Social Agrosystems, Social-Property Relations and Protoindustrialization: a Few Words on the Erik Thoen’s Concept of Agricultural Development of Regions in the Middle Ages

Abstract. This article offers some comments and reflections on the approach called the “social agrosystem” — an explanatory model proposed by the Belgian historian Erik Thoen at the beginning of the XXI century and now planned for publication in Russian. The usefulness of the presented approach for Russian science is justified by its consistency, integrity, which is necessary for understanding the evolution of the socio-economic basis of agrarian societies, some pointed observations, as well as the very way of posing the problem of qualitative variability in the development of the region in the long term. The publication of a theoretical and methodological article in Russian within the field of agrarian and socio-economic history is also an attempt to draw attention to the gaps that have formed in extremely important, but currently insufficiently researched problems in post-soviet medieval studies.

Keywords: medieval Flanders, agrarian history, peasant studies, social-property relations, protoindustrialization, political Marxism, Erik Thoen, social agrosystem, methods of historical research.