Feudalism as an economic system

This review essay discusses recent books on feudalism by Perry Anderson, John Critchley, Rodney Hilton, and Witold Kula. Its purpose is to provide an overview to a number of approaches toward the economic aspects of feudalism and to indicate promising directions in this field for comparative economists. To this end, four major questions are discussed: What is feudalism? How and why did the feudal economic system emerge? What are the short-term economic mechanisms within a feudal economy? And how and why did the feudal economic system decline?