According to Dazai Shundai, the Way of the ancient Chinese sage kings was established for the purpose of practicing political economy. The methods of the sages can be found in the Six Classics of ancient China, but this is not to say that the government of the sages should be practiced in its entirety in the present with no changes, as their methods must be adapted in response to present-day circumstances. Political economy requires an understanding of the “times” that one lives in, the regularities in things represented by “principle,” the “force” that can temporarily overcome this principle, and the “human feelings” of the people of the realm. A key aspect of the “times” of Tokugawa Japan is its decentralized feudal system of government, which resembles the feudalism of China during the time of the sages. This is in contrast to the centralized system of government that arose later in Chinese history and that was also used in Japan before the rise of military rule.

According to Dazai Shundai, systems of bureaucratic offices will inevitably change over time and must be suited to the circumstances of the present, but in establishing these, it is important to look back to the models of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In earlier times, Japan emulated these systems of bureaucratic offices from China, but even then Japan departed from the Chinese model by making offices hereditary. Since the advent of military rule in Japan, the situation has only worsened, with simplified military regulations taking the place of a proper system of offices.

According to Dazai Shundai, the most effective way for feudal domains to amass wealth and resolve their fiscal difficulties is to promote the production of crops and other products for which the domain’s soil and geography provide a particular advantage. Domain governments should then manage trade in these products with other regions in order to maximize profits for the domain, rather than allowing private merchants to dominate this trade. From the perspective of traditional Confucian teachings it is not ideal for rulers to pursue profit through commerce, but this is an acceptable emergency measure to deal with a time of crisis.

According to Dazai Shundai, the provision of food and goods to all the people is an essential element of good government. Wealth as measured in food and goods will then lead to a strong military. Some have considered the ideal of “enriching the country and strengthening the military” to be contrary to Confucian teachings, but this is mistaken. Currency should be seen as secondary to food and goods and does not in itself represent true wealth, a fact that many have lost sight of in Edo and other urban centers of Tokugawa Japan. In farming, it is crucial to extract the full productive potential of the land, which requires an understanding of the different types of land and the uses that each of these serves; an ignorance of these different uses has led to harmful policies that try to convert all land into paddies. The stabilization of prices is another important role for government and helps prevent merchants from exploiting price fluctuations for private gain. A system of government-managed granaries can be used to stabilize rice prices, provide relief in times of famine, and provide low-interest loans to samurai in times of need.

According to Dazai Shundai, techniques of political economy must be based on the models of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In order to apply these models to present-day Japan, it is important to draw proper analogies between ancient Chinese and later Japanese phenomena and to use appropriate terminology in describing Japanese phenomena.

The chapter provides an analytical survey of the development of wardship in England from 1066 to 1540, when the Court of Wards was placed on a legislative establishment. In so doing, the chapter performs two roles. Firstly, it provides a detailed introduction to the institution of wardship. Secondly, it explains how the Crown wrought seismic and profoundly unsettling changes in the English land law, especially during the 1530s. In conjunction with the largest forcible re-distribution of land since the Conquest, that is the dissolution of the monasteries, this significantly increased the number of heirs falling into wardship.

In the Middle Ages kingdoms could nominally reach very far, although kings typically did not have more resources than the most powerful feudal lords. Their mystical, sacred power ensured their right to rule over vast lands. The king obtained these attributes during the coronation, during which he simultaneously had to subjugate himself to the pope and the emperor. The coronation was an anchoring representant that enacted the God-given hierarchy in the cathedral: the laity was in the nave, the king in between the laity and the clergy, and the archbishop as the representative of the pope performed the unction with the holy balm through which the sacred entered the ceremony. It was the universal monarchy on stage. To rid themselves of papal and imperial superiority, while simultaneously maintaining their standing above feudal lords, kings modified the coronation and adapted other representants. This fundamental struggle led to a change in the early modern European order. During the Reformation, iconoclasms destroyed Catholic representants that upheld the hierarchical order. Simultaneously, kings adapted and repurposed existing Catholic representants for their own needs. The resulting dynastic divine right absolutism resembled the authority of pope and emperor, but it was territorially constrained.

The study of Ottoman rural history presents challenges in terms of both the sources available and the themes that are common to the entire empire. Researchers are particularly dependent on government administrative sources, and must make an effort to complement these with local court archives, foreign consular correspondence, and provincial chronicles if available. The principal themes these sources evoke are ultimately usually linked to revenue extraction, whether by state officials or by local notables acting on behalf of the state, making the history of Ottoman ruralism indissociable from the discussion of power relations and economic production. The main particularity of Ottoman rural history is the prominent role of pastoral nomadism and the resulting importance of tribal forms of social organization.

This chapter discusses the most famous hypothesis about the development of property law: that Western social evolution was determined by a passage “from slavery to feudalism,” from the ownership of humans in the slave economies of Antiquity to the ownership of land in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. That hypothesis was embraced by Marx, Weber, Bloch, and many others, but has been rejected today, because it rested on claims about economic history that have been proven dubious. The chapter argues that there was truth in the classical hypothesis, but that it should be reinterpreted as an account of transformation in the legal imagination. The chapter investigates the origins of the classic theories, and makes the case that the classic thinkers erred by mistaking the imaginative orientations in the legal sources for the economic realities.

A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Stirrup Rider Empires, from 600 to 1200. While being a major advance in horse riding, the stirrup just offers a short term for the intermediary phase of Rider Empires. Expansion of Islamic Caliphate was the towering event. It surpassed the Xiongnu area record. Apart from Tang, Tufan in Tibet, Liao, and Seljuk, all other medieval empires remained of modest size. In population, Song in 1125 briefly reached 38% of the world population – the largest percentage any empire has ever reached. The Caliphate altered the language mix throughout North Africa, introducing the Arabic. The Seljuks did so from Central Asia to Anatolia, introducing Turkic. The Caliphate clashed with Tang in Central Asia in 751. The forces of an empire reaching to the Atlantic Ocean confronted for the first time those of an empire that reached to the Pacific. Neither realized the momentousness of this skirmish. Western Europe developed feudalism, a maddeningly complex multistranded hierarchical order, which does away with single territorial authority.

The iconic image of the knight on horseback represents just one facet of the horse’s imprint on legal, political, and social systems developing in medieval Iberian society. This chapter argues that historical and bodily relations with horses shaped the negotiation of social status and the administration of territory during the dynamic periods of peace, conflict, and negotiation among Iberian kingdoms in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Defining the set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies making up an Iberian "culture of the horse” brings to light a fundamental tension in which the horse served as both an agent of control and a means to disrupt power relations.

The long evolution that had been transforming the Iberian economy since the fifth century found its excipient in the Islamic invasion at the beginning of the eighth century. A consequence was the division of the peninsula into two parts separated by a territorial strip as a border. In the south side, the Muslim al-Andalus settled new population, generally repeating its tribal and traditional structure; applied changes in the tenure and exploitation of agricultural systems; and consolidated the preeminence of urban centres. On this basis it was established a monetary economy connected to the political and social evolution of Mediterranean Islam, applying economic policies that involved public expenditure, taxation and market regulation. Meanwhile, in the northern side, the Christian kingdoms and counties were strengthened thanks to the increase of agrarian land, including the absorption of the border strip. From the eleventh century onwards, feudal structures favoured the kingdoms and counties expansion over the Muslim south. Urban capitals articulated the new territories, at the same time that the Camino de Santiago attracted European immigration which promoted urban activities. Commercial development linked to centres beyond the Pyrenees and, through the Mediterranean, to urban centres of Provence and Italy.

The period between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries was a phase of profound political and economic mutation for the Iberian Peninsula, in the context of which the confluence of expansionist processes dictated the emergence and reconfiguration of different political maps. This chapter seeks to trace the general evolution of the different political models that took shape in the Iberian Peninsula throughout this period, as well as to characterize the action of the institutions responsible for defining the foundations of an economic policy. To this end, the chapter is divided into two parts. The first one focuses on the evolution of the space controlled by the Muslims, looking at transversal aspects of economic policy and the implications deriving from the development of the territory. The second part focuses on the study of Christian institutions, on the construction of the Iberian kingdoms, and highlights the role of the monarchies and political institutions in the establishment of the economy and on the transition from a war-based economy to an economy where the market and trade assume a growing importance.

This chapter explores the constitutional ramifications of the French Revolution’s transformation of the old regime of property. It reinterprets the abolition of feudalism as part of the revolutionaries’ larger attempt to draw a conceptual and legal line of demarcation between property and power. Their double aim was to make property truly private by stripping from it all attributes of public authority and to make power truly public by eliminating its former patrimonial characteristics. The attempt to implement this demarcation in practice was still underway decades after the Revolution had formally ended feudalism. Over time, it largely succeeded. From this distinction between property and power flowed some of the key conceptual binaries – the political and social, state and society, public and private, sovereignty and property – through which we still apprehend the world. The abolition of feudalism was thus much more than simply the eradication of an archaic form of property. Rather, it played an essential role in shaping the conceptual building blocks from which modernity was built.

It was during the reign of Henry II (1154–89) that royal justice was available to anyone could bring their case within a certain formula, known as a writ. This is discussed in Chapter 5, ‘The Father of the Common Law (c.1154–1215)’, the title of which refers to the title often bestowed upon Henry II, the first monarch from the House of Plantagenet. The chapter focuses on the development of the writ system during and in the aftermath of Henry’s reign in relation to what we now call land law and whether this marked a move to centralisation that replaced the feudal system. The chapter begins by examining the Becket controversy but will then move on to argue that it is for other developments that Henry Plantagenet’s reign should be remembered. The second part of this chapter explored the developments to the legal system that occurred during this reign and that allowed for a common law to develop and be regularised. The final section will explore in detail the origins of the writ system, following Maitland’s legendary account of The Forms of Action as well as the revisions and criticisms put forward by Milsom.

This chapter explores the effect of the Norman Conquest as well as looking at the developments during the Norman period as a whole during the reigns of William I (1066–87), William II (1087–1100), Henry I (1100–35) and Stephen (1135–54). It falls into three sections. The first provides an overview of the main effects of 1066 in terms of law and order. The second and main section then discusses in detail what is often considered to be the most significant development under the Normans, the feudal system, and how this impacted upon law and order. Feudalism actually undermined the development of a common law by feudal lords presiding over their own feudal courts for their tenants. The king’s law and protection was only afforded to his own personal tenants. The third section then focuses upon two aspects that are often overlooked in accounts of the effect of the Conquest: the effect of the Norman era upon the position of slaves and women. The importance of the later Norman kings will be the focus of the conclusion.

Chapter 4 looks specifically at the reorganisation of military power in this period, which is closely related to the declining power of aristocracies. The rise of the modern state and its monopoly of legitimate force made militaries and law enforcement bureaucratic functions of the state, rather than localised privileges of divided nobilities. The pacification of the nobilities, the subduing of their traditions of martial competition to the modern state, opens up the scope for the more civil forms of competition. The ‘wild’ can now be replaced by the ‘domesticated’.