I understand that the industrial revolution and the invention of the printing press led to the capitalist mode of production, but what development moved humanity out of the slave society to the feudal society?
According to HM/DM, it's material conditions that determine social structures, but I can't think of any particular innovation that changed the old Roman slave system into the Germanic type feudal societies that followed.
pic unrelated
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
gen.lib.rus.ec
twitter.com
Advances in metalworking that made it easier to counter the legions. The Roman slave system was based directly on domination, so the foundation of their empire rested entirely on the invincibility of their legions.
It wasn't a development, it was actually a regression in terms of production. A slave society (almost always actually an empire) is just advanced feudalism. When there's a lot of free resources and not a lot of peasants, peasants have a decent life. When resources are cramped and there's lots of peasants, peasantry becomes strained to its limits and turns into slavery or something pretty much equivalent to slavery. If you want to make a profit building really big stuff or harvesting loads of difficult crops, but you don't have industry, your option is pretty much to throw loads of slaves at the problem and shorten their lifespan to 30 years or lower.
I don't know any hard Marxist account of a technological change, but from what I understand the typical refrain is that the Roman Empire began to stumble when it stagnated at its full extent. It didn't continue conquering, rather started even paying more out to maintain the stability of what the empire had already gathered. This stagnation included an inability to bring in new slaves. The slave population shrank and free men moved around the country more. Roman landowners started having free men work on their farms, and basically used their political power to slowly erode those free men's rights until they were tied to the land and started to resemble serfs.
So if I understand it right, it wasn't so much a technological change as it was a social change from the unraveling of the slave empire. The technological base which supported the Roman slave empire was just also capable of manifesting as feudalism, and that occurred when the slave system's logic broke down.
It's because they found out that paying people to die willingly is better than having to give rights to someone who is born into it.
the Praefectus urbi strengthened Slave rights because they didn't want there to be revolts, but the rights of tenants were lowered, because the state needed the taxes from the landlords and by the 4th century it was actually better to be born a slave than a "free" Roman citizen who was a tenant.
There is no evidence that during the later Roman Empire there were slaves being used in mines. They were paying people who willingly would go in and die. Why? Because they were paid.
Slaves would always revolt because they wanted rights.
The unraveling of the slave empire can perhaps be understood as an unraveling of the social consequences of technological change. Rome expanded because of its technical abilities, but this expansion ran into a wall somewhere. The empire stagnates and after a while fragments into feudalism.
Material conditions does not only refer to technological development. It is a more general thing. To put it another way, let's look at capitalism. It was not the industrial revolution itself which created capitalism, it was specifically the displacement of the serf and peasant from the land. The peasants then pored into the city, and while previously they could sell crops, now they could sell nothing but their labor power. That was the material condition which lead to capitalism. Changes in social relations cause changes in material conditions which cause changes in social conditions, and so on. That is the dialectic of human society.
I don’t think that there was one. Instead it had more to do with the specifics of Rome’s collapse. First of all, one of the later Western emperors (I forget who) passed two important economic reforms. The first was that taxes would now be paid in kind as a means of dealing with currency inflation. The second was that citizens would have to adopt the profession of their father, which effectively created serfs by tying poor farmers to the land. That right there creates two important elements of feudalism. The other big factor was that as Rome’s influence shrank, people on the frontiers had to rely more and more on local elites and leaders for protection. This eventually took the form of oaths of fealty that would characterize feudal political structures.
As some other anons have noted, material conditions are not necessarily technological, and thinking that is to completely misunderstand historical materialism. It's the same idea that leads to stupid theories like feudalism arising from the development of stirrups (which is wrong in so many ways).
Feudalism arises from the collapse or degeneration of large, centralised (traditionally slaving) empires: Conquering warlords take over old imperial institutions and villas, paying their soldiers in land and titles, who in turn demand tribute from the people living on that land. It is a change from slavery being the primary mode of ownership, to landlordism. Feudalism wasn't solely a "germanic" system either, and it has its origins well before the fall of the empire, with the Roman villa system. If you had to at a technological development related to the rise of feudalism, it would probably be the improvements in agriculture (such as the wheeled plough, the three-field system and later the horse collar) which made growing food far less labour-intensive.
Was there really a development when slave societies coexisted with feudalism all the way up to the 19th century?
Feudalism was practically dead by the 19th century, so no. Racialised chattel slavery like what you had in America was also very different from classical slavery. In fact, modern slavery was a major driver of capitalism. This essay by Ken Lawrence is a decent read on the subject.
I don't know of a book that addresses the transition specifically, but Marc Bloch's Feudal Society is a long examination of the feudalist socio-economic model. You can find it on libgen, Volume I has chapters on the beginning of feudalism. It was published in 1961 and influenced historical-materialist historiography a great deal.
most historians say the scientific method, which seems to be the most apt explanation.
actual systematic change requires a change in global ideology rather than simply material conditions.
Thanks for these lads. More bookposting.
your mom
For fucks sake, what the hell is wrong with posters here? It's like question from fifth grade or something.
1. Feudalism happened everywhere, not just in Europe. Tying it to Rome is simply ludicrous.
2. Slavery is clearly not "advanced Feudalism" (what kind of nonsense that even is?).
3. There are no unique advances (other than agriculture, I guess) that are inherent to all feudal societies - so searching there doesn't even begin to make sense.
If you don't know, don't answer.
The material condition you are looking for is a sufficiently high density of population - which prevents said population from simply moving away to greener pastures (they are already occupied) and permits local feudal lord to demand tribute from said population.
That's all.
Feudalism arose before the concept of serfdom, during a period of enormous migrations, famines, mass death, etc, along with the decline of the large classical cities, so the idea that feudalism arose due to a high population density is just silly. If that was the case, then it would have never survived the Black Death, either. A higher population density forces the peasant to stay on their land, which helps to enforce serfdom, but even without it the peasant is still bound to the land by the nature of his occupation - he has to maintain the fields and wait for the crops to grow. Sure, he can still move, but it is far from easy and it would simply mean being subordinate to another lord (barring a few notable exceptions). Population density did not become an issue until the rising contradictions of the feudal mode of production and the increased exploitation of the peasantry drove the lords to enforce serfdom.
Where does serfdom figure in my answer?
If you intend to prove that there was plenty of free lands in places where Feudalism came to life, then you need to actually do it (and name those places), not imply in a roundabout way that you might have an argument.
You are forgetting that Black Death permitted easier lives for peasants afterwards - i.e. reduced power of Feudals to extort surplus product. Which perfectly proves my points.
Which means he is not bound.
You are literally trying to argue that high population density is not a factor, since Feudalism functions in situation with high population density.
Why is there another lord on the empty land peasant is moving into? Who feeds this another lord and his troops? Magic?
Do you have any arguments to support this statement? Can you be more precise about what you consider "high population density"?
Do you even read what you write? Serfdom is increased exploitation.
I'm not implying I have an argument, I'm saying you don't have one. The reason I bring up serfdom is that your answer actually has some merit IF we were talking about the institution of serfdom, not feudalism as a mode of production. You would be correct in saying that the conditions of peasants and the 'harshness' of serfdom is correlated with population density, but not that feudalism emerged due to a high population density. The fact that you attribute it to a single cause is already a sign that you don't have the complete picture, and the narrative that you present of a massive population boom and people being unable to move to greener pastures does not coincide with historical reality during the late-roman and early-medieval era, which again saw massive migrations and famines. If you have a source to back you up, I would love to see it, but so far the only estimate I've found of the relevant period points to a decline in population between 1 and 350 AD of about 7 million.
No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that even if this was frontier America and you could settle anywhere you want, it is still not feasible to just move around. Settling a new area is extremely costly. It takes a huge amount of labour to clear the land and prepare the fields, without any idea of whether it will lead to a good harvest. Not to mention the dangers of living in the wild without the protection of a lord, a factor you conveniently forget. Finally, just because Europe was not completely saturated with farmland, which it definitely wasn't, does not mean it was 'empty' or that there were somehow places beyond the reach of any lord. That is just pure fantasy. I just remembered another reason why this is so ridiculous: Before the Black Death, a period of 'high population density', the population in Europe had risen to almost 80 million, roughly three times the European population during the late antiquity, in an era where agricultural technology was more advanced and less labour intensive (meaning a single peasant could work more land). With that in mind, the idea that Europe was somehow completely swamped at a third of the population, with less advanced tools, is profoundly idiotic.
I would ask you the same thing. To me a high population density in this context would mean that there is little to no empty, tillable land in the area. In other words, it is saturated and there is little room for expansion. This was certainly not the case during the early medieval period, but that does not mean it was 'empty' as you seem to suggest.
Some sources for the population stats:
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Here are the PDF's. I would definitely suggest people read the foreword before diving in. It gives a little perspective and most importantly points out some parts of the historiography that have become outdated (such as the Merovingian and Carolingian periods and the presence of old Roman institutions)
Also, to elaborate on why I didn't like your answer: It doesn't actually answer OP's question. OP asked which development lead to the rise of feudalism, ie. "what caused feudalism", and you respond by simply describing a situation which is 'advantageous' or which to a certain degree is necessary for feudalism to exist, but you do not say how this 'caused feudalism'. It is, depending on how you define "sufficiently high density", either utterly banal (yes, you do technically need a certain population density for the mode of production to be viable, but that does not say anything that we don't already know) or completely at odds with the actual conditions during the relevant period. Either way, it's not very helpful.
Another book, this time by an actual Marxist historian, about the development from slavery to feudalism: gen.lib.rus.ec