Precapitalist Political Power

The unity of political and economic power which differentiated pre-capitalist states, wherein exploitation was actually carried out by additional-economic means i.e. by means of judicial, military power and / or political 'politically constituted property’ that has existed in several forms: ancient empires where the state power was appointed in order to collect tribute from the subject peoples, such as their own peasants. The imperial office was the main means of getting more wealth.  The 'collective lordships’, the commercial city-states in early and modern period, the early modern absolutist state of European with its 'tax or office' struc­ture, where public office was the  source of private wealth, gained by collecting taxes particularly from peasants. The 'modern' nation state started from a very specific pre-capitalist formation, the unity of the economic and political power which took the  'parcellized sovereignty of  the Western feudalism, form of a different separate state power, and its different type kind of   additional economic power known as feudal lordship.

The separated political, , judicial and military powers of the region or state became the means wherein each  lord collected surpluses from the peas­ants. Simultaneously, political parcelization was matched by the economic division, therefore even internal trade, while it expanded beyond very local peasant markets, was less like the modern capitalist kind of trade in the integrated compet­itive market than like the conventional forms of the international com­merce, moving goods between  different individual markets.

The parcellized sovereignty of feudalism represented a network of very local and personal social relations, which were at once political and economic. This certainly meant that the feudal system was very fragmented. But at the same time, it was in the very nature of these relations that there were no rigid territorial boundaries between one feudal nexus and another. A feudal kingdom, constituted by a series of vertical relations of realty, bondage, and personal coercive power, and horizontal relations of family and dynastic alliance, was likely to have fairly porous borders, which could be breached or moved by extending or contracting the network of personal bonds and domination. Just as the feudal trading network was not an integrated global system but a series of conveyance and arbitrage operations between one locale and another, feudalism as a social system was an aggregation of personal and local networks with permeable or moveable boundaries.

Questionnaire:

• Explain about Precapitalist political power.