The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (10 page)

Even today hunger is a heartrending reality for millions. Reporting on famines in the Central African Republic a few years ago, the
New York Times
described a farmer who let his wife take the last of their millet to make a porridge to keep them all alive. Most people probably don’t realize that the grain that goes into bread or beer is the same as the seed for next year’s crop of wheat or barley. With persistent dearth, the temptation to eat the seed set aside for the coming season often becomes impossible to resist, as with the farmer in the Central African Republic, with dire consequences for the future.

Seeking to appreciate, rather than disturb, nature, people in traditional societies felt awe and reverence for their social arrangements, whereas modern men and women often think about reforming them. The daily philosophy of acceptance and resignation not only acted as a balm for pain, but encouraged respect for the spiritual stamina that enabled people to endure hard times. The stability imposed by authority staved off many bad consequences, but it also inhibited fresh thinking. The tedium of constant worry bred a kind of lethargy. Only by entering imaginatively into the old order that preceded capitalism can we appreciate the struggle it took innovators to change it.

Moving from the moral economy of sustaining society to that of promoting development was not accomplished in a single century. The sensibilities of contemporaries in the sixteenth century had not been formed in a commercial world. The ethos codified in the Tudor statutes regulating wages, poor relief, and the harvesting of grain rested upon powerful assumptions underpinned by God’s injunction to Adam to work by the sweat of his brow and by Amos’s direful castigations against those who “swallow up the needy.”

The salient features of the biblical economy were sufficiently congruent to the ordering of labor in sixteenth-century Europe to command belief: The world could be made fruitful through labor; labor came to man as both a punishment and a gift. As a gift, it tied human society to God’s charity. As a punishment it forever harnessed men and women in the common work of sustaining life and doing God’s will. Biblical texts explained this social order, infusing the daily round of tasks with a divine rationale. If the poor tenant found himself ground down by a cruel landlord, the pain of privation could be relieved by the lesson in Proverbs “Rob not the poor, because he is poor: neither oppress the afflicted in the gate: For the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.”

There was little that was private in the lives of rural or urban workers. Masters hovered over servants. Guilds controlled merchants and artisans. There were hundreds of these monopolistic occupational organizations, those of merchants being the most prestigious. To scan a list of artisans’ guilds is to get a picture of manufacturing when the hand—or
manus—
actually did it. There were guilds for shoemakers, bakers, dyers, stonemasons, carpenters, and even white stationery makers. Highly regimenting, the guilds protected the privileges of their members against outside competition. They also regulated prices and made sure that quality standards were maintained. Boys entered trades as apprentices and moved on to become journeymen; a few became masters of their own establishments. Girls normally served as housemaids under the strict supervision of a mistress. In Europe, neither group was allowed to marry until they were well into their twenties.

The obsession with order in premodern times had its roots in the limited economic horizon that prevailed and had prevailed through all time. Concerns about each year’s harvest of grain provided the principal justification for government control of most aspects of everyday life. The propriety of political control went unquestioned, especially among the propertied. People didn’t think of limited food production as a problem to be addressed; rather it was seen as a part of the cosmic order, an unalterable feature of human life. The annual round of activities that produced food belonged to a venerable round of duties and rights designed to protect society from famine, a goal made all the more vivid by everyone’s experience of hunger. Countries were often called commonwealths because of everyone’s shared stake in survival.

Military powers like the Romans in antiquity and the Arabs in the eighth century were able to support large armies not because they knew how to produce enough food to feed the soldiers but rather because they could extract food from their conquests. The Spanish used their might in a similar fashion in the sixteenth century. When famine threatened, the Spanish took the grain crops from their possessions Sicily and Naples and let the Italians starve. No people before the seventeenth century ever succeeded in altering the grim statistic that some 80 percent of the population had to farm to feed the rest. And the designation of feeder or fed was imposed by authority.

Agriculture as opposed to getting food by hunting and gathering made possible sedentary societies four centuries before the birth of Christ. The slaves, serfs, and laborers stuck to their hoes because even the primitive cultivation of crops yielded enough food to sustain them and the social superstructure raised on their backs. The surplus from their harvests and livestock went to pay royal households, religious establishments, armies, and a small coterie of merchants and artisans living in the interstices of society. Culture emanated from the few powerful and presumably talented, wise, and learned. Many societies in the past enjoyed prosperity, but none escaped the threat of famine by significantly improving the output of their agriculture.

A Growing Basket of Consumables

Geography, climate, and indigenous animals pretty much dictated what would be put on the table in premodern times. Grains, salted meat, and root vegetables carried people through the winter in cold climates. Lambs were slaughtered in the spring, beef throughout the year, but usually when the animals were young because of the high cost of keeping them alive. Good hunters plucked birds from the sky before they flew south. Well-off farm wives could afford to keep rabbits and chickens and sometimes bees. Families ate their homegrown fruits and vegetables through October. Then apples could be turned into cider. No one wanted salted fruit, and few fruits or vegetables can be successfully dried, so any excess perished because the sugar necessary for preserving them would have been expensive. Hops and barley went into beer unless the harvest was so lean that the law stepped in and forbade sales to brewers. New World maize—or what we call corn—and potatoes came into some European diets in the middle of the seventeenth century. And then there were sunflowers. Introduced from the New World, they were grown widely from the middle of the sixteenth century. Their grand height was turned into a contest. A gardener in England reported a sunflower fourteen feet high, passed by one in Madrid at twenty-four feet and another reported from Padua at a hard-to-believe forty feet. By the eighteenth century someone had patented a device for extracting oil from the sunflower seeds.

Discoveries of water routes to the East Indies and the New World added variety to European dinner tables. They also dealt a blow to the venerable belief that human history went in cycles without anything really new occurring. Along a broad front of topics from geography to theology, the existence of life at the antipodes proved by the explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries compelled intellectual reassessments as well as practical attention. Even more arresting, the joining of the Old and New Worlds made possible a global exchange in plants, animals, human practices, and—alas—germs. Before that, the people of the Western Hemisphere had been sealed off from the rest of mankind; after 1492 a new biological homogeneity began to emerge with profound consequences for the world’s people.
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Everything about the New World seemed strange to the Europeans. They had never seen reptiles as large as the iguana, and they puzzled that there were not only no horses or cows in the New World but also no four-legged animals larger than a fox on the islands of the Caribbean. The explorers and conquerors missed the familiar trees of Europe, but they marveled at the exquisite flowering plants of the Caribbean, later determined to number more than thirteen thousand. Horses, cattle, and uninvited rats throve in their new habitat. Hernando de Soto led a four-year expedition across the southeast of the North American continent. With many of his provisions on the hoof, he trekked across what is now North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas, leaving behind a host of European pigs to propagate in the New World. Conquistadors, given vast tracts of land, began to raise cattle while the horse made its way north, transforming the culture of the Plains Indians.

On his second trip Columbus brought seeds for all the Spanish fruits and vegetables that he hadn’t seen on his first visit to the Western Hemisphere. Veritable “Johnny Appleseeds,” the Spaniards acted quickly to exchange the flora and fauna of the two worlds. Spaniards and Portuguese introduced bananas, lemons, oranges, pomegranates, figs, dates, and coconuts, the latter found in the Philippines. From the New World, Europeans got a great variety of squashes, not to mention cocoa and tobacco. The range of European vegetables and fruits was far greater than those in the Western Hemisphere, but a few New World staples like potatoes, beans, and corn were to have a major impact on food-short Europe because the New World vegetables could be grown in places inhospitable to the grains Europeans depended upon as their principal source of nutrition. For instance, corn could grow where it was too wet for wheat and too dry for rice, and it yielded twice as much food per acre. These New World crops with their differing soil and weather needs usually acted like so many insurance policies against famine.

The potato was richer in calories than grains and could thrive on very small plots. Even more remarkable, potatoes yielded two to three times more bushels per acre than wheat or barley. They could be stored through the winter and didn’t demand much in the way of cultivation. People are amazingly resistant to changing their diet, slow to adopt strange foods, however beneficial. But the harvesting bounty of the humble potato won over the Irish, who began cultivating it at the end of the sixteenth century.

Potatoes had several advantages that rarely come into play now. They could be grown at high altitudes, helping the Spanish feed the miners of Potosí and enabling Chinese peasants to flee government tax collectors by moving into hill country.
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When invading armies burned crops to the ground, potatoes remained hidden in the earth. In China, Poland, and especially Ireland the potato’s bounty translated into earlier marriages and more children. When an airborne blight struck potato plants in 1846, 1848, and 1852, Ireland lost an eighth of its population from starvation or disease—one million of its eight million people. Whole families died in their cottages; corpses were found in the fields. The devastation, acerbated by British trade policies, sent another quarter of Ireland’s men and women to the New World.

The greatest New World contribution to the feeding of Europe came from the sugar produced in the islands of the Caribbean. Columbus brought sugarcanes from Portuguese Madeira on his second voyage. The Portuguese brought sugar cultivation from São Tomé off the West African coast to their New World colony of Brazil in the early sixteenth century. Quickly exhausting the gold deposits on Santo Domingo, settlers turned to the production of sugar as a surer source of profit. Spanish colonial administrators helped by making available sugarcanes and the slaves to cultivate them. An intensive kind of agriculture, usually involving work gangs of slaves, sprang up quickly. Unknown in the European world of family-based farming, these factories in the fields were the first examples of highly capitalized agriculture. Farm work, always drudgery, became brutal when the workers were enslaved and beaten to work harder. The sex ratio in the sugar plantations was often as high as thirteen men to one woman. Sugar was instantly popular in Europe. Soon the English, Dutch, and French seized Caribbean islands of their own during the seventeenth century to exploit this new and lucrative crop.

We all know the appeal of sugar in our candies, cookies, cakes, and coffees, but we’ve lost an appreciation of the critical role it played in the European diet. Sugar did more than furnish calories and sweetness; it made possible storing fruits and vegetables throughout the year. There were only three ways to keep food before artificial refrigeration: salting it, preserving it, or drying it. Sugar was the essential ingredient for preserves. Before a nineteenth-century German chemist showed how to extract sugar from beets, people had to import it from those tropical areas where sugarcane flourished. Its desirability and rarity did for the islands of the West Indies what oil later did for the Middle East: It gave them a monopoly of a commodity whose demand continued to climb for two centuries.

While the trade in exotic spices, luxury fabrics, and precious metals from the East and West Indies added great variety to the lives of well-off Europeans, they only slowly penetrated the closets and tables of ordinary men and women. Cities had grown, and trade among European countries had greatly increased, but in the rural areas men and women, their children and servants continued to work as they had for centuries, tilling the soil, cutting timber, and caring for livestock. People did not assign themselves parts in these agrarian activities; rather these responsibilities were allocated through the inherited statuses of landlord, tenant, cottager, and laborer. Supplying the food, fabric, and shelter for survival occupied the time of the whole family with a strict gender division of labor persisting. Customs, not incentives, regulated the flow of tasks that followed the calendar. Mix in a little ignorance, isolation, and superstition, and you can see that changing this order would involve a complicated choreography of incentive, innovation, and pure chance.

It took two hundred years before the volume coming from Caribbean plantations lowered the price of sugar enough to bring this wonderful ingredient into most people’s pantries. In 1750, 1 percent of calories in the English diet came from sugar; by the opening of the twentieth century it was 14 percent. The prospect of high profits suppressed any qualms about enslaved labor. Sugar became one more item in the expanding inventory of goods that knitted European countries together in an intensifying round of material exchanges. From the Baltic countries came grain and lumber, from the Dutch came dried herring and the goods their merchants collected around the world, from the Iberian Peninsula olive oil, wine, and fine merino wool, from Italy wine and fruit, from France luxury fabrics and wine, from England wool, metal tools, and foodstuffs. Within the web of international commerce, those countries with access to the Atlantic enjoyed a distinct advantage.