#7 Understanding Colonialism: The Destruction of the European Feudal System

Following on from the discussion in blog #4, I continue here about the transformation of ideas from the 1750s. It is difficult to make the changing of ideas concrete, so historians so often talk about ‘modernisation’ as a shorthand and assume that readers will intuitively understand. Colonialism, industrialisation and urbanisation in Western Europe and North America could not have occurred without the secularisation of thinking.

It is important to understand that ideas are the keystone that make life meaningful for all peoples.  Over millennia, the multitude of diverse civilisations created ideas and concepts about the world that made life real. The movements which recent historians call ‘progress’ involve, for many people, both a transformation of ideas and the rejection of the old. An example of the simplest of these new ideas is the creation of private property.  Private property in land for most people was unheard of not so long ago; it was unthought about as a concrete concept. Yet today it is accepted as a given, showing that it is a relatively recent concept.

People across the world, when deciding if they wanted to a capitalist or a socialist world, had to transform their ideas in the process. To this day, many peoples have resisted these ideological movements. Since the advent of the Protestant Reformation, started by Calvin and Luther, peoples and societies have wanted to ‘catch up’, although what this entails is a deeply complex issue I only touch upon here. Ideas and the ability to create new ideas are at the heart of the transformation begun though the Reformation.

One last thought before I end this introduction. The ideas that gave us capitalism will need to be transformed once again if we are to create a sustainable world for future generations. We will have to change our ideas of our relationship to nature and between ourselves if the world is to survive and prosper.

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The European Feudal System

Feudalism and the Christian church had been deeply integrated with one another in the 15th and 16th centuries, providing the governance and framework for social, political, economic and religious aspects of life for all Europeans. This was the system that made sense of people’s lives, providing rules that covered everything from marriage to people’s rights to land, even on how to understand the universe. This system also covered political power: the divine rights of monarchs, and the duties of nobles towards their people. Importantly at this time, economics was regarded as part of theology. Thomas Aquinas’ writing in the 13th century understood economics as a broad discipline covering politics, society ethics and moral philosophy. This was the comprehensive system that was to be slowly torn asunder. By 1600, the breakdown of this existing system was showing, creating incessant European wars and colonial aggression in the wider world.

No one has understood the enormity and totality of these changes better that R H Tawney, one of Britain's finest historians. Writing in 1926, he argued that:

The insistence of medieval thinkers that society is a spiritual organism, not an economic machine, and that economic activity which is one subordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and repressed by reference to the moral ends. so merciless is the tyranny of economic appetites, that a doctrine which confines them to their proper sphere, as the servant not the master of civilisation.... is a permanent element in any sane philosophy.

Ancient societies of every kind, from great historical empires to small acephalous societies, were governed with reference to religious and moral rather than economic ends. But in Europe, societies now broke out of these confines and began prioritising economic activity and making money as the primary goal in life. In so doing they created what Tawney termed a “vast and complex unity”, which has since come to be called capitalism.

Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, when writing about witchcraft and magic in 16th century Europe, also help us to understand the changes that had occurred in Europe. As they argue:

A belief in the reality and efficacy of witchcraft and magic is no longer an integral component of mainstream western culture. When misfortune strikes at us, we do not automatically seek to locate the source of all our ills and ailments in the operation of occult forces.

Religion moved through life's key rhythms: birth, coming of age, marriage and death, defining human relationships with nature and with each other, and likewise with power and wealth. Scientific discoveries, industrialisation and the incessant search for wealth, therefore, created deep personal and social disturbances among these views which threw into question ancient ways of thinking and doing.

Humans require an explanation of why things happen. In the days before natural science took hold of popular consciousness, human misfortune had to be explained. Witchcraft and magic the world over were the ‘common-sense’ of past centuries.

Tawney examined many aspects of European medieval religious thinking, and in particular what was then described as 'avarice', which we now call greed. In ancient Catholic doctrine, greed was a pernicious sin punishable by God. During the Reformation, the concept of avarice was swept away, making greed acceptable in a material world. Tawney's works examined the influence of the great continental reformers Luther and Calvin, who heralded the Protestant Reformation. This struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, over religious theory, consumed Europe for at least two hundred years.

Neither Luther nor Calvin advocated that avarice become a dominant value, but the new Protestant beliefs slowly separated the affairs of the church from those of the state, heralding a new moral space for individuals, and breaking many of the ancient axioms and values which Catholicism had kept in place.

As a consequence, land was nationalised by monarchs, and church privileges were removed. The Catholic Church ceased to be welfare providers for the poor, their role as the arbiters of all knowledge gradually disappeared; the church ceased to provide medical services. The Catholic church lost its key place in the world and it ceased to be a great landowner. The Protestant revolution ended up with the Church as just one more institution in society, instead of the key intuition in people’s lives. Not only did the Catholic church recede in importance, Protestantism opened the way for individualism. The two churches fought each other over the period of this blog. The end success of the Protestants was a true revolution.

Church land came into the monarchs’ possession, to be given to favourites, and land began to be commercialised. Peasant land rights were forcibly removed, and large groups of impoverished peoples spread across the countryside. In the case of the Scottish Highland clearances, sheep replaced people who either died or took a ship across the Atlantic to the Americas. The search for profit from commercialised land came to take precedence over peasant rights. In 1601, in England,  the state began to provide for the poor.

From the 16th century on, the process of loss of peasant rights to common land accompanied the church’s loss of their own land rights. Every village and town today in 21st century Europe can demarcate where peasants used to have land rights to graze their sheep and cattle. These land rights were ancient parts of the feudal order, symbolising the relationship between lord and peasant. Over the course of 350 years these rights were systematically removed as land was privatised, usually by the local lords and knights.

Two consequences arose: landlords were enriched as their land ownership hugely expanded, and peasants were impoverished. Stories of hordes of itinerant peoples were rife throughout these three hundred plus years. This movement of peoples formed the origin of the process of people inhabiting towns in the 19th century. These same circumstances made large numbers of people willing to make the trip across the Atlantic in tiny wooden sailing boats, with the promise of free land on the other side.

As a result, there was widespread discontent in the countryside at the beginning of the 17th century. Common people were acting against the gentry and nobility and had begun to take up arms against ‘Royalists’. The feudal system with its mutual systems of obligations was breaking down. The landed ruling classes carried weapons wherever they went. New dissenting political creeds appeared in the 1640s, such as the Levelers and the Diggers, and similarly new egalitarian religious creeds appeared, including the Baptists and Quakers. It was in these conditions that Cromwell appeared on the political scene, followed by the beheading of the king and the creation of the 'Long Parliament'. Cromwell's settlement was to the great advantage of gentry and merchants. The 1660 Restoration led to parliamentary sovereignty, limited monarchy and an imperialist foreign policy that ensured a world safe for business and trade.

It was at this point that the ‘sacred rights’ of property was established in law, together with the abolition of feudal tenure; those who owned property thus gained greatly in political power.

There was political and economic turmoil across the lands of Europe, as well as intense struggles in terms of ideas about what was the ‘true faith’. Catholics were burnt at the stake, as Protestant kings and queens attempted to ‘purify’ their peoples. In England, the monarchy itself was overthrown, and King Charles 1st was beheaded in the 1640s. Although the monarchy was replaced just eleven years later, its powers had been reduced and passed to the nobles. This was the first attempt in Europe to widen the base of centralised political power, and it was the first move towards democracy as we see it today.

A hundred and fifty years later, when the French King was overthrown in 1789, the British monarchy survived. The British Protestant state had already started down the road towards a capitalist political economy, and the structure of power surrounding the monarch and the ancient landowners had vastly expanded their money-making capabilities. By the time of the French Revolution, the feudal lords had become colonial landowners and investors in the monopoly trading companies. Alongside these new landed gentry had arisen a new trading class, made wealthy through the monopoly companies. They did not, however, obtain political power until 1834 in the case of England; the king of England held tightly to the reigns of political power. The English managed to avoid a revolution, but it was a close shave.

In France, the ancient political bonds of the feudal system had remained in place despite the search for new wealth through slavery and colonisation. But after 1789 and the revolution, a new class with new wealth demanded political power. All of France and much of Europe had dramatically changed by 1815, when Napoleon was finally defeated. The conditions for the creation of capitalism had begun.

In the turmoil throughout these years, the ancient bonds of antiquity between leaders and led, and between church and state, were broken irrevocably. The barriers to economic advancement were taken down, individual advancement became acceptable, and the taking of interest on loans became commonplace. How do we now assess and understand such turmoil?

The transformations of the entire period over 450 years provided the circumstances for new knowledge. Learned books were translated from Arabic. National societies with royal approval for the advancement of secular learning appeared in London and Paris. Secular knowledge had become something to be celebrated.

As war became endemic, governments had to find new methods of constantly raising funds to wage them, as these were days before standing armies. Even at the battle of Waterloo, much celebrated by the British, most of the soldiers were not British but a motley mix of men from across Europe. Finding recruits to fight, and the money to pay for them, was a top priority for governments. These two impulses, warlike and monetary, were brought together through monopoly companies in the 1600s.

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Suggested Reading

The Breakup of the Feudal System:

R.H Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. This covers a time in history which has fascinated historians, journalists, film makers, playwrights and novelists over a very long time. Shakespeare’s plays for example provide insights into this turbulent period. The Reformation and subsequent religious struggles have focused men and women clerics ever since.

Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, writing about Witchcraft and Magic in the 16th century of Europe. (I have emphasised witchcraft and magic because we are now so far away from what was once the common understanding of the world. See also the classic social anthropology text by Evans Pritchard: Witchcraft and Magic among the Azande).

There is of course a wide range of books on this theme and period. See for instance:

Christopher Hill: The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Idea During the English Revolution, Penguin 1975

Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism, Monthly Review Press 1989

E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin Modern Classics 2013

Imperial nations will always want 'justification'. In British history there are:

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Strahan & Cadell 1776

Thomas Macauley: 1849 A History of England, Crosby, Nichols, Lee and Company 1860

Arnold Toynbee: A Study of History, Oxford University Press 1987

Each book covers a vast panorama of history. All were about the how major cultures arose, grew, and decayed. Classical antiquity was always considered as Greek and Roman, not Arab. Each author was hugely popular and a scion of the ruling classes of England at their time. There have always been a wide range of historians who have disputed the central imperial thesis of the above authors. In 1838 William Howitt's Civilisation and Christianity provides detailed analysis of colonisations. He was followed by a wide range of excellent historians, which I will list elsewhere. In the 21st century there are a wide range of counter imperial arguments, which come from new historians from India, through a Marxist lens and much else besides:

Niall Ferguson: Empire; How Britain Made the Modern World, Penguin 2018

Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000, William Collins 2017

Brendan Simms: The Struggle for Supremacy: 1453 to the Present, Penguin 2013

David Scott Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power, William Collins 2013

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