Columbia University Graduate Conference on East Asia, 2015

The Super-Sign 封建/feudalism/Lehnswesen/féodalitéIts genealogy, its power, its critics

Nagoya Castle,Aichi Prefecture

“[A]re we like those early American colonists, who named their raw settlements after European cities, in order to gain

a comforting sense of familiarity?”

–Introduction to Joseph R. Strayer’s & Rushton Coulborn’s edited volume Feudalism in History, 1956.

The Sprouts of 封建

✤ 封建 is most closely associated with the Zhou dynasties (Western 1076-772 BCE, Eastern 771-222 BCE)

✤ Literally may have meant “fief establishment” or “the drawing of borders [around fiefs]”

✤ Utopian connotations that Liu Zongyuan disputed, writing “封建 was not the sages’ intent”

The Sprouts of Féodalité✤ First used by Boulainvilliers in

1727

✤ Intended to valorize the French nobility, link them to Charlemagne

✤ Popularized by Montesquieu

✤ By 1789, has taken a pejorative meaning; the National Assembly declares an end to “le régime féodal”

✤ (Facts by Marc Bloch, art by Jean-Francois Callet)

封建 with Japanese Characteristics

✤ Used by Rai Sanyō in 1827 to describe the systems of the two bakufu, Ashikaga & Tokugawa

✤ Intended to valorize them, link them to the Zhou dynasty

✤ By 1868, has taken on a pejorative meaning; the Meiji government, too, declared an end to the 封建制度

✤ (Facts by John Whitney Hall, art by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi)

“Japan, with its purely feudal organization of landed property and its developed petite culture, gives a much truer picture of the European middle ages than our own history books, dictated as they are, for the most part, by bourgeois prejudices.”

Capital (Chicago, 1912), 789. Photography by John Jabez Edwin Mayall.

Féodalité, 封建, Lehnswesen, and feudalism converge

✤ Engelbert Kaempfer, writing at the turn of the 18th century, did not attribute to Japan features that would later be associated with feudalism

✤ Von Siebold, writing in the 1830s, called Japan “a feudal empire in the strictest of terms”

✤ In 1888 Yokoi Tokifuyu used 封建 specifically to translate “feudalism”

✤ Kang Youwei & Liang Qichao used 封建 in its traditional sense—to refer to the Zhou dynasty

✤ Arif Dirlik & Wang Rongzu theorize that an 1898 history by Kuwahara, in its Chinese translation, was the first work to apply this new definition of the term to Chinese history

封建 & Marxist Orthodoxy

✤ Tao Xisheng 陶希聖 (1899-1988) recapitulated the classical periodization under the super-sign’s new auspices

✤ Zhu Peiwo 朱佩我 a.k.a. Zhu Qihua 朱其華 (1907-1945) argued that the birth of 封建／feudalism accompanied that of the Chinese empire in 221 BCE and continued to 1911

✤ Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892-1978) combined these views, deducing from Marxist periodization schema that all of recorded Chinese history to 1911 was feudal

We have never been feudal

✤ Li Feng 李峰 holds that the Zhou was not a personalistic decentralized polity, but a developed bureaucracy

✤ He interprets Zhou bronze inscriptions to indicate that 封建 meant not “the drawing of borders [around fiefs],” but “the establishment of cities”

✤ He is willing to entertain only that the Warring States period (475-221 BCE) may have been feudal

✤ Susan Reynolds has revised European medieval historiography by showing that the Latin term feodum was not used during the classically feudal period—that is, pre-1150 CE Europe—but only after it, in a bureaucratic context

✤ She dates the notion that the lord-vassal relationship defined all of medieval European society to the Romantic period of the early 19th century, and no earlier

封 in Song-Yuan-Ming China

✤ Local elites could petition the government to 封 a dead individual or a folk figure

✤ This would bring funding and pilgrims to the community, first to build a temple and then to take it in

✤ The imperial court would 封 foreign rulers—including ethnically Chinese émigrés—as recognition of their legitimacy and their cooperation with China

✤ This earned them military protection, both from neighboring states and from internal challenges

✤ (Facts by Robert Hymes, Valerie Hansen, and Geoff Wade. Art by Shen Zhou.)

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