The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (11 page)

The rich ate vast amounts of meat, fish, and fowl while the poor had to content themselves with a monotonous fare of bread. In northern England and Scotland not even wheat was available; the poor ate oats while everywhere members of the upper class enjoyed a great variety of dishes. A surviving household account gives us a record of what a nobleman served on the feast of Epiphany. His 450 guests ate 678 loaves of bread, 36 rounds of beef, 12 mutton, 2 calves, 4 pigs, 6 suckling pigs, 1 lamb, numerous chickens and rabbits, as well as oysters, lingcod, sturgeon, flounder, large eels, plaice, salmon, swans, geese, capons, peacocks, herons, mallards, woodcocks, larks, quails, eggs, butter, and milk along with wine and 259 flagons of ale.
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If we compare it with the monotonous diet that some 80 percent of the society ate, we see the difference in material comfort that status conferred. In this world of scarcity there were some who enjoyed abundance.

Agrarian practices, dignified through centuries of experience, organized by shared habits, backed by authority, knitted together communities through routines, shared tasks, rituals, and celebrations. An idealization of the rural way of life has even persisted through three centuries of modernity. Many Europeans still farmed together in common fields in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The least efficient farmer set the pace; community plots maintained strict schedules for planting and reaping. After harvesting, the villagers had to agree on a time for letting their animals graze on the remains of the crops left standing in the fields. While most villages also contained freehold farmers and prosperous tenants, their lives were also deeply entwined with those of their neighbors. The stability of this way of living had built a mighty wall of hostility to change. Even where families farmed separately, there were many restrictions on the use and disposition of land as well as complications in titles and the right to sell or bequeath one’s land.
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Population Growth and Agriculture

The rhythms of birth and death set the tempo for the expansion and contraction of population. In good times, people had more children—or more children survived. Over time the bulging demand from the new generation pushed up the price of food, which in turn encouraged some farmers to reach out and cultivate plots of marginal fertility. The higher prices that came from greater demand made it possible to extract a living from land that normally was too poor to trouble with, but as a strategy to sustain a larger population this one was doomed. Eventually the yield declined, and the enlarged population was even more vulnerable to famine. Europe and other parts of the world regularly went into these demographic cycles of growth and decline. Diseases killed people as well, often working in tandem with the debilitating effects of hunger. And then there were the casualties of war, made worse by armies battening off the countryside. The Thirty Years’ War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648, led to a 35 percent drop in population in Germany, bringing to an abrupt end the population growth of the previous century.

A few simple economic truths reigned supreme. Abundant food lowered prices; food shortages forced prices up. Population growth increased demand, and demand raised prices. With population decline both the price of grain and the acres in cultivation went down. Because premodern farmers didn’t produce enough grain and livestock to keep their families from want, the fear of bad years was ever present. It discouraged investment and increased dependence upon authority. Better to salt the money away for lean times ahead; better not to offend those who could help in grim times. With such precarious harvests, people were at the mercy of the weather. In situations like these, fatalism reigned. Only when agricultural productivity increased would bad weather become less a matter of life and death and people be willing to entertain a belief in men and women’s capacity to control their destiny.

European population had seesawed between growth and decline for centuries. It hit its nadir after the Black Death swept across the continent in the fourteenth century. Fleas on rats stowed away in the caravans coming from China carried the bubonic plague to Europe, where almost one-half of the people died within four years. Permanent cycles of the plague’s return kept population low for the next century. Only very slowly did the death rates drop.
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These sustained losses of people led to a general economic retrenchment. With fewer consumers and those scattered across the Continent, it became too costly to transport goods. Many trading connections snapped. But fewer people often meant better times for the survivors, who could garner higher wages or wrest better leases from landlords forced to compete for tenants. It was this paucity of workers that prompted Portuguese traders to sail down the west coast of Africa to buy enslaved men and women to bring back to Lisbon.

With a decline of population, people abandoned the settlements that had grown up around marginal land tilled in response to the earlier growth of population. In England more than four hundred villages and hamlets ceased to exist in the second half of the fifteenth century. At the beginning of the sixteenth century European population began to bounce back from the Black Death, but the number of Europeans did not pass the benchmarks set in the first century until the middle of the eighteenth century. The seesaw of growth and retraction returned. Population, which had grown in the sixteenth century, declined in the next century, but a new plateau emerged in the 1740s. This one became a permanent launching pad for the population growth we are still experiencing. After that, the retrenchments stopped, though continental Europeans suffered some famines in the early nineteenth century.

At the end of the eighteenth century Thomas Robert Malthus, with these realities well in mind, published his famous
Essay on Population
. In it, he exposed a catch-22. He started with a simple hypothesis about population growth: People would have more babies if food were plentiful, and this happy outcome would lead inevitably to dearth in the future. As he pithily put it, “The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
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All this was because population grew exponentially: If two parents brought six children to adulthood, they could soon have thirty-six grandchildren, a sixfold increase. Agriculture, if it expanded at all, did so slowly and arithmetically—two plus two, not two times two—as more acres were added to production or yields grew larger. A 10 percent increase in cultivation would add ten bushels of grain to an initial one hundred, not nearly enough for the new mouths to feed. Hastening the return of dearth, the new tillage also would be inferior to that already tilled, for people farmed the good land first, moving to marginal land only when demand pushed up prices.

The implications of Malthus’s theory startled: Reproduction could be counted on to wipe out any abundance that big harvests ushered in. In short, good times created bad times. For Malthus, it would take the grim reaper with his train of disease, dearth, and disaster to reestablish an equilibrium between people and food. Malthus was reacting negatively to the optimism swirling through European intellectual circles after the French Revolution, so he was not about to entertain hope that people might cut down on their insistent copulation. He recognized the possibility that having fewer babies would stave off famine but gave no credence to men and women’s willingness to control their fertility. No Enlightenment, in his opinion, could rewrite these inexorable laws of population growth and decline. He did acknowledge in subsequent editions of his essay that England was fortunate in having so many horses (the English loved shooting and hunting). The horses created a firewall against famine, Malthus said, since they could always serve for food in desperate times. And of course there was also their output of manure, so precious to farmers.

Like many prophets, Malthus was right…about the past. He published in 1798 on the cusp of two dramatic developments that are central to the history of capitalism: the limitation of family size and the steady growth of harvests after two centuries of mutually enhancing agricultural improvements. England and the Netherlands had already broken through the age-old limits on productivity by the end of the seventeenth century. Even so, Malthus saw clearly that population growth was the uncaged tiger in early modern societies, which is where our story begins. His grim figures, by the way, gave his young contemporary Charles Darwin a key idea. If all species had to struggle to feed themselves, then nature had initiated a war of all against all, leading the Darwinian enthusiast Herbert Spencer to coin the phrase “the survival of the fittest.”

After World War II scholars became interested in the centuries-old accordionlike oscillation of European population because it seemed to contain some clues about “the rise of the West.” For historians, their “Mount Everest” became explaining how countries in the West had thrown off the fetters of poverty and ignorance and marched into a modern era of their own creation, one that set them apart from other places as well as their past. For a long time, scholarly attention focused on foreign trade, urban growth, and the development of industry to explain the West’s divergence from its past and other contemporary societies. It finally became apparent that something was missing from this narrative, for money and workers could not move into industry unless farmers produced more food to feed them. This meant that change, if it was to be lasting, had to come in the most conservative and populous sector of the society, the countryside.

Wishing to confirm or disconfirm Malthus’s strictures about human reproduction, demographers found ways to investigate the population dynamics of the past with more precision. They pored through extant registers of marriages, births, and deaths that parish churches kept and through the statistics recorded by governments. With family reconstitution forms and painstaking effort, they charted the dates of weddings, christenings, and burials. Cumulatively, these records yielded statistics on the average age at marriage, the typical interval between births, and the life expectancy for men and women and their children.
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Aided by computers, historical demographers were able to plot rates of fertility and mortality. Meticulously filling in family reconstitution forms for hundreds of communities, they discovered patterns for whole countries and regions.

An arresting discovery emerged from this work: The majority of men and women in Europe married at a late age, around twenty-six and twenty-seven for men, twenty-four and twenty-five for women. This stood in stark contrast with the early age of marriage among the Chinese and Indians, whose men and women got married near the age of puberty and subsequently moved in with the families of the husbands or wives. Even in southern Europe, extended families lived together. Quite the contrary in England, most couples had to establish separate households before they could marry. This custom acted as a population check. If a third of a woman’s fertile years passed by before she married, she would have fewer children. The fact that a man could not marry until he could support his wife explained how this pattern of late marriage was maintained. Acquiring a plot of land usually depended upon the death of the father, a reality that linked mortality and fertility. But the age of marriage proved flexible. Later, when there were other industrial jobs for men, the age of marriage dropped two or three years. Still, it remained much higher for European countries than elsewhere.

These findings indicated why famines in Europe had never been as severe as in other parts of the world and why they disappeared first in England. Late marriages were most marked among the poor, whose adolescence was spent in apprenticeships and as farm servants. Among members of the propertied classes, concerns about heirs to continue the family lines were paramount. The wealthy married off their pubescent girls and boys because there was money to support young newlyweds. Parents could arrange—and canon law permitted—marriages among boys and girls as young as eight and nine, but this was not typical, as had long been thought. Romeo and Juliet were the exception, not the rule, and ordinary people always had to bide their time before they could marry.

The high price of food still had to be lowered if people were to break out of the vise of food shortages that had long set limited economic horizons, but this demographic indicator showed how European countries succeeded in limiting family size. New efficiencies in farming had to release workers and capital from the agricultural sector as well as bring down the cost of food for there to be any breakout from the vise of scarcity—a very tall order. The bookkeeping of a London baker in the early seventeenth century gives us a look at food costs relative to income. He paid three dollars in wages each week, while feeding the thirteen people in his household—wife, children, journeymen, apprentices, and maidservants—cost him twelve dollars. Food took four-fifths of his total outlay. A small firm today that covered the meals of its eight employees would spend less than a quarter on food.
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How Food Costs Limited Economic Development

With something like 80 percent of the people engaged in raising food, there were too few extra laborers and too little money to support many other enterprises. Whatever surplus accrued to those who worked the soil generally went to taxes for the ruler, rent for their landlords, and tithes for the church. Instead of acquiring income from enterprise, the members of the middle and upper classes—royal officials, landlords, and clergymen—were supported by the extractions in taxes and rents from those who worked the land. Others—merchants, lawyers, bankers, tradesmen—lived off the spending of the recipients of taxes, tithes, and rents. There could be no increase in demand for manufactured goods or even for the commodities brought from faraway lands without changes in food production because there was no money to spend on them. To make the point, the percentage of the population in farming in Europe of the sixteenth century was similar to that of Europe during the time of the Roman Empire.