{"id":25909,"date":"2017-09-21T06:45:47","date_gmt":"2017-09-21T11:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25909"},"modified":"2017-09-21T06:45:47","modified_gmt":"2017-09-21T11:45:47","slug":"the-return-of-the-peasant-or-the-history-of-the-world-in-10%c2%bd-blog-posts-3-from-the-ancient-to-the-medieval","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25909","title":{"rendered":"The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts. 3. From the ancient to the medieval"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts. 3. From the ancient to the medieval<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n
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Continuing my \u2018history of the world\u2019 series (a fully referenced version of which is available here<\/a>), I finished last time by saying we should take a peek at what came after the \u2018Axial Age\u2019 states\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026Well, that would be the so-called \u2018Dark Ages\u2019 \u2013 \u2018dark\u2019 if only because of a relative paucity of historical evidence to illuminate them in comparison with what went before. The successor states to the great Axial Age empires were smaller geopolitical units, but the idea that this constituted some kind of civilizational collapse has been subject to considerable debate and revision in recent years, for example in post-Maurya India and in post-Roman Europe. Let me say a little about the latter in particular, as a kind of case study for our times of what a putative \u2018collapse\u2019 and a return to more local polities and more agrarian production might look like. Of course, it\u2019s a dodgy business making inferences about the possible future fall of modern London or Washington on the basis of the fall of ancient Rome. But it\u2019s ground we\u2019ve been traversing a little of late in discussions on this site, and when people are confronted with the idea of a \u2018return\u2019 to small-scale farming they commonly reach for medieval notions either in order to critique the idea or to express foreboding: a small farm future would be like a small farm past, a return to \u2018feudalism\u2019 or to \u2018serfdom\u2019.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s start with some terminology. \u2018Feudalism\u2019 strictly speaking refers to a situation of so-called \u2018parcellized sovereignty\u2019 in which a ruler \u2013 typically a politically weak king of a tributary rather than a tax-raising state \u2013 grants land (a fief) to a subject, over which the subject has complete jurisdiction, as part of a reciprocal if often unequal bond of loyalty.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts. 3. From the ancient to the medieval Continuing my \u2018history of the world\u2019 series (a fully referenced version of which is available here), I finished last time by saying we should take a peek at what came after the \u2018Axial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[16081,150,16083,16082,9739,9738],"class_list":["post-25909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-ancient-world","tag-collapse","tag-history-of-the-world","tag-medieval-world","tag-peasantry","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25910,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25909\/revisions\/25910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}