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By comparison, Sweezy held that feudal society declined owing to contact with an outside force. Feudalism stood for both feudal society and a distinctive mode of production. More narrowly, they sometimes made out that capitalism developed within feudal society. On the whole, Marx and figures like Dobb and Hilton considered that feudal societies contained within themselves the preconditions for capitalist production. Building on studies by Henri Pirenne, the Crusades gave Western Europeans trade routes in the Mediterranean and informed a growth of commercial towns as enclaves of nonfeudal society.ĭivisions over why capitalism established itself when and where it did expose a need to clarify the ideas of feudal society and feudalism. Long-distance trade seemingly helped to create the conditions for change. Paul Sweezy registered that Dobb did not specify how a transition occurred and critiqued his assumptions of the economy. Rodney Hilton contested the idea of stagnation, noting technological changes with profits that often went to homesteaders. Backwardness made a system change possible. The ruling classes were unable to meet their revenue needs, and the neither feudal nor capitalist “petty mode of production” was inefficient. Tawney, Maurice Dobb argued that Western Europe entered a period of economic decline after services vanished. In the United States, homesteaders with freehold changed into a rural bourgeoisie.Ĭommunists subsequently elaborated their understandings of Late Medieval and Early Modern history. English landlords separated tenants from their homesteads, turning the land over to farmers using waged labor, while Prussian landlords became capitalists themselves. Geographically different ends to feudalism were outlined too. Though a feudal/natural economy turned into capitalism, because it “had to,” Lenin observed that much existing production in Russia still appeared to be halbfeudalen. Lenin critiqued accounts of unchanging agrarian life. An early 20th-Century concern was to show how the economically revolutionary nature of capitalism made proletarian organizing the main game in town. Marx's followers often portray feudalism negatively, that is, as the other of what defines capitalism. His brief and contradictory remarks were later developed by other scholars. Yet Marx sometimes also held that the “petty mode of production” on homesteads could not alone transform itself and remained halbfeudalen (semifeudal).

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Feudal rent passed through a series of forms-in service, kind, and cash-as tenants morphed into capitalist farmers. The tenant without any corvée obligation was a halbleibeigenen (semiserf).

Once serfdom ended, tenants organized both necessary and surplus-labor on their homesteads.

Surplus-labor took place under the lord's direction on their demesne. The latter were sites for labor-power reproduction. The former was typified by the Eastern European corvée (labor service). Simon Chilvers, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edition), 2020 The Beginning of the End of Feudalismįor Marx, feudal society had two basic attributes, unfree labor and homesteads.

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