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this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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chapotraphouse
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The advent of surnames in Europe heralded the downfall of feudalism so I have a soft spot in my heart for them based on that historical fact.
How?
So in Europe up until this point, people stayed in their own villages and if there were two Johns in the same village then one would be Tall John and the other would be Pious John, or Strong John or Fair(haired) John. Basically you were your first name because there was absolutely no need for a surname.
The only use for surnames was for the aristocracy to lay claim to their incestuous lineage and their ancestral holdings and shit.
Anyway, suddenly the black death rolls around and wipes out 1/3 to 1/2 of the population in Europe. Crops are lying in the field to rot because there just isn't enough labour available to do what needs to be done to survive until next season.
So the landlords smell trouble brewing and it becomes obvious that unless somebody harvests that grain then their village is fucked, and they sure as hell aren't about to roll up their velvet sleeves, so they begin to lure nearby villagers to abandon their lord and the crops of their home village in favour of shifting next door and harvesting this lord's crops with the promise of better pay and conditions.
Suddenly, where feudalism was once virtually set in stone, you have this black swan event and all this labour begins to get freed up to move around and labour starts to get a little bit of leverage as the foundations of feudalism begin to crack.
So next thing you have people from all sorts of villages moving around from place to place and everyone is named John and Henry and Margaret and Catherine and shit but also nobody knows anyone else because suddenly there's this influx of people from everywhere else. So this ain't cutting it anymore, and people begin to get named after their professions (John the blacksmith = John Blacksmith = John Smith, Henry the fuller = Henry Fuller, Margaret the baxter = Margaret Baxter etc.) or by things like patronymics (Johnson, Smithson, Ericson) or their personally-distinguishing characteristics or landmarks (in German this is really common with surnames like Bach, Bohm, Berger, Engel).
Anyway this is the moment where the tide started to shift and where feudalism was moribund - it would take other factors like the enclosure of the commons, the advent of chartered corporations for naval looting/trading/mass slaughter and enslavement expeditions, and the invention of the steam engine before we would see capitalism develop into its fully-fledged form but this freeing up of labour power and a rebalancing of economic and political power that shifted slightly in favour of serfs was enough that the house of cards that was feudalism would eventually come tumbling down.
And that's why surnames heralded the downfall of feudalism - as soon as labour stopped being bound to one ancestral plot of land and lords started competing against one another for "employees" (if you'll forgive me for using an anarchronism), where people needed a new way to distinguish between people who shared the same name, there the proto-capitalist/nascent capitalist market forces began to emerge within the cracks in the foundations of the old feudal material conditions.
History is so cool. I should read more about it.
Yes, I cannot emphasise how much I would encourage you to read more history.
There are so many threads you can tug at and they always lead back to the same themes, if not the very same things themselves. There's a reason why historians often end up implicitly Marxist, if not out and out card-carrying communists, and it's not by accident. (There's another comment I wrote under this post somewhere where another person also nudged me to talk about some completely different threads of history which I wove together into a little crash course in history that you might find interesting too.)
I have my criticisms of Joseph Jacotot but he was one of the good liberals imo and I really think that, at least when it comes to matters of history and pedagogy, his panécastique model is valid and I think the spirit of it is embodied in that Carl Sagan quip: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe"; I genuinely believe that if you tug at one thread of history long enough you can arrive at anything else in history. (This might be my galaxy-brain autistic/ADHD mind speaking lol - genuinely, this is kinda how combined-type ADHDers describe their thinking.)
The trick is to find whatever sparks inspiration in history and to just chase that down every rabbit hole it leads you to. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be guns, it could be cars, it could be knitting, it could be the complex economic and social organisation of a particular aboriginal Australian country that sprang up around the aquaculture of eels. It doesn't matter in the slightest; one of the most captivating books I've ever read was a book about Salt by Mark Kurlansky. Just find that topic that sparks wonder in you and wring it for all you can because you'll end up following it across countries and time periods and all sorts of events and figures in history.
The more you learn, the more exciting and wilder it gets.
There's literally a direct through-line that runs between fish that display iridescent colours on their scales, British-Australian imperialism and the displacement of the Banaba people, the Incan word for shit and the genocide and colonization of the Americas, the two world wars and the German chemical industry that would go on to enable Nazis putting "undesirables" to the gas chamber, the invention of methamphetamine, all the way to Rockefeller and the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.
(And there's so many detours along that route: do you want to follow IBM and how US industry such as Ford enabled the Nazi war machine and its industrial-scale genocide and how during WWII Germans learned to take shelter in Ford factories if there weren't any bomb shelters nearby when bombs started dropping? Do you want to learn about the early German concentration camps in Namibia that formed the blueprint for the Nazi concentration camps? Do you want to go down the Operation Paperclip route and to examine how post-WWII was a renazification in the west? Do you want to go down the Ha'avara Agreement path? Do you want to go down the eugenics path to learn about Carnegie and how his fortune is a direct product of the Opium Wars, the century of humiliation, the Chinese civil war and the establishment of the CPC and how this ties into the Forbes dynasty and the genocide of Native Americans?)
You can legit go from what makes shiny fish shiny to the goddamn Opium Wars and the US politician John F Kerry, and in doing so you will travel across the whole world.
Just find that one thing and dive in then chase it until you tire of it. Then find the next thing and do the same. The real trick, though, is seeing if you can find a way that the first and second things happen to connect up. And just keep doing that.
nods John and human John
So you're saying blockchain names will herald the end of capitalism??? /s
Fantastic post!