Has there ever been a Manoralist/feudal revolution?
Obviously there are proletarian revolutions, and bourgeois revolutions, but I've never heard of a Feudal revolution.
This is obviously going off of classical histiography of like, Engels's Origin of the Family, so maybe it's changed since then and the feudal-slave society split isnt really a thing.
cfgaussian - 3mon
Yes, in Europe it is called the Dark Ages. The end of the Roman empire came about essentially through a "feudal revolution" when the old, bureaucratic-centralized slave society of Roman times (both in Rome and Persia, the two big empires of the time in Europe+West Asia) fell and was replaced by a new socio-economic system centered on smaller scale feudal polities, warlords in fortified manors, and vassal-lord relationships.
This didn't happen all at once everywhere and it was not always as revolutionary and violent as it was in Western Europe, where local warlords seized control when central authority collapsed. For example in the Eastern Empire it was more like a series of crises and reforms that led to the pseudo-feudal system of the medieval Byzantine empire. The church also played a big part in this transition all throughout Europe.
In West Asia and North Africa you could call the rise of Islam a sort of feudal revolution as it violently displaced both the old Roman and Persian imperial systems and replaced them with a more decentralized and feudal-like system, though one should always be careful not to project the Eurocentric feudal model onto other parts of the world because it doesn't apply one-to-one.
Ethiopia is another interesting situation where you also had a transition from the Aksumite kingdom of classical antiquity into medieval Abyssinia, with Christianity playing a major role in social and political changes. There the socio-economic organization must have also changed and adopted elements of what was happening in the rest of the medieval world.
Also in East Africa, Arab and Islamic influence eventually reached down the Swahili coast leading to new forms of political and social organization there, though this was more of a change imposed from the outside by a new ruling elite, rather than a revolution by the native populations which largely still remained in their old social and economic forms.
Meanwhile in West Africa also you had medieval forms of political organization and modes of production emerge, partly spread via trade routes and the influence of Islam coming through the Sahel, and you see medieval african empires like Ghana, Mali, Songhay appear. Though again one should be careful not to project our European idea of feudal relations.
Then there's China which is a whole story in and of itself, arguably being ahead of Europe in its historic socio-economic development (the "medieval" period for China starts earlier), but where the line is much more blurred because it never really fully adopted a feudal system but went through cycles of centralized bureaucratic rule followed by warring feudal-ish states, only to centralize and have the authority of the local hereditary rulers dimished again. These political changes also go hand in hand with changes in the mode of production and degree of how organized and centralized production could be.
Similar processes happened in Korea and Japan given that they were in the broader Chinese cultural sphere of influence and what happened in China reverberated there too. Japan underwent its own feudal transition around the time the first Shogunates rose as central imperial authority declined, local lords usurped autonomy and began warring among themselves, which undoubtedly affected socio-economic relations.
And lastly there's India and South East Asia, but i honestly know way too little about their history in that period to say whether this model of "feudal transition" is even applicable there. They surely must have had their own native developments, but there was also a lot of influence especially in Northern India from Persia and later the Muslim world (later political entities in the north like the Delhi Sultanate had Muslim ruling classes), and in turn India itself heavily influenced South East Asia, so it is to be expected that they would adopt some of the same changes that were happening further West.
Regardless, eventually the polities that did emerge there, the various medieval Indian kingdoms and empires which followed the classical era Maurya empire, as well as the South East Asian kingdoms and empires like the Khmer, Srivijaya, Majapahit, were probably not too dissimilar from those in the rest of Asia (minus China which was always doing its own thing). With a lot of the social changes also being driven by the spread of religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam.
Also, some of these Asian polities were not just feudal but feudal-theocratic, like Tibet, and these new social relations also must have emerged from earlier forms, though i don't know enough to say how revolutionary the changes were. I don't know enough about the socio-economic relations in pre-Buddhist Tibet for example, but it's likely some major changes would have happened around the time of the introduction of Buddhism and the establishment of the first Tibetan empire.
King_Simp in genzhou
Has there ever been a Manoralist/feudal revolution?
Obviously there are proletarian revolutions, and bourgeois revolutions, but I've never heard of a Feudal revolution.
This is obviously going off of classical histiography of like, Engels's Origin of the Family, so maybe it's changed since then and the feudal-slave society split isnt really a thing.
Yes, in Europe it is called the Dark Ages. The end of the Roman empire came about essentially through a "feudal revolution" when the old, bureaucratic-centralized slave society of Roman times (both in Rome and Persia, the two big empires of the time in Europe+West Asia) fell and was replaced by a new socio-economic system centered on smaller scale feudal polities, warlords in fortified manors, and vassal-lord relationships.
This didn't happen all at once everywhere and it was not always as revolutionary and violent as it was in Western Europe, where local warlords seized control when central authority collapsed. For example in the Eastern Empire it was more like a series of crises and reforms that led to the pseudo-feudal system of the medieval Byzantine empire. The church also played a big part in this transition all throughout Europe.
In West Asia and North Africa you could call the rise of Islam a sort of feudal revolution as it violently displaced both the old Roman and Persian imperial systems and replaced them with a more decentralized and feudal-like system, though one should always be careful not to project the Eurocentric feudal model onto other parts of the world because it doesn't apply one-to-one.
Ethiopia is another interesting situation where you also had a transition from the Aksumite kingdom of classical antiquity into medieval Abyssinia, with Christianity playing a major role in social and political changes. There the socio-economic organization must have also changed and adopted elements of what was happening in the rest of the medieval world.
Also in East Africa, Arab and Islamic influence eventually reached down the Swahili coast leading to new forms of political and social organization there, though this was more of a change imposed from the outside by a new ruling elite, rather than a revolution by the native populations which largely still remained in their old social and economic forms.
Meanwhile in West Africa also you had medieval forms of political organization and modes of production emerge, partly spread via trade routes and the influence of Islam coming through the Sahel, and you see medieval african empires like Ghana, Mali, Songhay appear. Though again one should be careful not to project our European idea of feudal relations.
Then there's China which is a whole story in and of itself, arguably being ahead of Europe in its historic socio-economic development (the "medieval" period for China starts earlier), but where the line is much more blurred because it never really fully adopted a feudal system but went through cycles of centralized bureaucratic rule followed by warring feudal-ish states, only to centralize and have the authority of the local hereditary rulers dimished again. These political changes also go hand in hand with changes in the mode of production and degree of how organized and centralized production could be.
Similar processes happened in Korea and Japan given that they were in the broader Chinese cultural sphere of influence and what happened in China reverberated there too. Japan underwent its own feudal transition around the time the first Shogunates rose as central imperial authority declined, local lords usurped autonomy and began warring among themselves, which undoubtedly affected socio-economic relations.
And lastly there's India and South East Asia, but i honestly know way too little about their history in that period to say whether this model of "feudal transition" is even applicable there. They surely must have had their own native developments, but there was also a lot of influence especially in Northern India from Persia and later the Muslim world (later political entities in the north like the Delhi Sultanate had Muslim ruling classes), and in turn India itself heavily influenced South East Asia, so it is to be expected that they would adopt some of the same changes that were happening further West.
Regardless, eventually the polities that did emerge there, the various medieval Indian kingdoms and empires which followed the classical era Maurya empire, as well as the South East Asian kingdoms and empires like the Khmer, Srivijaya, Majapahit, were probably not too dissimilar from those in the rest of Asia (minus China which was always doing its own thing). With a lot of the social changes also being driven by the spread of religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam.
Also, some of these Asian polities were not just feudal but feudal-theocratic, like Tibet, and these new social relations also must have emerged from earlier forms, though i don't know enough to say how revolutionary the changes were. I don't know enough about the socio-economic relations in pre-Buddhist Tibet for example, but it's likely some major changes would have happened around the time of the introduction of Buddhism and the establishment of the first Tibetan empire.
11/10 🏆