Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism

Perry Anderson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781781680087
• eBook ISBN: 9781781684696
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism is a sustained exercise in historical sociology that shows how the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome eventually became the feudal societies of the Middle Ages. In the course of this study, Anderson vindicates and refines the explanatory power of historical materialism, while casting a fascinating light on the Ancient world, the Germanic invasions, nomadic society, and the different routes taken to feudalism in Northern, Mediterranean, Eastern and Western Europe.
Through this work and its companion volume, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Anderson presents a Marxist history of Western political development that takes readers from the first stirrings of political consciousness in the classical world to the rise of absolutist monarchies in Europe and the birth of the modern epoch.

Part One

I. Classical Antiquity

The delimitation of East and West within Europe has long been a conventional one for historians. It goes back, in fact, to the founder of modern positive historiography, Leopold Von Ranke. The cornerstone of Ranke’s first major work, written in 1824, was a ‘Sketch of the Unity of the Latin and Germanic Nations’, in which he drew a line across the continent excluding the Slavs of the East from the common destiny of the ‘great nations’ of the West which were to be the subject of his book. ‘It cannot be maintained that these peoples too belong to the unity of our nations; their customs and constitution have ever separated them from it. In that epoch they exercised no independent influence, but merely appear subordinate or antagonistic: now and then lapped, so to speak, by the receding waves of the general movements of history.’¹ It was the West alone which had participated in the barbarian migrations, the mediaeval crusades, and the modern colonial conquests – for Ranke, the drei grosse Atemzüge dieses unvergleichlichen Vereins, ‘the three deep breaths drawn by that incomparable union’.² A few years later, Hegel remarked that ‘the Slavs have to some extent been drawn within the sphere of Occidental Reason’, since ‘sometimes, as an advanced guard – an intermediate nationality – they took part in the struggle between Christian Europe and unchristian Asia.’ But the substance of his view of the history of the eastern region of the continent was closely similar to that of Ranke. ‘Yet this entire body of peoples remains excluded from our consideration, because hitherto it has not appeared as an independent element in the series of phases that Reason has assumed in the world.’³ A century and a half later, contemporary historians normally avoid such accents. Ethnic categories have given way to geographical terms: but the distinction itself, and the dating of it from the Dark Ages, remain virtually unaltered. Its application, in other words, starts with the emergence of feudalism, in that historical era when the classical relationship of regions within the Roman Empire – advanced East and backward West – began for the first time to be decisively reversed. This change of signs can be observed in virtually every treatment of the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Thus, the explanations proposed for the fall of the Empire itself in the most recent and monumental study of the decline of Antiquity, Jones’s The Later Roman Empire, revolve constantly round the structural differences between the East and West within it. The East, with its wealthy and numerous cities, developed economy, smallholding peasantry, relative civic unity and geographical distance from the main brunt of barbarian attacks, survived; the West, with its sparser population and weaker towns, magnate aristocracy and rent-racked peasantry, political anarchy and strategic vulnerability to the Germanic invasions, went under.⁴ The end of Antiquity was then sealed by the Arab conquests, which sundered the two shores of the Mediterranean. The Eastern Empire became Byzantium, a political and social system distinct from the rest of the European continent. It was in this new geographical space which emerged in the Dark Ages that the polarity between East and West was to permute its connotation. Bloch pronounced the authoritative judgment that ‘from the 8th century onwards there was a sharply demarcated group of societies in Western and Central Europe, whose elements, however diverse, were cemented solidly together by profound resemblances and constant relationships’. It was this region which gave birth to mediaeval Europe: ‘The European economy in the Middle Ages – in the sense in which this adjective, borrowed from the old geographical nomenclature of the five “parts of the world”, can be used to designate an actual human reality – is that of the Latin and Germanic bloc, edged by a few Celtic islets and Slav fringes, gradually won to a common culture … Thus understood, thus delimited, Europe is a creation of the early Middle Ages.’⁵ Bloch expressly excluded the regions that are today Eastern Europe from his social definition of the continent: ‘The greater parts of the Slav East in no way belonged to it … It is impossible to consider their economic conditions and those of their Western neighbours together, in the same object of scientific study. Their wholly different social structure and very special path of development forbid such a confusion absolutely: to commit it would be like mixing Europe and Europeanized countries with China or Persia in an economic history of the 19th century.’⁶ His successors have respected his injunctions. The formation of Europe, and the germination of feudalism, have generally been confined to the history of the Western half of the continent, excluding the Eastern half from survey. Duby’s commanding study of the early feudal economy, which starts in the 9th century, is already entitled: Rural Economy and Country Life in the Mediaeval West.⁷ The cultural and political forms created by feudalism in the same period – the ‘secret revolution of these centuries’⁸ – are the main focus of Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages. The generality of the title conceals an ellipse, implicitly identifying a specific time with a certain space; the first sentence declares: ‘The formation of Western Europe from the late tenth to the early thirteenth century is the subject of this book’.⁹ Here, the mediaeval world becomes Western Europe tout court. The distinction between East and West is thus reflected in modern historiography right from the outset of the post-classical age. Its origins, in effect, are coeval with those of feudalism itself. Any Marxist study of differential historical development within the continent must thus initially consider the general matrix of European feudalism. Only when this is established, will it be possible to see how far and in what way a divergent history is traceable in its Western and Eastern regions.

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1. Leopold Von Ranke, Geschichte der Romanischen and Germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, Leipzig 1885, p. XIX.

2. Ranke, op. cit., p. XXX.

3. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, London 1878, p. 363

4. A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 282–602, Oxford 1964, Vol. II, pp. 1026–68.

5. Marc Bloch, Mélanges Historiques, Paris 1963, Vol. I, pp. 123–4.

6. Bloch, op. cit., p. 124.

7. Georges Duby, L’économie Rurale et la Vie des Campagnes dans l’Occident Médiéval, Paris 1962; English translation, London 1968.

8. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, London 1953, p. 13.

9. Southern, op. cit., p. 11.

1

The Slave Mode of Production

The genesis of capitalism has been the object of many studies inspired by historical materialism, ever since Marx devoted celebrated chapters of Capital to it. The genesis of feudalism, by contrast, has remained largely unstudied within the same tradition: as a distinctive type of transition to a new mode of production, it has never been integrated into the general corpus of Marxist theory. Yet, as we shall see, its importance for the global pattern of history is perhaps scarcely less than that of the transition to capitalism. Gibbon’s solemn judgment on the fall of Rome and the end of Antiquity emerges, paradoxically, perhaps for the first time in its full truth today: ‘a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the Earth.’¹ By contrast with the ‘cumulative’ character of the advent of capitalism, the genesis of feudalism in Europe derived from a ‘catastrophic’, convergent collapse of two distinct anterior modes of production, the recombination of whose disintegrated elements released the feudal synthesis proper, which therefore always retained a hybrid character. The dual predecessors of the feudal mode of production were, of course, the decomposing slave mode of production on whose foundations the whole enormous edifice of the Roman Empire had once been constructed, and the distended and deformed primitive modes of production of the Germanic invaders which survived in their new homelands, after the barbarian conquests. These two radically distinct worlds had undergone a slow disintegration and creeping interpenetration in the last centuries of Antiquity.

To see how this had come about, it is necessary to look backwards at the original matrix of the whole civilization of the classical world. Graeco-Roman Antiquity had always constituted a universe centred on cities. The splendour and confidence of the early Hellenic polis and the later Roman Republic, which dazzled so many subsequent epochs, represented a meridian of urban polity and culture that was never to be equalled for another millennium. Philosophy, science, poetry, history, architecture, sculpture; law, administration, currency, taxation; suffrage, debate, enlistment – all these emerged or developed to levels of unexampled strength and sophistication. Yet at the same time this frieze of city civilization always had something of the effect of a trompe l’oeil facade, on its posterity. For behind this urban culture and polity lay no urban economy in any way commensurate with it: on the contrary, the material wealth which sustained its intellectual and civic vitality was drawn overwhelmingly from the countryside. The classical world was massively, unalterably rural in its basic quantitative proportions. Agriculture represented throughout its history the absolutely dominant domain of production, invariably furnishing the main fortunes of the cities themselves. The Graeco-Roman towns were never predominantly communities of manufacturers, traders or craftsmen: they were, in origin and principle, urban congeries of landowners. Every municipal order from democratic Athens to oligarchic Sparta or senatorial Rome, was essentially dominated by agrarian proprietors. Their income derived from corn, oil and wine – the three great staples of the Ancient World – produced on estates and farms outside the perimeter of the physical city itself. Within it, manufactures remained few and rudimentary: the range of normal urban commodities never extended much beyond textiles, pottery, furniture and glassware. Technique was simple, demand was limited and transport was exorbitantly expensive. The result was that manufactures in Antiquity characteristically developed not by increasing concentration, as in later epochs, but by decontraction and dispersal, since distance dictated relative costs of production rather than the division of labour. A graphic idea of the comparative weight of the rural and urban economies in the classical world is provided by the respective fiscal revenues yielded by each in the Roman Empire of the 4th century A.D., when city trade was finally subjected to an imperial levy for the first time by Constantine’s collatio lustralis: income from this duty in the towns never amounted to more than 5 per cent of the land-tax.²

Naturally, the statistical distribution of output in the two sectors did not suffice to subtract economic significance from the cities of Antiquity. For in a uniformly agricultural world, the gross profits of urban exchange might be very small: but the net superiority they could yield to any given agrarian economy over any other might still be decisive. The precondition of this distinctive feature of classical civilization was its coastal character.³ Graeco-Roman Antiquity was quintessentially Mediterranean, in its inmost structure. For the inter-local trade which linked it together could only proceed by water: marine transport was the sole viable means of commodity exchange over medium or long distances. The colossal importance of the sea for trade can be judged from the simple fact that it was cheaper in the epoch of Diocletian to ship wheat from Syria to Spain – one end of the Mediterranean to the other – than to cart it 75 miles over land.⁴ It is thus no accident that the Aegean zone – a labyrinth of islands, harbours and promontories – should have been the first home of the city-state; that Athens, its greatest exemplar, should have founded its commercial fortunes on shipping; that when Greek colonization spread to the Near East in the Hellenistic epoch, the port of Alexandria should have become the major city of Egypt, first maritime capital in its history; and that eventually Rome in its turn, upstream on the Tiber, should have become a coastal metropolis. Water was the irreplaceable medium of communication and trade which rendered possible urban growth of a concentration and sophistication far in advance of the rural interior behind it. The sea was the conductor of the improbable radiance of Antiquity. The specific combination of town and country that defined the classical world was in the last resort only operational because of the lake at the centre of it. The Mediterranean is the only large inland sea on the circumference of the earth: it alone offered marine speed of transport with terrestrial shelter from highest wind or wave, for a major geographical zone. The unique position of classical Antiquity within universal history cannot be separated from this physical privilege.

The Mediterranean, in other words, provided the necessary geographical setting for Ancient civilization. Its historical content and novelty, however, lay in the social foundation of the relationship between town and country within it. The slave mode of production was the decisive invention of the Graeco-Roman world, which provided the ultimate basis both for its accomplishments and its eclipse. The originality of this mode of production must be underlined. Slavery itself had existed in various forms throughout Near Eastern Antiquity (as it was later to do elsewhere in Asia): but it had always been one juridically impure condition – frequently taking the form of debt bondage or penal labour – among other mixed types of servitude, forming merely a very low category in an amorphous continuum of dependence and unfreedom that stretched well up the social scale above it.⁵ Nor was it ever the predominant type of surplus extraction in these pre-Hellenic monarchies: it was a residual phenomenon that existed on the edges of the main rural workforce. The Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian Empires – riverine states built on intensive, irrigated agriculture that contrasted with the light, dry-soil farming of the later Medite...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• Acknowledgments
• Index of Names
• Index of Authorities
• Copyright