The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (14 page)

Improving agriculture had thrown many out of work, but it also enabled more people to survive. Historical demographers happened on to a critical benchmark in English economic history when they reconstructed rising and falling grain prices along with rising and falling births and deaths. They learned that after the terrible harvest failures of 1648–1650, spikes in prices were rarely accompanied by more deaths. Though food costs could skyrocket from time to time, dearth stopped turning into disaster. By 1700 English annual output in agriculture was at least twice that of any other European country and continued so until the 1850s.
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Englishmen and women did not know that they had crossed a barrier that divided them from their own past and from every other contemporary society. Yet they had. After the middle of the seventeenth century famine no longer threatened them. Chronic malnutrition lingered on for the bottom 20 percent of European population, not completely disappearing for another century. Agricultural productivity, combined with the purchasing power to bring food from other places in times of shortage, had eliminated one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from England’s shores. A powerful reason for maintaining the strict social order had unobtrusively disappeared, leaving behind a set of social prescriptions whose obsolescence would slowly be discovered. Nothing could have so dramatically distinguished England from the rest of Europe with its last general famine in 1819, not to mention the rest of the world, which still wrestles with failing food supplies.

Despite the dislocations of the Agricultural Revolution, it improved everyone’s life chances. Inland trading in foods and other goods became denser. A single national market, the largest, free trading zone in Europe, took shape. This countrywide commercial network created another bulwark against famine because rarely did crop failures hit all regions at the same time. Now there were the connections—transportation, middlemen, and means of payment—to ship food anywhere there was a dearth. If the poor couldn’t pay for food, the government did. The formation of a national market reflected more than a good road system. It gave proof of farmers’ willingness to ship their harvests outside the local area. They did so, but not always happily. One contemporary lamented, “[W]e had once a kind of Market in every Parish and could utter most of our Commodities at home. We were not then forc’d to carry our Corn God knows where, deal, with God Knows whom, sell for God knows what, to be paid God knows when.”
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England and the Netherlands were the only European countries to enhance their capacity to feed their people in the first half of the seventeenth century. A half century later they were the first countries to increase population and income at the same time. When we turn to the rest of Europe, we see the enormous difference made by agricultural improvements. In Europe the protracted fighting of the Thirty Years’ War and a spate of storms and freezing temperatures wreaked devastation from Russia to Ireland. Agricultural practices in Italy and Spain remained static. Population growth only exacerbated declining agricultural productivity in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Balkans.
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Farther east landlords in Russia and Poland had been able to tie their peasants to the land through a regime of serfdom that removed incentives to improve agricultural routines. Those landlords in the Baltic who had responded to rising food prices by bringing more land into cultivation proved so indifferent to the peasants’ welfare that they shipped grains to garner profits in foreign markets at the expense of those starving at home.

In France, where farmers had access to information about Dutch improvements and soil and climate conditions were similar, no such improvement took place for another century. The depopulation of the Black Death had given the French peasantry a firmer hold on their land, but they were subject to numerous legal burdens. When population began to rise in the sixteenth century, the survival of more heirs meant that family plots had to be divided. This morselization of holdings left families struggling to survive on too few acres. France also lacked what England had in abundance, a network of rivers and canals to carry grain shipments. A byzantine maze of feudal privileges overlaid the French countryside. So difficult was the transportation of goods from one region to another that Frenchmen and women in one part of the country could almost starve to death when there was abundant grain in another.

While the French had a strong presence in trade and manufacturing, their agriculture stagnated. The misery of the peasantry only grew as noble landlords and the state siphoned off more and more money from their meager returns. French landlords had little leverage to change the farming techniques of these penurious peasants, but they could and did revive old feudal privileges to extract more money from them as prices rose. The king also exacted higher and higher taxes from the peasantry, even while he was protecting them from aggressive landlords.
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Not until the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century would there be any meaningful reform of the so-called ancien régime.

Traveling across Spain and France in 1787–1789 on the eve of the French Revolution, Arthur Young, an ardent English agricultural improver, reported his astonishment at the neglect of farming in Spain and the poverty in France. Noting that the poor went without shoes in one province, Young put his finger on a problem that still plagues economies. Widespread poverty struck at the root of national prosperity, he noted, because only the poor can consume in numbers sufficient to sustain other trades.
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The double role of workers had become salient to him. Keeping their incomes low made goods cheaper while at the same time limiting the market for those goods. In both Spain and France, Young criticized the intrusion of government, noting that in France, ancient privileges clogged the circulation of all goods, even grains in time of famine.

Being able to feed more people more cheaply with fewer workers released workers for other occupations and left more money in everyone’s pockets for purchasing pottery, utensils, Indian cottons, books, and a range of leather goods from shoes to saddles. When English farmers went from feeding six additional families to meeting the needs of thirty, they underwrote a stunning transformation in productivity. The steady increase of food output also introduced a new measure of certainty in people’s lives. After a generation without famines, spenders and investors could shed the caution associated with fear and begin to take a few risks with their savings. There is no direct connection between more effective farming and the ingenious engineering of new machines that ushered in a new age in manufacturing. The Agricultural Revolution could not produce the inventions central to industrialization, but without its bounteous harvests, those inventions would have been confined to that small part of the economy not dedicated to growing food for the whole.

Unlike the earlier quickening pace in commerce, the production of more food with less money and fewer workers released the vital resources of people and capital for a variety of other economic activities, some of them previously unimaginable. Among the welter of revolutions in the early modern centuries, that in agriculture is the one with the most profound consequences. Yet this revolution is often slighted in studies because it was not as conspicuous as the glamorous trade in spices, porcelain, and textiles or the marvelous parade of machines that advertised the “rise of the West” and its industrial might.

Village life stayed the same for those who inherited their parents’ places, but their redundant siblings lost those prescribed roles in life. Displaced by irreversible changes, they took to the roads, searching for work in nearby towns, or sought out forests and upland meadows where they might establish themselves as squatters. The commercialization of farming increased the number of men and women who worked for wages. Once uprooted from the traditional agrarian order, they lost their village status and were forced to join a class of workers in a modernizing society where patrons were few and employment was uncertain. Some became part of a migratory, seasonal work force. Many moved to London, a few no doubt catching hold of an opportunity created by a maturing commerce and a developing industry. Others traveled in a constant search for work, their feet following the course of economic expansion.

Henceforth the people of England could be divided between those whom the changes of the century dislodged and those who stayed put. Their experience was the harbinger of what awaited the entire European peasantry in the ensuing decades. Millions of these men and women would cross the Atlantic to establish a European beachhead in North and South America while their sisters and brothers became part of an emerging proletariat. Present-day famines remind us of the complex challenge of feeding a society. They also make us aware of how an agricultural revolution made capitalism possible.

COMMENTARY ON MARKETS AND HUMAN NATURE

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HE EAST INDIA COMPANY
began importing colorful calicoes and ginghams at the end of the seventeenth century. After spending lifetimes wearing heavy wools and linens, ordinary Englishmen and women reacted with enthusiasm to this opportunity to wear light, bright fabrics. Their response so surprised observers that some of them waxed eloquent on the benefit of material desires. “The Wants of the Mind are infinite, Man naturally Aspires, and as his mind is elevated, his senses grow more refined, and more capable of delight,” one wrote, going on to connect these aroused tastes with a tendency to work harder to be able to spend more. An important component of capitalism’s triumph over the traditional order came from getting people to change their minds about fundamental values. Their world had been held together by a coherent set of ideas that did a pretty good job of describing the way things worked in a world of scarcity. The distribution of praise and disapproval in songs, sermons, and old sayings kept people in their proper places. Since we learn social prescriptions while we’re growing up, we rarely give them much thought later on. Studying how they function is the province of sociologists and psychologists. But in a history of capitalism they cannot be ignored because capitalism relied on people’s acting differently: taking risks, endorsing novelty, and innovating. The calico craze epitomized this switch to a new way of being in the world.

Traditional society is structured around statuses, permanent places in the social structure like that of a nobleman or commoner. Social classes came in with capitalism and refer to groups distinguished by their wealth or lack of it and their relation to the economy. The spirit of enterprise ran athwart traditional social norms in conspicuous and profound ways. For instance, in modern society the hope of enjoying a richer life is one of the principal inducements to economic innovation whereas the hierarchy of inherited statuses clogged the path of anyone wishing to rise in society. Statuses were inherited and bore no relation to merit. Being absorbed in making money gave offense to gentlemen who considered such ambitions vulgar. Gentlemen didn’t strive; only servants rushed around doing things. Classes congealed around work, those who employed others and those who were employed. In the United States today almost all consider themselves to be in the middle class. Then the middle class, or bourgeoisie, referred to wealthy merchants, doctors, and lawyers who did not do manual labor but were not part of the gentry or nobility either.

Without force, people will change behavior only when they understand why they should and then only slowly. Usually it takes a new generation or two to grow up with the fresh ideas. The major reason that societies change slowly is that novelties must be incorporated into culture forms, and this is the work of expression and discussion. By that I mean that people need to take stock of innovations, assess their impact, search out the meaning for their lives, and determine how other facets of their community will be affected. The proponents of an entrepreneurial economy came up with explanations to facilitate the kinds of social transformations they were pushing for. Those most involved in change speak out first, and then the more articulate members of society weigh in. While this seems obvious when spelled out, few accounts of the emergence of capitalism deal with the absolutely essential task of nurturing values supportive of the new system. It’s as though people think that because economies are about material things, only material forces operate in it when in fact economies involve human beings who don’t do anything without an idea in their heads.

Before institutions change, advocates and opponents of policies have to thrash out the pros and cons of the alternatives much as the Reverends Lee and Moore did about enclosures. Capitalist values could not be imposed by authority because the genius of the new entrepreneurial economy was individual initiative. These unknown people made the critical choices on their own. The poor could be indirectly coerced through their need for food and shelter, but the system gave even them more latitude in choosing where and how to work. Words like “new,” “improved,” “profitable,” and “interest” acquired cachet at the same time that the evident disruption of old patterns of living and working provoked cries of anguish and anger. Those who enjoyed high status differed on whether to accept reforms or maintain old ways. The power to persuade became a mighty weapon in the ensuing contest of world views.

A New Economic Discourse

During the two centuries in which England’s market economy took shape, there was a vibrant press, originally nurtured by the religious and constitutional disputes of the seventeenth century. When evidence of the new wealth-making possibilities became conspicuous, contemporaries began to seek explanations, and they found it easy to publish their ideas about what was happening to the traditional economy. Often they wrote to justify their particular interests as active participants in the market. Some analyzers were “hired pens,” pleading the case of the overseas trading companies or of domestic manufacturers. Moralists often wrote to lament the sinful selfishness of individuals who flouted old rules designed to protect the poor. Quite unexpectedly to almost all who watched the marketplace, many—though by no means all—ordinary men and women responded positively to new opportunities. This demonstration of a capacity to think for themselves and act in their own interests surprised their social superiors because it had long been assumed that simple farmers or small-town traders didn’t possess the imagination to act outside prescribed routines.