The State and the Tributary Mode of Production

by John F. Haldon

In this groundbreaking critique of both traditional and Marxist notions of feudalism and of the pre-capitalist state, John Haldon considers the configuration of state and social relations in medieval Europe and Mughal India as well as in Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. He argues that a Marxist reading of the pre-capitalist state can take account of the autonomy of power relations and avoid economic reductionism while still focusing on the forms of tribute which sustained the ruling power. Haldon explores the conflicts to which these gave rise and shows the Ottoman state elite, often held to be a clear example of independence from underlying social relations, to be deeply enmeshed in economic relationships and the extraction of tribute.

Haldon argues that feudalism was the specifically European form of a much more widely diffused tributary mode, whose characteristic social relations and structural constraints can be seen at work in the Byzantine, Ottoman and Mughal empires as well. While acknowledging the range of ideological and cultural variation within and between these examples of the tributary mode, Haldon denies the thesis that such “superstructural” variations themselves yielded fundamentally contrasting social relations.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction

350 pages, Paperback

Published March 17, 1994

About the author

John Haldon is Shelby Cullom Davis '30 Professor of European History, and Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies. He has been Director of Graduate Studies for the History Department since July 2009. His research centers on the socio-economic, institutional, political and cultural history of the early and middle Byzantine empire from the seventh to the eleventh centuries. He also works on political systems and structures across the European and Islamic worlds from late ancient to early modern times and has explored how resources were produced, distributed and consumed, especially in warfare, during the late ancient and medieval periods. Professor Haldon is the author and co-author of more than two dozen books. His most recent books are The social history of Byzantium (Blackwell, Oxford 2008) and Byzantium in the iconoclast era: a history, with L. Brubaker (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2011).

Professor Haldon is the director of the Euchaita/Avkat Project - an archaeological and historical survey in north central Turkey. As well as traditional methods of field survey and historical research, this long-term project employs cutting edge survey, mapping and digital modeling techniques to enrich our understanding of the society, economy, land use, demography, paleo-environmental history and resources of the late Roman, Byzantine and Seljuk/Ottoman periods. Further information on the Euchaita/Avkat Project is available through the following links.

He is also co-director of the international Medieval Logistics Project - an international project deploying Geographical Information Systems and sophisticated modelling software to analyze the logistics of East Roman, early medieval Western European and Early Islamic warfare and structures of resource allocation.

A native of Northumbria, England, Professor Haldon has worked at the Universities of Athens and Munich, at the Max-Planck-Institut for European Legal History in Frankfurt, and at the University of Birmingham, where from 1995 he was Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies and from 2000-2004 Head of the School of Historical Studies. He came to Princeton University in 2005. From 2007-2013 he is a Senior Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington D.C. He is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and a member of the editorial boards of several scholarly journals in Europe and the USA.

Reviews

[Bill Crane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough and very dense outline of a unitary theory of the tributary mode of production as a general category embracing medieval Europe, the Middle East and South Asia. The first several chapters, which were devoted to an accounting of state theory at a level of high abstraction, were rough going, but it got better at the third chapter, which finally gets to the tributary mode. Haldon provides the most careful and convincing account of the usefulness of mode of production versus social formation that I have yet read. In Haldon's account, MoP is a heuristic device that is helpful as a framework for understanding specific historical social formations, which always contain multiple MoPs in operation. The economic relations of production and appropriation of surplus are the skeleton of an organic model of society which set the broad limits on social development, and over which grows the politics, culture and ideology used to change or sustain the economic relations.

The last half of the book which contains case studies of the states of Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, Merovingian and Carolingian Gaul, Mughal India, the Vijayanagara Empire, comparing and contrasting how different states formed (or failed to form) and how the competition between tributary states and ruling elites over the appropriation and distribution of the societal surplus. Many states such as the post-Roman Gaulish kingdoms and Vijayanagara failed to put down deep roots in society due to historical circumstances, their importance being mainly ideological and not developing a concrete process of hegemony including above all a ruling bureaucracy which made them transitory formations.

In Haldon's interpretation, states which survived the transition from decentralized tribal federations to more centralized territories constantly struggled for more control over the surplus due to the technological limits of these societies. As in the Ottoman Empire, the state could briefly acquire autonomy under command of a strong and farsighted ruler (Mehmed II), displacing traditional elites with new ones of its own creation (the Turkish tribal leaders with the devshirme), but this became a game of diminishing returns as new elites developed their own interests and autonomy from the state that created them.

Highly recommended for everyone wanting a better understanding of the dynamics of precapitalist societies, and modes of production in general. Halson's insights deserve to be extended to the historical study of precapitalist East and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America, which he touches on occasionally but can't address for reasons of space

[Nicholas Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In between 3 and 4 stars on this, although it's really not a big deal. Admittedly, I think I had expectations for this book beyond what its intentions are. As the title suggests, it is precisely focused on the nature of the state in pre-capitalist society, and the political conflict of surplus distribution. So, if like me you are looking for a holistic account of pre-industrial state and society relations, you may end up disappointed with Haldon's statist focus.

Haldon lays out a structure for the "tributary" state, as defined by it's method of surplus appropriation (tax/rent) and distribution (by/among a state/bureaucracy/ruling class). The heuristic is apparently valid, although I wonder what exactly its academic value is. It's so broad as to potentially not really say much. So what if Anglo Saxon England and Mughal India both are tributary states? Maybe the truth of their modes of production really are functionally the same, but if their social formations are vastly different then it feels like one would have to move into discussion of their "social formation" (as Haldon uses) to begin any comparison. Which seems to efface any intended comparative use.

All in all, however, I found the book valuable in showing the underlying economic similarities of precapitalist states, and the constraints those states faced.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by the leading Byzantine historian John Haldon, this book is a clear re-statement of the analytic value of a materialist approach to the understanding of history founded in the work of Marx, and in particular its use in understanding pre-capitalist states and what has traditionally been called a 'feudal' mode of production.

Haldon reasserts the value of the Marxist construct of 'mode of production' to an understanding of history. This is the assemblage of means and relations of production that structure how an economy works. As he explains, this is not a simply deterministic relationship where what happens in the economic 'base' determines what happens in a political 'superstructure' as is often presented both by a particular strand of Marxist thought, but also and especially by critics of Marxist historiography. For Haldon the relationship between the mode of production, politics, and ideology is much more complex. The mode of production sets parameters and opens possibilities for change and development. How this plays out in any specific conjunction however is down to the specific historical development of each individual society. The end result is that the two sides of the equation do not exist in a simple causal relationship. Instead they interact, each influencing the other.

This means that while Haldon asserts the usefulness of what was originally described as a 'feudal' mode of production to describe pre-capitalist societies, he finds the word itself too tied to the political structure of a particular period in western European history. He therefore proposes a 'tributary' mode of production instead. Under 'tributary' relations, wealth is primarily built on agricultural production with surplus extracted directly from producers through coercive means, colouring the relationship between a central state and the dominant class and the use of ideology to support the existing state within the overarching framework of a 'tributary' mode of production.

Through much of the book then, Haldon demonstrates the use of this analytical framework to demonstrate how having this as an underpinning theory can help us better understand structure and change across a range of pre-capitalist societies including the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Mughal empires. This approach allows him to identify sources of tension and likely paths of development which help to explain why change occurred in a particular way - for example the move in the Byzantine empire from a strong central state extracted surplus directly through taxation from independent producers, to a society of feudal magnates extracting surplus through rent from dependent peasants.

This is a superb re-statement of the value of a materialist approach to writing history, and an explanation of the complexity in Marx's analysis that is often lost to both his supporters and his critics.

This review can also be found on my blog: https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...