Review

Author(s): Gregory G. Guzman

Review by: Gregory G. Guzman
Source: Journal of World History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall, 1991), pp. 242-245
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20078503
Accessed: 12-12-2015 07:35 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of World History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Sat, 12 Dec 2015 07:35:17 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 242 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL I99I

Secondly, she suggests that forgiveness, as found in the Chris

tian religion, can counteract an individualism in which marriages
are dissolved at the first sign of a partner's dissatisfaction. She
defines forgiveness as adapting to each other so that marriages
can survive for additional years as life expectancies increase.
Considering her mostly materialistic interpretation of changes in
marriage systems throughout time and throughout the world, her
reference to religious values influencing family patterns comes as
something of a surprise.
The author raises many provocative questions and suggests
overall sustainable answers. For this reason, the book is worth
reading. This is not, however, a descriptive account of specific
systems or of marriage practices that an instructor may find use
ful for teaching world history courses.
JOHN KLASSEN

Trinity Western University

Asian and European Feudalism: Three Studies in Compara

tive History. By ma keyao. (East Asian Institute Occasional
Papers 7). Copenhagen: East Asian Institute, University of
Copenhagen, 1990. Pp. 47.

The title of this brief volume, Asian and European Feudalism,

is very misleading because it implies a comparison of the two
named continents. This book should have been entitled Chinese
and English Feudalism because it seriously looks at the institu
tions, customs, and traditions of only these two countries. Except
for a few brief and superficial references to France, continental
Europe is virtually ignored in this study (as is all of Asia outside
of China). This is a serious weakness because many aspects of
continental feudalism and manorialism are generally considered
to have crossed the Channel and entered England with the Nor
man conquest of 1066. This "England only" approach obviously
presents problems when dealing with the origins and beginnings
of European feudalism and manorialism because these basic
western institutions emerged first on the continent and entered
England in rather advanced and completed form in the eleventh
century.

Comparative study is a new field for Chinese historians, and

Professor Ma, the leading authority on this approach, presents
the earliest Chinese attempt at the comparative analysis of medie

This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Sat, 12 Dec 2015 07:35:17 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews 243

val societies in this short volume. He takes a topical approach to

the subject; the book consists of three brief chapters dealing with
peasants, cities, and feudal monarchies as they emerged and oper
ated in medieval England (a.d. iooo to 1500) and China (a.d. 200 to
1300). Although peasants comprised the labor force for the subsis
tence agricultural economy in both east and west, there were
major distinctions between the range of farming techniques,
types of soils and animals, and levels of cooperation involved. In
his discussion of the political status and subclasses of the peas
antry, Professor Ma concludes that Chinese historians tend to
overstress the economic conditions of the peasantry, while their
English counterparts tend to focus primarily on individual legal
status. Chapter two focuses on the cities and their role in the agri
cultural economies. Ma concludes that, despite different political
organizations and economic structures, neither eastern nor west
ern cities can accurately be viewed as capitalistic islands in a sea
of feudal institutions; Chinese and English medieval cities were
all basically feudal. In chapter three, Professor Ma addresses the
issue of whether royal power in both east and west was limited or
absolute?whether the rulers and their governments were above
or bound by the law. He concludes that like the English king, the
Chinese ruler was subject to the law, but that the Chinese tradi
tion and system of limiting the ruler's powci was not as strong as
in England.
One aspect of this book that will immediately strike most read
ers is the fact that the Christian Church is mentioned briefly on
only one or two occasions in the discussion of European feudal
ism. This powerful institution intruded on all aspects of Euro
pean medieval institutions and daily life, yet one could easily get
the impression from Ma's book that this pervasive entity did not
even exist in medieval Europe! In the light of his humanistic and
Marxist background, it is easy to understand why Professor Ma is
predisposed to downplay religious beliefs and institutions, but
one cannot hope to understand medieval Europe without accord
ing the Church a leading role in all aspects of medieval life.
Instead ofignoring the Christian Church, Professor Ma should
have recognized its rightful place and influence?at least as a pos
sible parallel to the Chinese bureaucratic system if not as a sepa
rate religious institution. Given the comparison presented in this
book, one could plausibly argue that with its virtual monopoly of
educated men, its advanced administrative agencies and offices,
its stress on orthodoxy and ritual, and its claim to have the right

This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Sat, 12 Dec 2015 07:35:17 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 244 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL 1991

to judge and depose unworthy rulers, the Church functioned

along somewhat the same lines as the Confucian bureaucracy,
which guided and directed, as well as curbed and restricted, the
powers and actions of Chinese rulers. This incorporation, rather
than exclusion, of the role of the medieval Church would have bet
ter served the purposes and goals of this comparative study.
Although these three brief chapters were originally prepared
for oral presentation as seminar papers, brief reference citations
have been periodically inserted
throughout the printed text, and a
short three-page bibliography has been added at the end. Approxi
mately half of the titles refer to China; of the European titles,
about half contain "England" or "English" in the title. Because
Professor Ma makes only a few references to medieval France,
some of the better and economic
social studies from the twentieth
century, work by Marc
Bloch, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and
George Duby, have been left out of the analysis. (Bloch is men
tioned in the text on page 16, but he is not listed in the bibliogra
phy.) Most studies of European feudalism, manorialism, the emer
gence of trade and cities, and the rise of feudal monarchies
normally reflect the influence of such studies by F. L. Ganshof,
Carl Stephenson, and Norman Zacour on medieval institutions,
and works by Henri Pirenne, Raymond de Roover, Robert La
touche, and Robert Lopez on medieval economic activity. Profes
sor Ma incorrectly assumes that many European medievalists
still uncritically accept the Pirenne thesis in its original form
when he states, "Now, however, the transition from ancient to feu
dal society in the West is viewed by many scholars as a continuity,
not a complete break of tradition and culture. In this light we
must reevaluate the origins of towns. If the ancient city never dis
appeared then at least some medieval cities did not have their ori
gin in the early middle ages" (p. 21). Recent comparative world his
tory studies of the medieval period by scholars like Archibald
Lewis and Janet Abu-Lughod would also have been very beneficial
and pertinent to this book, rather than the outdated volumes of
Frederic Maitland and Charles Petit-Detaillis on which Professor
Ma reliesheavily.
Maps and an index would have been very helpful, even for such
a short volume. It would also have been helpful if the editor had
made some effort to integrate the three separate chapters into
some type of meaningful and coherent whole. The one-and-a-half
page introduction fails to do this, and there is no summary or con
clusion at the end to tie together the three chapters or to place

This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Sat, 12 Dec 2015 07:35:17 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews 245

them meaningfully within the larger historical framework and

perspective. This is unfortunate because much of the information
on medieval China, undoubtedly new to western scholars, re
mains somewhat isolated in three separate topical units in this
brief volume. Professor Ma makes a significant and original con
tribution to comparative medieval history when he discusses the
Chinese half of his material; this is clearly the better and stronger
part of the study. His coverage of the western half is much weaker
and questionable, because of serious omissions and misconcep
tions. Nevertheless, as the first serious attempt at comparative
medieval history by a Chinese scholar, this book can be viewed as
a harbinger of good things to come from the east.
GREGORY G. GUZMAN

Bradley University

Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and

Ideologies of Western Dominance. By michael adas. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1989. Pp. xiv, 431. 3 maps, 7 illus.
$29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

Among the great unanswered questions of history is how

China, India, and the Islamic world made scientific and techno
logical strides, yet fell back by the (European) early modern
period. Michael Adas is not precisely interested in rise or fall but
in the related issue of how Europeans judged other peoples. He
catalogs at great length published Victorian opinion about China,
India, and sub-Saharan Africa, societies that were incompetent in
European a
eyes. This is work in the lavish American research tra
dition, but although there must be a thousand footnotes, unhap
pily there is no bibliography.
In particular, the author charts the way nineteenth-century
Europeans came to concentrate on technological advance as a
means of measuring the remainder of humanity?and found it
wanting. A single example will capture the spirit of a dispiriting
list: some Victorians thought that because they could travel at 60
mph by train, they must be five times as civilized as non-Europe
ans, who could manage only 12
mph by nonmechanized means.
Some Victorian writers were quite crazy, but this does not
mean that there were no honest scholars among them or no areas
in which the rest of the world was not genuinely less efficient than
Europe, with demonstrably horrible, and persisting, conse

This content downloaded from 142.104.240.194 on Sat, 12 Dec 2015 07:35:17 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions