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Why Europe?: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path, by Michael Mitterauer
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Why did capitalism and colonialism arise in Europe and not elsewhere? Why were parliamentarian and democratic forms of government founded there? What factors led to Europe’s unique position in shaping the world? Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Why Europe? tackles these classic questions with illuminating results.
Michael Mitterauer traces the roots of Europe’s singularity to the medieval era, specifically to developments in agriculture. While most historians have located the beginning of Europe’s special path in the rise of state power in the modern era, Mitterauer establishes its origins in rye and oats. These new crops played a decisive role in remaking the European family, he contends, spurring the rise of individualism and softening the constraints of patriarchy. Mitterauer reaches these conclusions by comparing Europe with other cultures, especially China and the Islamic world, while surveying the most important characteristics of European society as they took shape from the decline of the Roman empire to the invention of the printing press. Along the way, Why Europe? offers up a dazzling series of novel hypotheses to explain the unique evolution of European culture.
- Sales Rank: #1596797 in Books
- Published on: 2010-07-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.30" w x 6.00" l, 1.55 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 400 pages
Review
"Every scholar of medieval studies will find something of interest here." (Choice)
About the Author
Michael Mitterauer is professor emeritus of social history at the University of Vienna and the author of numerous books, including A History of Youth. Before his retirement Gerald Chapple was associate professor of German at McMaster University.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Detailed, informative, broad.
By Scara Jerk
I'm almost done reading this book and I'm glad that I bought it. Many other authors would have come up with a single theory for Europe's path through history. Mitterauer instead presents multiple interlocking theories, each of which contributes to Europe's particular path. He really understands the material and sees the connections between the different strands and his clear writing means that you will understand the connections as well.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
but if you would like some mental meat to chew on Why Europe
By Richard B.
A scholarly approach that is difficult to read. On the other hand a very interesting thesis to explain the rise of industrial technology only in western Europe, and not elsewhere, largely based on the cultivation of rye and oats, which lead to the keeping of draft animals, which in turn led to improved plows, carts and wagons, and thence to Iron and so on I find I must read in small bits and think about it.
If you are looking for a thrill-read, this is not it, but if you would like some mental meat to chew on Why Europe? is hard to beat.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
An interesting book
By A reader
This book caught my attention while I was researching the development of capitalism and the era of various bourgeois revolutions. I had become unnerved by the laxness of attention to detail that seems to pervade histories of the Early Modern period. The problem of rooting the key period of Europe's social development in that era seemed to open up more questions than answers. Those questions only increased as I began reading medievalist histories of Europe, invention, science, and commerce sprang forth in the High Middle Ages with a verve that wouldn't be matched until the 17th century. European colonialism was well underway before Columbus ever crossed the Atlantic, as Western Europeans expanded into Eastern Europe, the Levant, the Mediterranean and Northern Africa (especially the islands off its coast). The two most capitalist societies in early modern Europe, England and the Netherlands, also developed clear capitalist social relations in land tenure (the former especially so) in the 14-5th centuries. So rich yeoman and aristocrats were already enclosing and starting to pursue profit-based agriculture in England BEFORE Christopher Columbus had released his cruelty on the American world. Revolutions shook the medieval world with the a force that would not be seen until the 17th-20th centuries. The 1381 rising in England was easily as radical (if not more so) than the initial French Revolution of 1789. And the rebels of the Jacquerie and Hussite rebellions could've taught most of Cromwell's parliamentarians what class struggle really looks like. The medieval revolution is unfortunately not a subject Mitterauer really explores.
Although Mitterauer acknowledges that capitalism arose in Europe first, he does not provide for the reader an in-depth explanation of what capitalism is, how it was formed and why it took root in Europe. The most provocative point he makes on that issue is his analysis of European mining as the KEY capitalist industry in Europe as well as Europe's indisputable dominance in mining. With the heavy utilization of water-power and mechanization, no industry so closely resembled the steam age factory as mining. Firms such as the Fugger-Thurzo company were exceedingly well organized and had involved massive concentrations of capital. Large concentrations of labor and equipment (colloquially called capital) is the nature of mining, but Mitterauer makes an important connection regarding European agriculture's heavy dependence on iron tools creating great demand for iron and other metals. Whether European mining was truly capitalist (rather than being simple commerce) or whether the miners were true proletarians is obviously debatable (Mitterauer argues they were generally impoverished wage workers rather than artisans) but the thesis is different from the usual focus on textiles.
The strongest case he makes for a capitalist transformation in the middle ages lies in his analysis of various possessions seized in the crusades. For instance the first slave-based sugar plantations, a harbinger for the age of Caribbean prison islands populated by slaves took hold in the middle ages. Mitterauer ties the colonialism of medieval Italian city-states with the commune movements of the middle ages. He makes an interesting connection between free republican Pisa, which was a result of the medieval commune movement and her exploitation of Mediterranean islands like Elba and Sardinia. As a famous saying among merchants went: "Citizens in Pisa, Kings in Sardinia" as Elba provided 40% of Pisa's income its hard not to read its republican freedom as a kind of social-imperialism practiced on the part of the city-state. The author rightly points out that the Portuguese colonization of Africa beginning in 1415 was the first great act of European expansionism in global trade, he interestingly characterizes the Adiz dynasty as "crowned capitalists" (a similar remark has been made about England's Edward IV).
Another oddity is the fact that the most bellicose crusader popes were often considered "reformers" the costs of such reform seemed to become more tolerable with the prospect of colonial rewards to offset the costs. Another nasty side of Catholic "reform" was the use of crusades within Europe (and against fellow christian nations) against all manner of dissidents and rebels, the nasty Albigensian crusade in Southern France or the crusading armies that poured in from all over Europe to fight the Hussites, are a grim reminder of the role the crusades played in the formation of Europe's "persecuting society". I suspect that such "reform" hindered progress almost as much as it must've aided it.
Rather than seeing individualism as being primary to European development, the author correctly notes that communalism and struggles over different definitions of 'community' was everywhere. The chartered towns and urban communes and their movements was one style of communalism. In the countryside the communalism of estate, which grew out of roman slave plantations and military camps and its politics also predominated. In religion, Europe undoubtedly had the most highly organized (and highly disciplined) religious community in the world. The struggle for the common man of the medieval age as he saw it, must've undoubtedly been to take control of his/her communal religious life, his rural community, his commune. However, that does not mean he was a free-wheeling liberal, although his struggle and political language would later come to define modern liberalism as Rodney Hilton pointed out. It is difficult to view a society where lords had peasant children sent out of the home and away from their parents to work on their estates, for the simple reason that they preferred peasant households to have two generations instead of three as fundamentally individualist. Lords had significant power over who peasants could marry, what age they could marry, when they could take control of their meager plots and even assumed the roll of godparent to the children of vassals. The power lords wielded lessened the power of the individual father as well as the role of clanship and extended family but it must've came at a cost to the freedom of peasants. The system of patriarchy was more flexible and loose ties also encouraged social opportunity. The reader will probably find Mitterauer's description of West European family life scarily familiar i.e. a couple marries in their late twenties when they are financially secure and can keep their own house, two generations usually live within it, with grandparents either retiring or children pressured to move out. In spite of the sexual and feminists revolutions of the 20th century the basic structure is not far from what we have now-- in fact the importance of the couple as a social unit in stabilizing society, like today, outranked the social dominance of the father.
The most contestable point made by the author is his view that parliamentary democracy is the most essential and unique aspect of European civilization. Whatever we mean by "democracy" the fact is that democracy didn't exist for the vast majority of people and probably wouldn't exist until the 20th century. Capitalism gave the West 500 years of dominance, whereas mass democracy was fought every step of the way by European rulers. The correlation between capitalism and democracy is tenuous but real, not real enough to sustain the view 2,000 years of off-and-on again parliamentarianism for various ruling elites is the most important fact of European history. Nevertheless, this book contains a great wealth of information, only problem is that it doesn't really safeguard itself against the danger of a new eurocentrism that the author points out in the preview.
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