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This chapter presents Bhat ballads featuring linguistically talented bards who dominate and control their lords and benefactors. Bhat praise of kings and patrons in their practice as well as in their myths and epics is less an acknowledgment of Rajput (former feudal landlords of Rajasthan) or Kshatriya (Warrior) supremacy — be it based on generous patronage, martial sacrifice, or some other virtue — and more a Bhat tactic for establishing their own importance as cunning bards who themselves defend and protect their patron-lords. In shifting the focus from patrons to the insights of the author’s bardic informants and the power of linguistic representation, this chapter hopes to draw more explicit attention to the imaginative dimensions of caste hierarchies and the arbitrariness of social centers and peripheries, It also argues that Bhat poetics parallel many of the insights of contemporary postmodern and poststructuralist theories. This chapter ends by exploring the manner Bhats use stories and puppet dramas placing themselves in close relationship to kings and nobles to help them appropriate the roles and statuses associated with royal bards, which in turn enables them to better exploit the modern tourist industry.

Islam retained clans and often tribes whereas Europe moved towards nuclear families. In Europe, significant social and political relationships were based on oath rather than kinship, whether between lords and followers (‘feudalism’) or among householders in city communities. Church and 'umma remained as universal societies. In Europe, territorial units of government became more entrenched, and, unlike in Islam, the nation sometimes became a political unit. Islam was well-disposed towards commerce. In Europe, the idea of the corporation as a legal body with specific legitimate powers favoured the city-state. In both societies, social inequalities and classes were justified, in Christendom by the organic metpahor, in Islam by a theory of the four social ‘orders’.

Layered societies evolve distinctive institutions and culture, partly against and partly by way of internationalization. The latter nexus is often neglected but demonstrated well in the case of Germany. Social spaces are typically segmented, such that opposite meanings are allocated specific sub-spaces; co-exist at close quarters; and become temporarily interdependent. This vitiates any treatment of society being uniformly marked by specific characteristics. Internal opposition of meanings and external effects together fuel an evolutionary dialectic, which makes different characteristics prevail, alternate, and become intertwined at different moments. Such developments congeal into a meta-tradition which resembles the swing of a pendulum. A meta-tradition encases the dialectics of internationalization and provincialization, and other recombinations of opposed characteristics into novel institutions. In the case of Germany, a salient opposition governing the meta-tradition is between economic liberalization and corporatist economic and political association. The dialectic between these has been stimulated by international exposure, politically and economically. The fundamental casing of the meta-tradition is called the South Germanic bedrock (as against the North Germanic, Scandinavian, bedrock).

As Chapter 7, ‘Feudalism and the National Past’, explains, the period of feudalism was believed to represent a rupture in national life: the historians maintained in unison that it was a foreign development, the result of colonization, which never fully penetrated their societies. The chapter assesses the humanitarian and utilitarian arguments with which they supported their demands for the abolition of feudalism: they championed the emancipation of non‐privileged classes by endowing them with civic liberties and the right of property ownership. Furthermore, it explores how the historians utilized a mainstream argument of the age according to which trade and industry and medieval towns played a seminal role in the weakening of the feudal system. Last but not least, the chapter focuses not only on the content but also on the form of the proposed changes and tackles the historians' attitudes to liberalism, democracy, reform and revolution.

The central concept of the Naxalite metaphysic was the characterization of the Indian economy as ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial’. The characterization is not so much the description of a state of affairs as an injunction to the action of a particular kind. The characterization also does not refer so much to facts of the economy in a ‘materialist’ sense, but to perceived experiences of personality which are reified into an economic terminology. Semi-feudalism accrues from a schema which sees the Indian economy as progressing from a state of feudalism to a state of capitalism, in which semi-feudalism is an intermediate state. This chapter also considers the agrarian conditions in India and the question of the mode of production.

The theoretical tradition to which Charu Mazumdar himself links his speculations is the Marxist–Leninist–Maoist. In the materialist metaphysic of these schools, what Mazumdar wants to bring about is the New Democratic revolution. This is to establish the rule of the vast majority of the nation, composed specifically of the peasantry, the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie, upsetting the rule of the landlords, the comprador bourgeoisie, the US imperialists, and the Soviet social-imperialists, who constitute a tiny minority. The terminology in which what became for Mazumdar Jotedar-rajya was codified, defined India as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial country. This chapter also considers the initial formulations of revolution in terrorist tracts. Mazumdar’s view of the revolution is unarmed peasants turning ferociously on their armed oppressors, killing them and snatching their weapons to found an army that will liberate the whole country.

By the second half of the 16th century, the extension of English power across most parts of the island was reflected in the growth of new institutions of central and local government, in particular by the creation of counties. Attempts to assimilate Gaelic lordships into a social hierarchy modelled on that of England continued. But there were also attempts to plant colonies of English on land seized from native rulers. Meanwhile, attempts to persuade the nobility of English descent to abandon their private armies sustained by feudal levies encountered violent resistance. The chapter looks critically at claims that the 1560s and 1570s saw a clear shift from a vision of reform to a policy of colonization backed by physical force. The career of the Ulster warlord Shane O'Neill — involving constant shifts in alliance between English, Scots, and competing Gaelic lords — illustrates the primacy of short term expediency over ideology.

This chapter introduces the great household as a late medieval social structure and introduces models of exchange, based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Marcel Mauss, as a means of describing the economics of power in the period. Two models in particular will be central to the book's argument: one-sided ‘magnificence’ and asymmetric reciprocity or aristocratic ‘reciprocalism’, which emphasizes mutuality as well as hierarchy. The great household is introduced with discussion of membership, lordship, aristocratic status, landed interests, household office, livery, retinue, and ‘bastard feudalism’.

This chapter sketches an economic theory which might be able to explain both the origins and the resilience of the Hindu social system as expressed in its twin pillars: the caste system and the village “community”. It considers another novel aspect of Hindu customs — its ban on cow slaughter. It focuses on the north, in particular on the Indo-Gangetic plain, which was the crucible of Hinduism, and its social expression in the caste system. The chapter also outlines the variant of the Hindu social system that was established in the southern peninsula by about the 6th to 9th centuries AD, and the reasons for the form it took.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief historical background of the focus of this book, which is the March of Wales from 1087 to 1265. Europe and the roots of its culture were the creation of the High Middle Ages, the first period of European expansion. That expansion was important, for prior to it there existed a number of different Europes: Frankish, Celtic, Slavonic, and Muslim. The chapter discusses the neglect of the March by 20th-century modern scholarship; how the book differs from other family and lordship studies, the five baronial families to be examined — the Braoses, Cliffords, Lacys, Monmouths, and Mortimers.

This chapter examines the role of the Royal Government in the border region of Herefordshire and the adjacent Marcher lordship. It argues that the king played a greater role in the shaping of the March than is sometimes allowed. Although the customs of the Marcher lords were largely respected and their independence at times given free rein, most notably under Richard I, they were still tenants-in-chief and could not afford to ignore the king. The kings of England took varying approaches to the March. Henry I intruded new men into the region on a scale not seen again until the middle years of Henry III's reign. Henry II halted Marcher ambitions by reaching an accommodation with the Lord Rhys, a satisfactory agreement as long as the two men lived. Richard I had too pressing concerns elsewhere, and for a space of time the March reverted to a cockpit for baronial ambitions and vendettas.

This chapter examines the history of the March during reigns of Richard I and John. The fortunes of the Braose and Lacy families changed greatly between the death of Henry II in 1189 and that of his son King John in 1216. On the other hand, the Cliffords, Monmouths, and Mortimers held their ground and, during the tumultuous events of John's reign, positioned themselves advantageously for the future by developing closer links to the Crown. Richard I's reign was marked by a turning away from the policy of royal control and containment of Marcher ambitions which Henry II had pursued since 1172. This in effect licensed the magnates of the south-eastern March to resume their ambitions for the conquest and domination of neighbouring Welsh regions. John's reign in turn was marked by the rise of one of these magnates, his favourite William III de Braose, to even greater heights of landed power, in the most dramatic exercise of patronage by that king.

This chapter focuses on changes in the region of the March during the reign of Henry III. The early years of the reign of Henry III were a rather inauspicious period for the aristocracy of western Herefordshire and the south-eastern March. Little was achieved in terms of regaining lands lost to Llywelyn and the Welsh during the civil war, and the Marchers became increasingly reliant on royal power. The division of the great knightly holdings between those in Marcher lands and those in Herefordshire was largely completed by the 1220s. Herefordshire continued to be drawn further within the ambit of royal government, the directions issued to the sheriff of Hereford for the inquest into knights' fees of 1242-3 being particularly instructive in this respect.