7. What do Charlemagne and King Zwelithini have in common?
Feudalism
On Christmas Day in the year 800 CE, Charlemagne, the king of the Franks and the Lombards, and father of at least eighteen children, was crowned ‘Emperor of the Romans’ by Pope Leo III at Old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Charlemagne thereby united most of Western Europe under his rule, a vast area home to between 10 and 20 million people.1 Almost all of these people lived in the countryside.
The reason for this was that, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, Western Europe was characterised by conflict, population decline and de-urbanisation (the movement of people from the cities to rural areas). The Romans, of course, were known for their prosperous cities. A visitor to Rome today can still see the impressive ancient architecture of the Palatine Hill, the Forum, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon. But there were many other even more impressive architectural wonders built across the Roman Empire, which suggest an empire of opulent cities: the Library of Celsus in Ephesus (Selçuk), Turkey, the Aqueduct of Segovia in Spain, the Temple of Baalbek in Lebanon, Diocletian’s Palace in Croatia, and the Arena of Nîmes in France.
But these ancient Roman cities were unlike cities today in one important aspect. Most cities in the ancient world had a single purpose: to benefit a small elite. Power was attained not through producing things, but through politics and warfare. No one remembers the famous innovators or entrepreneurs of ancient Rome, but we all know the famous emperors and generals – people like Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
This meant that the cities of the ancient world maintained a parasitic relationship with farmers; they extracted the surplus from the farms but gave little in return. That is why most farm workers were slaves, usually people captured through conquest, even in ‘democratic’ Greece. The Roman economy depended, to a large extent, on acquiring new territories that would supply food or slave and bonded labour to sustain its affluent cities and large armies. The wealth of a few depended on the unfreedom of many.
Why the Roman Empire collapsed remains the subject of much debate. It was the historian William McNeill, in his 1976 book Plagues and Peoples, who suggested that one important factor could be the Plague of Cyprian around 250 CE. This plague killed about half the population of the Roman Empire.2 Pandemics like these, McNeill argues, left the empire with a population too small to support its large military and state bureaucracy. The parasitic nature of the cities had become too heavy a burden on the dwindling population of farmers and slaves in the countryside.
The fall of Rome marks the start of the Middle Ages, which lasted from about the fifth to the fifteenth centuries.3 In Europe this period was characterised by feudalism, a system structured around the relationship between land and labour. The economic historian Marc Bloch identified two types of relationship in the context of feudalism.4 The first was between the lord and the vassal. Charlemagne, as king, had many vassals who managed his vast lands. In exchange for the land (also known as a fief), they were required to serve as knights in his armies. The second relationship was between the vassals (knights) and their serfs. The serfs worked the land of the vassal in exchange for physical protection.
What should be clear is that the feudal economy was almost entirely based on agriculture. The reason is quite simple: farming then was far less productive than it is today. In the ancient and feudal world, two families in agriculture could, if things went well, support one family in non-agriculture. That meant that about 70 per cent of all people who worked had to do so in agriculture to sustain those who did not, such as soldiers or craftsmen. Things today are very different. Let’s take the largest economy in our time and also the largest exporter of food: the United States. Although around 2.6 million Americans work in agriculture, this accounts for only 1.3 per cent of the total employed US population. Farmers are vastly more productive today than they were in the past.5
One reason for this low level of agricultural productivity was that the serfs of feudal Europe had almost no incentive to produce large surpluses or invent new techniques that would allow them to do so. Any surplus would simply be extracted by the vassal or his king. And even if there was an incentive to produce more, there were limited means to do so: because they did not own the land they worked on, they could not use it as collateral to obtain loans to reinvest in capital equipment such as irrigation or acquire more land to achieve economies of scale.
Do we have any evidence that such land owernship arrangements actually retarded economic development? A 2021 paper by three economic historians exploits the Dissolution of the English Monasteries after 1535 to do just that.6 Before the Reformation, a topic we discuss in Chapter 13, English monastic lands could not be sold. The Dissolution opened up a market for formerly monastic lands, allowing them to be sold and worked more effectively compared to nonmonastic lands, where feudal tenure persisted until the twentieth century. The authors show that parishes affected by the Dissolution subsequently ‘had more innovation and higher yield in agriculture, a greater share of the population working outside of agriculture, and ultimately higher levels of industrialisation’.7 Feudal farming institutions really did limit farmers’ incentives and ability to boost productivitity.
It is true that not all production was limited to the countryside in feudal Europe. Villages and towns, especially after the twelfth century, did produce an increasing array of manufactured goods. These producers were often organised into guilds. A guild was an association of skilled artisans that specialised in the production of a specific good, such as weavers, jewellers and blacksmiths. Sometimes guilds in a number of towns would form a long-distance trading association. The most famous of these was the Hanseatic League, which at its height in the fourteenth century stretched from the Netherlands in the west to Russia in the east and achieved a monopoly over maritime trade in the Baltic Sea.
The wonderfully preserved Market Square of Brussels gives us a glimpse today into the assortment of guilds at the time: walk along its western side, and you will pass the House of the Corporation of Bakers, the House of the Corporation of Greasers, the House of the Corporation of Carpenters, the House of the Oath of Archers, the House of the Corporation of Boatmen and the House of the Corporation of Haberdashers.8 But despite the rich decorations of their houses, guilds were based on poor economics. Guilds would limit new entrants into the market, thus reducing competition and ensuring high prices for their goods. Apprentices often had to spend years learning from a master craftsman. The reason for this, the guilds maintained, was to ensure a high-quality product, but it came, much as in agriculture, at the cost of new innovations.9
We might think that this feudal world is far removed from our own setting, but for a third of South Africans it would sound very familiar. That is because these South Africans still live in areas that have very similar feudal institutions. The Charlemagne of our era is the king of the Zulu, an ethnic group of between 10 and 12 million people.
The Zulu monarch – Misuzulu Zulu, appointed on 7 May 2021 after the death of his father, Goodwill Zwelithini, who reigned from 1971 to 2021 – is the sole trustee of the Ingonyama Trust, a corporate entity which owns 30 per cent of the land in KwaZulu-Natal, one of South Africa’s nine provinces. Much as in the time of Charlemagne, the Zulu king has vassals – traditional leaders or chiefs – who lease land to Zulu household heads, many of whom are subsistence farmers. Although there are strong customary laws that protect the rights of these Zulu households, these are usage and not ownership rights, which means that the land cannot be used as collateral for loans. The economic outcomes in Zululand are thus not very different from those in feudal Europe: farmers have little incentive to expand production, acquire neighbouring farms or invest in capital equipment that can make them more productive.
Feudalism is a system that discourages innovation and improvement. Western Europeans during the Middle Ages would only see a sustained improvement in their living standards when they adopted a new attitude towards economic life.
The Carolingian empire, as it would later become known, would only last until 888, when it split owing to internal rivalries and external threats.↩︎
W. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press, 1976).↩︎
The first 600 years, up to 1000 CE, are sometimes called the Dark Ages.↩︎
M. Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).↩︎
Even in 1840, 70 per cent of all employees in the USA worked in agriculture.↩︎
Heldring, Leander, James A. Robinson, and Sebastian Vollmer. "The long-run impact of the dissolution of the English monasteries." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 4 (2021): 2093-2145.↩︎
Ibid, p. 2093.↩︎
A haberdasher is a seller of small articles for sewing, dressmaking and knitting, such as buttons or ribbons.↩︎
S. Ogilvie, The economics of guilds, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28 (4), 2014, 169–92.↩︎