Feudalism in History by Rushton CoulbornReview by: Kenneth M. SettonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Oct., 1956), pp. 95-97Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1848516 .

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Coulborn: Feudalism in History 95 The most significant feature of English history-at least as thus far written-

has been the development of the constitution, the Curia Regis with its many off- shoots, the common law with its gathered decisions, and parliament with its pow- ers slowly won. In those subjects one can discern order and symmetry, beauty, and something like poetry. Sir Winston has been ably advised and assisted by students of the constitution and has avoided those hidden pitfalls that throw many a horse and rider. Cautiously he has moved over dangerous ground and has shown institutions in operation at different times, not overlooking the economic and social factors involved. He has failed, however, to put forward any great generalizations about the growth of the constitution, to quicken our pulses. Who indeed among living men could draw that bow? Yet much investigation has taken place on the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, if less on the fifteenth, and the time has nearly come for someone of sweeping views and dar- ing imagination, preferably someone who has soiled his hands with rolls and manuscripts. The sweeping views of the amateur are not always helpful. But Sir Winston has extracted the meaning from many documents; he is a man of imagi- nation in affairs, and of an experience granted to few historians. It is encouraging that he is always looking ahead to the Stuart period and it is possible that he will have more philosophy to offer there. This volume is but an introduction. In later volumes he will be treading the more solid ground of modern history. In any case, we must not ask too much of the greatest man of action of his time. Let us be grateful that such a man is bestowing thought on the course of English history and that in this volume he has already set down many incisive comments upon the rulers of men and their ways.

New Haven, Connecticut WALLACE NOTESTEIN

FEUDALISM IN HISTORY. Edited by Rushton Coulborn. (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press. 1956. Pp. xiv, 439. $8.50.)

THE book under review is the result of a conference on feudalism held at Princeton University on October 3I and November i, I950, under the general sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. One of the purposes of the book is to explore "uniformities in history," of which feudalism is thought to be one. A brief introductory essay on the "idea of feudalism" by Joseph R. Strayer and Rushton Coulborn is called Part I, being followed by a series of eight chapters on the alleged feudalism of various times and places (Part II), with a final summation of the more important points made in these chapters and a comparative study of feudalism by Coulborn (Part III). The book falls into two quite different halves. The contributors to the first half (Part II) have given rather factual accounts of their assigned subjects: western Europe by J. R. Strayer, Japan during the Shogunate (E. 0. Reischauer), China under the Chou and after the Han dynasty (Derk Bodde), ancient Mesopotamia and Iran (B. C. Brundage), ancient Egypt following the sixth and the twentieth dynasties

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96 Reviews of Books (W. F. Edgerton), India (Daniel Thorner), the Byzantine empire (E. H. Kan- torowicz), and Russia (Marc Szeftel). These chapters are all valuable syntheses of their subjects, rather rigorously historical in presentation. Their authors, unlike Coulborn, give no evidence of having been persistent readers of Darwin, Spencer, W. G. Sumner, and the modern anthropologists and sociologists.

Mr. Coulborn is a historical sociologist, well read in anthropology. His half of the book (Part III) traces the course of certain societies, chiefly the eight dealt with in Part II, from empilre into the political and social disunion of feudalism, thence into periods of "nationalist" rivalries and finally into the reunion of empire. Coulborn has worked hard to show the occurrence of "uniformities" in the rise and fall of these societies; with less effort he could have shown the lack of uni- formity.

If your definition of feudalism is sufficiently broad for it to lose the char- acteristic content of western European feudalism (fiefs, aids, relief, incidents, etc.), you can acknowledge the existence of feudalism in Japan, but even here you should contrast, say, the social seclusion of women in Japanese society with their conspicuous roles in European society. Who could imagine the courts of love and the dawn songs of the ProvenSal poets in Japan? But suppose such queries are unimportant or even irrelevant. The authors of Part II have still found little feudalism in their assigned areas. Bodde writes that the political aspects of feudalism, the importance of which is emphasized in the introductory essay by Strayer and Coulborn, "are found to be largely or totally absent under most of [the] major dynasties [in China]" (pp. 49-50). Brundage informs the reader that he "will not find a definitive judgment as to whether feudalism ever existed in the ancient Near East in anything approximating its full development in medieval Europe" (p. 93). To Edgerton "it seems sure that Egyptologists who have applied the term 'feudal' to certain periods of Egyptian history have not had in mind any such substantive concept of feudalism [as that in the introductory essay]," and that Egyptian institutions "were not truly feudal" (p. I20). (The consideration of Mesopotamian and Egyptian feudalisms are confined to antiquity: medieval Islam is not considered in the book; otherwise some profitable attention might have been given to the development of the futz7wah by the caliph an- Nasir [ii80-i225], which for a while looked a little like an order of chivalry.) Concerning India, Thorner says, "using feudalism, then, in the sense of a method of government . . . we have to conclude that neither the Rajput states nor the Muslim regimes of northern India were feudal" (p. I50).

Such were the discouraging judgments facing Coulborn when he gathered in his colleagues' chapters and studied them as the background for his comparison of feudalisms. Coulborn does not write with the vigor of Spencer or the lucidity of Sir Arthur Keith, but his genuine love of ideas has carried the reviewer through more than two hundred pages of (somewhat wordy) abstraction with much meandering back and forth through time and space. Coulborn begins with Sumner's famous contrast between in-groups and out-groups (pp. I9I-92, quot-

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Griewank: Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff 97 ing Sumner's Folkways, 3d ed., Boston, I940, pp. I2-I3), which remains basic to various aspects of his treatment of feudalism, much as in another realm, for example, Sir Arthur Keith introduced his theory of evolution with precisely the same text (A New Theory of Human Evolution, New York, 1949, pp. I2-13). Coulborn's essay contains many penetrating observations, but there are certainly historians who will be rendered uneasy by the statement that "a fief . . . is an in- group whose purpose is defence against out-groups" (pp. 289-90). It would be easy to quote other statements that some historians would want to qualify to the point of gainsaying.

This book is a broad, bold attempt to deal with the general idea, but not the particular institutions, of feudalism. Feudalism is a modern concept, something more than a century and a half old; there is nothing sacred about the term; it is quite proper to take it apart and put the pieces together in new patterns. This is what Coulborn has tried to do. Is feudalism a recurrent phenomenon in history? Only in a vague, unnegotiable sort of way. William Crooke, an authority on northern India, is quoted by Thorner (pp. I40-4I) in protest against the super- ficial comparison of the tribal institutions of the Rajputs with European feudal- ism: "It is of little service to compare two systems of which only the nucleus is common to both, and to place side by side institutions which present only a factitious similitude, because the social development of each has progressed on different lines."

This criticism is relevant to the present book. It is far easier to compare and contrast, say, the work of the early Chinese alchemists with medieval Westerners' efforts to make gold. Despite the different motives of the two groups (Chinese alchemy having longevity for its main purpose), the data are specific, the prob- lem manageable. The comparison of a variety of feudalisms is a much more difficult undertaking, which Coulborn has faced up to with honesty and courage.

University of Pennsylvania KENNETH M. SETTON

DER NEUZEITLICHE REVOLUTIONSBEGRIFF: ENTSTEHUNG UND ENTWICKLUNG. By Karl Griewank. (Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nach- folger. I955. PP. xv, 327. DM I3.60.)

PROFESSOR Karl Griewank's death in I953 found his study of the concept of revolution in modern European history incomplete. Fortunately his pupil and assistant, Frau Dr. Ingeborg Horn, has been able by the exercise of great editorial skill to piece together the Nachlass into a sound whole, which has none of the unevenness, the obvious lacunae, so often found in posthumous works. No doubt Griewank, had he lived, would have expanded his treatment here and there, and notably for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; but even on Marx and Lenin he has left a clear final word.

This is a historian's book; it is not a sociology of revolution, not a study of revolution from the point of view still best labeled "philosophy of history." It is

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