Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World

8. THE ODDITY OF EUROPE

Though the identikit presented in this book is not a picture of any one society, it clearly fits some societies better than others. It is largely based on the Old World civilizations from about 600 BC onwards, and it probably has a medieval bias. This should not prevent it from being of general assistance, in so far as it is of any assistance at all; but two sets of societies are so deviant that they are better treated as exceptions to, rather than as variations upon, the picture presented.

The first is that of pre-Columbian America. The indigenous civilizations of the New World need an identikit of their own because they were erected on an extraordinarily slender foundation. For practical purposes all were stone-age cultures. Metals were only used for ornaments, or so at least in Mesoamerica; the Incas had begun to make use of bronze for military and productive purposes too, but here as thee the art of smelting iron was unknown. Moreover, the region was devoid of draught animals and riding animals, while pack animals were available only in Peru (in the form of llamas).Wheeled transport was absent too, though wheel-barrows and carts driven by coolies would have been a major advantage; the potter’s wheel was similarly absent, the wheel being known only as a toy. Practically all energy had to be supplied by humans unaided by mechanical devices. The tropical lowlands of Mesoamerica from which the Olmecs and the Mayas emerged were largely exploited through shifting slash-andburn agriculture, a primitive mode of production which, though suitable for the ecology in question, does not normally lend itself to the creation of complex societies. In fact, here as in the Old World, agriculture seems to have been particularly productive in areas where no forests had to be felled for sowing to be tried out, but where water was nonetheless in abundant supply, that is on raised fields in marshy river basins (by Aztec times in open lakes as well), corresponding to the irrigated river valleys of ancient Iraq, Egypt and India. but though intensive agriculture of this kind undoubtedly constituted the economic basis of early American civilization (and played a major role in the Aztec economy too), the tropical forest (and eventually also the desert) placed a limit on expansion, slash-and-burn agriculture yielding low returns. Finally, though the Olmecs developed a hieroglyphic script which became common property in Mesoamerica, literacy was extremely restricted and the Incas had not script at all, making do with knots as mnemonic aids. The transmission of information was thus overwhelmingly oral. The civilizations of Mesoamerica remained archaic, fragile and haunted until they fell, allaying their fears through endless human sacrifice (itself an archaic feature); and though those of Peru were more secure, all had more in common with the societies of the ancient Near East than with the sixteenth-century Spaniards who overran them.

Europe, too, needs an identikit of its own, at least from the sixteenth century onwards. The European deviation from the pre-industrial pattern is a development of vital importance for the world today and at the same time one which Western students rarely perceive as odd at all, either because they take it for granted or because they regard it as too objectionable in moral terms to be a suitable topic for historical analysis (readers in the second category should skip the rest of the chapter.) But whatever its moral value, odd it clearly is.

There is nothing surprising about the fact that it was a Eurasian civilization which rose to world dominance.The Eurasian continent (including Africa to the north of the Sahara) had advantages over other parts of the earth from the moment food production started. It was the world’s largest landmass and had a bigger human population than any other continent. It was also ecologically very diverse and better provided with plants and animals suitable for domestication. Above all, it had the large herbivores capable of providing transport and heavy labour (horses, cattle, camels) which were conspicuously missing not only from pre-Columbian America, the llama apart, but also from the rest of the world, in some cases because they had never been present there, in other cases because early human colonists had hunted them to extinction. Unlike the Americas and Africa, moreover, Eurasia is broader from east to west than from north to south, a seemingly trivial fact of enormous consequence in that domesticated plants and animals spread more easily to the east and west, where they remain within the same climatic zone, than to the north and south, where they have to cross climatic zones. Much the same was true of the humans who followed in their wake, as traders or conquerors, spreading new technologies, ideas and diseases (and thus immunity to them). In the Americas, where the problem of the north-south axis was compounded by the extreme narrowness of the land connecting the two halves of the continent, the llama still had not reached Mexico when the Spanish conquerors arrived in the sixteenth century, just as Maya writing still had not reached the Incas, and the two civilizations do not seem to have known about each other’s existence, close though they were by Eurasian standards. By contrast, plants, animals, people, know-how, and ideas all spread with relative ease from one end of Eurasia to the other, and the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Indians and Chinese were already aware of each other’s existence by the first century AD, though they still knew little or nothing about sub-Saharan Africa or Siberia. The constant interaction in Eurasia generated new developments which kept driving the competition between different centres into a higher gear.

But if the dominance of Eurasia is unproblematic, the fact that it was in Europe rather than one of the Asian civilizations that modernity evolved is certainly in need of explanation. Since it was a development which landed the West in a comfortable position, Westerners tend to think of it with pride, as a success story for which they deserve credit. But in fact, neither they nor anyone else deserve credit (or debit) for it, for it did not come about by a conscious effort to achieve it. Europe did not set out to create industrial capitalism, for the obvious reason that nobody had any idea, until the nineteenth century, that there was or could be such a thing, let alone what its consequences would be for the world at large. Rather, industrial capitalism evolved in Europe in the same way that agriculture evolved among various prehistoric populations and that the state evolved among the Sumerians, i.e. as an unforeseen byproduct of countless decisions about other things. In all three cases the byproduct was a fateful one for human history, with consequences so enormous that it is only really thousands of years later than we can appreciate their full extent in the case of the first two, while most of the consequences remain to be seen in the case of the third. It does not seem very useful to analyse such phenomena in terms of success or failure, be it for the inventors or mankind at large. But for those who like these categories, the best way to think of all three is as failures, in the same sense that our island experiment in chapter 1 was a failure: all we wanted back on that island was to defend ourselves, but the way we set about it caused us to lose the society that we wished to preserve. Similarly, the aim of Europe was to succeed by the standards of the day, meaning those of the pre-industrial world; but in its attempts to do so, it turned into something else.

Medieval Europe fits the pre-industrial pattern well enough. Here as elsewhere we have a far-flung ruling elite, partly military and partly religious, a cosmopolitan high culture (Christianity plus what remained of the classics), and a myriad of peasant communities characterized by the familiar absence of economic, political and cultural integration. Medieval Europe was backward in comparison with medieval China, India or the Islamic world, but it was not visibly different in kind. Of course it had its peculiar features, but so did other civilizations, and it is only in retrospect that medieval Europe can be seen to have contained an unusual potential. In fact, post- Reformation Europe fits the pattern too at first sight, the only difference being that by now the backwardness had disappeared.To a historian specializing in the non-European world there is something puzzling about the excitement with which European historians hail the arrival of cities, trade, regular taxation, standing armies, legal codes, bureaucracies, absolutist kings and other commonplace appurtenances of civilized societies as if they were unique and selfevident stepping stones to modernity: to the non-European historian they simply indicate that Europe had finally joined the club. But the excitement is justified. As the institutions of medieval Europe were dismantled, they gave way, not to a sophisticated pre-industrial civilization of the traditional type, but rather to territorial states with vernacular cultures, colonial expansion, capitalist economies and modes of thought, both scientific and other, which we recognize as our own. Europe had not joined the club. As a traditional society it was a failure long before it capped its deviant development by its invention of industry.

Why so? This question underlies a great deal of research on European and non-European history alike, the key problem being the direction in which pre-industrial society in general was going: what was the evolutionary trend? How and why did Europe diverge from it? Indeed, to what extent did it diverge as opposed to merely take the lead? As might be expected, there are no simple or generally accepted answers to these questions, but a considerable amount of work has been done on them in recent years so that provisional answers could be said to be available. I shall devote the rest of this chapter to sketching them out, begging the reader’s indulgence for what will necessarily be oversimplification of a fairly extreme kind.

THE LAND

Europe is that part of the world which became a cultural unit thanks to the Germanic invasions of the Roman empire.The Roman empire lost its western part to the invaders in the fifth century AD; and all the northern barbarians subsequently pledged their loyalties to the vanquished civilization (that is Christianity and classical culture) in so far as they had not done so already. The result was Christian Europe, a cultural unit stretching from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia.

At first sight, the unit seemed unpromising in ecological terms. ‘Since temperateness of climate is destroyed by the excessive cold, the land produces neither wine nor oil’, a Sicilian Greek of the first century BC observed with reference to Gaul; ‘they cultivate no olives and produce no wine, except to a very slight extent and of very bad quality since the climate is mostly harsh’, a third-century Greek from Asia Minor echoed with reference to barbarians along the Danube. In fact, both Gaul and the banks of the Danube were to produce plenty of wine in due course, and a more appropriate contrast would have been between Europe and Egypt. No part of Europe possessed the high fertility of alluvial river valleys such as those of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Indus, Ganges, Yangtze or Mekong. Egypt is assumed to have had a population density of about 725 persons per square mile in the first century BC, but in the sixteenth century AD there were only about ninety-five persons per square mile in Holland, the most densely populated part of Europe.

However, Europe had its compensations. In the first place, it was fed by rain, not by irrigation, meaning that agriculture was far less labour intensive and also far less vulnerable to natural or political disasters than the above-mentioned river valleys.The invention of the heavy plough (possibly in the seventh century AD, the dissemination taking place between the eighth and the eleventh) arguably made the soil of inland Europe the most fertile in the world in relation to labour input, if not in any other terms.

In the second place, the agricultural land was not surrounded by or dotted with desert, tropical forest or (a few exceptions apart) forbidding mountains so that Europe lacked ecological niches for nomadic pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, except in the extreme north; and the Eskimos, Samoyeds and other pastoralists and hunters of the polar circle were not much of a presence, least of all a military one. In this respect Europe was unique: no other part of the world was so uniformly given over to a fixed-field agriculture (as opposed to slash-and-burn agriculture or pastoralism), so uniformly amenable to government control and, once the invasions were over, so lacking in internal barbarians. Its complexity of territory none-the-less made it difficult for a single ruler to dominate (though in this respect it is hard to say whether it was unique).

In the third place, it was well protected against external barbarians. Its own supply of northern barbarians being limited, it was vulnerable only on the eastern frontier where it formed the tail-end of the Central Asian steppe. Periodic invasions by Huns, Avars, Magyars, Cumans and Mongols did retard the development of eastern Europe, but barely affected western Europe; and the Mongol incursion of the thirteenth century as the last. China, India and the Middle East all suffered far more disruption at the hands of barbarian invaders.

Finally, the natural resources of Europe were extremely varied (stretching as it does from the polar circle to the Mediterranean), meaning that it had a great potential for internal commerce, while at the same time an ample coastline and a profusion of navigable rivers endowed it with better and cheaper means of communications than any other part of the world with the possible exception of China.This was a fact of major consequence for traders, rulers, and disseminators of ideas alike.The rivers also gave it a source of inanimate energy far greater than that available in arid regions. All in all, Europe must be described as an exceptionally easy environment to manage and exploit.

THE PEOPLE

Like other stateless peoples, the northern barbarians were organized by kinship, but they did not remain so for long.Tribal particularism is said to have played a role in tenth-century Germany, but it soon disappeared; and even the Magyar horsemen lost their tribal organization once there were settle in the Hungarian plain. The fifteenthcentury Swiss may have been ‘cruel and rough people’, but unlike their counterparts in the Middle East, the Daylami mountaineers who served as mercenaries in the medieval Muslim world, there were no more tribal in organization then were their employers. ‘We have Indians at home – Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland’, an English pamphleteer lamented in 1652 (with reference to the newly discovered savages of the Americas), while Polish Jesuits lamented the presence of Indians in Lithuania; but the Lithuanians were merely pagans, and though kinship ties played a greater role on the Celtic fringe than anywhere else in Europe, even the Celts fell short of forming proper hill tribes of the type found in India, southwest China, South-East Asia or the Middle East, let alone Amerindia.

To some extent, this is simply to repeat the point that the ecology of Europe did not favour the survival of internal barbarians. Occasional patches of mountainous, marshy, densely forested or arid land notwithstanding, few part of Europe were so isolated as to enable their inhabitants to retain a socio-political organization radically different from that of mainstream society: constant interaction dictated that even areas which might well have remained tribal under other circumstances adopted non-tribal forms of organization. Thus tribal ties were of no importance in Christian Spain though they had mattered greatly when Spain was under Muslim rule; and the Magyars would undoubtedly have retained their tribal organization far longer than they did if Hungary had remained an outpost of Central Asian rather than European society.

However, given the tribal organization of the barbarian invaders on the one hand and the extreme primitivity of early Europe on the other, the fact that mainstream society itself lost its tribal roots so rapidly is in need of explanation.Why did feudalism rather than tribalism turn out to be the solution to the organization of post-Roman Europe? This is a question to which there is no proper answer yet. It has been argued that the Christian church did its best to undermine kin groups of any size of depth so as to facilitate the flow of wealth away from the family and into the church; but it is difficult to believe that the church would have made much headway in this respect if other factors had not been at work. European kinship was cognatic, that is traced through both make and female links, which may conceivably have increased its flexibility and by the same token diminished its durability. But more importantly, all the major Germanic peoples had ben through extensive migrations by the time the Roman empire collapsed and all proceeded to engage in some five hundred years of chaotic fighting. The migrations must have meant constant reshuffling of tribal groups with accompanying erosion of links between kinship, political power and rights in land; and both the lengthy warfare which preceded the Roman collapse and the chaos which ensued therefrom were more likely to grind away such kinship obligations as remained than to reverse the process. (Constant warfare similarly accelerated the formation of private ties at the expense of tribal ones in Central Asia on the eve of the Mongol conquests.Tribal ties might of course have reasserted themselves in Europe, as they did in Mongolia, if the ecology had been impoverished; but it was snot.) The systematic use of personal ties characteristic of feudalism certainly demonstrates that people could no longer enforce their rights by ganging up with their kinsmen: protection, access to land, social status and political power has all become negotiable assets acquired through agreement with whoever could dispense them rather than by birth into a particular family, lineage or tribe.

It is possible that the Germanic invaders brought the so-called European, or more precisely north-west European, marriage pattern with them, though this is not yet certain. However this may be, northwest Europe was or eventually became unique by its practice of delayed marriage for men and women: both sexes would postpone marriage until their twenties or even thirties, and a considerable proportion would not marry at all. Delayed marriage for men is common wherever neolocal residence prevails, that is, where the couple sets up home on their own instead of living with the parents of the bride or bridegroom: the husband has to be able to support his wife and children. But this usually means that mature men marry teenaged girls (whose contribution is their dowry), not that both partners postpone marriage until they have accumulated enough wealth between them to set up home. Delayed marriage for men was the Roman pattern, and it was practised in Europe too: it lies behind the endless fun poked at old husbands cuckolded by young wives in medieval fabliaux. But for one reason or another women might also, or came to, postpone their marriage on a par with men, at least below the level of the elite, which is where it matters most. The high proportion of celibates in lay European society is likewise unusual. Peasants usually practise universal marriage even when their religion rates celibacy higher than the married state (as do both Buddhism and Christianity) because they rely on children rather than hired hands for their supply of labour.

Whatever the date and origin of the European marriage pattern, it is said to have had two consequences of major importance. First, it enabled Europe to escape the so-called malthusian cycle. Where fertility is uncontrolled, economic advance is nullified by population growth. Increased food supplies enable more children to survive, meaning that still more children will be bred in the next generation, and so on until the population outstrips the resources, whereupon political disorder, famine and epidemics decimate the population on a cataclysmic scale and the cycle starts again. By contract, the European marriage pattern meant that fertility was controlled. The later a woman marries, the fewer children she will bear. (In early modern Europe women marrying in their late twenties rarely produce more than four children, only half of whom were likely to survive.) And a surprisingly large proportion of women never married at all. The comparatively low reproductive rate made for a balance between population and economic resources which was both favourable and sensitive to economic resources which was both favourable an sensitive to economic change, the age at marriage rising and falling in response to the availability of resources. Though Europe did not escape population crises, its numbers rarely multiplied on such a scale that mass extinction was necessary to restore the balance between population and environment, the only Malthusian crisis of major proportions being the Black Death of the fourteenth century.

Secondly, the European marriage pattern made for, or indeed was a manifestation of, individualism. It assumed that children were independent individuals who must leave home to accumulate funds of their own before they can start raising families, as opposed to members of a landholding corporation to which they would offer their labour, from which they would derive their access to land and by which they would be married off as soon as they could procreate, being maintained by it if necessary.Where marriage was delayed, men and women of peasant origin would typically accumulate their funds by working as servants (or so at least from the later Middle Ages onwards). Pre-industrial Europe is unique in that service came to be part of the life-cycle, and the promenance of hired servants in the household is the domestic counterpart to the prominence of feudal retainers in the political sphere: in both cases, recruitment was by contract rather than by kinship.

Since children left home, earned their own money and married late, their choice of spouses tended to escape parental control. Marriage was of the companionate type, based on affection between the spouses rather than family needs; or rather, this type of marriage was surprisingly common. Aristocratic marriage continued to be arranged, and aristocratic brides (and to some extent even grooms) continued to be very young.Yet even at elite level the reconciliation of individual inclination with family needs was perceived as a problem at an early state, love matches versus arranged marriage being a hotly debated issue in the Heptameron attributed to Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) and, more famously, in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Whatever the behaviour of the elite, there can be little doubt that geographical mobility and economic independence diminished (without in any way abolishing) the regimentation of behaviour by kinsmen and neighbours among commoners, both in respect of marriage and otherwise.

Though the European marriage pattern has been documented for the whole of north-western Europe at various times, research into individualism has so far concentrated on England, and detailed comparison with non-European societies still has not begun. It is certain that the blunt contrast between European (let alone English) individualism and non-European holism will have to be modified. The historical record of the great civilizations has scarcely been examined from this point of view, and many of the features discussed under the label of ‘individualism’ in the context of Europe recur under the label of ‘loose structure’ in anthropological discussions of South-East Asia (especially Thailand). However, though future research is likely to present us with a more nuanced picture, it is likely to rebut the contention that the feebleness of European kinship made for an unusual prominence of both individualism and contractual ties.

Once the land and the people had come together, the subsequent development was shaped by the political collapse of Europe on the one hand and the composite nature of European civilization on the other.We may start with the collapse.

FEUDALISM

Barbarian Europe was the outcome of centuries of chaos, and it continued to be in a state of chaos for another five centuries after the western Roman empire had collapsed, interrupted by a brief restoration of minimal order under Charlemagne (768–814). The state being incapable of protecting property or life, people reacted by placing themselves in servile positions vis-à-vis stronger men, offering to perform whatever services they might require in return for sustenance and protection, or in other words membership of their lords’ households or access to land under his control (they were often granted usage of land which they themselves had handed over by way of payment for protection). This process affected everyone from the bottom to the top of society. At the top, however, another factor was at work as well. The ruler would reward his vassals (as retainers performing military service came to be known) with grants of land because there was no money with which to pay either office-holders or soldiers, while at the same time the development of horsemanship meant that the army had to be based on a professional military class rather than conscripted peasants.

So far there is nothing unique about the European development. Peasants commending themselves to powerful landowners on the one hand and grants of land to military or civil governors and soldiers on the other are widely attested in pre-industrial history, both singly and together. The uniqueness of Europe lies in the degree to which the state lost control of the process.

Originally the benefice (or fief, as it eventually came to be known) was revocable or at best granted for life, being supposed to revert to the state on the death of the holder. But it soon became hereditary on the understanding that the vassal’s son would continue to perform the same services; and once it was hereditary, the vassal acquired a strong say in the definition of those services too. Moreover, the vassal would grant some of his land to vassals of his own, who would grant some of their to others (a process known as sub-infeudation); and vassals soon began to obtain benefices from a plurality of lords, thus accelerating the dispersal of power. By the tenth century, European feudalism had wholly ceased to be ‘prebendal’; fiefs were no longer acquired or lost on appointment or to dismissal from a public office or function, the very concept of a public domain having disappeared. The state had dissolved into a welter of overlapping jurisdictions, and all jurisdiction was private, being inherited along with rights in land and conflated with personal ties. This pattern rapidly cam to be regarded as normal, so that systematized versions were exported to England and Palestine: despite the opportunities presented by conquest and the centralizing measures which ensued therefrom, neither William the Conqueror not the Crusaders attempted a return to feudalism in its prebendal form. Nowhere else in the world has such a pattern prevailed (though Japan came close to it in some respects).The result was correspondingly unusual.

State and society

Feudalism amounted to an extreme dispersal of power along vertical lines. No agency had a monopoly on any governmental activity, let alone on the right to use force; taxes had entirely disappeared, the agricultural surplus being siphoned off purely in the form of rent to landlords: even the king was expected to live off his private domains, being simply the top of the social pyramid down which power had been lost.

Yet feudal Europe was not stateless, nor had power been dispersed horizontally, into tribal groups, as it normally is under stateless conditions.A state of a sort existed, but it had little autonomous existence: to a large extent it simply was society. Differently put, society was in an extremely strong position vis-à-vis the state even though it was no longer tribal. It shared with tribal societies the features of being ‘corporate’, that is composed of groups through which the individual acquired well-defined rights and duties; of being passionately defensive of liberty or ‘liberties’, both individual and collective; of being strongly imbued with a sense of reciprocity; and of possessing a leadership of its own as opposed to one imposed by the state. But it owned all of these features to contracts and charters as opposed to kinship on the one hand and to participation in the state as opposed to rejection of it on the other: the barons were representatives of such public power as remained, not tribal leaders sponsoring self-help in opposition thereto; ‘liberties’ were rights negotiated with authorities, not the freedom which prevails here no such authorities exist, and the sense of reciprocity rested on contractual agreement, not on kinship ties. Differently put, state and society formed a continuum, not an oppressive agency versus subjects who tried to escape it.

Now given the ecological potential of Europe, the feudal solution was too primitive to endure, and the recovery began as soon as the Magyar,Viking and Saracen raids were over. But kings had to recover their power from very local and very humble levels; they had to work for their money because they could not tax; and they had to bargain because their subjects were endowed with well-entrenched rights. Hence the outcome of the recovery was states which were deeply rooted in local society and unusually sensitive to developments within it. In other words, capstone government failed to become a European pattern.

Thus the monarch’s inability to tax his subjects (except in emergencies and by their consent) led to the characteristically European conflation of government and estate management. Every king or prince had to nurse his domains, seeing to their productivity, ensuring that they were properly administered, and adding to them by marriage and judicious use of force as best he could. Obviously, this made for a reconstitution of public power along lines very different from those which prevail where immense areas are united by conquest and loosely held together by a single tax-collecting apparatus. Both the king and the magnates whose territories he was in due course to take over governed on an intensive rather than extensive scale, with the result that self-help groups and robber barons were eliminated with a novel thoroughness.

At the same time the quest for revenues and order alike led to the expansion of royal justice, a process whereby the monarch assumed responsibility for dispute settlement throughout his realm (against payment, of course), eventually taking control of the law itself as well. Pioneered by England, this process was to culminate in the formation of judicial machineries coterminous with and controlled by states in place of the normal pre-industrial combination of local courts run by villages, guilds, castes or the like on the one hand and supra-national courts spawned by the religious institution on the other, both or them largely or wholly beyond the monarch’s control. (In China, the state did create an empire-wide system of courts, but it was only meant as a last resort, decent people being assembled to submit their disputes to arbitration by lineage heads, gentry, guilds or the like: ‘as for those who are troublesome, obstinate and quarrelsome, let them be ruined in the law courts – that is the justice that is due to them’, as a Manchu emperor put it.) The monarch’s assumption of responsibility for dispute settlement greatly reinforced the territoriality of the European state, contributing to its definition in terms of an area rather than a dynasty or otherwise. It also facilitated adoption of the idea (to which the rediscovery of Roman law accidentally contributed) of law as the command of the sovereign and thus something which could be made, as opposed to law as a regularity inherent in the cosmos, nature or divinity and this something which could only be found, an idea which in turn enabled kings to use legislation as an instrument of government and social engineering on a scale to which there are few parallels elsewhere. (The ‘legalists’ of ancient China did perceive law as an instrument of government, and their views influenced the Confucians; but the instrument consisted of little but punishments.)

It was similarly the weakness of feudal kings which led to the development in Europe of representative institutions. Here as elsewhere, kings were supposed to seek counsel while leading men were supposed to offer it along with other forms of help: the obligation was commonplace, but the feudal dispersal of power endowed it with a novel force. Given that the king was merely the top of the social pyramid, he had to govern in collaboration with that pyramid: he had no state apparatus distinct from it. Differently put, his barons were his state apparatus, not simply local leaders coexisting with it: they constituted his army and were the source of such taxed as he could hope to collect (under the label of ‘aid’). But they were not simply his dependents either, and he could not coerce any one of them without the assistance of the rest. Hence he had no choice but to govern by obtaining their agreement. As feudal society stabilized, gatherings of vassals gave way to assemblies of the estates (that is representatives of the functional orders) and parliaments of other kinds in response to royal efforts to broaden the basis of consent: he could not develop his state apparatus on top without drawing in further social groups underneath.The maxim ‘what touches all must be approved by all’ is of Roman origin, but the use to which it was put in medieval Europe was utterly new, and it enabled kings and subjects to engage in public negotiations in accordance with formal rules, as opposed to private bargaining behind the scene, while at the same time it increased the local anchorage of the state.

Though most parliaments were to wither away in the age of absolutism, many survived, be it at a provincial or (as in England, Sweden, Hungary and Poland) a ‘general’ level, and none was forgotten.When the French state found itself on the verge of bankruptcy in 1789 it was forced by the nobility to convoke the Estates General again, or in other words to consult its own subjects, an incredible reaction on the part of nobility and state alike from a non-European point of view; and other developments having meanwhile undermined the traditional order, the Estates proceeded to abolish themselves, turning all subjects into citizens and their assembly into a national one, a development that was in due course to be repeated elsewhere.