I have complained about it before but I heard on of the guests from guerrilla history on the deprogram make this argument and it made me want to gouge my eyes out. This kind of trans historical argumentation is both stupid and unmarxist, just stop! Sorry I felt the need to vent.
These states were not imperialist and they weren’t settler colonies. This framing doesn’t make any fucking sense when transfered to a medieval context. Like the best you could say is that the Italian city states represented an early firm of merchant capital, but even then that is an incredibly complex phenomenon that has only a tenuous connection to modern capitalism. Calling these city states early capitalism is just a fancy way of saying “lol u hate capitalism yet you exchange good or service! Curious!”
Seriously just stop. I don’t know why this set me off but it was like a week ago and I am still mad about it.
that’s a common misconception, because of the persistence of the state from antiquity people assume it maintained the same economic system. but in the 7th-9th centuries it transitioned and deurbanized due to major territorial losses & economic pressures. the medieval state was still more centralized and richer than european neighbors but not nearly as centralized as the Dominate period. slavery accordingly declined, but did not disappear—the presence of slaves is not itself contradictory to ‘feudalism’ though.
You can see the stark difference if you take a look at Constantinople immediately before and then immediately after the Fourth Crusade. Before, you have a centralized state which is still doing its best to acquire slaves via conquest (even if it was terrible at doing so, with rare exceptions, i.e., during the reign of Nikephoros Phokas); afterward, during the Latin Empire, you essentially have a collection of feudal baronies. I agree with your last point, however. One mode of production is generally dominant in a given area, but it can also coexist with other modes of production.
this is Luttwak pop-nonsense, how could a state magically devolve into feudatories without developing the economic bases and political frameworks in advance? in territories the Latins didn’t even control?
these authors like to imagine a smooth centralized machine like Justinian or Trajan were running that suddenly gets aborted by the Crusade, but that state no longer existed in 1204. political and economic bases were already decentralized by the thema, and regional rural aristocracies were dominating provincial politics for centuries. Constantinople didn’t even import grain to sustain an oversized population anymore, it was long since fed by the environs of Thrace and even internal agriculture.
the only thing that fundamentally set the medieval roman state apart from it’s neighbors was Constantinople, it’s control of the sea trade and being the patrimony of the imperial government meant there was money for a greater degree of central government and crucially a beefy central military that existed outside the regional powerbases. even so, it wasn’t so different from the Ayyubids or Great Seljuks, fundamentally feudal structures with a really rich royal core allowing for better centralization–for a period–when that core was lost or divided the decentralizing pressure reasserted itself and ‘governors’ were lords again.