Feudalism

[TommyK]

Greetings,

Maybe this has been done before, but!

Has anyone tackled the question of how 2 societies (Medieval Europe and Medieval Japan)wound up with roughly the same socio-economic system of Feudalism at about the same time in History, while widely separated on this earth with little if any contact between the 2 cultures?

Isn't it interesting that roughly the same causes sprung up at relatively the same time, without the so-called spread or leaching effect affecting societies physically between the 2 cultures?

Any comments and/or theories out there? Were we visited by aliens at the same time, in 2 different areas of earth and subjected to socio-economic mind control? (lol!)

Regards,
TommyK
Tom Militello
"One must respect the past, even as one lives it!"

[Sochin]

I have wondered about it all right but I have never tackled it - What forces take a society and mold it into feudalism?

Do you start with a warrior group that needs land and food to keep themselves going or do you start with an agricultural group that needs protection and so develops a warrior class? Because I have a hard time seeing peasants who own their land giving up that right to their protectors, I tend to the first thesis - a warrior people subjugated an agricultureal people and made them peasants but protected them so the food source was uninterupted...except this isn't how Japanese feudalism grew, is it, Hmmmm.

The Vikings were warriors / farmers but I don't think they accepted feudalism, did they? What about the large cultures in the Americas, they were't feudal either...why not?

Thanks for starting this Tommy, I hope it goes somewhere... :)

[Karl Friday]

QUOTE]Originally posted by TommyK
Has anyone tackled the question of how 2 societies (Medieval Europe and Medieval Japan)wound up with roughly the same socio-economic system of Feudalism at about the same time in History, while widely separated on this earth with little if any contact between the 2 cultures?

Isn't it interesting that roughly the same causes sprung up at relatively the same time, without the so-called spread or leaching effect affecting societies physically between the 2 cultures? [/QUOTE]

There's been quite a bit of work done comparing medieval European and Japanese institutions, beginning with Asakawa Kan'ichi's work in the early 1900s (see the essays in Land and Society in Medieval Japan [Japan Society for the Preservation of Science, 1965]). Broad comparative work includes Rushton Coulburn's anthology on comparative feudalism, Feudalism in History (Princeton, 1956); Peter Duus' Feudalism in Japan (Knopf, 1969); John Hall's "Feudalism in Japan: A Reassessment" (in Hall and Jansen, eds., Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan [Princeton, 1968]); and Archibad Lewis' Knights and Samurai (Temple Smith, 1979). There are a couple of dozen other articles out there that discuss the notion of "feudalism" in Japan, and even more stuff comparing specific institutions in Europe and Japan. (The book I'm working on now, for Routledge's Warfare and History series, has a lot of comparative material in it, too.)

But, as you can see from the dates on the citations above, scholars have given up on broad comparisons of "feudal systems." In fact, few, if any, contemporary scholars of medieval Europe still use the term "feudalism" without adding lot's of qualifiers. The general consensus is that the term is too ambiguous to be of any real value. For a good statement of this position, see Elizabeth Brown's "The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe," in The American Historical Review #79 (1974).

Comparative feudalism is even more problematic. The fundamental problem is that "feudalism" isn't one concept; it's several. If you read ten authors on the subject, you'll probably find ten different definitions. To create a usable definition for the purpose of comparative history, you can either a) collect existing definitions and try to reduce these to a least common denominator, b) start with the postulate that societies X, Y and Z were all feudal, and examine them for common elements, or c) base the definitions on a single society--a single place and time.

But a search for least common denominators, as in a) and b), tends to yield too inclusive a definition--the descriptive utility of any term being directly proportional to its particularity. And a definition arising from approach c), on the other hand, tends to be too particularistic to be of value--this approach really just amounts to disguising a description of a specific time and place as a general construct.

Leaving aside the term, "feudalism," the similarities between the socio-political and economic institutions and practices of medieval Japan and medieval Europe are more superficial than striking. They really just boil down to the presence of a military class at the top of the political-economic hierarchy, and the fragmentation of political power. Once you get below that surface, the differences are much more consequential than the resemblances. And you can easily find dozens of other societies in history--some even during the 20th century!--that are as, or more, similar to either medieval Japan or medieval Europe than the latter societies were to one another (one medieval Europeanist I once heard lecture, suggested greater similarity exists between the modern Mafia and feudalism in northwestern Europe than between Europe and Japan!).

The most tempting base for similarity between Japan and Europe is, of course, the resemblance of knights to samurai. But here again, the similarities are very superficial. The two warrior orders evolved under very different circumstances, for very different reasons, and functioned very differently within their respective worlds, for most of their histories. (For more on this, see my Hired Swords [Stanford, 1992], or Wm. Wayne Farris' Heavenly Warriors [Harvard, 1992].)

Even the notion of "medieval Europe" is misleading, since there are dramatic differences between what evolved in different parts of the continent, and at different stages of the six or eight centuries that tend to get labeled "the medieval period." The same is true for Japan, although there was less geographic variation, in part because political fragmentation there was never as complete in Japan as it was in parts of Europe.

The bottom line is that while early historians of Japan were intrigued by apparent similarities between "medieval" institutions in Japan and Europe, and devoted a great deal of energy to explaining them, the more we learned about either place, the more the differences came to overshadow the similarities. Those of us doing comparative analyses today are using them as tools to highlight the differences between the two places.

[TommyK]

Greetings,

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate Dr. Friday in particular for responding.

I always see the link between things, rather than the distance, but that said, I believe that many of the outward manifestations of Feudalism are visbile in both Anglo-Norman and Japanese Feudalism.

In general, both societies had the following in common, at least on the surface:

-Peasants supported the upper classes and the warrior estate,with their labor.
-Personal bonds of fealty (commitatus, if you will) existed between lords and their retainers.
-The leaders led the fighting, at least by taking the field if not charging off into battle like the "Black Prince."
-Finances were the ruination of many factions contending for the throne, whether of the imperial house or that of the Anglo-Norman dynasty.
-Sides were switched faster than you can say counteroffer.
-In relative periods of stability, the arts were practiced by the warrior classes, or at least supported by them.
-Churchs and temples were erected by the same upper and warrior classes.
-The younger sons were either divested into the military or the church under primogeniture in Europe, or spun off from the nobility classes supporting the Imperial family in Japan.

These outward similarities, obviously off the top of my head, prompted my question. I do not intend in any way for this response to be in the scholarly class of Dr. Friday, but I think you can see where I was going with this thought process.

My interest in the topic just prompted me to stir the juices of this forum. I am impressed by the likes of Dr. Friday who responded so well on this topic, and look forward to his further responses on topics in the future. For the rank and file on E-Budo I was curious as to the response, if any, this thread would bring.

Thanks to all on E-Budo.
Regards,
TommyK
Tom Militello
"There are no dumb questions,but one must be on the lookout for, and ever viligent against flawed answers."