From slave masters to land lords : the transformation of property law in the West

Left: Mosaic (detail), Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily, Italy. Right: Charles of Orleans receives tribute from a vassal. Ornate lettering, 15th century, Paris, Archives nationales — Left : mosaic (detail), Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina, Sicily, Italy.
Right : Charles of Orleans receives tribute from a vassal. Ornate lettering, ^15thcentury, Paris, Archives nationales. - Public domain

One of the most famous propositions of Western social science is associated with Karl Marx. According to Marx, the Western world underwent a profound socio-economic transition after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, from ancient slavery to medieval feudalism. Whereas the economies of the ancient world were based on the ownership of human beings, the economies of the Middle Ages were founded on feudal lordship of the land. Marx was not alone in his thinking. Many thinkers proposed their own versions of the same assertion, including the likes of Max Weber and Marc Bloch.

This classical interpretation of the reading of Western socio-economic history is almost universally rejected today. Modern researchers have shown that the socio-economic histories of classical thinkers were wrong. The societies of the ancient world did not have slave economies of the kind imagined by Marx or Weber. Nor are scholars prepared to characterize the Middle Ages as " feudal " as classical thinkers of the past did. The great hypothesis of the passage from slavery to feudalism, in the eyes of contemporary researchers, has been fundamentally refuted.

Yet, by examining legal sources, we discover many signs of change that recall the ideas of Marx, Weber and Bloch. Classical Rome did not have a Marxist economy of slavery. But the paradigmatic formula for claiming property rights was I declare that this man is mine. Roman law, more broadly, was rich in a language and symbolism that belonged to what Orlando Patterson calls " the idiom of power " of the master / slave relationship. The " feudalism " may not have descended on Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. But post-classical law is undoubtedly marked by an orientation towards land ownership, which remains the paradigmatic example of property in most modern legal cultures. Are classical interpretations of Western history really devoid of truth ?

These lectures argue that there is indeed truth in the classical interpretations. The West was indeed shaped by the shift from human ownership to land ownership. But Marx and his many successors were wrong to think that this transformation belonged to economic history. The great transformation was not a transformation of modes of production. It was a transformation of the legal imagination. It was a transformation in the way Western law solved the profound mystery of what it means to be an owner.

The lectures aim to make sense of this transformation. They begin in antiquity, analyzing the " idiom of power " of master / slave relations in ancient Roman law. They then turn to the post-classical shift towards land ownership. The beginnings of this shift can be dated to late antiquity. But the process of change in the legal imagination was extraordinarily slow, reaching its apogee only at the end of the ^18th and ^19th centuries, which saw the definitive disappearance of legitimate ownership of human beings. The end of legal slavery can only be understood in the context of this immensely long history of change in the legal imagination. To make sense of what happened, the lectures argue that we need to consider not only the history of law, but also the history of religion.