Anselm Hager presents his paper on the causes of feudalism. This event is part of the International Security Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for International Security.
This paper studies the emergence of feudalism in Central Europe. Anselm Hager, assistant professor of international politics at Humboldt University, builds a novel data set mapping all 11,986 Prussian feudal estates and show that canonical historical drivers – population declines, economic development, and warfare – cannot explain the pronounced local-level variation in feudalism. Based on archival accounts, Hager then considers a new explanation: Feudal estates acted as risk-sharing institutions and therefore developed in areas where peasants faced high economic uncertainty. In particular, by collectivizing farms, feudal estates generated economies of scale and thus afforded peasants more steady incomes. This increase in economic safety, however, came at a high cost: peasants lost their freedom. To support this hypothesis, Hager show a strong association between poor soils and the incidence of feudalism. To buttress that economic uncertainty, indeed, caused the emergence of feudal estates, he construct a panel model and show that as harvests improve, feudal estates decline.
Speaker
Anselm Hager
Anselm Hager is an assistant professor of international politics at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in 2017 from Columbia. His work lies at the intersection of comparative and international politics, focusing particularly on development, political activism, and inequality. He has done extensive field work in East and Southern Africa and has a methodological focus on causal inference.
