The Ottoman empire, too, maintained large granaries, above all in Istanbul and in Egypt, whose grain surplus maintained not only the capital but also the Holy Cities of Arabia. When in 1694 drought in the African interior meant that the Nile scarcely rose and receded quickly, leading to famine in Egypt, the sultan not only reduced or deferred taxes from affected areas (citing ‘poor irrigation and drought’) but also ‘created a rationing system in which vouchers were distributed to peasants allowing them to claim an amount of food for themselves and their families. The vouchers could be bought and sold as currency.’ Conditions worsened in 1695, with both continued drought and plague, leading to the migration of peasants to Cairo, where starving rioters looted ‘the granaries and the wheat and barley storehouses in Rumayla Square at the foot of the citadel’, the headquarters of Ottoman power. The sultan therefore dismissed the provincial governor, and his successor ‘gathered the poor and starving’, divided them into groups and assigned each group to ‘a notable who was to provide the destitute individuals with bread and food’.58
In Europe, only the cities of the south managed to create permanent public granaries – none of them as large as those of the Qing and Ottoman empires. The Madrid granary (the pósito or alhóndiga) normally handled 20,000 tonnes of wheat each year, but during the famine of 1630–1 it distributed over 40,000 tonnes. The grain silos (fosse del grano) of Naples could hold up to 13,000 tonnes, and although a visitor to Naples in 1663 heard that ‘here is always store enough to provide the city seven years’, he suspected ‘there might be enough to supply for two or three years’, but not more. The fosse certainly did not suffice during the revolution of 1647–8, a famine year, when troops loyal to Philip IV cut the city off from its normal sources of supply and forced the authorities to decree that bread would only be issued ‘per cartella’ (that is in exchange for a ration card), and that civilians would only be fed after soldiers.59 The states of northern Europe fell far short of even this standard. Proposals by James I in 1619 to build public granaries in England perished through the greed of grain producers who wanted to obtain the highest price possible for their crops and opposed any measure that might affect their profits. Six years later, similarly selfish motives defeated the efforts of his son Charles I to persuade the Scottish Parliament to
Mak, choise and designe suche placeis as thay sall think most fitte to be publict granaries whairin thair may be storehouses for preserving of all sortis of victuall and suche store of provisioun in the saidis storehouses as may prevent the extremitie of famine when bad yeiris sall happin, of the necessitie whairof we haif latelie had the experience.
In the 1620s the Swedish government also called in vain on each parish to establish a granary, repeating the call more insistently in 1642 (after a run of disastrous harvests), and again in the 1690s (after more famine years); but on each occasion it failed.60 In France, although Nicholas La Reynie, Lieutenant General of Police in Paris, also failed to overcome resistance to creating a municipal granary, he found another way to nourish the inhabitants of the French capital. Every winter he required the Parisian clergy to report the exact number of people in their parish who needed relief, and he then arranged the distribution of a wide variety of items by his troops. According to the meticulous surviving ‘Accounts of expenditure made during the winter from December 1, 1685, to April 30, 1686’:
Bread, soups, firewood, clothes, pants, wooden shoes, and shirts have been distributed to the sick men and women, and remedies and food necessary for women who are sick and pregnant, the recently born receiving packages of swaddling clothes and small linens necessary for them, and milk and flour daily for the older babies who are still nursing; mattresses, sheets, covers and bed-frames for those who are sleeping on the floor, especially the poor weavers, ribbon makers, button-makers, embroiderers and others working inside whose work has ceased during this year.
La Reynie did not intend to see bread riots in the capital on his watch.61
Since up to 90 per cent of all seventeenth-century people lived in villages, maintaining an effective rural safety net during famines was extremely important. In New Spain, the confraternities of many villages created a reserve of maize and beans, and a stock of cattle, in the course of the seventeenth century. Produced by communal labour, in normal years these assets were sold to support local religious rituals, but in times of dearth they formed a vital food reserve.62 In Russia, the tsars ordered all monasteries along the Volga to maintain granaries; while in southern Europe, many villages and small towns created a ‘loan bank’ that kept a reserve of grain (perhaps grown in the town's own fields) which it lent to poor families in hard times – although usually it required both a pledge (usually a piece of clothing or a utensil) and a guarantor (a relative, a neighbour or an employer) and charged a small fee, payable after the next good harvest. Magistrates might also borrow money in times of dearth to purchase grain which they either gave away free or at a subsidized price.63
Governments also intervened to provide other forms of welfare during the unusually harsh conditions of the seventeenth century. In Sweden, in 1633 the government established an orphanage in Stockholm, largely to accommodate the children of soldiers and sailors conscripted to fight in the ‘continental war’, because their mothers could not feed them; and in 1646 it created at Vadstena the earliest known home to care for injured and aged veterans. In Iceland, in 1651 the Danish crown established a hospital in each of the ‘four quarters’ of the island, donated crown land for their construction, and introduced a special tax to support them, to be paid by everyone. The legal obligation was critical because, in the words of an English pamphlet of 1601, ‘In this obdurate age of ours, neither godly perswasions of the pastors, or pitifull exclamations of the poore, can moove any to mercie unless there were a lawe made to compell them: whereby it appeareth, that most give to the poore rather by compulsion then of compassion.’64
The date of the pamphlet's publication is significant, because in that year the English Parliament passed the most comprehensive legislation of the century, following a decade of global cooling. The Poor Law Act of 1601 required each parish in the kingdom to provide ‘entitlements’ (as we would call them today) in certain well-defined times of need – old age, widowhood, illness and disability, unemployment – but only to those normally resident within the parish. Funding for the system came from a tax on income from local property (primarily land and buildings), administered by ‘overseers’ chosen from among local property owners, who had to present their accounts annually for audit by the local magistrates. This devolution of public welfare to parish level proved a stroke of genius for two reasons. First, the involvement of magistrates (backed up, if necessary, by the royal courts) ensured that all the rich contributed. Second, the limitation of benefits to local residents meant that, in a crisis, the poor would stay in their parishes where their ‘entitlements’ were guaranteed, instead of seeking relief in the nearest town and overloading its resources (as happened elsewhere). The system was by no means perfect, and even the great dearths of 1629–31 and 1647–9 failed to persuade magistrates to tax the rich to support the poor; but this changed during the famine of the 1690s, when government pressure ensured that ‘virtually every parish in the country was part of a nationally co-ordinated relief system’ that brought benefits not only to the 10 per cent or so who needed charity to survive at any given time, but also to the much larger group who might require relief in some future crisis. The series of climate-induced crises that afflicted England between the 1590s and the 1690s thus gave rise to the world's first ‘welfare state’, and in doing so provided an essential precondition for the first Industrial Revolution.65
Creative Destruction
The numerous urban fires in the seventeenth century also stimulated some ‘discriminating interventions’. In Germany some medieval guilds existed specifically to share fire risks, yet they could not cope with the proliferation of fires during the Thirty Years War; but in 1664, in Hamburg, regular
guilds began to issue fire-insurance contracts known as ‘Prudence in everything [Alles mit Bedacht]’, which promised each member 1,000 thalers towards rebuilding costs if his house burned down, in return for a 10-thalers premium; and as in other towns, the Hamburg magistrates issued orders to promote fire prevention and punish arson.66 It seems surprising that England did not immediately follow suit – after all, almost one hundred fires caused £1,000 or more of damage in the second half of the seventeenth century, a combined total of almost £1 million. Yet the only remedy for most of those afflicted was to secure a ‘charity brief’ from a sympathetic magistrate, authorizing them to collect money at the door of their local church. Even the Great Fire of London in 1666 failed to effect major changes. Admittedly, the following year, the London Rebuilding Act required the city corporation to straighten and widen some streets and all lanes, with compensation paid from a coal tax, and required future houses to be built of brick and stone; while Sir Christopher Wren oversaw the rebuilding of St Paul's Cathedral, 50 other churches and numerous public buildings in a uniform style. Yet so much more could have been done. The government received several imaginative plans for rebuilding the affected areas west of the Tower to create an imperial capital to rival Rome, but rejected all of them; while only seven provincial towns ravaged by fire in the seventeenth century followed London's example and secured a ‘Rebuilding Act’ that conferred special powers to realign streets and mandate construction in brick and stone.67
The ‘peccatogenic’ outlook of most Britons was partly responsible. Many initially blamed the Great Fire either on foreign residents, especially the French and the Dutch (crowds murdered several of them), or on Catholics. The ‘Monument’ erected after the Great Fire originally bore an inscription commemorating ‘the most dreadful burning of this City; begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction’ (a passage only removed in 1831). Nevertheless, 14 years after the Great Fire, Dr Nicholas Barbon (a physician turned property speculator) set up ‘The Insurance Office for Houses’ with a capital fund of £30,000. In its first three years of operation the office insured 4,000 London houses, receiving £18,000 in premiums (charging twice as much for timber as for brick houses), and paying out some £7,000 in claims. Barbon was aware of the risk – according to his prospectus, ‘the insuring of houses being a new design, it is impossible to make a certain guess’ of future profitability – but he considered it ‘very improbable (unless the whole city be destroyed at once) that any loss at one time should exceed the fund’. His ‘guess’ proved correct, and the profits of Barbon's venture led to the creation of numerous Fire Insurance Societies, with the members of each one affixing a ‘fire-insurance mark’ to their property, so that the company's private fire brigade could find them.68
Some states reacted to the increased frequency of fires in the mid-seventeenth century by creating a permanent public fire brigade. Thus after the Meireki fire in Edo (1657), the shogun created an all-samurai fire service with four brigades at the centre, and special detachments assigned to bridges, granaries and other important structures; while London divided the city into four zones, each with 800 leather buckets, 50 ladders and 24 pickaxes. The basic technique of firefighters in both cities remained demolition, either tearing down or blowing up buildings to create a fire-break; but elsewhere the constant fire hazard prompted more sophisticated measures. Suzhou, the capital of Chinese silk production, created fire engines with forced water pumps mounted on wheeled vehicles, a technique also developed independently in Amsterdam, where the painter and entrepreneur Jan van der Heyden invented a suction-hose pump which he incorporated into fire engines equipped with hoses, each made of flexible leather with brass attachment fittings and 50 feet long (which remains the standard length of fire hoses in Europe). He set up a factory and sold 70 of his engines to the city – one for each of its wards. The benefits were immediate and dramatic: between 1669 and 1673, 11 fires in Amsterdam caused between them more than £100,000 of damage, but between 1682 and 1687 the 40 fires extinguished by the new engines caused, in all, less than £2,000 of damage. Van der Heyden's invention soon spread – to Britain, to Germany and even to Japan (although when it failed to cope with a blaze in Edo in 1658, ‘the fire engine had been thrown into a pond nearby’), and to Russia (after Tsar Peter the Great saw one during his visit to the Dutch Republic in 1698) (Plate 26).69
Other public initiatives began to improve urban life. When James Fraser arrived in London in 1658, he marvelled that he could ‘walke as safe in the darkest night’ as by day, ‘for in the twailight every house hangs out a glasse lanthern and lighted candle over the door, so that the streets ar as a lamp of light’. He noted that ‘it was to prevent picking of pockets in the dark that those lights were appointed’, and now ‘if any offer to wrong yow’, he ‘could not escap, not through the narrowest lane or alley, unseen’.70 A decade later, the Amsterdam town council went one better. Jan van der Heyden had invented a lamp capable of burning the whole night (thanks to wicks of Cyprus cotton made in his lamp factory), and in 1669 the city accepted van der Heyden's bid to erect 1,800 lamps placed between 125 and 150 feet apart (which, the inventor calculated, combined maximum lighting efficiency with minimum cost). Within six months the system was in operation, serviced by 100 municipal lamp-lighters. Visitors immediately noted how disorder and crime fell, thanks to both the lamps and a new ‘neighbourhood watch’ system maintained by most Dutch cities. By the 1660s Amsterdam paid 150 lightly armed citizens to patrol the streets each night, with as many again in reserve, and they summarily arrested anyone observed committing anti-social behaviour: beating their wives or servants; engaged in rape, theft or blatant street prostitution; acting in a drunk or disorderly manner.71 Many cities in Germany and elsewhere in the Dutch Republic emulated the Amsterdam system and, by the end of the seventeenth century, humans had for the first time in world history tamed the night.
Non-Creative Destruction
In his influential analysis of ‘Creative Destruction’, Joseph Schumpeter recognized that, in certain circumstances, exceptions existed to the process of ‘incessantly destroying’ old economic structures and then ‘incessantly creating a new one’, which he saw as central to economic growth. He wrote:
Let us assume that there is a certain number of retailers in a neighborhood who try to improve their relative position by service and ‘atmosphere’ but avoid price competition and stick as to methods to the local tradition – a picture of stagnating routine. As others drift into the trade that quasi-equilibrium is indeed upset, but in a manner that does not benefit their customers. The economic space around each of the shops having been narrowed, their owners will no longer be able to make a living and they will try to mend the case by raising prices in tacit agreement. This will further reduce their sales and so, by successive pyramiding, a situation will evolve in which increasing potential supply will be attended by increasing instead of decreasing prices and by decreasing instead of increasing sales.
‘Such cases do occur,’ Schumpeter noted, ‘and it is right and proper to work them out. But as the practical instances usually given show, they are fringe-end cases to be found mainly in the sectors furthest removed from all that is most characteristic of capitalist activity. Moreover, they are transient by nature.’72
Schumpeter's assertion might have been true during the first half of the twentieth century – the period of which he had direct knowledge and about which he wrote – but it was entirely incorrect for the second half of the seventeenth century, when the ‘stagnating routine’ he described characterized almost every economic sector (not just ‘fringe-end’ cases). Moreover, instead of being ‘transient’, these exceptions persisted: in most parts of the world, survivors of the crisis reacted by trying to ‘narrow the economic space’ expressly to preserve the existing equilibrium and to prevent anything likely to upset their ‘stagnating routine’. Indeed, the decision of most communities to enforce a ‘low-pressure’ economic regime, as opposed to th
e ‘high-pressure’ regime favoured in England and its neighbours, contributed to the ‘Great Divergence’ discerned by many historians between western Europe and the rest of the world.
The attitude of some European farmers towards ‘alternative crops’ is instructive here. Thus although maize usually survives adverse weather that will ruin cereals, and although it produces far better yields per acre, many farmers refused to cultivate it until virtually forced to do so by a crisis. In Spain, only after the famine of 1630–1 did maize cultivation spread – and, even then only in some of the worst-affected areas. A comparison of demographic and crop records for Galicia reveals that those communities that grew maize increased far more, and far more rapidly, than those that remained dependent on cereals alone. This partial embrace of maize enabled Galicia to experience sustained demographic growth during the seventeenth century – yet elsewhere in Spain, tradition trumped expediency: farmers used maize (if they used it at all) mainly for fodder. Attitudes towards rice were much the same. Although the farmers in the Tuscan village of Altopascio suffered from extreme climatic events in the mid-seventeenth century (unprecedented floods in 1654–6; drought in 1659), and saw deaths outnumber births one year in three, they still refused to diversify. Although they experimented with rice after one famine, they reverted to cereal cultivation as soon as possible because potential profits were higher, and they introduced maize only after the catastrophic harvest of 1710.73
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