Domination: Chapter 4

4. OWNERSHIP AND CORPORATE GROUPS IN THE JURAL REVOLUTION

Fabricating “Truth” and the Other

It is my contention that once there was a material surplus e.g., dried fish in the case of fishers or grain or herds in the case of Neolithic domesticators, ambitious men set about to fabricate “truth scenarios” that reformed or reshaped the collectivistic (communalistic) ethos that had prevailed for hundreds of thousands of years in the Paleolithic Era. To get control of people’s minds and access their labor and goods, these men created scenarios of social circumstances that called for more individualism and less communalism.
We can relate this to brainwashing, thought reform or re-education. Brainwashing can be seen as a systematic effort aimed at instilling attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that run against the normal way of thinking and behaving. For Humankind at the advent of the Neolithic, the normal way of thinking was collective, communalistic and based on generalized reciprocity (sharing). This was a culture in which people were raised (socialized or enculturated) to share without the expectation of a specific repayment, though it was expected that others would act accordingly, though not immediately.
Aggrandizers had to change this way of thinking. To gain power over the minds of people, they had to replace collectivist thinking with the idea of individualistic thinking, which eventually led to the concept of private ownership. The idea behind their new “truth scenario” – what my professor Merlin Myers loved to call a “just-so story” – was that it was okay for individuals to want and have more prestige, power and property than others in society. That was the crux of the matter.
The “truth scenario” or ethos that had existed for time immemorial was that of community over the individual. The “new truth” promoted by the seekers of power, was that some individuals or favored corporate groups had the right to have more prestige, power and property than others.
Stressing new ideas of individualism and ownership ran against the grain of the Paleolithic ethos. No doubt, go-getters early on had to be understated in the behavior and had to subtly slip their new ideas into those already held by the group. However much time it took for these self-seeking men to fabricate a new way of thinking and behaving, it eventually came about and paved the road to privatism, hierarchy and stratification.
Establishing the idea that some people and groups were special and had unique rights was step one. Step two was its corollary: that others had duties toward these special people or groups. It was the earth-shaking idea that some people had to provide aggrandizers with the surplus value of their labor through corvée labor, tribute, taxes or tithes. It didn’t take aggrandizers long before they added slavery to the list. Serfdom would come later.
This was the beginning of classifying human beings and community members according to a new set of criteria. During the Paleolithic there were only a few social (biologically based) categories, including: men, women, children, youth, middle-aged childbearing people and elders, as well as people of different communities (bands). Early aggrandizers were about the business of establishing an ominous new way of classifying people i.e., into: haves and have-nots.
Once a surplus was established, aggrandizers began the process of compartmentalizing society in unique ways. In the new model, special people had more rights and non-special people had more duties toward the special people. Of course, it was the “special people” creating the discourse. They were the early scriptwriters, the fabricators of domination.
For the first time in the history of Humankind, the other became the Other. In my book, West Africa, I called this the process of Otherizing. The idea is similar to Edward Said’s (1979) concept of “Orientalism,” but broader I think, to include very early compartmentalizing of Humankind. Once aggrandizers had defined the Other, it became possible to act differently toward that newly-established “category of persons.”
The groundwork was laid for have and have-not, lord and lorded-over. A new and terrible world was born out of the desires of acquisitive men. In fact, Jared Diamond (1987) wrote an oft-quoted article about this entitled: “The worst mistake in the history of the human race,” referring to the development of agriculture in the early Neolithic and the development of a surplus.
It would have been difficult to enslave one’s family or community members, but captives in war, for example, could be defined as significantly different so that they could more easily be made into slaves. Producing serfs and people of one’s own community was a more difficult task, but with time and effort aggrandizers brought it off (see chapter 8). However, warfare was the first awesome means to enslave others who were defined by the warmongers as Others and hence useable surplus persons. Of course, slaves were highly useful in unlocking the potential of creating greater surpluses of food from land, which also could be taken in war.
All sorts of criteria of privilege were fabricated. Those persons had privileges who: were on a land first; were born first; were from the oldest lineage; had inheritance or succession rights; claimed supernatural powers; and so on. Once special categories of upper and lower people were cognitively created, assertive men could treat the “lower people” differently.
Initially no serfs or slaves were born such – their inferiority had to be manufactured cognitively, then defined according to a constructed body of accepted facts and then instituted as a set of exploitative procedures. Agency by forceful men was required. Inequality had dawned and the sun had set on the long practice of sharing on an equal basis.
The Indian caste system developed an elaborate version of the have/have-not dichotomy, one that established a sense of order among the people. There were five different levels of the system: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra and Dalits (a.k.a. Harijans or Untouchables). Within each of the first four varnas there were the many endogamous jatis or hereditary sub-castes. Furthermore, within each jati there were exogamous groups known as gotras, the lineage or clan of person. Traditionally poleconomic and military power lay with Kshatriya caste members and the Brahmans derived their influence and high prestige as keepers and interpreters of religion. At the top of the hierarchy, they received most of the prestige, power and property in pre-independence India. An elaborate system of ranking developed with the appearance of agriculture on the Indian sub-continent. Elaborate or simple hierarchy, the result was the same: those at the top lived well on the labor of those at the bottom.
But it is wrong to see such systems of ranking and stratification as fixed. They were created over time and usually continue to be modified by changing historical-material conditions e.g., some scholars believe that the caste system became more rigid and uniform throughout India due to the colonial domination of the British. In the deeper historical context, the system was not uniform throughout the sub-continent nor was it static and unchanging. It was altered or formed differently in various parts to meet special conditions and must be seen in more processual terms resulting in contextual stratification. Local élites would adapt emerging institutions such caste to fit their unique needs. Even persons within the Dalit outcasts used the caste system to stratify their own people.
What Was Being Fabricated in the Jural Revolution?

With a storable, stealable surplus, especially a grain-based one, aggrandizers set about to invent things. Material technology took off, but so did immaterial inventions. We can list the key ideas in this Jural Revolution:

● Rules about management of resources

● Ideas about the relationship between the Sacred and management of resources.

● Rules about ownership

● Corporations e.g., kin groups, sodalities (voluntary associations and secret societies), cults and age-sets, for example.

In addition to generating rules and ideas pertaining to the management of resources, opportunists began to fabricate ownership concepts of two sorts: collective and individual. Along with such initiatives, there emerged the idea that individuals or groups could have esoteric knowledge that set them apart. This, of course, had been prevalent in the Paleolithic as well e.g., a shaman who was unique because of his or her purported connection to the occult, but in the Jural Revolution this was connected to privilege of two sorts: (1) the ownership of office and (2) the ownership of property.
Even in the Neolithic, sometimes connection with the occult was unconnected with privileged access to power or property. For instance, Peter Whiteley (1988) notes that the Hopi village of Oraibi “was politically differentiated, on the basis of ritual knowledge and authority, into an élite and a commoner class, unmarked by economic differences.” This was hierarchy, not stratification, since rank did not give privileged access to material goods. Yet, once such separations were made, they could become the basis of economic and political stratification in the future, a base on which aggrandizers could build.
Moreover, sometimes secret knowledge was thought to be mystically connected with sacred objects or relics of the past. For example, among the Mossi of present-day Burkina Faso, there is a well-known founding myth. Many generations ago, a princess named Nyennega was not allowed to marry because she was a great warrior. She took a horse and fled north into what is now Mossi country, where she married a local man. Their son was named Ouedraogo (stallion). For reasons that are not explained, the couple sent the son back to be raised by his royal grandfather, Naba Nedega, who ruled over the Dagomba and other groups in what is today central Ghana. When he grew up, he returned to the north with mounted warriors and conquered his father's people, the Busani. It is said that the marriage of Ouedraogo and his troops with Mande women produced the Mossi people. It is also said the Ouedraogo’s spurs and perhaps other relics of his journey are still part of a repository of sacred objects kept by the Mossi King in Ouagadougou in modern day Burkina Faso. The myth and the relics function to legitimate the rule of the Mossi royal family.
Once Neolithic society began to become differentiated into separate groups – lineages, clans, age-sets, voluntary associations, secret societies, cults, etc., – each began to build a separate mini-culture with its unique history, genealogy, songs, rites, proverbs, relics and legends, much as had been the case in the Paleolithic for the undifferentiated residential band. Furthermore, leaders emerged within sub-groups who could begin to formulate ideas and materializations of ideas that would provide them with a platform for greater poleconomic control beyond the limits of the sub-group e.g., shrines, sacred mounds etc.
We find these ideas and objects in contemporary societies e.g., among the Zuni of the Southwestern United States. Men, who held high ritual office, often had a staff of office. Such inalienable objects were made special by the fact that their production was secret, but had to be legitimized through public feasting and ceremonialization. Moreover, concepts evolved pertaining to the owner of such objects. For instance, having a mask and being a Kachina impersonator ensured that the owner would go to a place called the “Kachina Village” upon dying and that he would return to the pueblo as rain clouds. Such masks needed to be ritually “fed” everyday by the senior member of the matrilineage. In this manner, inalienable possessions took on a cultural history and social identity that is attached to the owner, either an individual or a social group.
There are many ethnographic examples of such ownership providing men with income e.g., owning the divining bag and its companion shrine in Sisala society. But ownership of divinatory objects did not provide a diviner with poleconomic control. In traditional Sisala society, formal poleconomic authority was connected to ownership of other kinds of ancestral shrines (vensing), which were composed of soul bracelets of all the dead men of the lineage. The diviner’s shrine was of a class of shrines called vuyaa or personal shrines. They are not connected with a social group, but are individually owned. The lineage headman, however, was the custodian of shrines classed as vensing (s. vene) or social shrines, which were foci for rites pertaining to a group.
Being the custodian of ancestral shrines gave lineage headmen poleconomic control within their kin groups. Such ideas were fabricated over time providing patriarchs with the right to control resources and people. In traditional Sisala society, custodians of shrines were leaders of mini-polities (lineages).
Before the coming of the Europeans, there was no paramount chief of the Sisala, which was composed of different clans scattered over the land. But the basis of chiefship already existed in the gerontocracy, where elder men ruled over younger men and women in the lineage organization. The British appointed a chief of Tumu, the largest and most important town in the region and he immediately set about to define himself as more than a European-installed chief, but as a leader according to traditional criteria. He built a two-story “palace,” the normal abode of a big man and built in its courtyard a large shrine known as the Tumuwiheiya. Other secret shrines, relics and medicines were kept behind closed doors in the palace. In time, legend had it that this first chief became a powerful “wizard” and he used such beliefs to build a personal fortune and died leaving over sixty wives and hundreds of children and grandchildren. It is instructive that when the first Chief of Tumu died, people did not believe that he could die and many missed his funeral thinking the death announcement was merely a rumor.
The point is that ownership of relatively benign objects in one historical-material condition can lead to opportunities for aggrandizers in newly emerging historical-material conditions. The Chief of Tumu surrounded himself with supernatural ideas and contrivances that legitimized his position. At the same time he seized on trade and commercial opportunities brought on by colonialism that enabled him to capitalize on being chief. Whereas in olden times, control of shrines gave a man limited control over about fifty people in the linage context; the Tumu Chief was able to use shrines and ritual apparatuses to catapult himself to far greater poleconomic heights (controlling thousands in a fabricated “tribe”) because new opportunities came along with European control of that part of Africa.
When I arrived in Sisalaland in 1970, the Tumu Chief, Luri Kanton, was the wealthy owner of a trucking company and rode around his domain in a brand new Chevrolet Impala. He also presided over secret rites within the walls of his large compound, information about which “leaked out” beyond the walls and he also officiated at public rites held at the Tumuwiheiya shrine.
Sometimes early Neolithic aggrandizers turned collective leadership in a small group (a lineage, cult or sodality) into leadership of all such groups to become a chief. Sometimes the man who desired to be chief borrowed ideas and objects from known bases of power in society, picking and choosing symbols of power that members of society would recognize and consequently afford him authority. Sometimes he invented new symbols of office and imbued them with power because of their connection to known forms of Deity or supernatural powers. Poleconomic power was usually constructed out of existing building blocks within the known culture (for example, see chapter 7 and note how the Kuba King fabricated Divine Kingship out of smaller chiefdoms).
In other words, very early Neolithic society probably fit the model anthropologists call heterarchy, where there were small pockets of hierarchy forming in different locals and domains within society, but there were also many areas where people were still communally organized. It was a fluid situation.
We see this in the archaeology and ethnography of some societies studied recently e.g., Wills’ (2000) analysis of the archaeology of the construction of Chacoan great houses in New Mexico. The people of the Chaco Canyon constructed great ceremonial structures although their social organization is described as non-hierarchical. Wills indicated that great houses were the product of “aggrandizing behavior” by leaders whose power was based in control of farmland but whose authority was legitimized by control of religious office. That is, religious leaders competed for supporters by financing and directing the construction of great houses.
In the Chaco case, religion was one pocket of ideas that led to hierarchy in a segmentary society that was not a chiefdom or a kingdom and where there were many different kinds of social organization within a group of people who shared a common territory and culture. Professor Wills indicates that there was competition, not only between religious leaders, but between all leaders and great houses may have been constructed at different times by different kinds of leaders.
This is precisely the kind of social mix that most likely occurred at the beginning of the Neolithic – heterarchy with pockets of men on the rise, competing with each other for prestige and power, with some eventually becoming successful enough to begin to control wealth. Some achievers were successful, while others failed, but eventually, as the centuries wore on, chiefs arose to form hierarchical polities based on authoritative institutions that allowed the few to dominate the many.
Stratified societies were constructed out of the building blocks of non-stratified cultures. Even in Paleolithic bands, some people had more prestige than others. One man might be the best hunter. A woman might have the ability to go into trance. They gained prestige in their lifetimes because of those abilities but held no power over property. Once a storable, stealable surplus came into existence, the “prestige game” became more serious and consequential. Prestige could be converted into different kinds of power – that over people, places and things, both utilitarian and sacred.
It is highly likely then that early Neolithic societies began as communities with a strong communalistic ethos, but with men and corporate groups on the rise. Processes were at work to elevate some groups over others and some men over others. Women were being sidelined in this process of rule formation (see Gerda Lerner (1986) on this). Rankings were emerging, which could become the basis of later stratified societies.

Ownership
Over the last two centuries, one particular type of property relation has come to dominate modern societies. That is private property. Neoliberalists combine this with the rule of law to form a cluster they tell us is indispensable to development and being a “player” in the game of globalization, although, when measured against the eons of Paleolithic existence, private ownership is a very new concept.
What does ownership mean? What does it mean to say that the dog/house/slave/car/land/music is yours? Can you sell it? Kill or destroy it? Lend it out? Claim some affinity with it? Obviously ownership is a term with many nuances e.g., when a baseball player says he “owns” third base.
I take the perspective that ownership has shifted along a continuum from diffuse to specific. The “ownership” of a waterhole by a band of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers was something qualitatively different from “owning” the corner lot at Maple and Elm streets. The latter can be bought and sold. The waterhole was simply “held to be ours” by the band living nearest to it. The rules connected to “owning” the waterhole were diffuse and highly negotiable. It was possessed in the sense that non-band members had to ask permission to drink there, though that was almost always given, if contemporary hunter-gatherer ethnography is any guide. The corner lot at Maple and Elm streets will have highly specific rules governing ownership.
As an example, the Hadza are a foraging society in Tanzania, with a lifestyle not unlike Paleolithic groups. Who “owns” an antelope just killed by a Hadza hunter? There are two owners of a downed antelope: the man who made the arrow and the one who shot the arrow. These can be the same man or different men. But the minute the animal is killed both men become simple consumers right alongside all the Hadza back at camp who did not kill the animal. Society “owns” the animal in the sense that nobody can dry the meat and hoard it, though they know how to do this. Certainly no Hadza hunter could set up a kiosk and sell the meat (see Woodburn 1968, 1970, 1998).
When the arrow (or its poison) kills the antelope, it becomes a commonly owned piece of property. Every member of the Hadza band has equal demand rights with respect to it. No one in society and no faction in society have control over the distribution of this “thing,” at least not in the sense of varying the distribution of meat from what is traditional.
Ownership did come into being in storaging societies, but it was often semi-communal (or semi-private) ownership e.g., by a lineage, cult, age-set, voluntary association or secret society. Sharing went from the band level to that of a corporate group. It was “sodalisized,” so to speak. There was another difference: the undifferentiated band was small enough that everyone understood how things were done. There wasn’t a need for formal codes or officers to police society. A differentiated society was qualitatively dissimilar. With the presence of a storable, stealable surplus, codes emerged, with rules being embedded in hereditary offices within corporate groups e.g., cult leader or lineage headman. In a heterarchy, the lineage headman was responsible for production, distribution and consumption within his family, the cult leader within his group and so forth. As an overall hierarchy developed, the chief became partially responsible i.e., he had his hands on the process of producing and distributing food, an opportunity for siphoning off value for himself and/or his selected persons.
Property was not considered alienable, however. As land had become important, for instance, a given corporate group more often than not held it communally. Members had use rights (in usufruct) and the headman of the group regulated its use. He was an administrator, not an owner – a custodian for the others. He did not have rights in rem i.e., rights of alienation of that which was “owned.”
What happened over time is that property became more alienable or exchangeable. In modernity its alienability/exchangeability is what is important, whereas in tribal society property was less transferable. As land acquired alienability/exchangeability, specific rules emerged to deal with land exchange. Fiddling those rules could lead to amassing land in the hands of those manipulating rule creation and early aggrandizers realized this and moved accordingly.
With the focus of ownership in the corporate group, headmen of different groups were thrown into competition for resources, which led to a need for overarching leadership. This is where we begin to see the emergence of big men, little chiefs, which get transformed in time into full-blown hereditary chiefs with authority.
As time passed, fabricating élites devised rules of ownership and distribution that privileged them and their factions. Chiefs partly arose to mediate factional disputes, but as chiefships developed they often became yet another, albeit powerful, faction.
The ostensible purpose of chiefly control, often broadcast loudly by chiefly spokesmen, was to facilitate the public good (pro bono publico). But control gave privilege and privilege gave rise to favoritism, hoarding and behavior that were not always in the public interest.
In hindsight, with a longue durée perspective, we can see that there was some siphoning going on. Élites were enriching themselves, their families, factions and their friends. The ability to do this has increased as the build-up of structural rules has created official opacity. As time passed, there were more rules behind which to hide, a normative shield, so to speak. Ownership of key resources, the means of production and the means of destruction, now began to fall into the hands of a few aggrandizing rule creators. Society had changed forever.
This happened even among people who were hunter-gatherer-fishers, such as the Nootka of the Northwest Coast, where chiefs arose to “own” the major resources (Drucker 1951). All of the Nootka territory including the sea for miles offshore was private property, the possessions of certain chiefs. Head chiefs held the most, the lower chiefs less and commoners possessed none at all. Furthermore, commoners had to provide a “first fruits” offering, part of the fish they caught, which they were required to give as “help to the chief.
In such a society, fabricated rules gave chiefs the right to own such property and ownership gave them the right to demand payments from those who used the sea. In Paleolithic times, until the rise of storaging societies, the sea would have been a free good, open to anyone wishing to fish. Big men were able to manufacture institutions that re-defined the nature of Nature, definitions favorable to themselves and their chosen few.
The Nootka were sort of a halfway house between competitive Melanesian big men and full-blown hereditary chiefs who had some degree of stability to their polities. Apparently the Nootka hierarchy fluctuated between chiefs being strong at times and at other times the group was dominant. These were titular chiefs cum chiefs. When chiefs were strong, they sometimes banded together to raid commoners for their wealth and used captured slaves to bully them in extortionist ways. When chiefs were weak, devolving into “little chiefs,” there were cases where commoners rebelled through withdrawal of support and even killed chiefs they considered to be evil. We saw similar behavior among the Yakut-Mono of California.
By the time of European contact with the Nootka, however, chiefs had become strong and three or four big chiefs who warred and competed with each other for dominance governed the region. The muscle of the chiefs can be seen in their behavior in times of economic stress. Wike says:

Failures in the Nootka food supply are reported with some frequency from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Warfare over resources and territorial holding was widespread and intensive. Under these conditions it is not surprising that usufruct became less generous, and the chief’s stewardship of resources was transformed into personal or restricted ownership and use. The weak or unlucky were exterminated, or lost their holding completely, or they might be forced to pay tribute. Often they had to “join” other groups for protection where they lived at the bottom of the social scale without holdings or chief of their own as subject or tributary groups and “orphan” or “servant” commoners (1958:224).

While in some aspects the Nootka system was based on generalized reciprocity and the chiefs had social responsibilities toward their principal supporters, with the passage of time chiefs worked to manufacture institutions of domination that gave them rights over people and resources that had not previously existed. In varying degrees, head chiefs, war chiefs, chiefly spokesmen and shamans contrived to extract surplus wealth from those with less constructed power. They also took slaves in war, which gave them demographic power over non-slaveholders and intermarried with other “noble” families to form an aristocratic class that cooperated internally to exploit the powerless in society. This is the same kind of aggrandizement we saw with the titular chiefs and shamans of the Yokut-Mono, but in a historical-material condition of greater abundance, hence the greater stratification.
The Nootka provide a transitional example of a society where big man competition for power and prestige became transformed into hereditary chiefship with extreme hereditary stratification that looked like this:

Nootka Hierarchy
Head chiefs
Lesser chiefs
Chiefly officials e.g.,
spokesman & shamans
Commoners
Slaves

This ranking system developed in a storager society without either agriculture or herding. Yet, storable fish wealth allowed exploitative institutions to emerge and aggrandizers recognized opportunities and manufactured such structures to provide them with unequal access to resources.
In the agricultural groups that developed later in the Neolithic farming communities, people became tied to productive land and became sedentary (less mobile). Since not all land was equally productive or strategically defensible, this led to social variation.
Though they held no farmland, the same ranking happened to the storagers of the Northwest Coast as some streams were more productive than others and ownership of the adjacent land became important. Oberg writes:

In places where a number of clans live together, the allocation of resources correlates very closely with the principle of scarcity. When a number of clans settled on the banks of large rivers, like the Stikine, Taku, and Chilcat, the question of rights to salmon fishing did not arise. There was plenty for everyone in the large river. Similarly deep sea fishing was unrestricted by property rights. But on the islands the rivers were smaller and the important ones far apart. It was thus necessary to apportion the resources in some manner (1973:56).

Strong clans had agreements with each other and with weaker clans, but power was not fixed as authoritative rights and duties. If weaker clans developed resources that stronger clans wanted, conflict developed. Oberg notes that agreements about the boundaries and their permanent acceptance were constantly prejudiced by the power of the stronger clans and the factor of kinship. Strong clans held the prime water and they progressively infringed upon the rights of the weaker if this were worthwhile.
It must be remembered that not only did the rise of inequality lead to extraction of value from people, which in times of stress could cause death among the less fortunate; it also led to the rise of feuding and warfare on a large scale, resulting in enslavement and death for many of the less powerful in society. There was a direct correlation between the rise of storable, stealable surplus property and warfare. Philip Drucker notes:

Among the Nootka, bitter, long-drawn-out wars were carried on by various local groups and tribes for the express purpose of capturing the territory of their neighbors. In addition, the objective of frequent raids, some of them at quite long range, was to capture wealth goods and slaves … Presumably the developed concept of a war of conquest is to be attributed to the highly developed concepts of property rights in lands and places of economic importance, and to a certain amount of actual population pressure in the north in aboriginal times (1963:148).

Corporate Groups and Ownership

Most of the early corporate groups were family groups and sodalities e.g., lineages and cults. They held common rights and duties and were ongoing jural organizations that predated and outlived their members. In modern legal parlance they were legal persons. They could own property and control their membership. Of course, later in history we get chiefdoms, states, empires, gilds, trading companies and now IBM and Exxon. All are corporations in the sense that they have "aspects of a natural person" or corporation sole.
This prescient idea that men could come together to form a unit legally larger than the sum of its members was a new concept. Nothing like this could have existed among the non-storing foragers of the Paleolithic. The corporation was an entity with a life like a person, with an ongoing existence that would transcend the individual lives of its members. This was a revolutionary idea. Nothing like it had existed for thousands of years.
You could liken Paleolithic communalism to a giant mirror and with domestication that mirror was broken into several pieces, each shard being a corporate group. Individual ownership had not yet become common but when it did, the shards were shattered into even tinier bits.
Once there were resources to harness, they could go to individuals or to a sodality. For instance, among the Zuni, the firewalkers and sword-swallower-shamans formed religious societies that functioned as trade gilds, which held resource locations and secrets about manufacturing processes. These were money-making activities and, additionally, they sold such information to other communities.
In my own work, I found diviners in Sisalaland had formed corporate cults with elaborate initiation ceremonies, based on putative connections to spirits and the occult realm. They were thought to have secret information about the supernatural, natural and social worlds. They were owners of materializations of that power and secret knowledge – a wand, rattle, skin-bag, code-objects, divining shrine – and they possessed restricted knowledge that gave them the right to act as go-betweens linking the general population to the realm of the ancestors. Such corporate cults gave diviners exclusivity and privileges that commoners did not have.
Leaders of Sisala cults based on ownership of shrines or medicines often had secret rooms, called black rooms, which housed occult paraphernalia. Such big men were thought to be helpful in protecting and curing, but they were also feared. Shamanistic power to cure was often coupled with the power to kill and Sisala specialists were provided, not with normal respect (zile), but with “fearful respect” (fa). Such corporations in the early years of the Neolithic had an aura of respect and mystery that provided specialists with poleconomic power that would have been unthinkable in the Paleolithic.
Today, managers of cults, secret societies and other such corporate groups are set apart, usually in public rites of initiation. This makes them different from the general populace. As such, they are often endowed with mystical trappings of office and become materializations of the powers. Their lives may have special restrictions and prohibitions, they may eat special foods, wear unique clothing, go through purifying rites, take retreats, go on pilgrimages etc. Such trappings of sodality membership began with the first complex societies of the Neolithic.
Among the Pueblo Amerindians, special callings assigned to individuals or groups were sometimes based on myths, which contained accounts detailing the order of emergence from the sacred underworld and the importance of the knowledge controlled by the person, household, or group (Mills 2004). Those individuals functioning as group leaders or holders of special powers often portrayed their roles as onerous burdens. This is a form of noblesse oblige, wherein élites claimed publicly that their callings were not something that anyone would seek, being a weight on their shoulders rather than a privilege. Such an ideology, defining themselves as caretakers, not exploiters, served to hide the poleconomic opportunities office provided. Ethnographically and archaeologically we find such special persons receiving status burials, their uniqueness in life being carried into death.
Why did corporations emerge? Forming corporate groups was a type of poleconomic mini-centralization and later we see this on a larger scale with the development of chiefdoms and kingdoms. Once there was a storable, stealable surplus, factions arose, coalescing around common interests and poleconomic behavior became compartmentalized, bundled within segments of the larger society.
The corporate group was an especially useful way to continue a smaller version of communalism under new historical-material conditions. Sharing was kept within the group, most of which were kin groups, but also sodalities and cults began to come on the scene.
Such corporate groups were convenient legal entities for opportunists, which allowed them privileged access to some of the resources of the new historical-material circumstances. They were able to form social barriers preventing some members of society from the details of how people and things were being handled behind such barriers. This is most obvious with a secret society, but was also true of other corporate groups. The workings of a lineage were only visible to family members and then usually only male leaders, as I have described for Sisala gerontocrats. Since membership was exclusive, maneuvering and manipulating men could operate in an opaque jural framework, in a small and restricted political economy.
This aggregating of men in corporate groups was a response to natural needs that arose when humans had to, for the first time, address material realities that did not confront non-storing foragers e.g., storage of products and protection of surplus wealth. There were other things going on: new technologies were born, people had more food and population was on the rise. Also, with rising warfare, the world had become a more dangerous place.
Rising conflict came from the fact that, unlike in the Paleolithic, there were haves and have-nots. For instance, grain harvests could be uneven and based on soil, insect or weather differences. One society or corporate group might be fortunate to have a large surplus, while neighbors might not. It was a situation that soon led to warfare and the need for aggressive leadership, militia, weaponry and fortifications.
Managers took it on themselves to deal with such conflicts but also agricultural constructions (dams, canals, etc.) and environmental hazards e.g., flood waters from the lakes at different altitudes in the Valley of Mexico. These needs often led to leadership above the level of corporate group.
But there was also organization going on within corporate groups. Headmen and leaders arose to deal with internal matters. While chiefs and kings would be societal managers, corporate leaders dealt with internal affairs of their respective groups.
Early corporations started out as organic responses to threats and opportunities of one sort or another to a small number of people. But thinking men quickly realized that they could use such organizations as power bases. They also came to see that the same organizational principles could be used more broadly. They saw that they could enrich themselves, their kin and their fellows by using such political formations as a poleconomic base from which to launch an effort to dominate on a wider scale. What is more, as time went by, they tinkered with the formations to incorporate ideas of rights to perquisites that led to greater and greater accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few corporate office-holders.
After Neolithic domestication some people became farmers, but others were herders of animals, with the storable, stealable surplus being a herd; a mobile “bank account,” so to speak. While farmers had their grain stores to protect, pastoralists had herds to watch over. In both instances corporations arose to protect investments. Farmers often had corporate kin groups while herd-owners developed both descent groups and age sets to manage their mobile funds of wealth.
In pastoralism-based economies defense was even more critical than with farmers because animals formed a heritable fund that required normative regulation, as did stores of grain for farmers; but animals took more care, had to be penned daily or watched over and they could be more easily stolen in great quantities than, for example, grain or trade goods stored in various places in a fortified city. Marauders could swoop down and drive off a great deal of wealth in herding societies, whereas with agricultural groups, it was necessary to sack a town to get at an equal amount of wealth. Also, herds could be driven away while grain and goods had to be transported – a much more difficult endeavor.
Both farmers and herders organized corporate groups because both had a heritable fund that required rules of inheritance and also needed to be defended. Furthermore, such governing groups required offices and holders of office. These fund managers had to fabricate both rules of inheritance and succession to office. This was a jural environment that had not existed in non-storing Paleolithic peoples. Now accumulation began to percolate within corporate groups and the possibility of stratagems on the part of office-holders and other aggrandizers began in earnest. The possibility of factional competition had increased.
And they began their strategizing within the opacity provided by the jural walls around lineages, cults, secret societies and age-sets i.e., corporate groups. In a hunting and gathering band there was little or no opacity (save what a person did alone in the bush – and then someone might be watching). In camp, everything short of the most intimate details of the sexual act was carried out in public. It was hard to have secrets. It was a naturally transparent world, without the rule-based fabrications that the domestication of plants and animals thrust on Humankind.
As the Jural Revolution proceeded to deal with rising competition, it did so on a roadbed of privatized social relations and corporate opacity. Transparency declined inversely to the increase in rules and the rise of a more segmented society.
E. Adamson Hoebel (1966) noted that the essential nature of property can be found in social relationships rather than in any inherent attributes of the objects that constitute what we call property. In other words, property is not so much things, but a network of social relations that governs the conduct of people with respect to the use and disposition of goods. People everywhere had to deal with the rise in goods, by fabricated social relations were not constructed in the same manner everywhere. Sometimes they were situated within the corporate group and ownership was more or less communal; at other times and places individual ownership emerged.
Technology makes a difference. Jack Goody (1970, 1977) has contrasted cultures of the African hoe (or digging stick) with those of the plow, used mainly in Eurasia. He notes that hierarchical relations are more likely to be associated with plow cultures. This is because of Eurasian individuation of property rights. That is, property is passed from generation to generation through persons in a way that divides it, as compared with more corporate tenure schemes of Africa. As people migrated out of Africa they encountered new types of soil and weather, ones that required more labor and investment in land than in Africa, where soils are generally poor and agriculture is extensive, of a shifting nature, rather than fixed and intensive on a given plot. Intensive investment in Eurasian land fostered more competition for land and investments on it than in Africa where competition revolved around attracting or controlling people (labor) not land.
Presumably, individuals holding property can make alliances with other property holders to coalesce holdings and gain strategic advantage over those disadvantaged by this. Property can also be taken by force and turned into “legitimate” holdings by adroit manipulation of customs of land tenure e.g., in the unscrupulous use of written documents by castle-lords of Catalonia to firm up thefts of land in chapter 8.
Clearly, hierarchy accompanied the Jural Revolution, but of two kinds, as indicated above. Another way to look at this is that in some places hierarchy was individualized, while in others it was corporate groups that got ranked. For example, it is quite common in the ethnographic record to encounter lineage ranking based on the formula: first in existence is senior to segments formed subsequently. Sometimes both individual (familial) mini-poleconomies exist within a larger frame of a public political economy e.g., in Catalonia heritable funds of wealth held by baronial families within the context of the suzerainty of the House of Barcelona (see chapter 8).
What we see in history is that land was acquired by occupying it first or by aggressively ejecting or killing its occupants and post facto rules were then formulated to justify occupation. This leads to a second need. Rules have to be crafted to make the property heritable, to legally pass it from holder to heir.
The privatization and corporatization of property had to creep uphill against the massive force of communitarianism. This concept of generalized reciprocity still exists among many tribal peoples in the world today and it was more common in the Neolithic. Ownership rules have evolved, wrenchingly moving away from communal control. The evolutionary process was something like this:

communal > corporate > individual

This has been the result of the work by scriptors, those fabricating rules about ownership and office. Yet individuation of property was not automatic and butted up against traditional communalism. It took effort and strategizing on the part of aggrandizers to eventually break down the cultural ideas and rules of egalitarianism, communitarianism and corporate ownership in order to concentrate wealth in the hands of individuals. Even the move from communitarianism to corporate ownership must have been fraught with difficulty.
Communitarianism ideas lasted a long time into the Neolithic, and still exist in some parts of the globe. Homans (1942) noted that the peasants of the Middle Ages often dealt with the external world in a communalistic way. While this was the preferred way of life for the lower classes, élites favored private ownership. For instance, Catalan castle-lords in the seigneurie banale ignored collective rights of franchised communities, privileges that had been acquired from the public domain of the Count of Barcelona. They stole land and placed peasants in bondage. They even invaded sagreres, the circular areas with a radius of between 30 to 60 paces of the church house. This agreed-upon area traditionally enjoyed the privileges attached to the parish’s right of asylum and inviolability. Bonnassie (1975-76, 1991) says that the creation of the sagreres had as a consequence a dramatic contraction of village settlement which then huddled up against the church. The idea was that the church should act as a protector of the poor and powerless in the face of any undue assault by élites. It should have provided places of refuge and safety. During the violence of 1020-1060, aristocrats rampaged so wildly that even the sagrera was not sacred. The Medieval Sword severed any legal rights of villages and property holders during this Time of Violence. It was an especially stark example of a process that has been going on since someone built the first granary.
This didn’t end with the diminution of the most violent acts on the part of the berserk paladin lords. Communalism was in a constant struggle with the power of aristocrats wishing to cement their hold over income streams. They did this through violence and intimidation and then fabricated documents to further solidify their claims on the peasants. The Power of the Sword was supplemented with the Power of the Pen. After their frenzied efforts to secure castles, land and rights over labor, the lords fabricated a shield of legal protection (chapter 8).
In early Neolithic times and for ages beyond, such protective shields were manufactured by aggrandizers in the form of oral codes. Once writing was invented, these regulations were laid down, sometimes in real stone e.g., the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 3727 B.P.). This was the first written code in recorded history. The single most striking feature of this set of laws was Hammurabi’s commitment to protection of the weak from being brutalized by the strong. He believed that he had been ordained by his gods Anu (God of the Sky) and Bel (The Lord of Heaven and Earth, the God of Destiny) to establish the rule of law and justice over his people. The very need for such a statement reveals that élite selfishness and exploitation were common in Hammurabi’s world, the Babylonian Empire, which stretched from ca. 3763 B.P. to 2539 B.P.. It also shows that at times, powerful office-holders moved to establish public jurisdictions that had social value for the weaker members of society. Unfortunately these have been the exception to the rule and prestige, power and property have steadily percolated upwards in the social hierarchy.
Perhaps this is because power corrupts and office-holders have been able to operate behind closed doors for the last 12 millennia. The distribution of property, entitlements and human security is a function of political activities, many of which have occurred clouded by the thick fog of authority and misleading proclamations (spin) from office-holders. Corporate groups were one platform on which these early incipient officers began to enact the fabrication of domination. In time the platform grew to chiefdoms, kingdoms, empires and nation states. Most recently we have seen the emergence of polities engulfing nation states e.g., the European Union.

Tlingit Storaging and Stratification

Let’s look at some ethnohistory to get a better understanding of how domination evolved in storaging societies. The Tlingit Amerindians of the Northwest Coast of Canada were storagers who partly lived off the annual salmon runs up their rivers. But their country was rich in other forms of fish, sea mammals, waterfowl, mollusks, deer, caribou, bear, squirrels, berries and other forest products.
The Tlingit were hunter-gatherer-fishers or a maritime adapted population of hunter-gatherers. David Yesner (1980) lists several basic features that distinguished maritime-adapted populations: (1) high resource biomass, (2) high resource diversity, (3) low resource seasonality, (4) unearned or easily accessible resources, (5) linear settlement patterns, (6) sedentism, (7) technological complexity, (8) high population densities, (9) strong sense of territoriality, (10) inter-population resource competition, and (11) warfare. This was a complex society, not unlike agricultural societies of the early Neolithic. At the time of European contact, the Tlingit were organized into fourteen “triblets,” which were further divided into clans. These federations or “triblets” averaged about seven hundred persons.
The opportunity to derive a surplus from fishing led the Tlingit to invest in long-term, permanent capital goods, mainly fish nets and traps to capture running salmon. The Tlingit also foraged for other foodstuffs in the forest, but investment in capital equipment distinguished them from Paleolithic foragers who relied on a limited toolkit. Most Paleolithic foragers had no need for a technology beyond the bow and arrow, arrowhead poison, the digging stick and a few small items such as string bags in which to carry tubers. Obviously in harsher environments, such as that encountered by arctic hunters, the toolkit would have varied; but in general, in the Paleolithic environments of hunter-gatherers, nature did not concentrate food. It was diffuse and gatherable on a daily basis, though at places there were annual migrations to collect some concentrated foods e.g., piñon nuts in the American southwest. But these nuts were not something that could be stored in quantities that led to stratification, as with dried fish. For most in the Paleolithic, nature was a sufficient larder to provide food on a daily basis. As a consequence, no complexity arose in non-storing hunter-gatherers.
This is significant. Even in the late Paleolithic (a.k.a. Mesolithic or Epipalaeolithic ) where humans had moved into lush environments in, for example, modern-day France and Spain, no evidence has been unearthed to show any hierarchal social structure among them. Generally, hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic and in the ethnographic record have shown data that indicate high mobility, fluctuating group size and seasonal variability (Forsberg 1985:9). The mobility was sometimes circular. Some hunter-gatherers were semi-sedentary, practicing the well-known aggregation-dispersion cycle (Conkey 1980), spending part of the year in large groupings and then breaking into smaller bands for the remainder of the year. They developed art, sophisticated tools and had an elaborate symbolic life, but we have no strong evidence of any political economy in their organization (Fagan 1995:135-136). In some ways, they were equal in complexity to the Tlingit, yet they had no chiefs or stratification. Why was this? Because they had no storable, stealable surplus around which to form a political economy.
Among the Tlingit fish stimulated development of a ranked social system. Ownership, however, was corporate. The clan owned all property. Tlingit weirs and traps were owned and controlled by different clans and lineage groups. These were familial corporations that could allow others to use them with permission. Oberg notes:

The house-group (clan) owned the house, slaves, large canoes, important tools and food boxes, important weapons, ceremonial gear, and the food products of collective work… these objects were held in trust by the yitsati (“keeper of the house”) for the use of the group as a whole or one of its members… individual property… consists of tools, weapons, small canoes, clothing, decorations, and ceremonial objects (1973:62).

Upon death, the property used by the deceased would revert to the clan if no caretaker kin were there to continue to use it. Kinsmen only had rights in usufruct over property and when it was given away, for example in the potlatch (see below) it was the clan giving and another clan receiving, though prestige could be accrued to the giver, both individual and clan. Both individuals and groups competed for prestige. This concept of clan ownership also applied to stories, legends, myths and proverbs, songs and dances.
It is highly likely that such corporate jurality, with bundles of rights and duties, emerged first out of the collective ethos of the Paleolithic. Individual rights would have been built up on top of these collective notions.
The Tlingit went beyond subsistence to capture a surplus that could be stored. Given my thesis that such a surplus stimulates aggrandizers to fabricate institutions of domination, we should see this in Tlingit society.
Indeed, Tlingit ownership formed a basis for social ranking that divided people into nobles and commoners. A storable, stealable surplus led to norms of ownership and social class, even though the Tlingit lacked agriculture and herds in pre-contact America.
While in Paleolithic foraging, everyone worked to provide food for the band, in the surplus-dominated world of the Tlingit, a leisure class formed. They were the anyeti, the nobles and the highest class among the Tlingit. According to Oberg they did virtually no work:

a high-born Tlingit does little outside ceremonial activities other than amuse himself. He will scarcely speak to anyone but his equal. Common labor is quite impossible if he wishes to maintain his prestige. Anyeti women are not taught the common art of weaving but cultivate only mannerisms of speech and movement. In fact, girls who have never worked are considered special prizes to be won in marriage (1973:87).

The Tlingit had three levels of social stratification:

 Anyeti – leisure class
 Commoner class
 Slaves (persons without the rights and duties normally falling to kin).

The wealth of a person was partly calculated by the number of slaves held. Slaves were taken from surrounding tribes along the coast as far south as California. Thralls were bought and sold in the barter economy and given away in an exchange ceremony known as the potlatch. In that ceremony, slave owners could also magnanimously free the slave as a sign of his great wealth, so great that he could be so generous. The elevated level of the slave owner could also be demonstrated by killing the slave in this ceremony.
Trade also supplied an outlet for transforming surplus wealth into prestige and contributed to the quest for social elevation. Aurel Krause, an ethnographer who worked among the Tlingit in the 1880s writes:
the Tlingit devotes the greatest part of his energy to trade. Long before the coming of the Europeans this was carried on; not only did neighboring tribes exchange different products of hunting and fishing, but there is evidence that more distant coastal territory and remote interior tribes carried on an active tribe to tribe trade through the Tlingit (1956:126).

The Tlingit environment provided food and a good living, but in the presence of a surplus, aggrandizers wanted more. They wanted prestige. In addition to external trade, the different Tlingit federations were interrelated in religiously regulated practices known to anthropologists as the potlatch. This ceremony was an avenue to prestige for the Tlingit achiever. Through the potlatch the anyeti social climber could exchange goods for prestige, thus contributing to economic redistribution.
The potlatch was performed by an individual and/or his kin group to validate anyeti status or to indicate a change in rank. They could be convened for any rite de passage e.g., death, birth, naming, marriage or for other reasons e.g., raising a totem pole or honoring the dead or the leadership of the group.
During the ceremony the anyeti would distribute dried fish, trade goods and even slaves in a show of generosity. The potlatch was governed by strict protocol. The rules mandated who could receive what by virtue of their rank. The person/kin unit receiving goods was expected to return an equal amount or greater in the future. In this way, kin competed with each other for stature and social esteem.
Rank was calculated in terms of wealth owned. This system did two things: (1) it stimulated go-getters to produce above the subsistence level; and, (2) it served as a mechanism whereby goods were distributed more evenly, thereby addressing shortages in some groups at any given time. Professor Netting says:

Efforts to gather extra food supplies or to manufacture wealth goods would also tend to intensify the use of local resources and restricted niches. To the extent that each group used its immediate surrounding more effectively, the total carrying capacity of the area would be increased. The long-term security of any population is based not on its average production and consumption level but on the way it is able to weather periods of scarcity. If surplus production for potlatches or other types of interchange afforded such insurance, it would have given a selective advantage to the groups practicing it. In other words, socially rewarding occasions of exchange such as the potlatch provided an important social incentive to do what was ecologically beneficial – to build a surplus of food and gather wealth that could be exchanged for food (1977:33).

The Tlingit may or may not have been aware of the ecological implications of the potlatch, but it is clear that the ceremonies were coordinated with variations in the seasonal levels of their production and storage of wild foodstuffs. It was a form of social banking wherein a family could give when they had excess wealth in return for the obligation of the recipients of gifts to repay them in the future. Thus, the potlatch spread wealth over space and time.
It is important to remember that as aggrandizers developed institutions to deal with the need to control people and property. In so doing they were creating culture i.e., manufactured concepts that have the ability to control the minds of people, even those of the individuals who most benefit from their construction. This can be seen in the case of a wergild dispute among the Tlingit:

in cases where no blood-money could be agreed upon, a chief or noble of the slayer’s lineage would take it on himself to resolve the matter. He, of course, had to be of a rank as nearly as possible equivalent to that of the slain person. He donned the finest ceremonial regalia of his lineage. Then he went out of the house, dancing one of the slow, stately hereditary dances of his lineage as he approached the waiting foe. The courteous gesture on their part was to allow him the dignity of approaching to within a few yards of them before they evened matters by killing him (1963:149).

It is when fabricated institutions become so embedded in the minds of the people that we can truly speak of a culture of domination. That culture can be so strong as to lead to what Durkheim (1951) called altruistic suicide, as is illustrated in this case of an “eye for an eye.” Thus, we want to think of fabricated institutions of domination, once created, as becoming part of the larger cultural ideas that infiltrate the minds of the members of society and are passed on generation to generation through the process of socialization. As such, later generations receive inequality as being natural. In part, this is what Karl Marx (1963 [1869]) meant by his statement “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” In other words, the fabrication of domination, with the passage of time, becomes an accepted part of the sociocultural fabric and aggrandizers can build on constructs already in place in the minds of the people they want to manipulate and control.
There was trade in pre-contact Tlingit society, but it greatly increased and changed the nature of society with European contact. According to Oberg, collectivism gave way to individualism:

With the introduction of firearms, steel traps, and the great demand for furs, a new orientation was given to Tlingit production. Trapping had always been an individual enterprise, for it supplied a man, his wife, and their children with the necessary parts of their dress and bedding. But as compared with the collective activities of fishing, hunting, and the acquisition of moose and caribou hides, trapping of furs was of lesser importance. The coming of the fur trade disturbed this balance. The individual activity of trapping was now given a central place in the economy. Individuals built permanent lodges in their clan territory where they resided every winter for months at a time. With the intensification of fur hunting, the fur-bearing animals began to lessen in number with the consequence that the formerly undivided clan territories began to be cut up into small sections, to each of which an individual laid claim (1973:60-61).

This most directly affected the household group. Its economy was destroyed. Individual wealth and power supplanted collective jurality. Territory that was initially undivided was now parceled out to individuals and boundaries led to infringement and conflict.

Medieval Britain: Communal to Private Ownership

Let’s look at a European case where land and its accompanying capital investments had become important. After the Teutonic invasion of Britain by the Angles and Saxons, the Mark or clan emerged as the main communal unit of society, a kin or quasi-kin unit holding land in common, but within the group there was differentiation of land use, some people having one Hide (approximately 33 acres), others having many Hides. As Sir Paul Vinogradoff (1967 [1923]) has pointed out, this was a Teutonic division and came to Britain fully formed from Germany. Any private property in this system, though, was limited to the houses and property immediately adjoining them.
At the end of the Saxon period, the manor system appeared and spread everywhere in Norman times. Previous communalism was giving way to private ownership. This was a key transformation that interested Sir Henry Maine in Ancient Society (1877) who called it the beginnings of the shift from status to contract. In this regard, Vinogradoff hints at the process of the fabrication of domination when he says “in each particular village the headman had the means to use his authority in order to improve his material position; and when a family contrived to retain an office in the hands of its members this at once gave matters an aristocratic turn” (1967:45).
Vinogradoff is saying that with the passage of time the ranked clan was transmuted into the privatized manorial system to the point where the system was “rigged” in the favor of the lords:

manorial lords could remove peasants from their holdings at their will and pleasure. An appeal to the courts was of no avail: the lord in reply had only to oppose his right over the plaintiff’s person, and too refuse to go into the subject. Nor could the villein have any help as to the amount and nature of his services, the King’s Courts will not examine any complaint in this respect, and may sometimes go so far as to explain that it is not business of theirs to interfere between the lord and his man (1967:45-46).

Slowly, élites of the manor and those of the Crown conspired, having common interests, to dominate the lower orders of society, to defeat the civil rights of the peasantry. Manorial lords were able to abrogate these rights with the appearance of legality by fabricating new laws and codes, which were then imposed on the peasantry.
The resulting system, villeinage, was very close to slavery. For example, a villein could not legally own anything – land or chattels – that were not his or her lord’s property. In essence, the villein who acquired any property (villenagium) only had usury rights over it. He only held his property in villeinage. Only the lord held rights in rem over property – rights “against the world” – the right to distribute or sell it.
However, the medieval doctrine of possession prescribed that as long as the villein held the goods they were his to use. Yet, if the goods were not under the villein’s direct control, as with a wandering sheep, it could be taken into the possession of any lord and the villein would loose his rights. They would revert to the lord in possession.
It is highly improbable that villeins would construct such laws, but they had to submit to them in times of dire necessity i.e., when the land:labor ratio was not in their favor, or when prices rose so high that they had to rely on some redistribution by a generous lord or when protection by the lord was at a premium e.g., when war came to the land.
Members of the lordship were altering the rules in their favor. It must be remembered that laws were in flux as lawyers and judges struggled to make sense out of two conflicting sets of legal codes – common law (jus non scriptum) and Roman law. In this sorting out, these laws were written down, becoming jus scriptum and having a much greater force in society as written documents. They were then copied by hand as manuscripts into which errors or élite presuppositions would creep. Each scribe or his superior had some latitude in the transcription process and some of the “errors” were intentional, providing new privileges to the upper class.
It is often in the “cracks” (or operational spaces) between different interpretations that aggrandizers could find leverage and fabricate new ways to extract prestige, power and property from those not involved in the process of writing the codes.
It is difficult to know which of the “errors” were intentional. Vinogradoff points out that there are not only grave differences between such ancient texts as Bracton, Fleta and Britton, but also between different copies of each, some in the Cambridge University Library, others in the British Museum and yet others in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Furthermore, sometimes these differences were due to later glosses made by copyists. Legal change could be intended or unintended, but in either case it was not in the hands of the villeins and almost always favored those who already had more prestige, power and property – those who were writing the script or those paying for the transcription and looking over the shoulder of the scriptwriter.
There were some protections for the villein. If the lord held rights in rem over the villein’s land and chattel, the question arose as to whether the lord had the right to impoverish the villein to a point where he could not make a living e.g., by taking his waynage i.e., his plow and plow-team. The lord could not, under law, inflict intollerabilis injuria (debilitating injury) to his villein, to the point where his human security was endangered. He could not kill or maim a villein with impunity, but we do have cases where a family was impoverished to the point where they were driven off the land, left with only their labor to sell (for a case of this in the Scottish Highlands, see chapter 6).
Of course, British aristocrats eventually reformed the laws to a point where wholesale theft of villein land was considered legal i.e., in the infamous enclosure laws that gave élites the right to convert common land to private ownership. This occurred in England under the United Kingdom Acts of Parliament and privatization proceeded from the twelfth century, with the greatest massing of land occurring between 1760 and 1830 under the frenzy of land “rationalization” and modernization.
Prior to that it was the norm that a great deal of land had been in common use, but after the aristocracy altered land tenure laws, peasants who had been grazing their animals in the commons were denied this privilege.
Of this movement Marx noted that farm workers were forcibly expropriated from the soil and driven from their homes, being turned into vagabonds. On top of this, they were tortured by grotesque laws that supplied labor for the wage system. Sir Thomas More in Utopia (1975 [1516]) wrote that enclosure would produce vagrancy throughout the population, while proponents of the new system claimed the opposite i.e., that having common lands kept agrarian peoples poor because they overgrazed and debased them. The argument was that peasants did not make a rational use of the land, which many ethnographic studies have since refuted. In the data of chapter 8 we will encounter Catalan élites who saw peasants in much the same manner, as incapable of reasoning properly like nobles, hence the term used for them – ignoblilis. Peasants were seen as almost feeble-minded when compared to élites.
Building on such medieval prejudice, the English nobles felt that the emerging faith being put in reason by intellectuals must have meant that only they possessed it and therefore only they could be the directors of progress, a favorite maxim of the Enlightenment. As landlords forged ahead with “rationalizing” agriculture, some writers protested, for instance, in 1621 John Taylor had a vision of a country lord who:

Ignobly did oppresse
His Tenants, raising Rents to such excesse:
That they their states not able to maintaine,
They turn’d starke beggers in a yeare or twaine.
Yet though this Lord were too too miserable,
He in his House kep a well furnish’d Table:
Great store of Beggers dayly at his Gate,
Which he did feed, and much Compassionate.
(For ‘tis with the power of mighty men
To make five hundred Beggers, and feed ten.)
(Quoted in Carroll 1994:36-37).

In spite of the occasional “cry in the wilderness” by men like John Taylor, most aristocrats made the argument that they knew what was best for the peasantry. For instance, they said enclosures were good for society because it was natural for the highborn breed to rule their subjects because they had held “estates and abilities.” Élitism aside, landlords mostly made the case that enclosures were more rational than having common lands.
However, there were irrational arguments as well. An anonymous pamphleteer in the 1650s reasoned that enclosures were good for the commonweal and, beyond that, there was no example of common fields in the Bible and that God, being the God of order, and order being the soul of things, made common fields the seat of disorder, the seed plot of contention, the nursery of beggary. In fact, it was doing away with the commons that produced greater beggary.
Others claimed that common fields and forests were “nurseries and receptacles of thieves, rogues and beggars.” Many dramatists and civil authorities accepted the pat equation between common holdings and lawlessness, even sedition – beggars running amok. Better to have them off the land and at work for the good of society.
In 1801 the Inclosure Consolidation Act was passed to “tidy up” previous acts. Part of this sanitizing process was to deprive the peasantry of its time honored right to object to the alienation of common land. In the beginning of the enclosure movement, the consent of all concerned was needed to consolidate the disparate strips of land used by peasants or to use common land for private purposes. Élites took care of that with successive acts that did away with the pesky need to ask the peasants to agree to consolidation. Eventually, peasants were simply written out of the process, which was taken over by aristocratic decision-makers. Over the years, élite lawmakers cited the need to “clean up” the laws and went ahead with revisions that served the interests of their class to the detriment of commoners.
In 1845, for example, another General Inclosure Act allowed for the employment of Inclosure Commissioners who could enclose land without even submitting a request to parliament. Notice the process here, which we can see as a very broad process throughout history: lawmaking was moving away from community decision making (common law) into the hands of fewer and fewer élites. If we compare such a situation to the Paleolithic or early Neolithic societies, we see that communalism so prevalent then was distorted in medieval Britain into an exploitative system.
At the beginning of this chapter I asked the question: What was being fabricated in the Jural Revolution? The answer is: various codes that enabled aggrandizers to dominate the less wealthy and powerless in society and to extract from them labor value in one manner or another. The forms varied in different places and times, but the trend can easily be seen over the broad stretch of history since the Jural Revolution. The end result of lawmaking and revision of common law has almost always been the same: expanded opportunities for exploitation by office-holders and aristocrats.


SOURCES – CHAPTER 4: OWNERSHIP

Brandt, Elizabeth A. 1994. Egalitarianism, hierarchy, and centralization in the pueblos. In: Wills, W. H. & Robert E. Leonard (Eds.). The ancient southwestern community: Models and methods for the study of prehistoric social organization. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 9-23.

Burt, Richard & John Michael Archer. 1994. Enclosure acts: Sexuality, property and culture in early modern England. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Carroll, William C. 1994. “The nursery of beggary”: Enclosure, vagrancy and sedition in the Tudor-Stuart period. In: Burt, Richard & John Michael Archer (Eds.) Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, property and culture in early modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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