------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (July 2008)
Jean-Pierre Devroey, _?conomie rurale et soci?t? dans l'Europe
franque (VI-IX si?cles)_. Paris: Belin, 2003. 381 pp. ?22.50
(paperback), ISBN: 2-7011-2618-5. and
Jean-Pierre Devroey, _Puissants et mis?rables: Syst?me social et
monde paysan dans l'Europe des Francs (VI-IX si?cles)_. Brussels:
Academie Royale de Belgique, 2006. 725 pp. ?60.50 (cloth), ISBN:
2-8031-0227-7.
Reviewed for EH.NET by George Grantham, Department of Economics,
McGill University.
Most economic historians who do not specialize in the medieval period
draw their understanding of its economic and social evolution
directly or indirectly from the work of historians inspired by Henri
Pirenne and Marc Bloch, both of whom viewed it as a decisive turning
point in Western history. As set out by Georges Duby in his essay on
the early growth of the European economy, the half millennium
following the formal end of the Roman Empire in the West marks the
crucial discontinuity in Western Europe's economic and social
history.[1] The notion was, of course, not new. Originating in the
humanist philological critique of early medieval Latin, the notion of
a decisive break in social, political, and economic institutions was
extended to other domains in the debate between Abb? Du Bos and
Montesquieu over whether the Franks were subject to royal taxation,
and by early nineteenth-century efforts to construct historical
typologies from the surviving diplomatic and legal texts as part of
the project to place the French Revolution in historical perspective.
That effort led to a consensus that the West experienced a major
economic and institutional collapse in the sixth and seventh
centuries, and that from the wreckage there emerged a more
decentralized economic and political system based on the exploitation
of the rural population by lords connected politically in hierarchies
constructed from bilateral ties of mutual obligation and fidelity.
That institutional space left little room for agricultural innovation
and hardly any for economic organization founded on the legal
egalitarianism of voluntary exchange. The historiography thus posed
three questions: the first concerned the process by which the old
world was transformed into a new one; the second concerned the nature
of that new world as an economic and social type; the third was how
it in turn gave birth to modern western capitalism. Since the
dissolution of Roman civilization was an uncontested fact, most
attention was devoted to the second and third questions. It is only
in the past thirty years that the first has received the attention it
deserves, with devastating consequences for the conventional wisdom.
The present works by the eminent Belgian historian Jean-Pierre
Devroey represent a vigorous defense of the conventional view that
the early medieval society and economy was a distinct social type
fundamentally different from the societies that preceded and
succeeded it. Explicitly inspired by the theories of Max Weber and
Karl Polanyi, this vision is idealistic rather than causal or
mechanistic, to use an old-fashioned dichotomy. It aims to explain
"why" things worked in terms of their relation to a pre-existing
whole rather than "how" they worked in terms of ordinary connections
between cause and effect. For Devroey, the true history is sociology.
The historian's task is to show how relations between different
elements of a society formed a coherent "whole" or type. The
theoretical foundation of this approach to the past is Durkheim's
tenet that social cohesion is a necessary condition for the temporal
persistence of a society. This makes the central task of the
historian the identification of the sources and mechanisms of that
cohesion. Since every society is unique, the mechanisms will differ,
providing a basis for comparative analysis of societies. The project
of these two works, then, is to construct an ideal type for that
analysis. As Teggart pointed out long ago, this approach to history
is essentially teleological, since it presumes the whole used to
explain the meaning of the parts.[2] In the present case the "whole"
is Frankish society. The books thus fall in the category of "stages"
history, to which may be added work on the same period by the English
historian Chris Wickham, whose approach is also inspired by Polanyi
notions of reciprocity and redistribution as essential means of
securing social solidarity in primitive societies.[3] Both authors
read the early medieval record through the eyes of social
anthropologists, and are thus blind to what the eyes of Machiavelli
and Adam Smith detect in it.
Devroey's work thus poses a direct challenge to the alternative
vision of early medieval society proposed by Karl-Ferdinand Werner,
Jean Durliat and Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier, who view the early Middle
Ages from the perspective of the two great theorists of
self-interested human behavior. That perspective reveals significant
continuity with late Roman civilization in Frankish institutions of
public administration and landholding.[4] The findings rest on a
re-reading of the polemical and chronological texts, on
prosographical studies of the leading Frankish families in the degree
the evidence supports it, and on close analysis of the contemporary
legal texts. It starts from the premise that the dissolution of the
Roman state in the West was essentially an appropriation of its
levers of power by German military leaders to whom the Roman state
had unwisely subcontracted the defense of the Empire. Given that
premise, the central historical questions turn on how the change in
administration affected existing governmental apparatus and the
day-to-day life of ordinary people, and how political legitimacy --
the ability to command and the willingness to obey -- was maintained
in the presence of new and foreign rulers. Of the day-to-day life we
know virtually nothing; but it seems plausible that in the core of
the Frankish kingdom, things went on pretty much as before, except
that, as would be the case down to the middle of the seventeenth
century, there was fighting among elites for control of the state and
its fiscal resources, and that for this and other reasons that part
of the economy based on exchange imploded. On the sources of
political legitimacy and the apparatus of administration, the texts
are more loquacious, and everything thing they say supports the
notion of continuity rather than the creation of a new society by
force.[5] If so, the early medieval past was not a different country,
but a place and time where men (and women) behaved in ways that are
familiar to us. It did not constitute a "whole" whose meaning is
accessible only through an exposition of its inner logic, but a
congeries of institutions, practices, and attitudes evolving at
different rates under the pressure of particular events.
From the perspective of economic history the main issues concern the
nature of landholding and the organization of the state. Was land
effectively "owned" by the elite and farmed by tenants on tenures
determined by asymmetric bargaining, or was it mostly in the hands of
small holders subject to their paying a property tax? To some that
may be a distinction without a difference: taxes mainly went to
support soldiers who the conventional historiography holds were
granted land and rights of peasants in payment for their services. In
either case the agricultural surplus went to the same people. But
from the perspective of agrarian history the distinction is crucial.
Taxes were based on assessments not easily altered, since they were
regulated by law. On the assumption that they continued to be
collected by tax farmers, the proceeds, or more commonly the tax base
that generated them, could be securitized and alienated like any
other asset, which would explain the exceptionally complex pattern of
claims revealed by the sources. The issue turns on the continuity of
law. The "primitivist" view of early medieval society espoused by
Devroey considers the early medieval era to be fundamentally lawless
and governed by relations of force in which the strong expropriated
the weak. The "Romanist" view holds for legal continuity; the strong
appropriated the tax base but within what must have been fairly wide
bounds maintained the rule of law with respect to collection. The
issue bears directly on the interpretation of terms relating to
agricultural organization, which can be read alternatively as
describing estates and farms or as units of fiscal assessment.
According to Devroey, the "fiscalist" view is in his words
"formalist," because it rests on the explicit meaning of the legal
texts rather than their presumed "real" meaning. He denies that view
at great length and in great detail. The denial represents the core
of both volumes.
Neither book is an easy read. _?conomie rurale_ is intended as a
textbook for students preparing the _aggr?gation_, or state doctoral
examinations in medieval history. _Puissants et mis?rables_ is a
treatise constructed on Weberian principles modified by late
twentieth-century French sociology. Both deploy immense erudition to
support the conventional view of a discontinuity and social
primitivism against the hypothesis of continuity. Since the technical
debate turns on etymological issues bearing on individual terms, it
would be fruitless to attempt to summarize the argument in a short
review. I am not persuaded by it, but as I am not a specialist in
late Roman and early medieval Latin my judgment carries no special
weight in the debate. Nevertheless, many of his arguments strike me
as dogmatic assertions and special pleading. Heavy reliance on
Polanyi as a source of theoretical insight raises further danger
flags, as do abstract sociological arguments used to motivate
description and analysis of institutions. One longs for a simple
explanation of how things worked rather than why they worked. In
terms of the issues raised, both books would have been better served
by a clear exposition of the alternative points of view followed by
analysis of facts bearing on them. They contain a lot of useful
matter, but it is hard work to release them from their matrix of
verbiage. The bibliography is magnificent. To cite the review of
Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld's _Portuguese Irregular Verbs_, the books
give the impression that "there is nothing more to be said on this
subject. Nothing."[6] There is, of course, much more to be said.
Of the two works, the textbook is more accessible to non-specialists,
despite being disfigured by "boxes" containing further information of
the kind familiar to users of elementary textbooks in economics. The
other covers more ground and provides a splendid introduction to the
huge explosion in scholarship since the 1960s. Neither book can be
ignored. Though clearly not the last word in early medieval economic
and social history, they represent a major contribution that no one
pretending to an opinion on the period can afford to dismiss. They
are, however, highly opinionated, and must be read in conjunction
with the literature they criticize. This is hard work, but there are
no short-cuts to mastering the secondary literature on early medieval
economic history. The divisions among its main practitioners are
important and deep. The best account in English is a recent survey by
Goldsmith, who gives a clear exposition of the "fiscalist"
hypothesis, and follows up its implications for the subsequent
evolution of land tenure in France to the end of the Middle Ages.[7]
This is the best place for beginners to start.
The early middle ages are a fascinating and central segment of the
history of western civilization. Like all extended periods, they were
a time of transition. The explosion of scholarship since the 1960s
and the renewal of interest in classical antiquity have given new
life to a subject whose general contours seemed to have been set in
stone in the magnificent syntheses proposed by Pirenne and Bloch. It
is time for a new synthesis that encompasses the new findings and
interpretations in a plausible narrative account of the
transformation of a society and economy over five centuries. That
synthesis is within reach, but to attain it will require confronting
these two large volumes that, like the Roman army in its latter days,
defend the conventional wisdom on the several fronts of attack.
References:
1. Georges Duby, _The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors
and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century_, London (1974).
2. Frederick J. Teggart, _Theory of History_, New Haven (1925).
3. Chris Wickham, _Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the
Mediterranean, 400 - 800_, Oxford (2005).
4. Karl-Ferdinand Werner, _Naissance de la noblesse: L'essor des
?lites politiques en Europe_, Paris (1998); Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier,
_Aux sources de la gestion publique. 1. Enqu?te lexicographique sur
le fundus, villa, domus, mansus_, Lille (1993); Jean Durliat, _Les
finances publiques de Diocl?tien aux Carolingiens, 284-889_,
Sigmaringen (1990).
5. Bernard Bachrach, _Early Medieval Warfare: Prelude to Empire_,
Philadelphia (2001).
6. Alexander McCall Smith, _Portuguese Irregular Verbs_, London (2003).
7. James Lowth Goldsmith, _Lordship in France, 500-1500_, New York (2003).
George Grantham is Professor of Economics at McGill University, where
he teaches economic history and the history of economic thought. His
work on the present topic includes "The Early Medieval Transition: On
the Origins of the Manor and the Early Medieval Transition,"
presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Economic
Association, Nashville, 2003. He is currently revising papers on
"What's Space Got to Do with It? Distance and Agricultural
Productivity before the Railway Age" and "The Prehistoric Origins of
European Economic Integration."
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Published by EH.Net (July 2008). All EH.Net reviews are archived at
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