…barring exceptional & extraordinary historical accidents, of course. From Patricia Crone: Pre-Industrial Societies. & why is this still the best short thing I have to hand on the cultural-political-societal divergence of the Dover Circle societies, even though it was written more than a generation ago? Has my mind become ossified, and there is something much newer and better that I simply do not recognize? Or what?…
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I believe that the reasons I still find the book worth assigning—still find it worth re-reading and re-re-reading for myself—is a combination of its:
Accessibility—it is super-readable…
Analytical Depth—Crone is not afraid to generalize across continents and millennia of history by drawing on the ideas of social scientists; she thus packs a huge amount of analysis into a very brief number of pages while somehow retaining readability…
Insight into Social Dynamics—closely connected, her ability to use social-science concepts to try to understand how pre-industrial societies managed to hang together makes it a superb resource for not just the what happened but for why it was happening…
Interdisciplinarity—again closely connected, analyses of a topic this broad that restrict themselves to one particular social science cannot be analytically deep…
Unifying—by looking at all pre-industrial societies as having to solve similar problems of production, organization, distribution, coördination and domination via force, reciprocity, redistribution, ideology, and fraud, she powerfully and economically sets out the unifying themes by which all pre-industrial societies are, although very different, also very similar…
Comprehensiveness: —closely related, Crone provides a sweeping exploration of common and analogous features across a wide range of pre-industrial societies from Ancient Egypt through the Mongol Empire to pre-Columbian America…
So let me give her the mic:
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Patricia Crone: Pre-Industrial Societies: ‘Two sets of societies are so deviant that they are better treated as exceptions to, rather than as variations upon, the [standard] picture…. The first is… pre-Columbian America…. Europe, too… at least from the sixteenth century onwards… European deviation… is… a phenomenon which the European student may not perceive as odd at all. Yet odd it clearly is.
Medieval Europe fits the common pattern… far-flung ruling elite, partly military and partly religious… cosmopolitan high culture… a myriad of peasant communities characterized by the familiar absence of economic, political and cultural integration. Medieval Europe was backward… but… not visibly different in kind…. Only in retrospect… [can] Mediæval Europe… be seen to have… unusual potential…. Post-Reformation Europe fits the pattern too… [but] by now the backwardness had disappeared.
To a historian specializing in the non-European world there is something puzzling about the excitement with which European historians hail the arrival of cities, trade, regular taxation, standing armies, legal codes, bureaucracies, absolutist kings and other commonplace appurtenances of civilized societies as if they were unique and self-evident stepping stones to modernity: to the non-European historian they simply indicate that Europe had finally joined the club.
But the excitement is justified…. Medieval Europe… [did] not join… the club…. Why?… [For] pre-industrial society in general… what was the evolutionary trend? How and why did Europe diverge from it? Indeed, to what extent did it diverge as opposed to merely take the lead?… Provisional answers could be said to be available….
Land: Europe… became a cultural unit thanks to the Germanic invasions of… Rom[e]…. [While] no part of Europe possessed the high fertility of… valleys… of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Indus, Ganges, Yangtze or Mekong… Europe… was fed by rain… meaning that agriculture was far less labour intensive…. The invention of the heavy plough… arguably made the soil of inland Europe the most fertile in the world in relation to labour…. No other part of the world was so uniformly given over to fixed-field agriculture… uniformly amenable to government control and, once the invasions were over, so lacking in… barbarians. Its complexity of territory nonetheless made it difficult for a single ruler to dominate…. Natural resources… were extremely varied… great potential for internal commerce…. An ample coastline and a profusion of navigable rivers endowed it with better and cheaper means of communications… a fact of major consequence for traders, rulers, and disseminators of ideas alike….
People…. The northern [Germanic] barbarians were organized by kinship, but they did not remain so for long…. Constant interaction dictated that even areas which might well have remained tribal under other circumstances adopted non-tribal forms of organization…. Why… feudalism rather than tribalism[?]… This is a question to which there is no proper answer yet. It has been plausibly argued that the Christian church did its best to undermine kin groups of any size or depth….
The European marriage pattern… two consequences…. Numbers rarely multiplied on such a scale that mass extinction was necessary to restore the balance between population and environment…. [Plus] European marriage pattern made for, or indeed was a manifestation of, individualism…. Service came to be part of the life-cycle, and the prominence of hired servants in the household is the domestic counterpart to the prominence of feudal retainers in the political sphere: in both cases, recruitment was by contract rather than by kinship….
Feudalism: Barbarian Europe was the outcome of… chaos… [and] continued… in a… chaos…. [With] the state… incapable of protecting property or life, people reacted by placing themselves in servile positions vis-a-vis stronger men… often granted usage of land which they themselves had handed over by way of payment for protection…. The ruler would reward his vassals… with grants of land because there was no money…. Horsemanship meant that the army had to be based on a professional military class rather than conscripted peasants. So far… nothing unique…. The uniqueness… lies in… the state los[ing] control of the process…. By the tenth century, European feudalism had wholly ceased to be ‘prebendal’: fiefs were no longer acquired or lost on appointment to or dismissal from a public office or function, the very concept of a public domain having disappeared….
The result was correspondingly unusual…. Feudal Europe was not stateless, nor had power been dispersed horizontally, into tribal groups, as it normally is under stateless conditions. A state of a sort existed, but it had little autonomous existence…. Society was in an extremely strong position vis-a-vis the state…. ‘Liberties’ were rights negotiated with authorities, not the freedom which prevails where no such authorities exist; and the sense of reciprocity rested on contractual agreement, not on kinship ties…. State and society formed a continuum, not an oppressive agency versus subjects who tried to escape it…. Capstone government failed to become a European pattern…. Every king or prince had to nurse his domains, seeing to their productivity, ensuring that they were properly administered, and adding to them by marriage and judicious use of force as best he could. Obviously, this made for a reconstitution of public power along lines very different from those which prevail where immense areas are united by conquest and loosely held together by a single tax-collecting apparatus….
At the same time the quest for revenues and order alike led to the expansion of royal justice… judicial machineries coterminous with and controlled by states in place of the normal pre-industrial combination of local courts run by villages, guilds, castes or the like on the one hand and supra-national courts spawned by the religious institution on the other…. Law as the command of the sovereign and thus something which could be made, as opposed to law as a regularity inherent in the cosmos, nature or divinity and thus something which could only be found….
The weakness of feudal kings which led to the development in Europe of representative institutions. Here as elsewhere, kings were supposed to seek counsel while leading men were supposed to offer it… but the feudal dispersal of power endowed it with a novel force…. The king was merely the top of the social pyramid, [so] he had to govern in collaboration with that pyramid: he had no state apparatus distinct from it…. Though most parliaments were to wither away in the age of absolutism, many survived… and none was forgotten….
Cities and trade… market forces, non-agrarian income and monetization. Cities were thus profoundly disruptive of the feudal order. This was not however obvious to rural lords without prior experience of urban society…. The result was unusual….
First, neither kings nor nobles plundered merchants as a matter of course…. Much of the trade was in cheap and bulky commodities… not worth seizing, though… worth taxing…. [With] Europe[’s]… divi[sion] into a plurality of states, ill-treated merchants could transfer their services to rival rulers… [as] in the Islamic world…. [But] Muslim rulers could afford to alienate merchants for short-term windfalls because stable revenues were provided by peasants, whereas European kings had to nurse theirs because they had no right to impose taxes without their subjects’ consent. [And] when absolutism finally made its appearance in Europe, mercantile power was far too well organized to allow itself to be fleeced….
Secondly, kings and nobles alike allowed their cities to administer themselves… [they] had bigger fish to fry in the countryside…. Like the principle of representation, urban autonomy was a feudal creation, not a legacy from classical antiquity; and it endowed the bourgeoisie with a power impossible to achieve where the landed elite used the agricultural surplus to keep both town and countryside under its own control….
Far from being stultified by imperial government, Europe was to be propelled forward by constant competition between its component parts…. [With] Europe… divided among… barbarian kings… and a Roman church…. The Roman church and barbarian kings were thus competitors; rivalry between them stood in the way of unification…. By the time European monarchs had the ability to finance armies of conquest and occupation, Europe was too highly and too evenly developed under governments too well-entrenched for empire-building to be possible…. The illiterate country bumpkins who dominated Europe for a thousand years or so after the fall of Rome had to be entertained and otherwise catered for in their own vernaculars: they knew no better…. By the sixteenth century we have the outline of states with fixed territorial identities and (by pre-industrial standards) considerable political, religious and cultural unity….
Scientific Thought…. Christianity and classical culture were two completely different world views which had… fallen into the hands of alien barbarians…. Classical thought was conceptual and strictly deductive… empirical testing was disdained on the ground that theory was above the haphazard behaviour which we can actually observe…. Christianity… was monotheist and… inductive…. Human reason can only observe. It was the interaction between these two views which issued in the conviction that the regularities postulated by deductive thought must be systematically tested by empirical observation….
Capitalism: All the factors considered so far come together in the explanation of the rise of capitalism…. An economy is… capitalist when[:]… Everything can be bought and sold, including land and human labour. Everything is a commodity as opposed to a means of subsistence. Labour being a commodity, it is distinct from the person who supplies it; it is neutral labour, not political or personal support…. People are hired, as opposed to born into the productive enterprise, and they are free rather than indentured, enserfed or enslaved…. Workers supply labour, not political followings; entrepreneurs supply wages, not protection or homesteads; and the products are destined fot the market, not for the households of the producers or their exploiters: the only tie between them is the cash nexus….
Manv pre-industrial societies had a capitalist sector… rest[ing] on long-distance trade in products obtained through hunting and gathering or agriculture…. Commonly the capitalist sector flourished within an agrarian economy without greatly affecting either the nature or the primacy of the latter, let alone the socio-political relations it engendered…. The question is how Europe came to go beyond it…. The answer… takes us back…. Medieval and early modern rulers set the scene for the bourgeoisie, first by allowing it to manage its own cities… and next by clearing their kingdoms of unruly nobles, robber barons and self-help groups…. This alliance between state and bourgeoisie is distinctly unusual. The growth of urban wealth and skills also assisted the expansion of the state at the cost of ecclesiastical jurisdictions, while at the same time contributing to the emancipation of thought from church control….
It goes without saying that there are endless controversies over the precise manner in which these and other developments interacted, as well as over the question why England was the first…. But whichever way the story is told, its protagonists are the peculiar political evolution arising from the feudal collapse, the plural roots of European culture, and the wealth with which the ecology and population control endowed it.
‘European dynamism’’…. Having collapsed politically, Europe devised a primitive organization to suit it only to find that its ecology endowed it with a potential far too great for the solution adopted, so that what ought to have been the end of the formative period turned out only to be the beginning…. Europe was inventive in different areas from other civilizations, having a peculiar penchant for technology which still has not been explained…. Whatever the ultimate explanation for this penchant may be, the extreme primitivity of barbarian Europe certainly plays a role in it. Outside Europe, the state created sophisticated elites utterly different from the masses in all and every respect; but the unwashed, vermin-infested, badly clothed. badly housed, illiterate and half-studied barons and clerics who held sway in medieval Europe were barely distinguishable from the serfs they ruled….
It was the failure of the European elite thoroughly to distance itself from the masses which made technology respectable, not just for military armoury and amusing gadgets, but also for labour-saving and other devices of the most prosaic kind. Differently put, a state without money generated an aristocracy without manners and bearers of high culture without a proper disdain for flywheels and cranks, let alone for the uneducated men who put such things together….
General inventiveness [thus] arose from the protracted nature of its formative period. But by the sixteenth century one might have expected this period to come to an end…. But the implications were so drastic and the rate of change so immense that in another way Europe could be said never to have come out of its formative period at all…. Competition between… states was the motor of European history thereafter…. Military competition is absent where a single empire reigns supreme…. Even where a plurality of states exists, however, competition is not necessarily a source of changes other than dynastic ups and downs. In the medieval Islamic and Indian worlds, for example, states were generally too loosely placed on top of society to generate much innovation below….
First or freak?… Was modernity (in the sense of industrial economy with accompan ing social, political and cognitive arrangements) in the making elsewhere? Should Europe be seen… ‘dynamic’ and Asia as… ‘stagnating’… or should we rather see Europe and Asia, or indeed all complex societies, as travelling in different directions?… Given that history is the story of the human accumulation of experience, it does indeed appear to have a unitary direction. As the centuries roll on, stateless societies acquire states under the influence of their neighbours, their neighbours develop better governmental techniques, populations grow, means of communications improve and urbanization increases, making for more trade and manufacture, more individualism, new ideas and greater sophistication: everywhere the earth seems to be ‘filling up’. In this very general sense there undoubtedly was an identical trend all over the world.
It is however an altogether different matter to argue that the world outside Europe was moving in the same specific direction as Europe itself…. But the historical record suggests that all non-European paths were leading towards modified versions of the same societies, not towards that evolved in Europe…. Europe and the different civilizations of Asia were all travelling along paths of their own. China was not moving in the European direction, but nor was it moving in that of the Middle East or vice versa; India was not moving closer to the path taken by Japan, and so on: all were developing along the lines laid down in their respective formative periods….
Asian societies may well appear to resemble each other more than they do Europe (particularly of course when the observer is an ignorant European to whom all distant civilizations look the same); but this is merely to say that the modern predominance of the West engenders an illusion trick…. Where in the world is there anything like European cities? But where is there anything like Chinese bureaucracy?… If the Islamic world had won out, all non-Islamic civilizations would have appeared as so many variations on the theme of failure to invent slave soldiers (due to blockages, no doubt).
There is only one respect in which all non-European civilizations genuinely resemble each other more than Europe, and that is in their successful discovery of durable solutions to the problems inherent in pre-industrial organization. Europe failed: had it succeeded, it would have remained a pre-industrial society. Human societies aim at stability; all hope to find the social and political organization best suited to the specific cultural and natural environment they inhabit…. Formative periods are about the invention of basic frameworks. This or that solution is tried out until a viable compromise is found, whereupon tinkering suffices for the accommodation of further change unless it is of a positively cataclysmic kind.
What happened in Europe is clearly that the formative period went wrong. The political organization was too primitive and the high culture was too composite to survive once people began to acquire money and to think (people could do plenty of both elsewhere without thereby causing their establishments to totter)…. Europe failed to devise a socio-political and cognitive order in which a united elite kept both the high culture and the society it sanctioned in place and in which drastic change was impossible because all the key members of society had too strong an interest in the order that prevailed.
Adherents of the blockage theory may object with reference to China… high agricultural output… a large internal market… a dense network of… rural markets and market towns… use of machinery and inanimate energy (notably water power), literacy… high, and [no] formal barriers to social or geographical mobility…. All this is apt to convey the impression that a blockage theory is needed to explain the failure of the Chinese economy to take off. But in fact China is a star example of a successful civilization: the problems inherent in pre-industrial organization had here been solved with such expertise that people could do more thinking and accumulate more wealth than ever before without thereby undermining the prevailing order. China reached the pinnacle of economic development possible under pre-industrial conditions and stopped: no forces pushing it in a different direction are in evidence; no movements towards take-off were blocked.
The durability of the Chinese solution arose from its manner of elite-building. The state recruited… through an examination system which… [gave] close to a monopoly on the distribution of prestige… [so] everyone who could afford it competed…. The mighty dragon might not be a match for the local snake… but every local snake wanted the dragon to give him a degree… [so sought] full mastery of the Confucian culture which tied the educated person to the state. China… tamed its landowner [but] not by developing a state apparatus which… deprived them of a political role, but on the contrary… transforming them into Confucian degree-holders… [and] local snakes with a vested interest in the state-sponsored world view to which they owed their prestige. There was no way in which this alliance could be upset by internal developments….
Politically, the representatives of trade and commerce were redundant (or, at times, even undesirable)… not in a position to turn the state into an instrument for their aims, be it directly or indirectly…. The unitary nature of the high culture meant that urbanization, commercialization and the spread of literacy were in no danger of shattering the traditional world view, as opposed to strengthening its hold…. Greater productivity and better government did make for population growth, so the market was huge; but it consisted, apart from the elite, of impoverished peasants whose purchasing power could not be raised. Despite its interest in production (occasionally even mass production) of everyday goods, Chinese capitalism was thus pre-modern in terms of its customers and its relationship with the state alike. The abundance of labour… deprived manufacturers of an interest in labour-saving devices, labour being cheap in comparison with raw material….
Where in all this, one wonders, is the dynamic potential supposed to have been blocked? China had succeeded where Europe had failed, and it was the inability of Europe similarly to contain its capitalist sector which eventually caused the Confucian [I think this is a typo: I think this should be “Mediæval-Feudal-Roman Catholic”] order to collapse.
The only case comparable to Europe is that of Japan… [with] a composite culture and a long formative period in which political power was fragmented…. Barbarian Japan was no more capable of reshaping itself along Chinese lines than was barbarian Europe of keeping the Roman empire going in all but name, and the upshot was a long period of constant change culminating, here as there, in the sixteenth century, when Japan was politically united in a proto-nation state and its Buddhist monasteries despoiled…. By then the formative period of Japan came to an end, precisely as it ought to have done and in some sense did in Europe too.
The crucial difference is that Japan was on its own, not part of a state system…. In isolation Japan experienced developments similar to those of Europe, that is taming of the feudal aristocracy, urbanization and agricultural growth. But… cities[‘]… position was insecure… [so] they did not spawn a comparable bourgeoisie. And the absence of military competition meant that Japan could remain what it was…. Japan enjoyed two centuries of undisturbed tranquility before the West forced it to join the competition… <https://archive.org/details/isbn_2901851683115>
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