3 - Feudalism: a transition to capitalism or the collapse of Europe and the domination of Asia?

Summary

The word feudalism is used in a variety of ways. Often it refers in ordinary speech to any hierarchy that is not elected, not achieved, such as the original House of Lords. In more technical language, we may follow Strayer's distinctions: ‘One group of scholars uses the word to describe the technical arrangements by which vassals become dependents of lords, and landed property (with attached economic benefits) became organized as dependent tenures of fiefs. The other group of scholars uses feudalism as a general word which sums up the dominant forms of social and political organization during certain centuries of the Middle Ages’. In his introduction to Marc Bloch's study, Feudal Society, Postan makes a similar distinction between those Anglophone speakers who assess military fiefs and Soviet scholars who discourse on class domination and the exploitation of peasants by landlords. Like Bloch, Postan prefers the latter approach. Here we use the term to refer to a period that followed classical Antiquity in Europe.

The shift to feudalism from Antiquity

In western eyes feudalism has often been seen as a transition to capitalism and as a ‘progressive’ phase in the development of the west, a phase which other societies could not have attained in the same way. Its absence, like that of Antiquity, excluded others from the path to modernity. However, this period demonstrated little that was definitely intrinsic to the later expansion of mercantile and emergence of industrial capitalism except in so far as a regressive phase is sometimes followed by more vigorous innovative action, as has been argued for the Dark Age in Greece – the advantage of backwardness.