It was during the interwar period when Byzantine historiography began to broaden the scope of its studies beyond politics, biographies, and the focus on significant events. With the most important trends in European historical studies being the Annales school and the historical materialism of Marxist theory, Byzantine rural society, small and large landownership, demographic trends, currency circulation, and the relations between social groups gradually began to emerge.

The first Marxist historian to deal with the Byzantine period was Yannis Kordatos. One of the main issues that concerned him was the form of the productive system that prevailed in the Eastern empire. Following, with some variations, the Marxist scheme: slavery - feudalism - capitalism, Kordatos considered the Byzantine economy a combination of open barter and closed agricultural systems. Over time, large landowners were strengthened, acquiring expanded power at the expense of the communities, a fact that resulted in the creation of the despotates. Kordatos' conclusion was that, while Byzantium's economy never evolved into a capitalist one, feudalism was completed and interrupted economic development, resulting in decline and eventual extinction. Kordatos focused only on specific sectors of Byzantium.

The second Greek Marxist historian who engaged with Byzantium was Nikos Svoronos. Svoronos attempted to study Byzantium from the perspective of its provinces, in contrast to the entrenched Constantinople-centrism of his time. He considered that Byzantium remained pre-feudal until its end. According to him, it was precisely for this reason that investments were not encouraged and Byzantium was led to economic stagnation and ultimately to its fall. Nikos Svoronos left us with many data and hypotheses as a basis for further study.

Tilemachos Loungis offers a third Marxist perspective. He accepts the existence of feudalism, but distinguishes some Byzantine peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. For Loungis, the slave-owning early Byzantine period (330 - 610 AD) was followed by a pre-feudal stage dominated by free labor (middle Byzantine period, 610 - 1204 AD), culminating in an imperfectly feudal situation during the late Byzantine period (1204 - 1453 AD).

In the book at hand, Loungis describes the decline of the cities of the early Byzantine period, as society was transformed into a rural one with only a few large urban centers (e.g. Constantinople, Antioch, Thessaloniki). The early Byzantine period ends with the dominance of the iconoclastic, thematic, and tagmatic troops (the "national" army of free farmers) of Constantine V Copronymus, over the monastic clergy which constituted the refuge of the early Byzantine, senatorial aristocracy. Of course, neither the senatorial nor the clerical aristocracy disappeared. However, they were limited.

The next period begins with the consensus and cooperation of the higher military with the clergy and the downgrading of the imperial centralized institution, despite the reactions of some of the military (mainly middle and lower-ranking/free peasants). Nevertheless, the difference with Western European medieval feudalism was that the Byzantine aristocracy, due to its rivalry with the Macedonian dynasty, was forced to turn towards a centralized form of power, which, according to Loungis, did not lead to a fully developed feudal system and consequently to a subsequent state of capitalist relations of production. In any case, the intense and continuous competition and conflicts (either direct or conspiratorial) between different factions, families, localisms, and social groups (and the clergy constitutes a distinct social group for Loungis) – the complex web that made up Byzantine reality – proved beneficial for the entire Byzantine society of the period. According to the professor, any pro-people measures to protect the free small landowners were part of the central authority's struggle to limit the strengthening of the regional feudal lords.

During the middle Byzantine period, there was a flourishing of provincial cities, which became the feudal centers of the powerful landowners-military (feudal lords) who lived in them (Phokades, Skleroi, Doukai, Bryennoi). The gradual feudalization and aristocratization of Byzantine society resulted in the loss of vertical mobility that allowed people from lower strata to rise socially. Ultimately, family rule prevailed, and the people gradually lost their allegiance to the Roman monarchy (the expression of which was the reigning Constantinople), seeing their local feudal lords as their natural leaders.

For Professor Loungis, the political interpretation of Byzantine theological disputes was yet another expression of the ongoing conflict between the central authority (Patriarchate of Constantinople) and the regional powers (Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch). Thus, although the Macedonian dynasty (867-1025) succeeded in concentrating power in its hands, the rival of this central concentration – the new class of feudal landowners of the powerful provincial cities – succeeded in seizing power with the Komnenos dynasty (1081, Alexios Komnenos). At the same time, the aristocracy of bureaucrats also emerged.

The mixture of centripetal and centrifugal forces in Byzantine history is a fascinating journey worth studying from as many perspectives as possible. Naturally, the criticism of the Marxist approach to Byzantium (as with any other approach) is that it is a somewhat one-dimensional and sometimes anachronistic view, which leaves out important equations of the Byzantine experience. Indeed, one of these, the ideology of Orthodox Christianity, cannot be missing from the puzzle, since it is a worldview (ideology) of the pre-capitalist era, which, wherever it was established – in Eastern Europe – contributed to the delayed development and maturation of the bourgeois class. And when and where a bourgeois class did develop, it was incapable of carrying out any significant bourgeois revolution as in Western Europe. For some for better and for others for worse, the Orthodox Church, even through the prism of class struggle—since it secured tax exemption and the inalienability of its property—was not interested in the productive process, but in the distribution of goods between rich and poor, not only for ideological reasons of faith but also to create obstacles to the further empowerment of other privileged groups.

The counterargument to Marxist approaches to the Byzantine economy is that, based on existing writings, the family farm remained until the end as the dominant form of agriculture—and not some proto-feudal class—throughout Eastern Roman history. After all, wealth did not come from land ownership, but from the possession of gold, which was inextricably linked to central authority through grants and titles. Consequently, any private wealth could not allow anyone to challenge or ignore the imperial institution, which remained its "source" and rendered it "state-dependent." Thus, revolutions, uprisings, and coups did not aim for the independence or autonomy of any region or class—local group or family—but for the seizure of central power, maintaining the institutions and the state as they were. That is why every coup, uprising, or revolution targeted Constantinople and the Great Palace.

Furthermore, the granting of provision did not make someone an independent or unchecked landowner. There were no exclusive and private areas—independent from central law—that belonged to someone with everything on them, immovable or living. And where grants were given, the state could ensure they changed hands. As Andronikos II is said to have stated in a chrysobull, no one, not even a monastery, had guaranteed possession of any property unless it was confirmed by royal decrees. Therefore, as easily or as difficultly as someone could acquire status and power, just as easily or difficultly could they lose them.

In any case, the Marxist approach and Tilemachos Loungis provide some convincing—though in some cases, oversimplified—answers for this period and certainly contribute to the complex puzzle of the relationships between state, church, citizens, center, periphery, and Byzantium’s relations with the outside world.