ABSTRACT
Feudalism was a highly centralized form of production organization with wealth and power very concentrated, inflexibly organized, with both production and military services based on barter exchange and with involuntary servitude at its labor base. Feudalism arose as the product of fundamental technological innovations near the end of the first millennium of the Common Era which made its system of specialized military force a cost-effective means for the provision of social order and organization. Economic models have been developed that capture the very important role of population growth in explaining the evolution of the market economy through the vast acceleration characterized by the Industrial Revolution. Historians call the increasing extent of labor devoted to market-based activity "commercialization". Locking in the market and its political analogue representative parliament were the extensive privatizations of land brought on by the dissolution of the monasteries and the enclosures of the beginning in the fifteenth and completed in the nineteenth centuries.
