Introduction

Abstract

In a typically pithy aside, Karl Marx commented that ‘[i]t is far too easy to be “liberal" at the expense of the Middle Ages’. His point was that most histories of feudalism are coloured by ‘bourgeois prejudices’, and ignore the fact that ‘although the soil of England, after the Norman conquest, was divided up into gigantic baronies … it was strewn with small peasant properties, only interspersed here and there with great seigniorial domains’. By not recognizing that such smallholdings existed, the conventional historiography painted an exaggerated picture of the miserable and servile condition of the feudal peasant, so as to extol by comparison the virtues of the system of ‘equal’ rights and ‘free’ labour associated with democratic politics and market economics. According to Marx, these historians and the political economists who deliberately or accidentally repeated their mistake, had thus failed to take account of one of the main processes by which capitalist relations of production were introduced in England: ‘the great feudal lords … created an incomparably larger proletariat by forcibly driving the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal title as the lords themselves, and by usurpation of the common lands’. We are presenting this book on the ‘globalization of liberalism’ because we believe that a similar, albeit differently framed, problem exists within international relations theory today.