The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism (12 page)

Food costs strictly limited the funds available to buy such luxuries as leather goods, decorative objects, spices, cutlery, carriages, furniture, fabrics, and books. Bad harvests pushed up the price of grains, curtailing purchases further. Meat, for instance, left the table of the poor for years on end in times of dearth. People would postpone new purchases until better times returned, adding an uncertainty to the prospects of those who made those postponed purchases. Even if money had become more abundant, growth in commerce or manufacturing had another obstacle, a lack of people to work outside the farm. Expanded production depended upon having men and women available to work in these enterprises, but the demand for laborers in farming came first.

This state of affairs had several consequences. It encouraged people to save money for the proverbial rainy day. It also meant that luxury consumption was confined to the very small percentage of the society with disposable income—no more than 15 percent. To get out of this box, farmers had to learn how to produce more food with fewer hands. New methods of farming would have to sustain larger and larger harvests to remove the fear of famine that inhibited investments in other enterprises. The price of food would also have to continue to drop to enable people outside the gentry and the urban rich to buy manufactured and imported goods. To further complicate the picture, these requisite changes for a permanent escape from scarcity had to start in rural communities known for their fidelity to custom.

The incentive for change must have come when food prices began to rise in the early sixteenth century. With more mouths to feed pushing up the price of grains, the improvements that the Dutch pioneered became attractive despite the risk of doing something differently. The influx of New World gold and silver caused a century of inflation period, but cereal prices rose even faster. In England a number of propitious factors converged to promote reform of the old agrarian order. The relationship between landlords and their tenants was flexible enough to permit the adoption of new practices. Landlords, their tenants, and freeholders began imitating the techniques that farmers in the Netherlands had shown to be successful.

The catastrophe of the Black Death had an impact on the structure of landholding throughout Europe. In Eastern countries, landlords turned their tenants into serfs, while in Western Europe many families escaped tenancy altogether and acquired land of their own. In England there were many independent farmers—yeomen or freeholders—along with tenants farming large tracts of land. English landlords succeeded in breaking their customary low-rent leases that lasted the lifetime of the tenant. They acquired the power to adjust rents to the price levels of the grain and livestock their tenants produced. With fixed obligations, the tenants too could plan better. Many entered into arrangements in which, for instance, they specified improvements in cropping in return for long leases that would enable them to share with their landlords in the benefits from their expenditures of time and money. In France, landlords used different tactics to increase their incomes; they squeezed their tenants with fines, feudal dues, and labor services.

Higher prices from a rising population during the sixteenth century encouraged landlords in Europe’s Baltic bread basket to move onto neglected land and bring in larger crops to export. Again, growth brought the old scissors movement of more workers lowering the price of wages and the same population growth raising demand for food along with the price of it. The wealthy flourished for a time. In the long run, food production could not keep up with the insistent demand from new mouths to feed. In the short run of fifty years, rising grain prices created a powerful incentive to find ways to get bigger yields. Most landlords in most places preferred to stick to their ingrained ways, but enough opted to try new ways to increase harvests to set Europe on the course of transforming its agricultural system.

All Europe gained from the intensification of trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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More ships and carts were carrying more goods between countries, meaning that if harvests failed in one region, imports from other parts of the Continent could sometimes make up the loss. Urban population grew faster than rural areas, so city fathers began to store grain against future crop failures, particularly in the Netherlands, which always fell short of feeding its people. Spain depended upon northern European countries for wheat, copper, tin, wood, hemp, linen, and high-quality textiles, and for a while many Spaniards had the money to buy them. Naturally this increase of money chasing goods led to inflation. But interestingly, the cost of food went up faster than that of other commodities. Inflation came from an excess of people as well as of silver.

Having a natural source of water, European farmers did not have to depend on irrigation, as did those in China and the Middle East. Setting up the canals, sluices, and waterwheels for irrigation was a costly business that only the government or the well off could afford. This fact probably limited the number of possible innovators there to officials or the rich, often the most conservative members of society because they have the greatest investment in the status quo. Still, parts of China enjoyed both growth and greater wealth for a long period until population growth overwhelmed its capacity to respond in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Dutch Farming Improvements

On land wrested from the tidal incursions of the North Sea, the United Provinces were the wonder of Europe, especially after they secured their independence from the Spanish at the end of the sixteenth century. They extracted tons of herring from the seas that lapped at their shores and then created the world’s largest merchant fleet to ship this wonderful source of precious protein to their European neighbors. In Flanders, farmers reclaimed wasteland that was usually too sandy to nourish grains by planting flax and hemp, the crops that produce linen and rope (not to mention marijuana). These plants had the advantage of leaving behind fibrous stalks that could be plowed under to bulk up the sandy soil. Elsewhere the Dutch drained marshland to create more acres for tillage. They also experimented with clover, a weed that had been around forever. Evidently someone’s close observation showed that clover, like many legumes, actually left nitrogen in the soil. Turnips too became a new crop, one that could be grown in the summer and stored for winter feed for animals. This innovation led to bigger animals and more manure for the hungry soil.

Agriculture throughout the world was woefully unproductive because cropping drained the land of its fertility. The traditional remedy for soil exhaustion was allowing land to become fallow to recapture its fertility, but this took a third or a quarter of acres under tillage out of production. Farmers could also restore fertility by adding nitrogen to the soil. Their principal source of this came from animals that unfortunately had to be fed to stay alive and defecate, taking even more land away from producing food for the people. Breaking through this bind of declining soil fertility took a bundle of mutually enhancing practices. Fortunately Dutch farmers had been experimenting with possible improvements for many decades.

Some farmers in the Netherlands realized that they could abandon the old medieval practice of leaving a third of the land to lie fallow each year. This move increased the number of tilled acres by a third. Instead of the fallow rotation, they divided land into four parts, rotating fields of grain, turnips, hay, and clover each season. Not only did this increase the number of tilled acres by a third, but the clover fed livestock after it had enriched the soil with its nitrogen deposits. The virtuous circle of growth replaced the vicious circle of decline. When some landlords and farmers responded to the possibility of becoming more productive, they were taking the first permanent steps away from the age-old economy of scarcity.

English farmers copied the Dutch and succeeded in making their agricultural base feed more and more people with fewer laborers and less investment. Unlike the Dutch, the English had enough arable land to grow the grains that fed the people as well as their livestock. The Dutch could not produce what was needed to get their people through a year. With their profits from trade, they could store grain, but this lifesaving program got more and more expensive.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century England contained almost six million people and more than one million horses. The horses could deliver the power of eight to ten men, adding to the wind, water, and coal that English industry could call upon for energy.
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With many different types of soil, the possibilities of improving fertility varied. Rich but heavy clay soil could be lightened with sea sand and ground seashells if farmers lived near enough to the sea to cart them home. Farmers could dig in marl and limestone. Sandy soils were enriched through planting legumes and clover, which left behind nitrogen, the vital enhancer of all soils. Farmers also began to tether animals in fields for nature’s most efficient delivery of manure.

While some English farmers copied the Dutch four-field rotation, others adopted up-and-down husbandry. In this routine, a farmer would crop his best land for three or four years and then put it in pasture for another five, during which time the animal manure and nitrogen-fixing crops would rebuild the fertility necessary for growing grains again. As in the Dutch system, land was no longer left fallow but always growing some crop, whether for animals or humans. Every element on the farm was put to some use; every hand, given new tasks. These innovations made urgent a farmer’s attentiveness because of their interlocking qualities. Both the Dutch and English began to flood meadows to warm the soil in winter and extend the growing season. Over the course of the century all these improvements raised the seed to yield ratio, the labor to yield ratio, and the land to yield ratio. Or more simply, they led to bigger harvests from fewer acres, less labor, and fewer seeds.

Doing things differently when the subject is the staff of life took courage, imagination, and careful attention to detail. In the familiar and rather mindless narrative of progress, the assumption is made that all that was required for change was to mix opportunity with the natural human drive for self-improvement. Then people, the account goes, would seize these ingenious ways to bring prosperity to the countryside. This would be true only if traditional farm families and landlords thought like venture capitalists today. They didn’t, and many factors kept them from doing so. Novelty frightens those used to following custom. Taking risks could make the difference between having enough to eat or not having enough.

One more factor worked against the adoption of these new techniques: The biorhythms of premodern men and women were not attuned to sustained labor. People were used to suffering from want and many other discomforts but not to exerting themselves for long stretches of time day after day. Human beings do not naturally labor long hours. Raising grain crops the old way required intensive work at planting and harvesting time. In between these seasons there was lots of leisure time. The Christian calendar even encouraged work-free days with dozens and dozens of feast days, almost a hundred a year if Sundays are included. Working hard is a capacity that has to be developed, usually through rigorous, early childhood training. Fear of punishment and tenacious oversight can change habits, but only slowly. It is also clear that some people are more attuned to laboring strenuously for a perceived purpose than others. What became critically important to breaking out of the old agrarian order was making it easier for those who were receptive to exerting themselves in new ways to do so. Being what economists call a rational economic actor didn’t make a lot of sense for landlords or tenants when there were so many more customary ways to spend money and risks outpaced rewards.

English Agricultural Improvers

The new wave of improvements moved England beyond the seven-fat-year, seven-lean-year phenomenon. This time, rather than collide with the familiar blocks to permanent change, gains were made secure. Over the next three and a half centuries, the percentage of farmers in northwestern Europe passed from around 80 percent to some 3 percent of the population. Two groups in England had largely freed themselves from institutional constraints on change. They were freehold farmers and landlords who had succeeded in replacing low fixed rents with leases reflecting market prices. These were the probable innovators. The landlords would have to succeed in finding cooperative tenants since few of them farmed their own acreage. The amount of land in the hands of the nobility and gentry varied greatly throughout England, as did the ability of landlords to coerce their tenants into adopting agricultural reforms. A few nobles so hated badgering their tenants that they turned to other economic areas like mining. Together the improving landlords and freeholders probably came to control about 60 percent of the arable land in England. The king, landowners whose customary tenants enjoyed fixed rents, landlords who had no taste for managing their estates, and poor cottagers held the rest of the arable acreage in the country.

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.