SOCIAL SCIENTIST particular political structure. In a very strong historical tradition, especially rooted in France, feudalism is used in the latter sense alone. Fernand Braudel, for instance, was of firm belief that feudalism 'should be applied .. only to the fief and things pertaining to it, and to nothing else' (Braudel 1985, 464). And when Georges Lefebre participated in the celebrated debate on transition from feudalism to capitalism, he was careful to record his objection to what he thought was a wrong use of the word: '...in so far as the organization of production was the central problem of the debate, "the feudal system" as such was not an issue, and the use of the word "feudalism" was not appropriate to the discussion... The correct formulation for the purposes of the discussion is manorial system...' (in Hilton 1978, 122, italics Lefebre's). It was as the follower of this usage that Barrington Moore Jr reprimanded Chinese historians - as D.C. Sircar did Indian ones -for confusing landlordism with feudalism (Moore, 163) Despite these repudiations, the use of feudalism as an economic category has been an established practice in history and other social sciences, especially - but not just - among Marxists. The practitioners of this usage, however, do not generally deny the other meaning of the term. They recognize it as 'political feudalism'; less often, they use elements of it in their definition of feudal mode of production, or ignore it as superfluous or irrelevant to their concern. But the two identities of feudalism are not always kept apart, and sometimes one identity is mistaken for the other. While all the contributors in our volume are consciously engaged in defining feudalism in the economic sense, the discussions have occasionally been clouded by this confusion of identities. To give the most important instance, the authority of Marc Bloch on the concept of feudalism should not have been invoked by the participants in the present debate (Byres, 16; Mukhia, 59 nl, 61; Sharma, 83; Mukhia A, 249,261 n!3; Berktay, 269,299-300 nl, 304 n8; Rudra, 325-26). Despite the passage beginning with 'subject peasantry', Bloch used feudalism strictly in the sense of a political structure, as I have tried to show elsewhere (Jha, Vishwa Mohan 2000, 236-39). The first plank of Mukhia's critique was, as Dirlik puts it, 'a new definition of feudalism to sustain his arguments against an Indian feudalism' (Dirlik, 180 n2). After a detailed survey of the economic history of medieval western Europe, Mukhia discovered the true differentia of feudalism in the labour rent which the peasant owed to