The feudal-feudal economy in Europe replaced the slave-owning way of managing in the third or fourth century of a new era. The change was not instantaneous, gradually, from decade to decade, landowners who used slave labor in their latifundia began to pay attention to the fact that the economic efficiency of estates began to decline steadily.
This was due to the general crisis of the slave system: the war of conquest of Rome gradually came to naught, the influx of slaves from the outside dried up, and slave families were never large. And as the agronomic culture developed, the slaves who were not interested in the results of their labor could not, and did not want to cultivate well-drained, fairly depleted lands.
The predominantly serf Byzantium, which replaced slave-owning Rome, immediately showed its economic viability. The barbarian kingdoms that arose on the site of the Western Roman Empire were also not slaveholdings. From this moment began the gradual development and improvement of the economic system, which later became known as the “feudal serf economy”. Relapse of slavery in Europe (primarily in Muslim states) has never played a significant economic role.
The feudal-feudal economy could satisfy the needs of society only with a relatively low level of needs. The presence of a large number of small personally unfree owners did not contribute to the intensive development of the economy. Labor productivity in these conditions could not be high. True, this did not apply to cities. Not without reason in the Middle Ages there was a saying: "The air of the city makes it free." The peasant, who managed to escape from his lord and live several years in the city, became legally free.
When we say “feudal-feudal economy”, by this we mean the medieval way of farming only. Cities at that time were the locomotives of history, the rudiments of new, capitalist relations had begun to appear in them: manufactories and the division of labor appeared.
With the development of society, the failure of serfdom became apparent, as a thousand years before - the failure of slavery. In Europe, the gradual abolition of serfdom began , the feudal economy everywhere receded to the capitalist.
In most European countries,
serfdom was abolished during the eighteenth - first half of the nineteenth century. One of the last states was the Russian Empire, where serfdom was abolished in 1861. Later, serfdom was abolished in Russia only in Romania and Bulgaria. In all cases, the reforms recorded already existing new capitalist relations.
The economic definitions of scientific political economy, “born” in the nineteenth century, became the basis for the development of social sciences in the twentieth century. The classical capitalist and post-capitalist economies turned out to be incredibly more complex than the economies of previous centuries, and economic coercion to work - much more effective than non-economic.