The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism

by Joyce Appleby

  Improving landlords and freeholders could add to their holdings by buying land that came on the market because of an owner’s death or financial troubles. They could respond quickly to price incentives because they were well off enough to gamble on change. Their success with improvements brought them the money to buy more land. The government took a hand in promoting agricultural improvements as well, granting pensions to experts to publicize utilitarian plants and demonstrating to farmers how to raise them. Manuals on farming went through successive cheap editions at the same time that literacy was increasing. Over the long haul the returns on improvement cut down the sense of risk felt by those watching from the sidelines, removing one of the disincentives to change.

  The records don’t allow us to know which group—the improving landlords or the improving freeholders—played the stronger role in turning English agriculture from a largely subsistence, village-based system to a market-driven regime of private farms. Since the size of the farm had little influence upon whether or not to adopt the new techniques, we might turn to the cultural and personal qualities that prompted innovation. Roman advice books describe the best dung as being the tread of the master’s boot. Writers in the seventeenth century repeated that bromide again and again. If true, this may have given the advantage to the owner farmer over the landlord who had to induce his tenants to learn new skills. Only a very efficient manager could save all animal waste, convert his fields from pasture to tillage, rotate grain crops, grow soil enhancers like clover, flood meadows, and keep his children and servants at their various tasks.

  The greatest force working for the adoption of improvements sprang from their conspicuous success in producing larger harvests. Because improvements got results, the trailblazers, few and scattered across the countryside, acted as catalysts for change. Abandoning fallow periods immediately brought more acreage under the plow. When enough people invested their resources in productive improvements, they forced others to imitate them or suffer. Enlarged harvests precipitated a drop in the prices of grains. The improvers could still profit because they had larger yields, but those landlords and farmers who had not enhanced the fertility of their soil or adopted better cropping methods would be wiped out by the persistent decline in prices. Slowly the mechanism of the market built a momentum for improvement.

  The countryside’s most salient division became that between those who engaged in improvements and those who didn’t—whether they were farmers, tenants, or landlords. It was not between landlords and their tenants per se. Nor did self-interest exercise a consistent influence because in times of dramatic change it was difficult to know wherein one’s interests lay. The market was hard on those who wanted to stand still; its price dynamic rewarded the provident and improving and punished those resistant to change or out of touch. The future is always unclear, and capitalism’s reliance upon individual decisions made it even more difficult to imagine, much less know, what would be the results of cumulative decisions.

  These may sound like innocuous statements, but they challenge the Marxist position that the conversion of agriculture from primitive reproduction to enhanced productivity began with farsighted landlords who coerced their tenants into commercial leases with rents set in response to harvest yields that exposed tenants to the competitive forces of the market.11 In this analysis tenants are assumed to have resisted cooperating with their landlords’ improvement plans because they feared becoming dependent on the market and losing the independence that fixed rents gave them. But there is no way that anyone could have predicted the results of initiating improvements or what dependence upon the market would entail. These are retrospective observations. Nor was it possible to imagine that adopting a few experiments in agricultural technology would start a train of unique developments leading to a total restructuring of the economy. Pointing to landlords as the agents of change makes them more prescient and disciplined than they were.12 There is no evidence that landlords, as a group, initiated the crucial changes in agriculture or that farmers and tenants were loath to embrace them on their own.

  I believe that the reverse of the Marxist position is true: that new social relations were the consequence, not the cause, of the transformation of English farming. The changes themselves took place over five or six generations of experimentation and resistance, during which time there would have been a slow, untidy sorting out of the successes and the failures in all strata of the old agrarian order, from cottagers to great lords. Innovations certainly redistributed agricultural income. They delivered profits to those who undertook them and reduced returns to the landlords, farmers, and tenants who did not. This sequence of developments slowly rearranged hundreds of rural communities.

  Many a gentry family tumbled from casual indebtedness to forced liquidation of estates. Tenants who did not have secure leases lost their holdings. Bad luck, sickness, or insufficient planning could push them into the ranks of cottagers—those with a house and small garden plot—or, worse, of itinerant laborers. The records indicate that some freeholders prospered even as their numbers grew smaller over the course of the seventeenth century. The most successful moved into the gentry while others lost their independent footing altogether. The market in its own impersonal and seemingly inexorable way increased both rich and poor and changed the array of options for many in the middle.

  Priming the Pump of Capitalism

  Improved agricultural techniques didn’t stop at enhancing harvests; they upended the old agrarian order. Producing for the market, with all of its practical adjustments, replaced a settled way of life, guided by tradition and inherited status. What Marx and his followers got right was the coherence of a new class of owners determined to use its influence and money to secure policies that favored its interests. Ironically, this complicated social rearrangement began to be seen as a natural process. Part of the improving landlords’ campaign to free themselves of the old restraints, encapsulated in the laws against engrossing, forestalling, and regrating, was rhetorical. Disputants and pamphleteers began talking about producing for the market as a natural system resistant to political tampering.

  Continued, abundant harvests had another intellectual impact. They made it possible for people to feel less threatened by change, less subservient to nature, less inclined to accept authority. We might put it this way: In an emergency our psychological template is different. We’re anxious and fearful. We accept the authority of a leader; we do as we are told. Premodern society had always lived with a sense of teetering on the brink of disaster. The fading of that fearfulness made way for more optimistic assessments of the future and more positive estimates of human capacities. Men and women relaxed a bit.

  By the middle of the seventeenth century both population and prices had leveled off in England, only to begin a climb again after 1730. The world’s population had expanded and contracted over three millennia, but from that eighteenth-century benchmark it has continued to the present. Unlike the old accordion pattern that had characterized previous European population fluctuations, the increase in people this time laid a new basis for future growth with each cohort forming a larger springboard from which world population still soars. Food supplies were to be severely strained from time to time, but instead of shrinking, they expanded to sustain new levels of population. The twenty million Frenchmen Louis XIV ruled in 1700 became the forty million Frenchmen who couldn’t be wrong in 1914. English population grew at an even faster clip. And in England’s North American colonies—that catch basin of surplus men and women from northwestern Europe—the number of people doubled every twenty-five or so years.

  Since officials started keeping systematic records for agricultural output in England only in 1860, the numbers I’m giving here are guesstimates from the account books farmers kept and records from litigation over leases. In 1520, when almost 80 percent of the English population worked the land, 100 families could produce enough food in a regular season to feed 125 families. Those 25 extra families constituted the
country’s military, clergy, and royal officials as well as retailers, mechanics, merchants, and artisans. From 1600 onward fewer and fewer hands were needed in English farming. In 1800 only 36 percent of adult male laborers were working in agriculture, and those farm families grew the food for their own and 60 other families. This meant a fourfold increase in those who composed the political, clerical, and commercial sectors of society. In the next half century the farming population dropped to 25 percent of the whole. At the same time other countries in Europe would have had between 60 and 80 percent of their men and women still working on the farm while the populations of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands grew by the same amount.13 France did not have the market integration in the middle of the nineteenth century that England had achieved by the end of the seventeenth century.

  We need to take a last look at the traditional agrarian world in order to understand the outrage that the new agricultural practices elicited. Farming had been organized around villages, most of which contained large common fields with strips of land on which villagers could sow and reap. While each villager farmed his own strip, decisions about when to plant, when to harvest, and when to glean were made collectively. The weak and the irresponsible were knit into the same web of responsibilities with the able and industrious. The countryside was also peopled by cottagers who had one or two acres for growing food and keeping poultry. They got by through working on the farms of others, as did servants on yearly contracts and casual day laborers. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, private farming had pretty much replaced the old open fields, regardless of the law, but the old ideal lingered on as a—well—ideal.

  As food prices kept climbing, it grew more and more attractive to consolidate what was left of the communal strips into separate, private farms. Because the government was so heavily invested in preventing food shortages, such enclosures required parliamentary statutes. As the word suggests, enclosures enclosed what had previously been open. During the first half of the sixteenth century, when wool prices were high, some English landlords had turned their arable land into sheep runs. These enclosures cast tenants out of their holdings. They then became the “masterless men” who walked the roads looking for work and food during the Elizabethan period. Although frowned upon and much criticized, these enclosures continued until wool prices fell again. Enclosing to create private farms for grain tillage, which was done mainly in the seventeenth century, had a different social impact. These enclosures actually created jobs and produced more food, so they didn’t make government officials anxious. They looked like a better management of cropland, the matrix from which all other economic activities sprang.

  The coordinated tilling, weeding, and reaping of the common fields had created patterns of work, play, and ceremony that reinforced the corporate life of the village. Enclosure disentangled each person from this network of community obligations and activities. It permitted individuals to organize their own resources and brought in its train greater disparity between the poor and the prosperous. The awareness of a common fate faded when the principal producers became single families rather than a group of villagers coordinating their round of seasonal tasks.

  Unlike many other changes, the consolidation and hedging of once open fields were conspicuous. And they drew commentary. For moralists, community farming was worth maintaining because it taught men and women their duties to one another. But by the mid-seventeenth century advocates of new farm techniques had vigorously challenged this argument. They were impressed by the productivity gains achieved when the farmer had the flexibility to lay down pasture or plant grain, flood meadows, and follow his own crop rotation. The disputants evoked different ideals. Cherishing the poor and cultivating brotherly love were pitted against using one’s own wits, foresight, discipline, and intelligence to enhance the bounty of nature.

  Two ministers in the 1650s traded pamphlets that explored with great passion these options. The Reverend John Moore started the exchange with a full-throated attack on enclosures: they turned husbandmen into cottagers, undoing them because they could not care for their families on tiny plots. They encouraged indifference to the poor that amounted to not loving Christ. Responding anonymously, the Reverend Joseph Lee agreed that not caring for the poor was a sin, but tenants and freeholds would be better able, after enclosure, to contribute to the relief of the poor. The gain in productivity was the virtue of enclosure. As Lee explained, “the monarch of one acre will make more profit thereof, then he that hath his share in forty in common.” While arguing on the basis of advantage, Lee also strongly suggested that people had the right to do what they wanted rather than be shackled to an idea of corporate well-being.14 Similar battle lines were to be drawn over and over again as contemporaries wrestled with economic practices that had no sanction in the Bible and little connection to community traditions.

  Equally concerned with reknitting the old social fabric, the English Poor Laws passed at the end of the sixteenth century reaffirmed society’s commitment to feed its members and look to their need for work. It established two overseers of the poor in each parish, the basic unit of local government. Every English man, woman, and child was entitled to relief from his or her birth parish when in need. Parish officials made dead certain that applicants were eligible before giving them any relief. One overseer of the poor encapsulated the gist of the law: “work for those that will Labour, Punishment for those that will not, and Bread for those that cannot.”15 These laws established the community’s responsibility either to give outdoor relief or to provide facilities for indoor care. The law grew in importance as more and more people, once settled in villages, became impoverished cottagers or migratory laborers during the long process of change from open fields to enclosed, private farms.

  We can get something of a handle on the dimensions of poverty in England because a civil servant named Gregory King compiled a detailed list of his country’s social categories at the end of the seventeenth century. He drew up lists that numbered, among others, those who were baronets, shopkeepers, persons in the law, and vagrants.16 Scholars have pored over and amended King’s fascinating enumerations ever since. One startling fact in his summary is that more than half the English had to turn to some form of charity to get through each year. That group had probably been larger a century earlier, when roving bands of beggars and vagabonds alarmed the propertied. Such fears prompted standards for all labor contracts and wrote into law the ideal of a settled population in which each worker had his superior. Employers were bound to keep their wage servants for at least a year and to observe statutory limit in wages.

  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.17

  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.”18

  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.19 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.