This article offers a preliminary critical-historical reconstruction of the concept of dispossession. Part I examines its role in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century struggles against European feudal ...land tenure. Drawing upon Marx’s critique of French anarchism in particular, I identify a persistent limitation at the heart of the concept. Since dispossession presupposes prior possession, recourse to it appears conservative and tends to reinforce the very proprietary and commoditized models of social relations that radical critics generally seek to undermine. Part II turns to use of the term in Indigenous struggles against colonization, both in order to better grasp the stakes of the above problematic and suggest a way beyond it. Through a reconstruction of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists, I seek to show the coherence and novelty of their formulation by suggesting that dispossession has come to name a unique historical process, one in which property is generated under conditions that require divestment and alienation from those who appear, only retroactively, as its original owners. In this way, theft and property are related in a recursive, rather than strictly unilinear, manner. Part III provides a specific historical example in the form of nineteenth-century US property law concerning squatters and homesteaders.
How and Why Was Domesday Made? Baxter, Stephen
The English historical review,
10/2020, Letnik:
135, Številka:
576
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract
This article offers a new interpretation of the Domesday survey, drawing upon a collaborative study of its earliest surviving manuscript, Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3500 (Exon). It ...identifies five principal stages: first, the survey was launched at Gloucester in midwinter 1085; secondly, fiscal information extracted from geld assessment lists was integrated with manorial detail supplied by landholders to create a survey organised on a geographical plan by hundred; thirdly, this hundredal recension was checked by a second group of commissioners at meetings of shire courts, generating a substantial corpus of contested matter; fourthly, the hundredal recension was restructured into circuit returns which grouped together and summarised the holdings of barons who held directly from the king; fifthly, Domesday Book itself was written directly from these circuit returns. Royal assemblies held at Easter, Whitsun and Lammas functioned as deadlines for the second, third and fourth stages respectively; and a major geld levied at the rate of six shillings to the hide was collected and accounted for during this period. The survey generated a range of different outputs, each intended to serve specific fiscal and political purposes: the hundredal recension was designed to facilitate a reassessment of geld liabilities; the lists of contested matter anticipated a later judicial review; the circuit returns, summaries and Domesday Book were designed to make the administration of the royal demesne and the profits of royal lordship more efficient. The latter also supplied barons with what amounted to confirmation charters of their uncontested holdings, for which they performed homage.
Nuestro objetivo en este trabajo es estudiar la relación entre las rentas que recibían los nobles, asignadas sobre las rentas regias en ciertos lugares (situados) y el poder señorial. Para ello ...compararemos la información de las cuentas de Sancho IV que se conservan para finales del siglo XIII (1292) y la del Becerro de las Behetrías para mediados del siglo XIV (1352) en relación con algunos territorios que conocemos bien por nuestros trabajos anteriores. Ambos textos nos permiten abordar el estudio de esos aspectos en un período muy importante en el desarrollo de la relación entre el poder regio y el poder nobiliario. Un período de cambios y transformaciones marcado por la crisis y los conflictos desde las últimas décadas del siglo XIII.
O texto examina o modo como os juristas, dos glosadores a Jacques Cujas, analisaram a definição de feudo na interpretação do direito comum à luz dos escritos de Oberto dell’Orto. Nessa perspectiva, o ...autor revê aspectos da situação real do feudatário como domínio útil, afirmando a inadequação técnica do usufruto para expressá-la, analisa a posterior caracterização dos feudos como quase-dominium, presente, sobretudo, em alguns juristas entre os séculos XVI e XVII.
This paper treats organizations as adaptive systems that have to match the complexity of their environments. The nature of this complexity is analyzed by linking an institutional Information-Space ...(I-Space) framework to the work of complexity theorists. The I-Space framework identifies the codification, abstraction, and diffusion of information as cultural attributes. Codification involves the assignment of data to categories, thus giving them form. Abstraction involves a reduction in the number of categories to which data needs to be assigned for a phenomenon to be apprehended. Information is diffused through populations of data-processing agents, thus constituting the diffusion dimension. Complexity theorists have identified the stability and structure of algorithmic information complexity in a way that corresponds to levels of codification and abstraction. Their identification of system parts and the richness of cross-coupling draws attention to the fabric of information diffusion. We discuss two modes of adaptation to complex environments: complexity reduction and complexity absorption. Complexity reduction entails getting to understand the complexity and acting on it directly, including attempts at environmental enactment. Complexity absorption entails creating options and risk-hedging strategies, often through alliances.
The analysis, and its practical utility, is illustrated with reference to China, the world's largest social system. Historical factors have shaped the nature of complexity in China, giving it very different characteristics than those typical of Western industrial countries. Its organizations and other social units have correspondingly handled this complexity through a strategy of absorption rather than the reduction strategy characteristic of Western societies. Western firms operating in China therefore face a choice between maintaining their norms of complexity reduction or adopting a strategy of complexity absorption that is more consistent with Chinese culture. The specifics of these policy alternatives are explored, together with their advantages and disadvantages.
The paper concludes with the outlines of a possible agenda for future research, focusing on the investigation of complexity-handling modes and the contingencies which may bear upon the choice between them.
China's rapid economic development is being accomplished through a system of industrial governance and transaction that differs from Western experience. Here, we identify the broad institutional ...nature of this distinctiveness within a framework of information codification and diffusion. The emergent features of China's economic order are analyzed with reference to the business system developing there, in particular, the nature of market arrangements, the form of capitalism, and the role of government within that system. The limited extent of codification of information in China and its communal property rights and organization of economic transactions suggest that decentralization from the former state-command system is giving rise to a distinctive institutional form--network capitalism.
The Bela Peč (Weißenfels) dominion, which encompassed with the exception of the Dovje (Lengenfeld) and Koroška Bela (Kärntner Vellach) the entire area of the Upper Sava Valley, was formed as an ...independent economic and administrative unit in the middle of the 15th century. The living of the dominion was defined especially by the Alpine world with specific climatic conditions and extensive iron ore deposits. The book contains the edition of two oldest domain urbarium from 1498 and 1636, which offer an excellent economic, demographic and social image of domain, where agrarian and non-agrarian production intensively intertwine. As such it is an interesting starting point for possible further comparative studies not only for the area of present-day Slovenia, but also for the wider eastern Alpine region and Friuli. The edition is accompanied by an extensive study.
In Egyptology, the subordinates of the Hyksos are commonly defined as vassals, often without giving a definition of the concept and as a consequence, the complexity that subordination practices might ...acquire is overlooked. In this paper, I present a revision of the origin and meaning of the concept of vassal, the underlying paradigms that sustain it, and discuss the scarce evidence as to reconstruct the subordination practices carried out by the Hyksos in Egypt.
Scholars agree that before the Habsburg legislation of 1595–1616, nobility was essentially a social phenomenon in the Southern Low Countries, but the conventions that structured that social consensus ...are still subject to debate. This article challenges the established opinion that being or becoming noble was a matter of mastering the so-called 'vivre noblement', namely a distinct lifestyle that included large-scale landownership, military service, a patrilineal family structure and a specific material culture that entailed, among other things, clothing, riding horses, carrying swords, hunting, the use of heraldry and specific behavioural patterns in speech, posture and consumption. In-depth research shows that the discourse of noble exclusivity in lifestyle only emerged in the sixteenth century under the impulse of the Habsburg government, and that in the late medieval county of Flanders (the most important principality of the Southern Low Countries), the various elements of the 'vivre noblement' were widely accessible to the many wealthy commoners in town and countryside. A study of the medieval discourse on nobility and a quantitative analysis suggest that nobility was in fact tied to a limited number of seigniories, that is, private property rights which entailed the exertion of public power over village communities. The concluding section of this article draws on social semiotics and anthropological studies on the value of objects to discuss how the ownership of similar objects and symbols by noblemen and wealthy commoners carried different meanings, depending on the social context of its use.
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