‘Feudalism,’ Jural Subjecthood and Peasant Resistance in Early Modern Eurasia

ABSTRACT: By comparison with the 1980s and 1990s, the 21^st century has seen much less systematic or comparative analysis of what ‘feudalism’ means, a shift which stems from the Western academy’s diminished interest in grand social-historical theorizing in general, and in Marxist analysis in particular.  In the wake of this flight from theory, historical research has instead been marked by a preference for smaller-scale empirical investigations, and for narrative, rather than structural, approaches to history.  With respect to the experiences of historical subalterns, the result has been a flowering of studies highlighting their powers of agency and capacity for resistance to social elites.  But although investigations of this sort have explored peasant, artisan and day laborer experiences from one end of Eurasia to the other, they too often operate with a distressingly undifferentiated conception of the social systems within which the agency in question is exercised.  In the German case, for example, almost all historians now agree that resort to appellate tribunals (Gerichtsnutzung) was a central expression of early modern peasant resistance, but almost no one asks why such tribunals were there in the first place, why they were not present in many other parts of Eurasia, or how the resort to these tribunals shaped the exercise of public power more broadly.  In an effort to begin engaging with (if not definitively to answer) these problems, the present paper presents a broad overview of the strikingly different social prominence and political function of legal jurisdiction in the various early modern Eurasian macroregions.  It also explores the way in which a distinctively European pattern of ‘maximal jurisdiction’ provided subalterns with enhanced access, at the price of heightened exposure, to legal tribunals, a condition I term ‘political intimacy.’