The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism

by Joyce Appleby

  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.1

  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.2 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 great
ly 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.

  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.3 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.4

  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.5 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.”6 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 far
med 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.”