this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Feudal systems express and store power in different ways than mercantilist and early capitalist systems. Maintaining local loyalties and manpower are important to each feudal landholder, so the intention is generally to ensure that everyone else's lands starve, and, if your own lands starve anyway, ensuring that you and your most loyal men do not starve with them. The kind of absentee landlords that dominated Ireland at the time were not wholly unknown under feudal systems, but would not have made up such an overwhelming proportion of a nation's land, for inability to maintain the necessary loyalties, if nothing else.
This is not to say that the behavior of feudal lords is better than capitalist magnates - only emphasizing that it is different.