An anonymous reader responds to my short discussion of Patrick Geary's treatment of the late Roman Empire to recommend Samuel Dill's treatment of this process 100 years ago in Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire and Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age, books written in 1898 and 1926 respectively. In the anonymous …
Origins of feudalism in the West
In the grand historical march postulated by historical materialism, ancient slavery and medieval feudalism preceded capitalism as distinct systems of domination and exploitation (e.g. Perry Anderson's Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism). In each social order small elites captured great wealth from the mass of producers, whether enslaved farmers and artisans in the ancient (Roman) world or …
M I Finley on the dynamics of the Roman Empire
One of the books I found influential in graduate school in philosophy was M. I. Finley's The Ancient Economy, which appeared in 1973. Finley's book sought to explain important parts of the Roman world by piecing together the best knowledge available about the economic relations that defined its socioeconomic foundation. And the book proposes to consider …
Continue reading "M I Finley on the dynamics of the Roman Empire"
Eurasia Project on Population and Family History
The Eurasia Project on Population and Family History represents an innovative and important genre of comparative historical research. Lead scholars in this project include James Lee, Cameron Campbell, Tommy Bengtsson, Norika Tsuya, Satomi Kurosu, and George Alter, as well as many others. The first two volumes of research from the project, Life under Pressure: Mortality and …
Continue reading "Eurasia Project on Population and Family History"
The West and the East
Ian Morris has written a pair of books that are intended to contribute to a particularly important set of disagreements in comparative economic history: what accounts for the advantage in economic development that seems to be enjoyed by Western Europe at various points in history? The key arguments are presented in Why the West Rules--for …
Merchant capital
Karl Marx was very interested in capital -- an abstract concept referring to society's wealth. And he was interested in the persons who owned and controlled capital -- the capitalists. But the primary focus of his lifelong analysis was upon one particular species of capital, what he referred to as "industrial capital." This is the form …
A new history of China
James Lee and Byong-Ho Lee have created a remarkable new course on Coursera titled "A New History for a New China, 1700-2000: New Data and New Methods, Part 1". This production is a genuinely important contribution to Chinese history. The course is not designed as an up-to-date summary of the history of early modern China, …
Michael Mann on power
In 1986 Michael Mann began a strikingly ambitious project -- to give a theoretical and historical account of the history of power in human history. This effort came to closure in the past few months with the publication of volume 3 (The Sources of Social Power: Volume 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945) and volume …
Historians of Past and Present
by Stephen Frederick Godfrey Farthing, oil on canvas, 1999 image: "Historians of Past and Present," National Portrait Gallery, London A recent article on J. H. Elliott in the New York Review of Books includes a very striking portrait of the founders of the British history journal, Past and Present. The painting includes Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Lawrence Stone, …
Greenblatt on civilization
Steven Greenblatt's recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is an ambitious widening of Greenblatt's intellectual palette. The title of the book refers to one of the central ideas in the metaphysics of Epicurus: the idea that atoms sometimes deviate from their straight courses, permitting collisions. This fact, according to Epicurus, is the only possible …
Understanding Society 