Before the Emergence of Economic Society

Abstract

The process in which “decentralized society” formed was slow everywhere. In Western Europe, it appeared mostly in the eighth and ninth centuries. However, this required more than 400 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire and over the course of several historical events. Those included the large fluctuations that took place in Europe after the fourth century, the invasions of the Roman Empire by German tribes, the formation of German tribal states, and the Islamic takeover of the Mediterranean Sea and Southern Europe, and certainly this process did not take place all at once. Considering the era when the German tribes learned of state-formation systems and literacy through their contact with Rome and came into contact with a universal religion called Christianity, even in Western Europe the formation of decentralized society had 500-plus years of transition.