner of land without any real obligations other than to live there and make use of it. In other cases severe restrictions and duties were placed on the tenure and the tenure would only be held as long as you were alive.

Sub tenured land could for example become allodial land if the tenuring lord's bloodline died out and the crown did not reclaim it. The whole system is extremely complex and largely depended upon the wording and agreements made in the different layers of tenure. But it was very well possible for land to be unreclaimable for a lord or for the crown.

[ckaihatsu]

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The centuries of chaos

The 5th century was a period of break up and confusion for the three empires which had dominated southern Eurasia. There was a similar sense of crisis in each, a similar bewilderment as thousand year old civilisations seemed to crumble, as barbarians swept across borders and warlords carved out new kingdoms, as famine and plagues spread, trade declined and cities became depopulated. There were also attempts in all three empires to fix on ideological certainties to counter the new insecurity. In Roman north Africa, Augustine wrote one of the most influential works of Christian doctrine, City of God, in an attempt to come to terms with the sacking of the earthly city of Rome. In China, the Buddhist doctrines elaborated almost a millennium before in India began to gain a mass of adherents, especially among the embattled trading classes. In India new cults flourished as Hinduism consolidated itself.

The similarity between the crises of the civilisations has led some historians to suggest they flowed from a global change in climate. But to blame the weather alone is to ignore the great problem that had beset each of the civilisations for centuries. It lay in the most basic ways in which those who worked the land made a livelihood for themselves and everyone else. Advances in agricultural productivity were nowhere near comparable to those associated with the spread of ironworking a millennium before. Yet the consumption of the rich was more lavish and the superstructure of the state vaster than ever. A point was bound to be reached at which things simply could not go on as before, just as it had with the first Bronze Age civilisations.

The crisis was gravest for the Roman world. The flourishing of its civilisation had depended on an apparently endless supply of slaves. The result was that the imperial authorities and the great landowners concerned themselves much less with ways of improving agricultural yields than their equivalents in India or China. The collapse was correspondingly greater.

The period which followed in Europe is rightly known as the ‘Dark Ages’. It saw the progressive collapse of civilisation—in the sense of town life, literacy, literature and the arts. But that was not all. The ordinary people who had paid such a price for the glories of Rome paid an even greater price with its demise. Famine and plague racked the lands of the former empire and it is estimated that the population halved in the late 6th and 7th centuries.1 The first wave of Germanic warriors to sweep across the former borders—the Goths and Franks, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes—began to settle in the Roman lands and soon adopted many Roman customs, embracing the Christian religion and often speaking in Latin dialects. But behind them came successive waves of conquerors who had not been touched by Roman influence in the past and came simply to loot and burn rather than settle and cultivate. Huns and Norsemen tore into the kingdoms established by the Franks, the Goths and the Anglo-Saxons, making insecurity and fear as widespread in the 9th and 10th centuries as it had been in the 5th and 6th.

Eventually all the conquerors did settle. The majority had, in fact, been cultivators in their lands of origin, already beginning to use iron for tools as well as for the weapons that enabled them to defeat ‘civilised’ armies in battle. Their societies had already begun to make the transition from primitive communism towards class division, with chieftains who aspired to be kings, and aristocrats ruling over peasants and herders who still had some remaining traditions of communal cultivation. Had Roman agriculture been more advanced and based on something other than a mixture of large, slave-run latifundia and the smallholdings of impoverished peasants, the conquerors would have successfully taken over its methods and settled into essentially Roman patterns of life. We shall see that this is what happened with successive waves of ‘barbarians’ who carved out empires in China and its border lands. But Roman society was already disintegrating as its conquerors swept in, and they simply added to the disintegration. Some of the conquerors did attempt to adopt Roman agriculture, cultivating huge estates with captives from war. Some also attempted to re-establish the centralised structures of the old empire. At the end of the 5th century the Ostrogoth Theodoric proclaimed himself emperor of the west. At the end of the 8th, Charlemagne established a new empire across most of what is now France, Catalonia, Italy and Germany. But their empires fell apart at their deaths for the same reason that the original Roman Empire fell apart. There was not the material base in production to sustain such vast undertakings.

Soon the cities were not only depopulated but often abandoned and left to fall apart. Trade declined to such a low level that gold money ceased to circulate.2 Literacy was confined to the clergy, employing a language—literary Latin—no longer used in everyday life. Classical learning was forgotten outside a handful of monasteries, at one point concentrated mainly on the Irish fringe of Europe. Itinerant, monkish scholars became the only link between the small islands of literate culture.3 The books which contained much of the learning of the Graeco-Roman world were destroyed as successive invaders torched the monastic libraries.

Such was the condition of much of western Europe for the best part of 600 years. Yet out of the chaos a new sort of order eventually emerged. Across Europe agriculture began to be organised in ways which owed something both to the self contained estates of the late Roman Empire and the village communities of the conquering peoples. Over time, people began to adopt ways of growing food which were more productive than those of the old empire. The success of invaders such as the Vikings was testimony to the advance of their agricultural (and maritime) techniques, despite their lack of civilisation and urban crafts. Associated with the changing agricultural methods were new forms of social organisation. Everywhere armed lords, resident in crude fortified castles, began simultaneously to exploit and protect villages of dependent peasants, taking tribute from them in the form of unpaid labour or payments in kind. But it was a long time before this laid the basis for a new civilisation.




Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 103-105