Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages

摘要

This paper sets out to establish a general contrast between the traditions of agrarian bondage that characterized the West in the wake of the disintegration of the Roman empire and the peculiar vulnerability of the peasantry in the Byzantine, Sasanian and Islamic Near East. Within this general contrast between peasantries, I explore the differences between aristocracies in the late antique and post-Roman worlds, date the beginnings of the medieval expansion to the seventh century, and advance a critique of the way Chris Wickham handles the relations of production of the early middle ages. I argue that there was both more coercion and more complexity in the use of labour than Wickham's characterization of a self-managing peasantry suggests. The paper concludes by looking at some of the peculiarities of agrarian domination in the Near East.