The western European merchant class was socially extrinsic to feudalism

Evidence

Into this depressed land where few were free of the authority of an intellectually backward and commercially unimaginative ruling class, where famine and epidemics were the natural order of things, and where the sciences of the Ancient World had long been displaced as the basis of intellectual development by theological fables and demonology, appeared the figure to which European social theorists, Liberal and Marxist, attribute the generation of Western civilization: the bourgeoisie. The merchant was as alien to feudal society as the barbarian invaders had been to the Empire. Unlike the Mediterranean tradesmen, the origins of the western European bourgeoisie are obscured. No doubt this is largely due to the fact that historical documentation is inevitably sparse where civilization in the formal sense of urban culture has largely disappeared, and where life is recorded by an elite of land and church largely preoccupied with its own experience while hostile to commerce. Nevertheless, it is clear that the western European merchant class—“a class of deracines”36—crystallized within a social order for which it was an extrinsic phenomena. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 139

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the bourgeoisie’s foundational character as deracinated and alien to the feudal order it arose within.