In a bold study that focused on the production and consumption of households in northwest Europe and North America, economic historian Jan de Vries perceived a Western version of Japan's ‘Industrious Revolution’, starting around 1650. According to de Vries:
A growing number of households acted to re-allocate their productive resources (which are chiefly the time of their members) in ways that increased both the supply of market-oriented, money-earning activities and the demand for goods offered in the marketplace. Increased production specialization in the household gives access to augmented consumption choices in the marketplace.
In short, the value as well as the volume of goods produced and consumed in the later seventeenth century increased because so many baby boomers wanted more than the bare necessities of life. To take the example of housing, all over northwest Europe, after 1650 ‘brick construction replaced wood and lime; functional spaces became better defined, as drawing rooms and dining rooms appeared in middle class homes and distinct bed chambers came to be defined … and these interior spaces came to be filled with more, and more specialized, furniture’. Similar diversification characterized the consumption, and therefore the production, of apparel, food and beverages. Moreover, since technology could not provide the water, illumination, heat and hygiene sought by wealthier consumers, the heightened demand for many of these necessities also heightened the demand for domestic servants to provide them.22
A burgeoning demand for ‘comfort items’ also characterized late Ming China, but the trauma of the Ming-Qing transition brought it to an abrupt end in most areas. Suzhou, for example, with a population of 500,000, was in the early seventeenth century ‘the most populous, and most prosperous, non-capital city on the face of the earth’; but famines, plagues and riots under the late Ming undermined its prosperity, and its defiance of the Qing led to a sack that left only ‘broken tiles and walls’ within the city, while ‘outside the city, four or five out of every ten houses had been destroyed. What met the eye wounded the heart’.23 Nevertheless, by 1676 four merchant guilds (including the printers and the drug merchants) as well as groups of ‘foreign’ merchants had founded or reconstructed lodges in the city, and 11 more followed suit over the next two decades: each lodge represented a major investment, and their multiplication reflected the construction both of merchant ships in the city (a new development) and of the quality goods to fill them. As he passed through Nanking in 1656, Johan Nieuhof noted that ‘the shops of the chief citizens and merchants are fill'd with all manner of rich Chinese wares, as cottons, silk stuffs, China dishes [porcelain], pearls, diamonds’; while on the Yangzi ‘the number of all manner of vessels is so great, that it seems as if all the shipping of the world were harbor'd there’.24
In Shanghai, the official-turned-schoolteacher Yao Tinglin noted in his journal in the 1680s how many things had altered since the fall of the Ming, focusing on the dramatic changes in apparel and foods available to ordinary people, thanks in part to the mass production of items that had been unknown or reserved for the rich under the Ming. Neighbouring Suzhou grew rich by catering to this market. An attempt by Qing officials to prevent the city's women from going to temples to burn incense (seen as an extravagance) had to be abandoned because it threw so many boatmen and sedan-chair carriers out of work; and when the Kangxi emperor visited in the 1680s, he noted disdainfully that the city's inhabitants ‘set great store by the false and extravagant and are satisfied with comfort and pleasure; those who pursue commerce and crafts are many, those who till the fields are few’. Shortly afterwards, the emperor's trusted bondservant, Cao Yin, saw the situation rather differently. ‘Suzhou,’ he wrote, ‘is heaven’.25
Again as in Japan, the ‘industrious revolution’ in China and Europe ran parallel to improvements to the damaged infrastructure. Dongting Lake, in Hunan province, became the largest lake in Ming China each autumn when the flood waters of the Yangzi flowed in, bringing nutrients and fish. At an early date, the central government constructed dikes to control the process, which allowed farming to develop on the fertile soil. This in turn encouraged private drainage projects, stimulated the production and export of crop surpluses and attracted both immigrant labour and grain merchants. Then, in the early seventeenth century, the state ceased to maintain its dikes, which compromised the private ventures and led to abandoned fields, emigration and the loss of the tax revenues required for repair. Local sources lamented the poverty of the area until the 1680s, but in the following decade the Qing provided subsidies to rebuild 16 of the major dikes, which once again stimulated private reclamation projects and the recovery of the area.26 The same chronology characterized the recovery of another key element of infrastructure: transportation. Louis Le Comte, a French Jesuit who claimed to have ‘travelled 2,000 leagues, covering almost every province’ of China in the 1680s, was deeply impressed by
The care taken to make public highways accessible. They are about eighty feet wide, made of soil that is light and soon dries after rain. In some provinces you find (as with our [French] bridges) causeways for travellers on foot on the right and left hand, protected on both sides by an endless row of great trees, often enclosed by a wall eight or ten foot high on each side to keep passengers out of the fields.
Le Comte also noted with approval the post-stations and guard houses built at regular intervals along every road, and the numerous arches which, with few exceptions, displayed
A board on which characters that one can read a hundred paces away state the distance from the town one has just left and to the town to which the road leads. So guides are not necessary, and you always know where you are going, where you have been, how far you have travelled and how far you still have to go.27
Some of those highways remained in use in the twentieth century.
Water transport also improved. Above all, the Qing mobilized the full-time forced labour of 47,000 men to carry out repairs to the Grand Canal, the longest artificial waterway in the world, which allowed the relatively rapid transport of goods and passengers between Beijing and Jiangnan, a distance of 1,000 miles. Although Johannes Nieuhof came from a country studded with busy waterways, he believed that ‘there is nothing more pleasant to be seen in all the world’ than the Grand Canal, with its ‘smooth large banks’ and its ‘extraordinary traffick’. Nieuhof's sketch of the canal at Tianjin, not far from Beijing, shows China's main thoroughfare in all its splendour in 1658, just 14 years after the Manchu invasion (Plate 24).28
Communications infrastructure in Europe also improved dramatically after the troubles of the mid-century subsided. When James Fraser arrived in London in 1657 he was amazed to find a postal network operated by ‘a postmaster general and about 200 sub-postmasters’, who conveyed letters at ‘120 miles in 24 houres’; and also ‘hakeney [hackney] and stage coaches, wherin yow have yowr seat for a shilling the six miles, bravely sheltered from fowle ways and fowle wether’. The following year, a coach managed to travel up the Great North Road between London and York (apparently the first wheeled transport to do so), covering 200 miles in four days; and five years later, an Act of Parliament gave magistrates along the Great North Road powers to erect tollgates and apply the proceeds to highway improvement. Similar improvements evidently took place elsewhere, because a courier who left Dartmouth in Devon at 5 a.m. on 5 November 1688, bearing the alarming news that William of Orange and a fleet of 500 ships had just appeared off the English coast, reached Whitehall at 3 p.m. the following day: he had ridden ‘above eight-score [160] miles in fewer than 24 hours’.29 The English road network improved more rapidly after 1696 in response to a series of ‘Turnpike Acts’, which allowed magistrates to set up barriers (known as turnpikes) where they could collect tolls from travellers, and also to borrow money and appoint surveyors to improve highways. Almost 40 turnpike trusts existed in England by 1720.
Transporting bulky items could only be done efficiently by water, and here too the later seventeenth century saw important innovations throughout w
estern Europe. Although building canals represented the greatest civil-engineering venture of the age, by 1665 the Dutch Republic boasted over 400 miles of inter-city transport canals at a cost of almost £500,000. Each canal possessed a towpath that permitted horse-pulled barges to convey passengers and freight quickly and cheaply between the principal cities of the coastal provinces, according to a regular schedule. Before long, fastidious Amsterdammers even sent their dirty washing by barge to the cheaper and cleaner laundries of Haarlem, 15 miles away. In France, in 1667 a group of investors directed the efforts of up to 12,000 labourers on the 150 miles of the ‘Royal Canal of Languedoc’, linking the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, which involved creating an artificial lake near the summit, several aqueducts and Europe's first tunnel constructed expressly for a canal. The first barges and almost 4,000 passengers paid to use the canal in 1682, its first year of operation, and traffic continued to use it until the drought of 1989 made it impassable.
Although the great age of English canal-building began somewhat later, from the 1650s local entrepreneurs started to invest their money in improving river navigation so that barges could convey goods to and from distant markets. The account books of Colonel Robert Walpole, an MP from Norfolk, reveal that when he went to London in the 1690s he bought both ale from Nottingham and Thomas Bass's beer from Burton (both locations that, thanks to the distinctive geology of the Trent valley, still produce outstanding brews) because they could be transported to the taverns of the capital entirely by water. He also bought Scotch whisky at three shillings a bottle, as well as countless other luxuries. The economy of connected ‘shallow ponds’ characteristic of the seventeenth century (see Fig. 9 above) had given way to an economy of mutually dependent regions (Fig. 52).30
Some condemned such purchases as sinful extravagance, and many states passed legislation (known as ‘Sumptuary Laws’) expressly designed to restrain consumption. In 1662 Sir William Petty, a distinguished economic theorist, argued that
There are two sorts of riches, one actual and the other potential. A man is actually and truly rich according to what he eateth, drinketh, weareth, or any other way really and actually enjoyeth; others are but potentially or imaginatively rich, who, though they have power over much, make little use of it; these being rather stewards and exchangers for the other sort, than owners for themselves.
Petty therefore favoured imposing excise duties because they encourage ‘thrift, the onely way to enrich a nation’. Such ideas soon went out of fashion. Thirty years later, Sir Dudley North, a merchant who had travelled the world and made a fortune through trade, observed succinctly that ‘countries which have sumptuary laws are generally poor’, because ‘the main spur to trade, or rather to industry and ingenuity, is the exorbitant appetites of men, which they will take pains to gratifie, and so be disposed to work, when nothing else will incline them to it, for did men content themselves with bare necessaries, we should have a poor world’.31
52. An economy of integrated regions.
Although each regional economy remains open, the domestic market has become integrated. The stronger regional economies include foreign trade, but even there multi-directional trade with other regional economies is more important. Compare with Figure 9 above.
Surviving household inventories in England, New England, the Dutch Republic and northern France suggest that the ‘exorbitant appetites’ of consumers like Colonel Walpole formed part of a consumer revolution. Early in the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe included in his Compleat English Tradesman a chapter entitled ‘Of the luxury and extravagancies of the age becoming virtues in commerce, and how they propagate the trade and manufactures of the whole nation’, which argued (like Sir Dudley North) that the re-introduction of ‘what we call sumptuary laws’ would ‘ruin thousands of families’ because ‘the luxury of the people is become a vertue in trade’:
If a due calculation were made of all the several trades besides labouring, manufacturing, and handicraft business, which are supported in this nation merely by the sins of the people … [namely by] the numberless gayeties of dress; as also by the gluttony, the drunkenness, and other exorbitances of life, it might remain a question, whether the necessary or the unnecessary were the greatest blessing to trade; and whether reforming our vices would not ruin the nation.
Although Defoe noted cautiously that ‘heaven could, with but one dry or wet summer, bring us to the necessity of drastically reducing consumption’, he considered the Britain in which he lived as ‘the most flourishing and opulent country in the world’.32
A similar debate on the ‘confusions of pleasure’ took place in seventeenth-century China. The Confucian sage Mencius had pointed out the need for ‘an intercommunication of the production of labour, and an interchange of men's services, so that one from his overplus may supply the deficiency of another’. A writer in Shanghai quoted this passage with approval, noting that although the frugality of a family ‘can, perhaps, save it from becoming poor’, the same was not true of larger communities because ‘if a place is accustomed to extravagance, then the people there will find it easy to make a living, and if a place is accustomed to frugality, then the people there will find it difficult to make a living’. More specifically, when the rich ‘are extravagant in meat and rice, farmers and cooks will share the profit; when they are extravagant in silk textiles, weavers and dealers will share the profit’. After the austerity of the Ming-Qing transition, China rediscovered the wisdom of Mencius: ‘Spendthrifts may spend a million taels a day on foolish extravagances,’ wrote a government official around 1680, ‘but the expended treasure circulates among the people through the hands of those who obtain it’, whereas ‘a miser who saves up a sizable amount of money will impoverish numerous families around him’.33
‘Seeing like a State’
In his paean of praise to conspicuous consumption, Daniel Defoe argued that ‘exorbitances’ of attire, food and drink had become ‘so necessary to the support of the very government, as well as of commerce, that without the revenue now raised by them [through the excise], we can hardly see how the publick affairs could be supported’.34 This was an extraordinary statement, considering that just one generation earlier, those same excise taxes (‘gabelles’ or ‘gabelas’ on the continent) had precipitated major revolts in the Spanish Monarchy, France and the Dutch Republic (see chapters 9, 10, 14 and 17 above); and that enraged crowds had burned down excise offices and attacked excise collectors (see chapters 12 and 14 above). The tax originated in England in 1643 as a temporary wartime measure but, as Scott Wheeler has noted, it ‘brought “the state” to the English people in a way they had never experienced before’. Henceforth ‘all Englishmen paid some taxes, regardless of their economic status’ – indeed, excise became the crown's second largest source of revenue in peacetime and the third largest in wartime.35
Nevertheless the yield of the British excise, and also of customs duties and ‘the Assessment’ (later known as the ‘Land Tax’), the three principal sources of public revenue, went almost entirely to defray the country's defence budget. The economic growth praised by Defoe reflected private rather than public finance. Even the costliest investments, such as improvements to roads and rivers, were effected by groups of private individuals known as ‘undertakers’. The state nevertheless played a crucial role: it provided security and stability. Thus, every undertaker required government permission to start work and to collect tolls, but until 1688 England had two competing systems for obtaining and enforcing improvement rights: one through a patent granted by the crown, the other through Act of Parliament. Throughout the seventeenth century, each regime change threatened to ruin ‘undertakers’ who held a grant from the previous regime (for example, the Restoration settlement of 1660 included an Act that declared all ‘orders and ordinances’ made during the Interregnum ‘to be null and void’). The Glorious Revolution ended this dual system: henceforth, crown and Parliament combined to provide a stable and predictable regulatory authorit
y that made investment worthwhile and, thanks to the new climate of business confidence, individuals invested as much money in improving roads and rivers in the 15-year period 1695–1709 as in the 85-year period 1604–88. Moreover, their investment substantially reduced transport costs, which benefited investors and producers alike, and thus stimulated further investment.36
Increasing consumption made it possible for many governments to shift their fiscal base from direct to indirect taxes. In England, total revenues in 1650–9 exceeded £18 million, of which over one-third came from the ‘Assessment’ on landed property, whereas total revenues in 1680–9 fell below £15 million, of which only £530,000 came from the Assessment. In France, although the total revenues of Louis XIV rose from 84 million livres in 1661 to 114 million in 1688, the yield of the principal land tax (the taille) fell from 42 to 32 million. The statistics for other European states collected in the ‘European State Finance Database’ show similar trends.37 These shifts – stable or rising state income, derived from taxes on consumption rather than on production – benefited both richer taxpayers, who spent proportionally less of their income on consumer goods, and the state, which gained a greater disposable income.
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