Whereas Georges Duby and his successors had argued from the 1950s that the 'feudal revolution' began in France around the year 1000, but Dominique Barthélemy in the 1990s had led an argument that many of the changes happened around 900, but became obvious in the surviving source-material only later.

It seems more important that had the Carolingian project continued, it would have ended in a world dominated by power so formalised and well-defined that it could in some circumstances even be thought of as property, which is more or less exactly what happened' (p. 263).

Chapter 2, however, shows the validity of counter-arguments that, despite this, formal ideas of offices and property 'dissolve on inspection' (p. 76), revealing a politics that was more unstable, contested and provisional.

Chapter 3 synthesises these arguments by arguing that while Carolingians did not create a public state, their cultural reforms did have a profound effect on elites' ways of thinking: 'the impasse ... between top-down approaches and those centred on the local practice of power, which has shadowed the debate on the Feudal Revolution, can be dismantled.

Chapter 4 argues that the weaker kingship evident in the post-Carolingian period may have been a consequence of the Carolingians' own project of formalising and stabilising the power of the aristocracy, and so a symptom of wider social change rather than a cause of it.

Chapter 7 is the book's closest engagement with Susan Reynolds's seminal Fiefs and Vassals, and argues amongst other things that the ecclesiastical Investiture Dispute is evidence for a more general enthusiasm for defining and constituting more precisely social roles, statuses, laws and rituals.

Finally, chapter 8 compares and contrasts Champagne and Upper Lotharingia, considering how different political conditions in these parts of the former Carolingian Empire cast light on West's thesis.