Book that covers the modern mainstream attack on historical slavery-to-serfdom narratives
The slavery-to-serfdom narrative believed by Weber, Hegel, Savigny, Bucher, and Marx was based on legal texts, not backed by historical evidence
High medieval scholars began to believe in feudalism after discovering that the Roman Corpus iuris civilis supported absolute "dominus" ownership rather than lord-vassal feudal/fief "feudorum" ownership
Modern common law still governed by "Feudal Calculus" according to Bernard Rudden, while modern civil law consciously supports "dominus" roman ownership
Civil law maintained feudalism through duplex dominium, dividing dominus rights into dominium utile (for vassals) and dominium directum (for lords)
The physiocrats protested duplex dominium, favoring instead absolute classical dominus rights
After Napoleon's civil code and its abolution of "la feudalite" or fiefdom, owners obtained dominus authority over inanimate property, but not people (unlike in classical rome)
"Many or most real property rights, in many or most human societies, to say it again, have been granted out by superiors to inferiors."
Meanwhile the distinction between slave and serf has been difficult for historians to define, e.g. the Protestant jurist, Pufendorf, defined effectively ALL workers as "servus" ("servus" is the latin term for "slave", but is the etymological root of the word "serf")
According to author, the transition from slavery to serfdom "is a fact; but it is a fact about general agrariansociology, not about some particular age of change in Western socioeconomic history, whether ancient or medieval."
Ie late antiquity is not a specific period where slave economy collapsed and gave way to serfdom
Chris Wickham, a Marxist historian, argues that late antique elites were drawn from the city to the countryside, civitas to villa, polis to imperium, etc.
Paulo Grossi argues the "juridical experience" of property law shifted to a "more rural orientation"
Author argues that this transition was not a "crisis of a classical slave economy" but instead a crisis of Aristotelian "zoon politikon" + the "triumph of Christianity"
Prior to Feudalism, at the peak of the Roman Empire, urban elites were privileged over "rustics" who were considered more backwards. But the "later Empire experienced a measure of deurbanization" due to war (e.g. barbarians), disease, and climate change (way from "Roman Climate Optimum")
"city culture of the classical period faded in importance after the third century... It became acceptable to live primarily as a countryside lord in a way that had not been the case before."
Archeologists have documented how the villa, the countryside house owned by urban elites, expanded into the medieval village during this period of late antiquity as they added churches and divided rooms
Ancient urban elitism also evidenced in early christianity, where "pagan" literally meant "country-dweller" or "worshippers of countryside gods"
Shift to the countryside may have influenced property law: Ernst Levy argues that the classical Roman distinction between ownership and possession became blurred. "These centuries began to use “possession” for what would once have been carefully specified as dominium." <- Hegel describes possession as the "positive aspect" (as opposed to negative or infinite aspect) of ownership around ss.54 of Philosophy of Right: Introduction