Feudalism as a Contested Concept in Historical Political Economy

This post is cross-posted at the How the World Became Rich

A goal of Historical Political Economy (HPE) is to build connections between social scientists and historians. But this laudable goal is, in fact, very hard to realize. Interdisciplinary scholarship has become ever more challenging. Academic specialization does not reward it and the intensive methods training required for mastering new techniques in economics or quantitative social science in general crowd out reading in other fields or disciplines.

Consider one of my favorite papers in historical political economy: “The Feudal Revolution and Europe’s Rise: Political Divergence of the Christian West and the Muslim World before 1500 CE” published in the American Political Science Review in 2013 by Lisa Blaydes and Eric Chaney.

Blaydes and Chaney compile data on ruler duration in Europe and the Middle East. Ruler duration — how long a king or queen reigned for — is a basic measure of political stability. The findings of the paper are straightforward:

“First, ruler duration in Western Europe statistically diverged from duration in the Islamic world during the medieval period. Second, this divergence was driven, in part, by a reduced probability of monarchical overthrow in Western Europe”.

Figure one from their paper demonstrates their main results. No fancy econometrics are needed: it is a simple and powerful empirical finding. Until sometime in the 10th century, rulers in the Islamic Middle East and Western Europe ruled for similarly short reigns. However, after that point ruler duration diverged. Rulers in Western Europe enjoyed longer and more stable periods of rule.

In other words, there was a divergence in political outcomes long before the start of the economic divergence between Western Europe and the Middle Age.

How do Blaydes and Chaney explain this divergence? Their answer is the “Feudal Revolution”. They provide a potted history of the rise of feudalism":

“ . . . with the collapse of the western Roman Empire. The fiscal position of the Germanic successor states to the Roman Empire tended to be weak. Unable to fund military expenditure through tax receipts, European rulers sought other avenues for raising armies. The innovations introduced by Charlemagne marked a pivotal change. Lacking the capacity to introduce a system of tax collection, Charlemagne required landholders to