I. The Crises of European Feudalism

A Sketch of the Capitalist Revolution in Europe (I)

The political and economic structures of Europe in the Middle Ages were at the same time distinctive and entirely typical of precapitalist societies. Despite some mercantile or small-scale industrial enclaves, they were on the whole predominately rural and agricultural, both in terms of population and economic activity. Rural economic life was, moreover, governed by traditional practices geared towards maximizing not total income but instead peasants' probability of subsistence in a highly precarious environment. Peasant communities' strategies to ensure their subsistence were balanced against the claims of armed elites for work on their fields or payment of various dues. This much, again, Europe shared with almost every other settled agrarian society in human history. What was distinctive--indeed, what was immensely variable in different societies and over time--was how exactly those elites were organized, which went a long way in determining the form and degree of success of their claims on the peasantry.

In Medieval Europe, there developed three broad, inter-related types of elites: the landed nobility who directly ruled over particular manors and lords, a clerical hierarchy that both held land and claimed a special tax (the tithe) on all agrarian land, and the direct officers of the monarchy, who collected taxes and resolved disputes. These types were, in practice, deeply intertwined: clerical benefices were often doled out to non-inheriting members of the nobility, either on the prerogative of landed lords or of the monarchies--this itself being a matter of hot contention at various times--and royal office (as well as the income that came along with it) was often granted as a reward to loyal nobles, or conversely favored officials could often obtain landholdings through purchase or marriage.

There were, nonetheless, three deep fault-lines in these polities, which led to repeated crises in medieval and early modern periods. The first was the struggle between all elites and the productive classes, especially the peasantry, for the goods produced by the labor of the latter. Elite's attempt to claim revenue from the direct producers could take various forms--labor services on the lord's estate, fees for monopolies such as the lord's mill, or dues, taxes, or tithes whether in money or in kind--but whatever the specific form, it largely represented a zero-sum tug-of-war: more paid to the lord, bishop, or king was less for the peasant. The problem was exacerbated by the inherent economic and demographic tendencies of a premodern agrarian economy, in which the peasantry has a tendency to grow in number and subdivide the land. To some extent, the opening of new land for cultivation or more intensive cultivation of already cultivated land can increase output along with population, but the incentives and capacity for deep innovation in cultivation simply do not exist, and so eventually the margin of survival of the peasantry begins to narrow. This exacerbates the conflict with the lords, since if there is less food per person in the village, the burden of paying the same overall percentage of the crop to the lord is that much worse.

Added to this, while in this kind of society individuals are not generally exposed to the economic competition in the market that is characteristic of capitalism, there does exist a general tendency to political competition among elites. This competition takes two main forms. On the one hand is conflict within the feudal polity: between the monarchy and its nominally vassal lords and among lords for advantageous positions in the monarchy. On the other is the territorial conflict among the feudal political units. The logic of the two is actually quite similar: especially in the context of declining agricultural output per capita from decreasing ratios of land to peasants, the primary avenue for elites to increase their income is to expand the scope of their extraction. The simplest form of this is territorial expansion through warfare: invade a neighbor, kick out the existing lords, and add it to one's own lands or those of one's followers. For individual lords who are vassals of a single overlord--e.g. the King of France--there is the added complication that the King does not look kindly on his vassals invading one another. The monarchy itself is in large part the arbiter of the fortunes of individual lords, and this is the incentive for lords to participate in military campaigns but also, to the monarchies' incessant chagrin, to engage in factional intrigue for advantageous position in the royal court.

Together, these tensions are a recipe for war driving the expansion of royal military machines (and in turn requiring a greater extraction of material resources), internal dissension verging into noble rebellion of civil war, and widespread popular suffering driving uprisings and (when exacerbated by epidemics or war) demographic crises. Every region of Europe fell into some combination of these crises: the entire Continent in the 14th century, England and France again during or after the Hundred Years War in the 15th, France again along with the German principalities this time in the 16th (the Wars of Religion), Germany and France once more in the 17th (the Thirty Years War and the Fronde).

However, if the process that produced these crises was cyclical, it was not symmetrical. That is to say, political and economic institutions did not remain unchanged once the convulsion had passed. Each region had its own characteristic trajectories of development, but at least one general trend can be discerned: the military competition of feudal states steadily increased the "fixed costs" of territorial viability. If in the 12th and 13th centuries warfare was carried out by feudal levies--in which vassals served their lieges with specified numbers of heavy cavalry and largely untrained peasant infrantry for part of the year. By the 14th and 15th centuries, it was already increasingly necessarily to be able to pay troops, often raised by semi-independent commands, in cash. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the size of armies and the cost of equipping them with firearms increased explosively. The consequence of this was that if a political entity did not want to become the spoils of war among the great powers--as actually happened to the city-states of Italy and later to the Kingdom of Poland--then it was forced to invest in a large military machine, which could only be done with high levels of taxation, which in turn required an expansion of the administrative apparatus that extracted payments and maintained order. It is incorrect to say this dynamic always strengthened the monarchical states, since for instance it led to the consolidation of the various German principalities at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire. Nonetheless, though the specific institutional patterns varied from case to case, it was this process that led to consolidation of what are generally known as the absolutist monarchies of Continental Europe in France, Spain, and some of the German principalities.

However, there was no singular "crisis of feudalism" that marked the "exhaustion" of the developmental trajectory of the feudal mode of production. Absolutism was not, in this sense, a development out of feudalism, let alone a half-way house between it and capitalism. Such a way of talking imparts an almost mystical character to modes of production, as if some spirit of history had marked the historical role, with its entrance and exit, for each. Yet, it is the case that specifically capitalist social property relations emerged out of the internal dynamics of feudal relations, in a particular context that rendered the adoption of capitalistic economic strategies the best available option for actors conditioned by the characteristic rules for reproduction of feudal society. It is all too easy to falsely identify the "seeds" or "embryo" of capitalistic activity within the social life not just of medieval and early modern Europe but also of agrarian societies in many other times and places. However, their natural tendency was never to "grow" into capitalism but instead to follow the cyclical rise and fall of feudal economic life. The transition to capitalism occurred only as the result of a special--perhaps unique--conjunction of the feudal economic cycle and specific political and economic institutions.