The Changing Circumstances of the Polis and Xenophon's Economic Thought

XU Songyan

Xenophon stands as the earliest classical writer in the Western tradition to produce separate treatises on household management (oikonomia) and public finance. His economic thought serves as a concentrated reflection of the socioeconomic conditions of the Greek world during the classical period. The historical backdrop of Xenophon’s political and economic ideas was shaped by two major developments in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War: the collapse of the Greek polis order, which entailed the disintegration of the citizen-militia system and the emergence of acute fiscal crises; and the intensifying cross-regional economic and cultural interactions across West Asia, North Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Taking household management and the administration of slave-staffed estates as his theoretical point of departure, Xenophon explored the natural division of labor between men and women, the occupational division between town and country, and the hierarchical division between managers and laborers. He distinguished between the use-value and exchange-value of goods, regarded agriculture as the foundation of all economic activities, and made preliminary inquiries into the multiple functions of silver coinage and the mechanisms of market price fluctuation. In response to Athens' fiscal predicaments, Xenophon proposed pragmatic measures such as attracting foreign residents and exploiting silver mines, proposals that combined idealistic vision with practical applicability. He offered pioneering discussions on multi-tiered division of labor, defined wealth in terms of use-value, and put forward diverse strategies for increasing household assets. At the same time, he adhered to a value orientation that privileged agriculture over commerce and crafts, while revealing rudimentary market dynamics such as the pricing mechanism of supply and demand. Grounded in the everyday productive practices of the polis, Xenophon's economic writings attracted the attention and critical commentary of Karl Marx.

Feudal Relations between England and France and the Disintegration of the Angevin Empire

LIN Zhiqiang & WANG Linglv

In 1203–1204, the Angevin dynasty lost the greater part of its continental possessions, and the so-called Angevin Empire thereby disintegrated. Existing scholarship has predominantly attributed this collapse to the character and military capacities of King John, while paying insufficient attention to the role of feudal jurisprudence, in particular, neglecting the Treaty of Le Goulet, signed between England and France in 1200. This treaty had already placed the Angevin Empire at a legal disadvantage by transforming the previously ambiguous feudal customs of subordination between the English and French crowns into a rigid contractual obligation. In so doing, it furnished the procedural legal basis for King Philip II of France to conduct a trial in absentia of John and to pronounce the judgment of forfeiture of fiefs. The disintegration of the Angevin Empire originated in the structural predicament inherent in the trans-national system of feudal tenure, namely, the dual status of the English king as both an independent sovereign and a vassal of the French crown. “John’s loss of territory” was by no means a merely military reverse; rather, it exemplifies the central role played by reciprocal feudal contracts in the arena of trans-national political contestation. Only by approaching the subject from the perspective of feudal jurisprudence can we grasp the deeper institutional logic at work in the politics of medieval Western Europe.

Legislative Bargaining and the Evolution of Trust Land Rights in Early Modern England

SUN Xiaojiao

From the later Middle Ages to the early modern period, the trust (or use) functioned in England as a mechanism of land transfer by which landholders sought to evade feudal incidents and to exercise free disposition over their estates. Initially condemned as fraudulent because it disturbed the feudal order and generated confusion in proprietary titles, the trust gradually underwent a shift in the legal criteria for its characterization as fraudulent. The focus of judicial scrutiny moved from the trust per se to the improper practices involved in its creation, such as breach of faith, falsehood, concealment, and perjury. Parliament responded with a series of legislative measures that can be understood as a staged process: from denying the legality of the trust and restructuring its proprietary framework in order to safeguard the feudal rights of lords, to accommodating the security of transactions so as to balance multiple interests, and finally to regulating the formalities of trust creation for the sake of market order. This legislative evolution, from the defence of feudal prerogatives towards accommodation of market demands, reflected the aggregate interests of the landed classes and embodied the broader transformation of English society from feudal land tenure to early modern proprietary rights.

The Corporate Body: Monastic Convent and Abbey Governance in Medieval England

LI Hao

In the independent Benedictine monasteries of medieval England, the monastic community emerged as a corporate community endogenous to the monastery itself. Through the institutionalized allocation of common resources, the embedding of procedural legal action, and internal political expression and negotiation, this convent acquired stable and sustainable collective agency, while remaining subject to the authority of the abbot. Far from dissolving the unified corporate personality of the monastery, the differentiation of the monastic community rather infused monastic governance with a constructive internal tension. This case demonstrates that the corporate organization did not suppress internal differentiation; on the contrary, it transformed such differentiation into an institutionalized mechanism to sustain its own functioning. Thus, it reveals the inner operational logic of the corporate community, namely, that unity and division are not antithetical, but coexist as a dynamic process mediated by institutionalized mechanisms.

Human Evolution and the Foundations of Civilization in the Prehistoric Mediterranean World

FENG Dingxiong

The evolutionary process of the ancient Mediterranean world from the origins of humanity to the emergence of civilization may be divided into five principal phases. From approximately 2.5 million to 800,000 years ago, the initial phase witnessed the movement of early hominins from Africa to the margins of the Mediterranean. Representative sites such as Ain Hanech in Algeria and 'Ubeidiya in the Levant reveal an intermittent pattern of dispersal among populations bearing Oldowan and Acheulean lithic technologies. From around 800,000 to 250,000 years ago, Homo heidelbergensis emerged and established itself widely across western Eurasia, while early Homo sapiens underwent their initial evolution in Africa and made their first attempts at dispersal out of the continent. From approximately 250,000 to 40,000 years ago, the period was characterised by the coexistence and eventual replacement of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans across the Mediterranean world, with final episodes of contact in regions such as Iberia. From about 25,000 to 10,000 years ago, spanning the Last Glacial Maximum and the subsequent deglaciation, human populations adapted to climatic fluctuations, and the emergence of Mesolithic cultures attests to active human resilience. From roughly 12,000 to 6,000 years ago, agriculture gradually took shape in the Fertile Crescent, and the Neolithic Revolution spread to various parts of the Mediterranean, laying the foundations for the rise of subsequent civilizations. The prehistory of the Mediterranean is, in essence, the history of the “human hand” continuously reshaping the “Great Sea”, an epoch that constituted the foundational age of the ancient civilizations.

The Dissemination and Impact of the Black Death in the Golden Horde during the 14th Century

DENG Peiyong

The Black Death of the 14th century originated in the Issyk-Kul region of Central Asia and soon spread into the neighboring territories of the Golden Horde. The propagation of the pandemic was conditioned not only by global climatic fluctuations, but also by the over-expansion of pastoralism within the khanate; at the same time, the rapid growth of commerce and industry, together with the reopening of the Silk Road, greatly facilitated the swift transmission of the disease. The Golden Horde suffered four separate outbreaks of the Black Death. The first epidemic, which was the most extensive in its geographical reach, swept across the entire khanate before spreading to Europe via the port cities of the Black Sea coast. Thereafter, three further outbreaks of the Black Death struck the Golden Horde, interspersed with periods of warfare. The frequent recurrence of epidemic disease and armed conflict caused a dramatic demographic decline and severe socio-economic dislocation, weakened the center’s control over the provinces, and precipitated political instability marked by frequent changes of the khan. The international standing of the Golden Horde declined sharply, and it was during this period of weakening that the Principality of Moscow seized the opportunity to rise to prominence.

Miyazaki Ichisada and the Study of Asian History

by OKAMOTO Takashi, translated by YANG Liying

On the basis of inheriting the Japanese tradition of Oriental historiography (Tōyō shigaku), Miyazaki Ichisada constructed a unique research framework for “Asian history” that, grounded in the study of Chinese history, placed particular emphasis on the interactions between the East and the Islamic world. From the 1950s onward, he focused on monetary circulation and economic fluctuations, expanding his historical perspective on transportation and communication (kōtsū) through an economic-historical lens, thereby advancing what he called the “view of historical fluctuations” (keiki hendō shikan). However, this historical perspective was primarily applied to Chinese history and never matured into a comprehensive theoretical system encompassing the whole of Asia. The failure of Miyazaki's historical vision to develop into a fully fledged world-historical system may be attributed to three factors: first, the limitations inherent in his “city-state theory” and his regional divisions; second, his relative neglect of the historical role played by nomadic peoples; and third, the comparative weakness of his research on modern history. A critical examination of the achievements and limitations of Miyazaki's world-historical studies gives rise to three further questions worthy of exploration: how to redefine Europe with reference to the medieval West rather than the Roman Empire; how to incorporate the transport and circulation functions of nomadic peoples into the narrative framework of Asian history; and how to clarify the qualitative differences between the modern capitalist system and the economic structures of Asia. An inquiry into these questions may offer new perspectives for rethinking the narrative frameworks of both Asian history and world history.

Japanese Anti-War Intellectuals after the Manchurian Incident: Transformation, Silence, and Persistence

PAN Yan

In the years preceding the Japanese invasion of China, Abe Isoo, Mizuno Hirotoku, and Yanaihara Tadao were prominent intellectuals who all advocated anti-war positions, yet their ideological foundations differed markedly. Following the Manchurian Incident, Abe Isoo, who had originally championed socialism, swiftly shifted his stance and became an advocate of the emperor-centred polity (kokutai) and wartime state nationalism. Mizuno Hirotoku, who had travelled twice to Europe and witnessed the devastation of the First World War, placed his hopes for peace in the post-war international order and the rationality of the nation-state. The Manchurian Incident, however, deprived his anti-war thinking of its intellectual foundation, and under the wartime regime he gradually fell into silence. Yanaihara Tadao, relying on his Christian faith and scholarly conviction, consistently opposed the war of aggression, yet, lacking a broader social base, he could only maintain his personal integrity within the constraints of the wartime system. The divergent trajectories of these three anti-war thinkers reveal the historical predicament of pacifist thought in modern Japan, and also demonstrate that the wartime “national unanimity” (kyokoku icchi) was not a genuine social consensus, but rather an atmosphere fabricated through state suppression and wartime mobilization.