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.20 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.21 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
THE 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 comm
unity 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.
Slowly receding was the world of scarcity, where the country’s labor and resources were committed to replacing one year’s consumption with another year’s production. There was still widespread suffering from wants of many kinds. One respected expert, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, conjectured that half the English population required assistance to get through each year, having to rely on the countrywide tax-supported system of relief.1 In no way generous, outdoor relief did make it easier for innovating employers to fire or displace workers since local governments had in place ways to provide for those in want.
Soon those watching the novel phenomenon of economic development put into circulation descriptions of how people behaved in their market transactions. They started to depict men and women as having an inherent disposition toward the producing, selling, and buying that drove the market’s expansion. These observations, scattered in pamphlets, how-to books, broadsides, and learned tomes, many of them written by such luminaries as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Daniel Defoe, converged on the universal appeal of making money. The initiatives of ordinary people, such as floating a meadow to gain a head start on spring planting or carrying locally made cheese to a distant market, mattered most. This no longer appeared as peculiar conduct; being responsive in their commercial dealings was treated as a newly discovered human capacity. Even as sober a witness of the human scene as Locke indulged in a futuristic fantasy when he wrote that if everyone worked, the world’s work could be done routinely in half a day.2
Every piece of advice about exchange rates, wages, rents, and account balances called on new notions about how men and women reacted to choice. Instead of human impulsiveness, these observers of England’s pulsating economic rhythms began to describe participants as calculating costs and weighing benefits. After several decades of such observations, a preponderance of commentators came to believe that there was a uniform response from market bargainers. People could be counted on because they counted their interests. By the mid-eighteenth century Samuel Johnson could casually comment that “there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”3 A decisive cultural shift had clicked into place.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the intellectual effort to understand the phenomenon of capitalism found its Aristotle in Adam Smith, whose An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776. Smith presented a brilliantly detailed explanation of the causes of the unparalleled wealth in Great Britain. (After the Scottish and English crowns were joined in 1706, England was called Great Britain or the United Kingdom.) Building on the new conception of human beings as responsibly pursuing their own interest, he advocated a system of “natural liberty” because he thought that the “invisible hand” of the market would function better if left free of most regulation.
With few opportunities to choose among options, men and women had appeared as fickle, impulsive, and given over to their passions. From the Christian point of view, they were also bathed in sin. With such a picture of human nature, it would have been a form of madness to leave them free to do as they wished with their resources. The new truths about how people behaved in their market transactions underpinned Smith’s recommendations. Smith himself seemed unaware that his immediate predecessors had dramatically upgraded human nature while observing the new market economy. The ideas had been around long enough for him to take them for granted. More significantly, these new assertions had acquired the status of universal truths, something Edmund Burke affirmed when he wrote Smith that “a theory like yours founded on the nature of man, which is always the same will last, when those that are founded on his opinions, which are always changing, will and must be forgotten.”4 What a seductive idea: an invariant human nature.
In England all this was played out in the public arena, where pamphlets were written, speeches reported, and disputes advertised with a significant proportion of the population attentive. The country had become highly homogenous during the course of the seventeenth century. It had one monarch, one language, one established church, a single legal system, and a vigorous press. As local farmers and artisans had moved in ever-wider circles, a national market emerged. London itself best expressed England’s unity. With more than half a million inhabitants in 1690, it was Europe’s largest city and still growing rapidly. Some 10 percent of the five million English people lived in London.
The pattern of London’s growth contains some fascinating features. With a high mortality rate, it required at least eight thousand outsiders moving in annually to sustain its growth. Since mobility was highest among the unmarried, we can presume that most of the men and women who came from other towns, villages, and hamlets were young. This churning through England’s metropolitan center had a countrywide effect. One scholar has calculated that more than one-sixth of the English had lived in London sometime in their lives. Coming into contact with London—the seat of government, matrix of enterprise, and center of public sociability—spread ideas, cultivated tastes, and stimulated wants.5
The debate over economic change might have remained an elite affair had not the Civil War with its ferocious battles over religion widened the catch basin of readers and discussants. The religious dissensions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had spawned a large and diverse group of writers. The English were getting used to public discord. Like other European societies, a censorship system was in place, but unlike them, it was rarely enforced. Economic tra
cts were not particularly censorable anyway. What was important was the existence of many writers and even more readers accustomed to getting involved in public discussions. The settlement of the seventeenth-century political discord gave England a constitutional monarchy. All English persons received important guarantees for their person and property in the pathbreaking Bill of Rights of 1689. The licensing law through which publications could be censored was allowed to lapse, and the Bank of England was founded. The first promoted the circulation of ideas, and the second the circulation of money, both lubricants of innovation. Equally important, a new upper class with a mainly progressive attitude toward economic development solidified its power.
England came out of its “century of revolution” with significant economic and political gains. The century began with a king who believed he had a “divine right” to rule and ended with a constitutional arrangement that placed sovereignty in the balanced power of king and Parliament. Although the upper class longed for stability, it could not suppress the strong antiauthoritarian strand that now entered popular culture. Awe of authority had greatly diminished during the past three generations. Just think of this remarkable set of novelties: a king who got his crown only by giving his subjects a bill of rights, an aristocracy whose members showed a decided interest in commerce, entrepreneurs who expanded the realm of enterprise, young people who moved about the country with ease, and a capital that vibrated with contentious conviviality. Reviewing this is not to praise the English, but to point out the social environment necessary to enable capitalists to push aside a venerable social order.
The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism Page 11