Historical commentary on the Catholic Church’s role in early European property rights

2] When the Catholic Church [forbade cousin marriage] in the eighth century, it wasn’t thinking about the effect on kinship. It was acting in a self-interested way, because by cutting off these ways of kin- groups’ keeping property, the Church ended up being the beneficiary. So if a woman didn’t marry and didn’t have children but had a big estate, she tended to donate it to the Church. So the Church helped effect in Europe the breakdown of extended kinship very, very early. Even in the beginning of the Middle Ages, people owned property as individuals. Women could hold property — they could sell it, alienate it, in ways that they still can’t in parts of the Arab world. And this meant that individualism became very deeply rooted in European society. So some individualism was already established by the time Europe got to feudalism. And feudalism is basically a contract — it’s one that is very hierarchical, between a stronger and weaker person, but it is a contract between two people. So the idea of exchange and private property dates way, way back, hundreds of years before the Enlightenment, Reformation, etc. So I think that the basis for European modernization traces all the way back to developments like that. In China, in India, the exit out of kinship was accomplished through political power, via a state that tried to create impersonal government layered on top of a kin-based society. And those kin-groups really never went away. Even in contemporary China and India, in certain parts there are still kin- groups that influence politics. SHAFFER: But China had an impersonal government — a meritocratic bureaucracy — without Christianity, and long before the West did, yes? HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031902