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Feudalism

The term "feudalism" is used to refer to a political and economic

system in medieval Europe by which agriculture was conducted by
serfs on the manors of lords (suzerains) to whom they were bound by
oaths of loyalty and to whom they owed goods and services. These
lords owed goods and services, in turn, to suzerains above them, up a
hierarchical line to a king.

Seen from the top down, the king owned all land, which he granted
"in fief" to "vassals" (the people who were the suzerains when seen
from below) in exchange for goods and services (including support in
war). Depending upon the region, various titles such as knights and
squires, barons, counts, marquises, and so on were all part of this
system.

Characterized by the near complete sovereignty of a suzerain on

his fief and the total subordination of the serf to the suzerain, the
system was incompatible with strongly centralized political power
capable of connecting the king directly to the farming peasant, and
hence we do not see feudalism persisting after the establishment of
central strong monarchies in Europe.

Scholars differ on the extent to which they are willing to extend

the term "feudalism" as a general name for roughly similar
arrangements in other parts of the world, such as XVIIIth-century
Uganda, for example, or Bronze-Age China.

In the case of China, the application of the word is reasonably

common, since the Bronze-Age dynasties (the Shāng and the Zhōu) do
in fact seem to have involved an allocation of plots of land down a
hierarchy of vassals. This system obviously came to an end with the
assertion of direct centralized authority in the founding of the Qín
Dynasty in 221 BC, although occasional semi-feudal situations arose
 from time to time in periods of dynastic breakdown for many
centuries thereafter.

This is not the way the term is used by Communist writers,

however. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels spoke of a capitalist mode of
production, in which capitalists appropriated the "surplus value"
produced by industrial workers or "proletarians.". They contrasted this
with a rural equivalent, which they saw as a "feudal mode of
production," in which the "surplus value" produced by peasants was
appropriated by feudal lords in the form of rents, based not on market
forces, but on coercion. This seems not too far off from the classic
definition of feudalism, although it does not apply in most of the rural
world (especially today), since most rural society is not a world of
feudal lords and their peasants. However, Marx and Engels also
imagined a universal sequence of five broad stages in which rural
feudalism, the second stage, fell between earlier, "slave" society and
later, urban, "capitalist" society, which was to be followed by socialism
and eventually communism. In other words, feudalism became a stage
of development in all societies.

As Marxist analysis has been compulsorily applied by historians

writing under the intellectual oversight of the Chinese Communist
Party, the term "slave society" is applied to the Bronze Age (despite
that period being arguably feudal) and the term "feudal society" ( 封建
社会) is applied to the remainder of the dynastic period up until the
XXth century (despite the comparative absence of true feudalism
after the establishment of the centralized Qín administration in 221
BC).

In modern Chinese usage, the term "feudal" therefore has no

useful intellectual content, but is simply a mildly derogatory term for
Chinese society before the institutionalization of Communism in 1949.

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Content Revised: 2008-01-14

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