How to Use feudalism in a Sentence

feudalism

noun
  • We’re over two decades into an era of digital feudalism.
    Don Tapscott, Quartz, 11 Sep. 2019
  • The early stages of the revolution famously abolished the last vestiges of feudalism in France.
    National Geographic, 10 Sep. 2020
  • Throughout many of his articles, Kotkin has laid out policy ideas that might ward off feudalism.
    John Loftus, National Review, 18 Oct. 2020
  • What better place to beta-test the future of digital feudalism?
    Gregory Barber, WIRED, 6 June 2019
  • Fifteen hundred years later, the rules of Middle Ages’ feudalism were formal.
    Scott Feldmann, Orange County Register, 5 May 2017
  • But though the attempt to overthrow the aristocracy had been put down, the old feudalism could not be resuscitated—at least not in England.
    Kevin Baker, Harper's Magazine, 23 June 2020
  • Under feudalism, tenants were obligated to work the land of their lords, and lords were obligated to provide for the basic needs of their tenants.
    Eula Biss, The New Yorker, 8 June 2022
  • The museum charts South Korea’s rise out of feudalism and colonialism into the democratic present.
    E. Tammy Kim, The New York Review of Books, 17 Dec. 2020
  • For its part, Kering gets first look at a new crop of talent without the whiff of feudalism attached to a prize, as well as a bird’s-eye view on new ways of selling and communicating without any risk to its more boldface brands.
    New York Times, 16 Dec. 2021
  • In Europe, this started to change after the French Revolution, which abolished feudalism and serfdom.
    Robert Sullivan, Vogue, 30 Nov. 2018
  • Mr. Thomas’s book portrayed the vast complexity of the Spanish Civil War, with its background of feudalism and religious fervor, but it was also seen as the chronicle of a noble but failed cause.
    Matt Schudel, Washington Post, 13 May 2017
  • When feudalism gave way to industrialism, factory workers did much the same thing.
    Erik Kain, Forbes, 27 Jan. 2023
  • People in the 21st century typically see feudalism as a bad thing and more importantly, something from the distant past.
    Roger Valdez, Forbes, 8 June 2021
  • Harry and Meghan were never looking for private lives but, rather, for privatized ones—which sounds crass, unless one considers that the alternative was feudalism.
    Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, 18 Jan. 2023
  • Capitalism is constantly mutating into something else, and a growing number of scholars think the online age could be giving way to a sort of neo-feudalism.
    Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 9 Sep. 2022
  • Officials turned to unfavorable land relocation and quit-rent, a holdover from feudalism that was essentially a land tax, in hopes of course-correcting.
    Francine Uenuma, Smithsonian Magazine, 14 June 2023
  • Marx saw socialism as a new mode of production that would follow capitalism the same way that capitalism had followed feudalism.
    John B. Judis, New Republic, 24 Aug. 2017
  • Still later, as feudalism declined, the Catholic Church encouraged and enforced imprisonment for unpaid debts.
    Kristin Collier, Longreads, 1 Dec. 2021
  • Putin’s Russia has been given many labels, from kleptocracy to Mafia state, but the most analytically helpful may be among the oldest: feudalism.
    Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker, 29 May 2017
  • Russia has been given many labels, from kleptocracy to Mafia state, but the most analytically helpful may be among the oldest: feudalism.
    Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker, 29 May 2017
  • For miners, the system resembled something like feudalism.
    Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian, 25 Apr. 2017
  • The setting is little more than an opportunity for Cannon, who wrote the Pitch Perfect movies and directed the uproariously sweet Blockers, to dole out easy criticisms of feudalism in the name of female agency.
    David Sims, The Atlantic, 1 Sep. 2021
  • In 2017, a form of data feudalism governs the digital ecosystem: Private companies control and reap value from big data with few obligations to the very people who generate their most prized asset.
    Michelle De Mooy, Fortune, 12 Sep. 2017
  • John Locke, after the fall of the Cromwell regime—is a design for perfect feudalism, with social rank and authority corresponding exactly, in perpetuity, to the amount of land held by an individual.
    Marilynne Robinson, Harper’s Magazine , 20 July 2022
  • Family farmers say concentrating farmland among a few big companies is akin to feudalism, and un-American.
    Alana Semuels / Fremont, Time, 27 Nov. 2019
  • Greig and Walter, stalwart veterans of British stage and screen, lead a compelling ensemble in a story that hinges on the rattling collision of dying feudalism against rising industrialization.
    Robyn Bahr, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 Apr. 2020
  • In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded.
    Colin Woodard, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Jan. 2023
  • To a largely illiterate society trying to overcome feudalism, these posters again give us insight into how the new Soviet government wanted to emphasize progress.
    Anne Tschida, miamiherald, 22 June 2018
  • Yet, as Proulx writes, since the fifteenth century—when feudalism began to give way to nation states, Western capitalism, and imperialism—it has been perpetuated that peatlands are worthless because the same land drained is valuable for agriculture.
    Liam Freeman, Vogue, 25 Oct. 2022
  • Capitalism, the scholar Cedric Robinson argues, was not a revolutionary departure from feudalism but an extension of it, a new permutation.
    Eula Biss, The New Yorker, 8 June 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'feudalism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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