Document 6521802

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Document 6521802

Economic History Review, XLIX, 2(1996), pp. 213-249
Path dependency y or why Britain
hecame an industrialized and
urbanized economy long hefore
France^
By PATRICK KARL O'BRIEN
hatever historians now argue about the relative merits in welfare or
ecological terms of the very 'different paths to the twentieth century'
W
taken by Britain and France, there is no avoiding statistical contrasts related
to their long-run patterns of structural change.^ For example, on the eve
of the Great War, agriculture, according to official censuses of population,
continued to provide employment for up to 41 per cent of the workforce
in France and generated around 35 per cent of the country's national
income.^ In Britain only 8 per cent of the workforce could be officially
classified as employed on the land, and agriculture accounted for a mere
5 per cent of gross domestic product/ Around 1911, 35 per cent of the
population of France resided in towns containing populations of 3,000 and
above, while the comparable proportion for Britain was 78 per cent.^
Older commentaries on the 'retardation of France' suggested that an
earlier commitment to industrialization and urbanization along British lines
would have led to significantly higher standards of living for the majority
of families who lived and worked in France for some two centuries before
1914.* But differentials in incomes per caput before the Great War now
appear too narrow to undermine other 'representations' derived from 'social'
statistics (including health indicators, conditions of employment, working
hours, literacy, and education etc.) which indicate that average standards
of living were probably not that far apart.^ Furthermore, many French
> Written to honour François Crouzet and to thank R. AUen, F. Capie, G. Grantham, C. Heywood,
P. Hunt, D. Keene, M. Overton, L. Prados de la Escosura, J. Simpson, M. Turner, and E. A. Wrigley
for the advice and education they generously offered.
^ Aldrich, 'Latecomer or early starter'; Cameron and Freedman, 'French economic growth'; and
Heywood, French economy, provide recent syntheses.
' Prolonged discussion among French historians on the size of the workforce and the numbers
employed in agriculture has now led to inconclusive and confusing results (see below, n. 53 and notes
to ñgs. 1,3). For recent estimates, see Marchand and Thelot, Deux siècles de travail. My calculations
use Toutain, Le produit de l'agriculture, pp. 2cx)-i, for the agricultural workforce, and Lévy-Leboyer
and Bourguignon, French economy, p. 294 for the active population, and tab. i for the share of
agricultural income to net national product.
•* Floud, 'Britain, 1860-1914', pp. 18, 93; Deane and Cole, British economic growth, pp. 166, 175.
' The urbanization ratio from France is from Dupcux, Atlas historique, tabs. Il-b, V-a. The English
ratio is from Thompson, 'Town and city', p. 8.
« Kemp, Economic forces in French history; Kindleberger, Economic growth in France and Britain.
'' In weUare terms the differential in real per caput incomes depends upon the purchasing power
parity rates of exchange used to convert net national products measured in current prices from francs
to sterling and vice versa. The data and relevant rates of exchange are tmder constant n ' '
uc Hùmy
Society 1996. Published by BlackaxU PubUsken, 108 CowUy Road, Oxford OX4 iJF,
UK and 238 Main Street,
214
PATRICK KARL O ' B R I E N
visitors to Victorian and Edwardian Britain, even Anglophiles, evinced few
doubts that family life and the distribution of wealth, income, and status
seemed better arranged in their own society.^
For the now venerable retardation debate two major problems seem
unresolved: first, whether the slower pace of structural transformation
seriously depressed average incomes in France; and secondly, whether the
timing and pace of French industrialization could ever have proceeded along
English lines?' If the answer to the second question is probably not, the
first question becomes more or less redundant. That is why this article
bypasses the national accounts framework as an approach to understanding
economic development in the two countries and concentrates upon agricultural
preconditions. It will make the case that structural change in France
was in large measure 'predetermined' by a combination of geographical
endowments and a system of property rights inherited from its feudal past.
Both constraints, operating within the context of pre-chemical and premechardcal agricultural systems, so limited the scale and scope of French
endeavours to follow the path taken by Britain between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries, that 'the British way', as Count Mirabeau told Arthur
Young, became almost irrelevant to conditions in France.'"
Bilateral comparisons at countrywide levels of aggregation remain interesting to pursue because the exercise will also help to place the accumulation
of regional and local agrarian history, that characterizes the bulk of historical
research on French and English fanning, into a context where the evidence
can be marshalled to reveal the major forces behind the growth of agriculture
and its connections with industrialization over the long run.'^ But in order
to escape from the confines of writing purely English or French history, as
well as the oppressive weight of local facts and arbitrarily demarcated periods
of time, the prior acceptance of two conditions is necessary: first, a national
rather than a regional focus for analysis; and secondly, some suspension of
disbelief in the countrywide averages that the article presents in order to
measure contrasts and changes in the capacities in two national agricultural
sectors to support industrialization over no less than four centuries of history
(see figures 1-3, below).'^ Many of the questions raised within a bilateral
present the differential faUs in favour of the UK in the 15% to 25% range. For recent data, see Mitchell,
International historical statistics, pp. 893, 897. A research programme to measure real standards of living
and the quality of life across European societies for the period before and after 1914 is now under way.
See Schohers, ed., Realwages; Burger, A. and Vermaas, A., 'An international comparison of productivity
and the standard of living of industrial workers, 1850-1913' (unpub. paper, Institut voor Geschiedenis,
Univ. of Utrecht, 1993).
* Travel literature is an under-used source for comparisons of cultures and the quality of life. For
French perceptions of Britain, see Faucher, Études sur l'Angleterre; Ledru-RoUin, De la décadence de
l'Angleterre; Taine, Notes sur rAngUterre; Boutmy, English people.
' Crouzet, Britain ascendant, pp. 1-126.
"> Kaplow, ed., France on the eve of the Revolution, pp. 126-9.
" Truly massive syntheses of research in agrarian history have been edited by Thirsk et al.. Agrarian
history; by Duby and Wallon, Histoire de ¡a France rurale; by Braudel and Labrousse, Histoire économique.
" The alternative is further proliferation of local histories which deliberately eschew wider perspectives
concerned with the 'Competitive power of nations' and 'European miracles'. For France, Cleary offers
a recent and select bibliographical essay of 166 books and artides: Cleary, 'French agrarian ¿story';
and the published volumes of the Agrarian history of Erstand and Wales contain 110 pages of bibliography
and nearly 7,000 pages of text.
PATH DEPENDENCY IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE
215
comparison might, moreover, draw other European agricultures (with natural
endowments, institutions, and market structures comparable to Britain or
similar to France) into a framework of enquiry which could extend
the explanatory power of the suggestions offered below.'^ Finally, at a
methodological level, the insistence upon comparing national agricultural
sectors which simply include and average out more local and traditional
forms of agrarian history, addresses the ongoing debate among economic
historians about the compatibility between exercises designed to offer macro
and long-run perspectives on the one hand, with those more deeply
researched narrative styles of regional and short-run history on the other. ^'*
I
Until capital formation in both agricultures can be measured it will probably
remain impossible to compare movements in total factor productivities before
the second half of the twentieth century.'' Significant differences can still,
however, be 'represented' by using indices of partial productivities for
labour interpolated across bench mark years from 1520 to 1910, and for
land for the two centuries after I'joo (see figure i).
Although the data imderlying the construction of index numbers designed
to measure rates of change for total agricultural outputs, land, and labour
do not constitute hard evidence, these indices are currently used by economic
historians to offer conjectures about the course of productivity change over
three periods: 1520 to 1700, 1700 to 1800, and 1800 to 1910. I have chained
these indices to produce graphs of developments in British and French
agriculture over la longue durée (see figures 1-3).
Prior to the era of large-scale foreign trade in primary produce, national
agricultures supported the growth of industrial, urban, and rural populations
detached from the land: by supplying them with food and organic raw
materials; by releasing labour and capital to the industrial and service sectors
of domestic economies; and by acting as a home market for a nation's
specialized producers of manufactured goods and urban services. To borrow
a metaphor from psychology, agricultures operated for several centuries of
economic development as parents who could nurture or stultify the
development of younger industrial sectors. With its functions specified and
some sort of statistical basis for 'anchored' comparisons of changes through
time in place, an attempt can now be made to offer a general explanation
for the persistent and impressive support lent by British agriculture to the
earher and more extensive industrialization of the nation's workforce.
Attention will be concentrated upon connections between outputs per
hectare and per worker employed in agriculture. Taxonomically, the
'^ Simpson, Spanish agriculture; Abramovitz, 'Catching up'; Baiunol, 'Productivity growth'.
14 Vide current debates between Crafts and his critics reviewed by O'Brien, 'Modem conceptions of
the industrial revolution'.
" Grantham has offered preliminary estimates for capital formation and total factor productivity
change in French agriculture from 1789 to 1914: Grantham, G., 'Capital and agricultural productivity
in France' (unpub. paper. Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Paris, June 1992). For a
sophisticated attempt to use price data to measure total factor productivity for agriculture in the Paris
Basin, 1450-1789, see Hoffinan, 'Land rents'.
© Economie History Sodan 1996
2l6
explanation for Britain's superior record of labour productivity growth
(figure i) can be structured into a set of proximate determinants where:
output per worker employed in agriculture is related to H/L (hectares of
land cultivated and sown, per worker); and to 0/H (returns, including the
composition and prices of output as well as physical yields, per hectare).
The latter depends in turn upon techniques of production used, K/H (capital
per hectare) and K/L (capital per worker employed) as well as the
organizational efficiency of agriculture.'*
Great Britain
France
Figure I . Conjectural growth rates of labour productivity in British and French
agriculture, IS20-1910
Note: The vertical scale is logarithmic.
Sources and methods: The source used and methods emulated to construct the output index for Britam, 1520-1700, arc
contained in Wrigley, 'Urban growth', pp. 700-1, 720-1. The index for 1700-1850 is from a forthcoming book by
Mark Overton. Ovenon's output estimates are based on Chartres, 'Marketing of agricultural produce', and Holderness,
'Prices, productivity and output'. His input data are derived from Wrigley, 'Urban growth'. The index for 1860-1910
is from Ó Grada, 'British agriculture, 1860-1914'. (Ó Gráda's index has been linked to Overton's on the assumption
that productivity growth 1850-60 was equivalent to the annual average rate for 1860-90). For France, 1520-1700, the
source and methods are from Wrigley, 'Urban growth'; for 1700-1807,1 used Le Roy Ladurie's growth rate for output
because French historians have rejected Toutain's estimates for the eighteenth century; see Le Roy Ladurie, 'De la
crise ultime', p. 395. The whole vexed issue of agricultural growth in France is surveyed in Crouzet, Bntam ascendanu
pp. 47-54. For 1807-1910, the growth rate is calculated from data in Toutain, Le produit de l'agriculture, pp. 128-9,
200-1. (See also idem. La production agricole). Inputs of cultivated land for Britain, I7oo-t85o, are from Allen,
'Agriculture during the industrial revolution'; for i85O-t9OO, from O'Brien and Keyder, Economic growth, p . 105. The
cultivated area for France is from Toutain, Le produit de l'agriculture, and O'Brien and Keyder, Economu: growth.
Connections between output per worker and returns per hectare can be
illustrated with reference to estimates available for 1910, when the area of
'unstandardized' hectares of cultivable land per worker employed in primary
production in Britain was nearly double that in French agriculture; and
when returns per hectare cultivated in France were well above British levels.
With more human energy at their disposal French farmers obtained higher
gross and net monetary returns per hectare cultivated.'^ Since the middle
"' Overton and Campbell, 'Productivity change', provides the best survey of this topic.
" O'Brien and Prados de la Escosura, 'Agricultural productivity'. Preliminary estimates suggest that
c. 1910 gross returns per hectare cultivated in France may have been 34% above British levels, and net
value added valued in sterling 82% higher. For the methods involved in these calculations, see O'Brien
217
ages grain yields per sown hectare had responded positively in many regions
of Europe to population growth, and the intensification of labour inputs per
unit of land cultivated. ^^ The diffusion of improved agricultural techniques
and increases in capital to land ratios could also raise crop yields.^'
Nevertheless, Europe's agrarian historians suggest that higher yields from
arable land depended basically, and for long runs of history, upon
intensification of labour inputs. These often flowed from the establishment
of networks of transport and distribution in regions where farmers enjoyed
efficient connections to expanding urban markets.^" For such favoured
locations the reallocation of land to high value cash crops, including vines,
olives, fruit, industrialfibres,horticulture, and dairy produce, also augmented
gross returns per hectare cultivated.^*
—^ Great Brii
Figure 2. Conjectural rates of change in total output per hectare cultivated in
Great Britain and France, 1700-1910
Sources and methods: seefig.i
In the long stream of agrarian history there is nothing surprising in
estimates for 1910 that show French agriculture (with ratios of labour to
land about double the British ratios) achieving far higher returns per hectare
cultivated (see figure 2). What seems remarkable is that for some four
centuries from 1500 the productivity of labour employed by British agriculture
grew consistently at a higher rate than it did in France. Differences are
already visible in the sixteenth century, discernible between 1600 and 1700
but pronounced thereafter. Between 1520 and 1910 labour productivity
and Toniolo, 'Poverty of Italy'. I wish to acknowledge the research of Stefan Houpt and Leandro
Prados de la Escosura of Carlos m University, Madrid, and their permission to cite these estimates.
•» Van der Wee and Van Cauwenberghe, eds.. Productivity.
" Campbell and Overton, 'A new perspective'.
2" Campbell and Overton, 'Norfolk livestock farming'.
" Grantham, 'Divisions of labour'.
© Economic Hismy Sodet)/ J996
Figure 3. Populations/workforces 'attached' to agriculture, iôo-igw
Sources and methods: British data rely on population censuses and Wrigley's estimates in 'Urban growth'. For 1S50
1910, see Deane and Cole, Bntish economic growth. For France the figures depend upon Toutain, Le prodmi de
l'agriculture. As the discussion in the text and the extensive debate cited below, n. 53, suggest, the figures are contested.
They do not represent labour employed in agriculture or inputs of labour time utilized to produce food and raw
materials. They serve here simply as proxies which indicate how employment and labour inputs into agriculture may
have moved through time in both economies. For present purposes the 'non-agricultural population or workforce' is
defined as that part of the workforce not designated by the population censuses as employed in agriculture. For the
period c. 1500-1:. 1800 the source used was Wrigley, 'Urban growth'. For the British observations for 1801-1911 see
Deane and Cole, Bntish economic growth; O'Brien and Keyder, Economic growth. For French observations, 1803-12,
1845-54, 1895-1904, and 1905-13, I subtracted the agricultural workforce as broadly defined by O'Brien and Keyder,
Economic growth, p . 94, from the active population or workforce. Following Lévy-Leboyer and Bourguignon, French
economy, p . 294, I assumed the share of the French poptilation actively employed to be rising through time from 40%
to 53% in the early twentieth century. These calculations undoubtedly overstate the size of the agricultural and
understate the size of the non-agricultural workforce in France compared with Britain, But the magnitude of the gap
in the multipliers is so big that it makes little difference to trends as ploned on the graphs,
probably multiplied 4.7 times in Britain conipared to 2.4 in France (figure
i). Down to 1850 the superior record of British agriculture on this single
but important indicator seems, moreover, to be relatively independent of
the growth of the workforce engaged in the production of farm output. For
example, while the agricultiu-al population grew rapidly between 1500 and
1600, labour productivity increased slowly; stable or falling growth in the
agrarian workforce from 1600 to 1750 accompanied far higher rates of
increase in labour productivity; while the rapid growth in the workforce
over the following century occurred along with even faster growth in output
per worker employed in agriculture; and productivity continued to rise
when the workforce declined between 1850 and 1900. In France the two
curves are more closely aligned. The steadily increasing numbers employed
tended to be accompanied by comparable and slower rates of increase in
labour productivity. Historically, France seems to have been far more
dependent than Britain upon an intensification of labour inputs in order to
raise and maintain the growth of agricultural output above the rate of
population growth (compare figures i and 3).
219
This significant contrast emerges again from the data for output per
hectare. For example, the figures indicate that between 17CX) and 1850
outputs per hectare cultivated increased by comparable percentages in both
countries but the British workforce grew at a slower rate than the workforce
in France. After 1850 returns per hectare stabilized when the British
workforce declined in absolute terms. Until 1910 both returns per hectare
and the workforce continued to go up in France (figure 2).^^
II
In pursuing this Boserupian arithmetic in comparative terms over the
very long run, what emerges is a clear contrast in the capacities of the
agricultures of Britain and France to support increases in output per hectare
cultivated at a faster rate than they absorbed labour inputs. Over time
improvements in that capacity could be augmented by the incorporation
into the techniques of cultivation used by farmers of an entirely limited
range of knowledge, available since the twelfth century, for raising levels
of output per cultivated hectare.^' In essence that knowledge consisted of
a slowly changing, largely unwritten corpus of 'know-how' for raising the
capacity of farmland to carry crops and animals in a mutually reinforcing
symbiosis.^'*
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries British and French farmers
appreciated the constricted options available to maintain and to improve
crop yields from arable land imder their management.^^ Their tacit knowledge
about fecundity (passed arovmd the. countryside) consisted essentially of
rudimentary practices to store and accimiiilate nitrogen in the soil. As
modem agronomic science now recognizes, this formed the rationale behind
such techniques as crop rotations, the fallowing of land, converting pasture
to arable and back again, and incorporating htunan and animal manures as
well as bones, rags, seaweed, compost, and a long list of waste products,
into the soil.^* Medieval farmers also understood that deeply ploughed,
well-tilled beds of soil from which perennial weeds and siuplus water had
been removed could generate higher crop yields. Unfortunately, techniques
for field drainage (and irrigation) remained rather traditional until the midnineteenth centiuy. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of soil preparation continued
to be constrained by the amoimts of energy (human labour and animal
power) and by the quantity and quality of the implements that fanners
commanded for tillage—a process which embodied a set of seasonal tasks
^^ Alas, rates of growth returns per hectare cultivated can be calculated only for the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Historians who evince scepticism towards the indicators of long-run trends in the
productivities of land and labour, may be reassured to learn that they are congruent with preliminary
but direct estimates of returns per hectare made for 1910; see n. 17. For estimates of English yields
per acre before 17CX), see Clark, 'Yields per acre'. Gross output per worker in the early sixteenth century
may have been about 20% higher in France than in England—a differential which is in line with relative
levels of urbanization in the two countries—see n. 17 and Wrigley, 'Urban growth'.
" Postan, ed., 'Agrarian life'; Grigg, Dynamics; Abel, Agricultural fluctuations.
^ Bolton, Medieval English economy; Bridbury, English economy, pp. 1-43.
" Chorley, 'Agricultural revolution'.
^Fm^û,
Crop nutrition.
© Economic Hismy Sacie^ 1996
220
PATRICK KARL O'BRIEN
determined by climate.^^ These same constraints of time, energy supplies,
and capital stocks operated with perhaps even greater intensity to limit net
returns per hectare of crops that were already ripe for harvesting (reaping
and binding) and for such post-harvesting processes as threshing, carried
on within farms.^^
In their endeavour to raise returns per hectare British and French farmers
experimented with methods to recycle and to optimize the use of nitrogen
in the soil. Before the advent of cheap chemical substitutes for, and
complements to, traditional forms of nitrogen (such as phosphates and
potash), possibilities for significantly improving the fecundity of the land
depended in large part upon augmenting inputs of organic materials. Although
crop yields did not respond with anything like the increments produced by
today's chemical fertilizer, the relationship between the incorporation of
animal manures into the soil and better yields had long been realized. But,
and except for farmland favourably situated around cities and where surfaced
roads or waterways made the transport of night soil a profitable option, the
only substitutes for dung consisted of green manures, such as grass, peas,
beans, and vetches (which absorbed nitrogen from the atmosphere and
returned it to the soil), plus a restricted range of waste products. For
centuries it had been obvious that the accumulation of populations of
atümals under their control would provide farmers with both organic
fertilizer and extra draught power, as well as high value protein (meat,
milk, butter, and cheese), and industrial raw materials (including fibres,
hair, skins, tallow, horn, and bones).
Supplies of manure per hectare of arable land depended not simply,
however, upon the density of animal populations but also on their breeds,
weights, feeding regimes, and above all their precise locations with respect
to arable land.^^ For example, hectares of land devoted to root crops
(turnips, swedes, wurzles) yielded more feed to transform into animal
manure than hectares cultivated with oats or barley, and considerably more
manure per hectare than land put down to grass and to artificial grasses
(clovers, sainfoin, lucerne, etc.). Manures could be wasted unless collected,
properly stored, and reincorporated into the arable. Permanent and specialized
pastures distant from cropped fields recycled very little nitrogen unless they
passed under the plough. That is why 'convertible husbandry'—the sequential
reallocation of land between grass and arable—became a favoured device
for recapturing nitrogen in order to boost grain and vegetable yields.''' But
that technique saved less nitrogen than integrated or mixed farming systems
which incorporated nitrogen fixing fodder crops (roots, clovers, and grasses)
into crop rotations, and which also used stall feeding and systematic
arrangements to feed animals on the arable to ensure that the maximum
" Raebum, Agriculture.
^' Clark, 'Yields per acre'.
^' The location of animals with respect to arable land is strongly emphasized by Campbell and
Overton, 'A new perspective' and 'Norfolk livestock farming*.
'" Kerridge, Agricultural revolution.
221
possible quantities of manure could be easily collected, stored, and returned
to the soil,^'
Manures, fanners knew, worked best on non-acid soils because acidity
(again as soil scientists observe today) limited the amount of nitrogen taken
up per application of dung. The 'absorption' problem could be alleviated,
however, by regular dressings of marl and lime which facilitated the
conversion of mantire into nitrogen and amended the composition of the
soil in ways hospitable to the cultivation of root crops, particularly turnips,
which could then be fed to animals in order to produce more manure.'^
Furthermore, that vital component of animal populations, working beasts
of burden (particularly oxen and horses, but also mules and asses) provided
fanners with supplies of energy required for traction, cartage, rotary power,
and other highly energy intensive operations on the farm.^^ Efficiency in
these operations depended upon age, weights, health, and food intakes of
farm animals. Over time fanners found that horses performed more effectively
and more cheaply than oxen.^"* When the energies of horses, or oxen, were
put to work in conjunction with ploughs, harrows, scarifiers, rollers, and
other implements to prepare the soil for seeding, they raised the physical
productivity of farm labour employed on tasks connected with tillage well
above levels attainable by manpower assisted by hand operated tools alone.
Working animals also hauled manures, marl, and lime onto the arable and
were used for heavy cartage on and off the farm. Farmers cultivating wet
and heavy soils without animal power, particularly for deep ploughing and
for other traction purposes, remained perpetuailly short of the energy
required for the efficient cultivation of grain. ^^ For viticulture and horticulture
animals were more dispensable components of agrarian capital. Their
potential could also be circumscribed in hilly or mountainous regions. Their
productivity could be diminished when farmers bred, reared, and deployed
bovines and horses to serve multiple purposes (for example, as livestock as
well as beasts of burden) and also when implements (particularly ploughs)
were poorly engineered for tasks on the farm. Nevertheless, there can be
no doubt Üiat animal powered and man directed implements raised both
the productivity of labour and (through deeper ploughing and better tillage)
physical yields per hectare of arable land sown with grain.^^
As early as the middle ages British and French farmers knew that
increasing the populations of animals under their control and close to arable
land could provide increased supplies of fertilizer, more energy, and tradable
high value protein as well as more grain from the sown area. Alas, the
contrasts in the animal intensities of these two agricultural systems can only
be captured in statistical form for the nineteenth century. Around 1910 the
" Our understanding of the nitrogen cycle has now been clarified by Shiel's excellent paper,
'Improving soil productivity'.
" Heath, D., 'Contemporary description of marling in France' (unpub. paper, Univ. of Oxford,
1980).
" Wrigley, 'Energy availability'.
^ Thompson, ed.. Horses; Perkins, J. A., 'The ox and horse and EngUsh fanning, 1750-1850' (Dept.
of Economic History, Univ. of New South Wales, Working paper 3, I975)" Langdon, Horses, oxen and technological innovation.
" Bowman, Animals for man; Meuvret, La production des céréales.
© Economic History Society 1996
222
share of animal products to final agricultural outputs came to 50 per cent
for France and 75 per cent for the UK.'^ In the 1890s the estimated volume
of animal dung available for application onto farmland of the Victorian
kingdom may have been two or three times greater than that potentially
available to French fanners of the Third Republic. At that time British
fanners enjoyed access to a stock of draught animal power which amounted
to 156 units of 'horsepower equivalents' per 1,000 hectares of arable land
compared to only 36 units for France.^^
Just how far back in history this distinction in animal intensity can be
traced will be difficult to ascertain. It had probably persisted for centuries.
Unfortunately, it will also remain impossible to quantify the differences that
contrasts in the densities of animal populations had upon returns per hectare
in the two agricultures, but can their significance remain in doubt? As usual
substitutes for animals could be found. Chemicals developed rather late in
the nineteenth century but localized and limited supplies of organic fertilizers
(particularly night soil which had traditionally represented other options to
raise the fecundity of land) certainly existed.^' Up to a point human toil
could (and in France continued to) replace beasts of burden even in the
most energy intensive of farm operations. Finally, alternative outputs to
replace high value animal produce included the vines, olives, fruits, and
vegetables grown in wanner and drier regions, and by 1910 these crops
accounted for aroimd one-quarter of French agricultural output. Before the
advent of railways they did not, however, provide farmers with a sufficiently
profitable form of agricultural output to raise average monetary returns per
hectare above returns obtainable from animal produce, largely because
animals could be walked to market. Furthermore, these Mediterranean
crops, unlike fodder recycled through animals, did not help to restore
nitrogen to the soil.'*"
Nevertheless, the spread of integrated mixed husbandry has now been
marked out as the core element of Europe's agrarian transformation since
the middle ages. Agricultural development depended upon the accumulation
of ever increasing numbers of animals per unit of cultivated land. Progressive
agrarian regions (including Norfolk and Flanders) had pushed furthest along
this particular 'technological frontier'. Above all, the pace of national and
regional advance was conditioned by variations in long-run elasticities for
the supply of fodder and forage crops consumed by farm animals. Before
the mid-nineteenth century intemational and interregional trade in animal
feedstuffs occurred on a liniited scale and fodder supplies had to be accessible
to farmers at local levels. Furthermore, additions to the output of animal
food emanated from improved yields per hectare of pasture and/or arable
land sown with fodder crops, or alternatively followed from the allocation
of increasing shares of the arable area to their cultivation.'*'
" See n. 17.
'» O'Brien and Heath, 'Agricultural efficiency'.
" Meuvret, Etudes d'histoire économiqtie, p. 195; Grantham, 'Growth of labour productivity'.
'^ Goubert, 'Les campagnes françaises', pp. 92-118; Faucher, La vie rurale, pp. 67-94. I owe this
point to James Simpson.
"" Overton and Campbell, 'Productivity change'; Campbell and Overton, 'A new perspective'.
223
Fodder for animals and food crops for humans required scarce land and
labour for their cultivation. Animds needed food to produce food. Apart
from the forage they gleaned from the waste, they competed with people
for a slowly changing area of cultivable land. In France, where population
recovered more rapidly than in Britain from the Black Death, land-labour
ratios remained less favourable."*^ This implies that the reallocation of land
from the cultivation of food grains into fodder crops would have been more
difficult unless the transport and distribution system had promoted regional
specialization through higher levels of internal trade in animal feedstuff s.
All the available evidence points, however, to superior levels of inter-regional
commerce within Britain—a country persistently favoured by lower densities
of population to land for centuries after the Black Death.'*'
Botanical possibilities for increasing long-run yields of fodder from land
actually allocated to the production of food for animals also evolved over
time. Fodder included numerous varieties of: grass; legumes; sown crops,
such as clover, alfalfa, lucerne, vetch, and sainfoin; small grains (oats,
barley, and bigg); and roots (turnips, swedes, beets, and wurzles). Over
time Üie varieties of food grown for animals widened, but the optimal
geographical conditions for their growth varied by type of plant. Swedes,
for example, fiourished on soils at elevations and precipitation levels which
stimted die growth of some small grains. White clover required different
soil, aeration, rainfall, temperature, slope, and other conditions from red
clover."*^ Ecological conditions clearly favoured the more rapid diffusion of
fodder crops in some localities over others.'*^ Yields per hectare for grass
and small grains were strongly influenced by precipitation and a higher
percentage of the British Isles (compared to France) experienced temperatures
and rainfall favourable to the growth of lush grasses, oats, and barley.'*^
Quantifying the significance of geographical constraints is invariably very
difficult but perhaps three suggestions might command assent: first, fodder
crops of all kinds did not thrive in the arid conditions characteristic of
Mediterranean France; secondly, the British Isles possessed a significantly
higher percentage of land which offered the 'right' environments for the
cultivation of root and fodder crops; thirdly, the 'new crops' did not grow
well on acid soils and British soils were either less deficient in lime, or that
deficiency could be repaired by the application of lime and marl from
deposits which were usually local or accessible by water transport.'*^
Finally, the shape of the long-run supply curves for fodder in Britain and
France also depended upon additions to the cultivated area cropped with
« See figs. 3 and 4; Grigg, Population growth; CipoUa, Before the industrial revolution.
*' Meuvret, Le commerce des grains; Szostak, Role of transportation; Price, Modernization of rural
France; Chevet, J. M., 'Regional market, national market in France' (unpub. paper. Institut National
de la Recherche Agronomique, Paris, March 1993); Kussmaul, General view of the rural economy.
** Ambrosoli, Sdemiata contadini e proprietani. I am indebted to Professor Ambrosoli for sharing with
me his deep knowledge of fodder crops.
*' Clout's books are invaluable for understanding the diffusion of new fodder crops in France: Clout,
Land of France; idem. Agriculture in France. See also Newell, 'Agricultural revolution'; Grantham,
'Diffusion'.
•^ Thran and Brockhuizen, Agro-climatic atlas; Hohnes, Grass.
" I am indebted for this point to Daniel Heath's unpubUshed research on marl and lime in the two
ies.
lie Hütoty Society 1996
224
animal foodstuffs. Apart from land reclaimed from the waste, increased
fodder production emanated in large part from land left fallow in medieval
two- and three-cotu-se rotations. Wherever root crops and artificial grasses
could be grown on fallow land they provided sustenance for animals, aerated
the soil, and improved the circulation of air and water which facilitated the
absorption of more nitrogen. Thus they simtiltaneously produced extra
fodder output with a higher nutrient value than grass, and improved the
fecundity of the soil.'**
In order for farmers (particularly those on heavier soils) to raise the ratio
of cropped to cultivated area by abandoning the traditional device of fallow,
they required additional inputs of labour, animals, implements, and
machinery for the deeper ploughing, tillage, hoeing, and harvesting. The
pace at which any agrarian system could diffuse new courses depended first
upon threshold supplies of man hours or horsepower, and secondly upon
the rate at which each region could accumulate manpower or draught
animals per hectare of arable land.
As France recovered from the Black Death its density of population to
cultivable land became higher than Britain's. But when stocks of draught
animals are included total supplies of energy per hectare favoured Britain.
Furthermore, both base period advantages increased over time, because the
gradual réintégration of fallow land into full production enabled British
farmers to increase supplies of fodder and to acciunulate animal power more
rapidly than French farmers. Thus a potential constraint on shifting to
improved courses of rotation, to include root and fodder crops, was solved
more easily in Britain by a process of factor substitution which raised the
ratio of draught animals and machinery per worker/land.'*'
Here in outline is a plausible conjecture about the positions and shapes
of the long-run supply curves for animal fodder in Britain and France.
Geography exercised a profound influence on threshold levels of fodder
output in two ways. First, a favourable natural endowment led to higher
average yields; secondly, the terrain in Britain demanded less investment
per unit of output for capital formation in transport and distribution. This
gift of nature for the long-run development of trade favoured regional and
local specialization within agriculture, and allowed for the allocation of a
higher proportion of cultivable land to animal foodstuffs.
Threshold contrasts in land/labour ratios then diverged and thereby help
to account for differences in the elasticities of the long-run supply curves
for fodder in the two economies. Higher population density in France not
only pushed the allocation of land towards food grains as marginal land
passed under the plough, but it also biased choices by French farmers
towards a more labour-intensive spectrum of techniques—specifically towards
lightweight hand tools compared to the heavier animal-powered iron
implements and machinery favoured in Britain.^"
To stun up: in pre-modern technological conditions, farm animals
** Langer, Agricultural plants.
*« See Grantham, 'Diffusion'; idem, 'Agricultural supply'; idem, 'Scale and organisation'.
"> See Le Roy Ladurie and Morineau, 'Les masses profondes',/lajsim. Mulliez, 'Du blé mal nécessaire',
is a seminal article for appreciating the significance of population pressure in the French countryside.
225
represented an 'engine for growth' which provided for a cumulative rise in
agrarian productivity which in turn supported structural change for the
economy as a whole. Animals supplied the bulk of organic fertilizer applied
to arable land which simultaneously increased both grain and fodder outputs.
Soils conserved and enriched with manures produced higher yields of
artificial grasses and root crops which also provided them with a more
nutritious diet than the traditional fare of grass, hay, and straw. Meat, dairy
produce, and draught power could then be produced in a less land intensive
way than through the use of cultivable hectares devoted to pastures and
meadows. Animals also supplied an ever increasing share of the power
required for the diffusion of improved iron ploughs and other farm
implements which came on stream over the eighteenth century. This
combination of man-directed and horse- (or ox-) powered implements not
only reduced the energy constraint on diffusing new crops and courses, it
improved tillage and thereby raised yields per hectare while releasing labour
at the same time for employment in industry and services. In turn the
reallocation of labour promoted internal commerce between town and
coxmtryside, initially and mainly in food grains but increasingly through
trade in meat, dairy produce, vegetables, fruit, and in the animals required
for urban and inter-regional transport. As incomes rose outside agriculture
the proportion of household expenditure on horticultural and animal produce
increased and the favourable shift in the composition of aggregate demand
fed back in a virtuous circle to encoiurage farmers to raise even more
animals.^^
Over time the advantages embodied in the package of animal intensive
technology and output, selected by an ever increasing share of British
farmers, cimiulated until they could till, sow, and harvest the land more
efficiently than the more labour and grain (and even grape and olive)
intensive agriculttures which remained dominant in many parts of Europe,
particularly the south. Apart from the agriculture of the Paris Basin,
geographical constraints on shifting to patterns of production based upon
mixed systems of integrated animal and arable husbandry persisted across
large areas of France.
For entirely explicable reasons coimected to the country's natural
endowments for the production of animal fodder, French agriculture moved
too slowly along a path which could potentially have supported and promoted
an earlier and more extensive industrialization of its workforce.
Ill
Economistic objections to this kind of argument, which will be represented
as 'geographical reductionism', will be elaborated upon in this section.
When French families left the land, and as knowledge of the technical
possibilities (as well as opportunities provided by markets for raising returns
per hectare cultivated) continued to diffuse, output per worker employed
" The exogenous nature (or demand side) of this 'virtuous circle' is emphasized by Ruttan, 'Structural
retardation'; and by Grantham, 'Scale and organisation', pp. 286-92, and idem, 'Labour productivity'.
© Econome Hisiay SociOf 1996
in agriculture should have moved sooner rather than later towards levels
established by Britain. Before 1914 convergence did not occur more rapidly,
however, because industrialization in Britain and France was accompanied
by two very different demographic revolutions and by contrasting patterns
and rates of internal migration.^^ For example, over the eighteenth century,
the French workforce 'connected to' agriculture increased from 4.3 million
in 1700 to reach 5.75 million before the Revolution. By the mid-nineteenth
century the population recorded as 'active in agricixlture' stood at 7.5 million
workers and by 1905-13 another million had been added to the numbers,
so classified by the census of population for 1906. Meanwhile, the British
agrarian workforce increased more slowly from just over 1.5 million in 1700
to reach 2.0 million in 1851 and declined again to 1.6 million by 1910.^^
Compared to France, Britain employed on the land a smaller proportion
of the increment to the total supply of labour that became available as a
result of population growth. British families left the countryside, partly in
response to better opportunities in towns or abroad but essentially because
the institutions of capitalist agriculture will not retain as much redundant
labour. In this respect Britain's agrarian institutions and the evolution of
its peasantry into a virtually wage dependent agricultural labour force, for
centuries of history and long before 1800, can be contrasted to the tenurial
systems, not only of France, but of Italy, Germany, Spain, and other parts
of Europe as well. Early and successive waves of enclosure, the shift to
larger farms over the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reinforced
by harsher attitudes to the poor which culminated in the new poor law of
1834, promoted internal migration and led to an elastic and committed
supply of labour for construction, industry, and services. In the Tudor,
Stuart, and Hanoverian kingdoms a steady outfiow from agriculture (see
figure 4) exerted downward pressure on wage rates in towns, increased
profits, and stimulated higher rates of capital formation for the development
of an urban economy.''^
Differential wages, and prospects for jobs, also explain migration from
agriculture in other European countries. French workers, particularly that
economy's underclass of landless males who moved in search of seasonal
employment, were clearly not immobile." Furthermore, there should be no
easy presumption that the higher proportion of the French workforce who
remained 'attached' over long periods of time in varying degrees to village
life could be explained by the absence of discernible incentives to labour
mobility in France.^^ Such incentives to both occupational and locational
" Pautard, Les disparités régionales; Baines, Migration.
^' French figures are based upon census categories and definitions. For an alternative but still
debatable set of ntunbers for the agrictiltural workforce, see Marchand and Thelot, Deux siècles de
travail, and Carré et al.. La croissance. For the complexity of defining occupations for males engaged in
agriculture see Rinaudo, 'Un travail en plus'. Debates on this issue are perhaps not resolvable but see
Crafts, 'Economic growth'; Schmitt, 'Agriculture'; and notes to figs, i, 3, above.
" Boyer, An economic history; Williamson, 'City growth'.
" Corbin, Archaisme et modernité en Limousin; Desert, Une société rurale au XIX' siècle:, Gutton,
Domestiques et serviteurs; Bompard et al., 'Migrations saisonnières'.
5' But see Grantham's analyses which are based on cyclical ñuctuations in demand for food and raw
materials: idem, 'Capital and agricultural productivity' (above, n. t5).
227
mobility are, however, not easy to capture statistically. Incentives caimot
be encapsulated simply in terms of differential nominal wage rates payable
to unskilled urban and agricultural labourers. Proxies for real wage gaps are
difficult to construct because attaching prices to the 'baskets' of private and
public goods as well as the externalities perceived by and confronting
potential migrants is a post hoc representation that may be of ambiguous
relevance to decisions to leave or remain in villages. Furthermore, the
greater dispersal of manufactures throughout the coimtryside and small
towns of France meant that choices to remain attached to land and to obtain
supplementary earnings from industry persisted for far longer and on a
larger scale than they did in England."
^^— Great Britain
France
1850
1900 10
Figure 4. Non-agricultural populations, 1500-1910
Nou: The vertical scale is logarithmic.
Sources and methods: seefîg.3
Although the basis for the structuralist argument pursued here is certainly
not premised upon assumptions of 'peasant rationality' compared to 'Smithian
rationality' across the Channel, wage data (in the usual form of daily rates
for unskilled construction workers and landless labourers) are interesting to
contemplate. Alas, the evidence for periods before the mid-nineteenth
century when Britain had ahready become significantly more urbanized and
industrialized than France, is not available. Incentives to move (especially
for families dependent for their consumption and welfare over the life cycle
upon wages alone) always existed in France and they seem to have increased
appreciably before and during I'exode rurale between 1852 and 1911.^*
Nevertheless, stronger attachments to the land, to villages, and to permanent
"Hatton and Williamson, 'Integrated and segmented labour markets'; Baines, D . , 'European
emigration, 1815-30: looking at the emigration decision again', L.S.E. working paper in economic
history, 5/92 (1992); Postel-Vinay, 'Traditional labour markets'; Lewis, 'Proto-industrialisation'.
'» Sicsic, 'Qty-farm wages gaps'; Postel-Vinay, G. and Weir, D . , 'Frenchmen into peasants: myths
and realities of agricultural labour markets in France' (NBER, Washington, DC, unpub. paper, 1993).
© Economic History Sodet,
iggó
228
residence within the borders of France, characterized the patterns of internal
and external mobility exhibited by the majority of Frenchmen and their
families until well into the twentieth century. Depicting these structural
and durable characteristics in terms of labour market failure is beside the
point. For purposes of an exercise in comparative history, the observation
that the institutions and culture of peasant agriculture in France operated
to restrain the outflow of people from countryside to towns and from
agriculture to industry is familiar and probably sufficient, although economists
might well suggest that the observation impUcitly assumes that the elasticity
of response to the emergence of similar incentives remained persistently
weaker in France than in Britain.
Since these elasticities can never be measured, in order to sharpen and
accoimt for this well documented contrast between the two societies it will
be necessary to infer them from historical depictions of the institutions
surrounding French land and labour markets as they operated for more
than a century after the Revolution. For this purpose French agriculture
will be demarcated into two sectors: a peasant economy of small farms using
family labour, and a capitalist economy of larger farms dependent on hired
labour.5'
To start the analysis in 1789 seems heuristic because the Revolution
effectively checked an attempt from above to curtail the traditional rights
of access to land that French peasants had enjoyed for centuries but which
came under sustained attack during the seigneurial reaction of the eighteenth
century.^" After the fall of Napoleon, the penumbra of measures relating to
feudal dues, tenancy, and land ownership, to the layout of fields, to grazing
rights on common and waste land, passed by governments in the 1790s,
continued in operation because the balance of political forces in nineteenthcentury France precluded further attempts to upset the Revolutionary
settlement of property rights, agrarian contracts, and judicial procedures
affecting transactions in land.*' Although French agriculture hardly prospered
diuring the era of political change and warfare from 1789 to 1815, for its longer
term evolution, the agrarian reforms mattered." They had redistributed onetenth of the cultivated area to middling proprietors. By abolishing seigneurial
dues and suppressing tithes, the Revolutionaries also transferred agricultural
income back to those who farmed the land. At a stroke, the tax and judicial
reforms of the 1790s lightened burdens on the peasantry and enhanced their
capacity to prosper on small plots of land.*' Napoleon's legal code of 1804
strengthened partible inheritance and encouraged the young to stay on the
land; while cuts in fertility, which coincided with the Revolution, mitigated
dangers from morcellement and also weakened pressures to migrate.*'* Over
roughly the same period in which British landowners secured a dramatic
' ' But there is no intention behind the taxonomy to obscure the importance of capitalist agriculture
n France as exposed by Clout, Agriculture in France; by Lepetit, 'Sur les dénivellations'; by Meuvret,
Le production des céréales, pp. 73-147«> Goubert, 'Le paysan et la terre'; Soboul, La France; Mackrell, Attack on feudalism.
"' Soboul, 'Le choc revolutionaire'; Jones, Peasantry; Rosenthal, Fruits of revolution.
" Le Goff and Sutherland, 'Revolution'.
" Jones, Peasantry; Postel-Vinay, 'A la recherche de la révolution économique'.
" Van der Walle and Hennalin, 'Civü code'; Weir, 'Life under pressure'.
C) Economu Hision Soculy /9
229
and permanent hike in real rents per acre, the Revolutionary land settlement,
distressed land sales by threatened nobles, and currency inflation that wiped
out peasant debt, worked to consolidate the economic position of those who
fanned the land of France."
During the long nineteenth century peasant fanning came under continuous
challenge, no longer from kings, physiocratic reformers, and seigneurs but
from the capitalist sector of French agriculture, and after 1873 from imported
American grain. Exactly how those smaller scale, under-capitalized peasant
farms (castigated by Arthur Young) fared in competition for internal markets
is difficult to assess. Certainly the peasantry experienced cycles of prosperity
and depression, especially as competition intensified following the integration
of markets by railways after mid-century.^ Some fanners survived by
growing their own food and provided for cash needs by marketing produce
at prices below its real (or opportunity) costs of production. The majority
of peasants remained in the market and concentrated resources along lines
of comparative advantage. For example, they cultivated produce which took
advantage of soil and location or sold a mix of crops and livestock where
labour intensive techniques of production could compete effectively with
capitalist farmers.*^ Although hortictilture and viticulttire come to mind as
natural forms of smaller scale enterprise, peasants also competed effectively
across a wider range of crops by exploiting their relatively abundant
resource—^family labour—in order to undercut their more capital intensive
rivals who depended on hired workers for regular and seasonal supplies of
labour.^* Wherever geographical conditions were not constricting, peasants
also innovated because fodder crops and new courses could be diffused
along both labour and capital intensive spectnmis of techniques.*' Not only
does the shift to integrated animal and arable husbandry appear as more or
less neutral with respect to possibilities for factor substitution, but technical
improvements occurred in both hand and animal-powered tools and
implements. Peasants could raise yields per hectare by intensifying the
labour input, that is by substituting labour for land in the traditional way.
At the same time their 'rivals', capitalist farmers, could respond to higher
wages by replacing labour with animal-powered implements. The effects on
physical yields per hectare were not necessarily dissimilar.^"
Meanwhile, long-term trends in the relative prices of land, hired labour,
and capital slowly improved the relative position of the peasantry. Unlike
industry, agricultural operations could not be extensively 'mechanized' over
the nineteenth centtiry. Progressive husbandry continued to demand more
« Postel-Vinay, 'A la recherche de la révolution économique'; Vovelle, Ville et campagne; Crouzet,
La grande it^tion. Turner and Becken's unpublished index confirms the sharp upswing in rents during
the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
** The following pages depend upon two excellent surveys of nineteenth-century French agriculture
by Laurent, 'Le secteur agricole' and by Agulhon et al., 'La civilisation paysanne'. See also Price, Rural
Labrousse, Peasant society ; A^cPhee, Peasantry .
*' Gavignaud, Propriétaires, viticulteurs en Roussülon; Moulin, Peasantry, eh. 2. On seasonal demand
and suppUes of labour, see Magnac and Postel-Vinay, 'Seasonal migration of labour'.
«» Hubscher, 'La petite exploitation en France'; NeweU, 'Agricultural revolution'.
™ Grantham, 'Scale and organisation'; idem, 'Diffusion'; NeweU, Population change.
© Economie Hislory Society 1996
230
labour time per unit of output. Wage rates began to rise slowly before the
1840s but rapidly thereafter as the supply of agricultural labour available
for hire diminished. Ironically, and as competition between mechanized
industry and traditional and more labour intensive manufactures in the
coimtryside intensified, journaliers (landless labourers) lost an alternative and
important source of faniily earnings and began to leave their villages for
jobs in towns.'"' Already by mid-century 'labour shortages' provided a major
subject for complaints by larger farmers. Gradually the pool of landless and
virtually landless labourers dried up as such fanühes either left for towns
and industry or purchased plots in order to farm on their own account.^^
That pool was not, moreover, refilled by population growth because the
French natural rate of increase fell way below the British rate. With a lag
this reduced the size of cohorts of young adults available for seasonal
employment and for commitment to full-time work in industry and services.^'
From their rich local history, the landless of nineteentíi-century rural
France appear as anxious as their forebears to buy land in order to mitigate
the uncertainties associated with that risky condition. Their situation
rendered them vulnerable to poor harvests, which reduced opportunities for
seasonal employment in autumn, and confronted their families with rising
prices for subsistence throughout the winter. In sickness and old age
labourers possessed no assured income from property to sustain them and
were without access to any kind of social security system. Unlike peasants
they could not depend on their children to guarantee sustenance in hard
times or in old age as reward for patrimony.^"* Even if higher urban wages
could attract labourers from the countryside, insecurities associated with
industrial employment seemed as great as in agriculture. French manufacturing enterprises with their own fanuly-based workforces tended to dismiss
hired hands first in periods of cyclical downturn.^^
There is no problem in understanding why peasants maintained and
extended their proprietorship over the cultivated area of France. They
wished to minimize risks over the life cycle inseparable from proletarian
status either in the countryside or the town. Peasants and their families,
particularly those steadily improving the underlying fecundity of their own
plots, remained willing to trade potential short-run gains in income from
migration in order to augment wealth and to avoid the instabilities which
attended the working lives of wage labourers both in agriculture and, for
all but a skilled minority, in industry.
With the application of new and labour intensive techniques for cropping
the land, yields on peasant holdings went up, and this further reduced their
" Underemployment dominated the labour market down to the 1840s: see Vidalenc, Les peuples des
campagnes. For a recent and penetrating analysis of the interconnections between the agricultural
and industrial workforces, see Postel-Vinay, 'Traditional labour markets'. See also Lewis, 'Protoindustrialisation'.
" Price, 'Labour shortages'.
' ' Armengaud, 'Le rôle de la démographie'; Weir, 'Life under pressure'.
'" Hufton, The poor; Gutten, Domestiques et serviteurs.
' ' Fohlen, 'Entrepreneurship and management', pp. 358-63; Carón, Economie history, eh. 8; Nye,
'Firm size'. Young men from villages were the gastarbeiter of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.
23I
demands for cash income from labouring on capitalist farms. If and when
their own plots extended in area, full-time employment could be assured
for all members of the family. Further depletion of the labour supply to
the capitalist sector accompanied the relative increase in the share of labour
employed on the smaller units of cultivation. After 1850, when wages went
up faster than the price of land, more peasants managed to accumulate
sufficient savings to buy a small plot which placed them on the ladder
leadmg towards independence from wage labour. As real incomes rose and
family size diminished through controls on fertility (not unrelated to the
very same proprietorial mentalité) peasants also preferred leisure to arduous
labour in the fields. First the women and children and later the menfolk
decreased their labour inputs into agriculture. Labour time offered to the
capitalist sector (even on a seasonal basis) was reduced in favour of the
satisfaction and long-term gains derived from improvements to family
holdings as well as release from toil.^*
For millions of French families the peasant farm provided an adequate
standard of living, status, security, and opportimities for advancement
through fertility restraint and the purchase of land. Families cohered around
their patrimony as parents maintained authority over children throughout
long stretches of their working lives. Most spoke their own patois, not
French. Poets of pastoralism argued that the system provided satisfaction
to those who tilled their own land through endless seasons in the unchanging
countryside of France.^^
Nevertheless, the survival of a large and (as the landless bought their
way onto the ladder) growing peasant sector reduced the supply of labour
available to capitalist farms and forced up wage rates for labour hired by
the day at harvest time. Larger proprietors, alive to opportunities outside
agriculture, saw their profits denuded by higher wages and the greater
difficulties of extracting optimal worWoads from labour becoming less
dependent on wages. Their difficulties in securing the very substantial but
seasonally concentrated increase in the supply of labour required to bring
in the grain harvest were, moreover, compounded by the steady erosion of
proto-industry which had traditionally 'released' labour to agriculture in
summer time.^* Their predilection to sell land and invest their capital
outside agriculture increased. During the Great Depression of 1873-96
landowners also witnessed the collapse of prices for vegetable oils and
industrial fibres as well as grain. Phylloxera devastated their vineyards. As
land prices plummeted, moderate sized landowners (imlike British owners
of great estates) could not hang on. They pulled their capital out of
agriculture and disposed of land in small parcels to peasants and labourers.^'
'* The cultural anthropology of the peasantries of France includes a rich literature. Cleary, 'French
agrarian history', and Moulin, Peasantry offer bibliographical surveys. See also Watts, Social history.
" Segalen, Love and power in the peasant famUy; Moulin, Peasantry. Darker pictures of French rural
life are, however, painted nowadays by American scholars from Los Angeles: see Weber, Peasants into
Frenchmen.
" The issue of the agrarian labour supply is debated by Hohenberg, ' U b o u r supply' and Price, 'On
agricultural labour supply'; see also Postel-Vinay, 'Traditional labour markets'.
" Postel-Vinay, 'L'agriculture dans l'économie française'; Hubscher, L'agriculture et la société rurale.
Peasants were willing to buy land in part because nineteenth-century capital markets remained too
© Economic Histoiy Society 1Ç96
232
This part of the story has been started in 1789, but the capacity of the
rural economy of France to hold labour in the countryside did not originate
with the Revolution but depended rather upon a position of legal and
political strength built up by peasants in the course of centuries of successful
resistance to attempts by seigneurs of the ancien régime to control access to
land, to take away their rights to exploit common and waste, and to squeeze
their incomes.*° French agrarian history is not marked by anything
comparable to British waves of enclosure, particularly to that final parliamentary attack on customary rights to use common and waste land that occurred
between 1750 and 1815.
Indeed, in Britain the hold on the land of anything comparable to a
'peasantry' had historically been tenuous long before the rate of industrial
and urban growth accelerated in the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Contrasts in the distribution of land ownership, farm size, security
of tenure, common rights to pasture, fuel, and game, and the legal status
of those who worked the land of Britain and France had almost certainly
persisted for centuries. Alas, such distinctions can only be validated
statistically for the mid-Victorian period when farms of 100 acres and above
covered 75 per cent of the cultivable area of Britain but only 29 per cent
of that in France. About two-thirds of French agricultural land was farmed
by owner occupiers, while tenants (mainly tenants at will) managed 85 per
cent of Britain's farmland.*^ Landless labourers dominated the agrarian
workforce of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Much smaller and,
down to 1914, diminishing proportions of the French workforce could be
classified as 'virtually dependent' on wage labour over the life cycle.
As the inconclusive outcome of the Brenner debate revealed, the statistics
required to date, map, and explain when and why contrasts in securing
rights of access to land first arose, and then diverged over time are unlikely
ever to appear.*^ We must perforce 'make do' with impressions gained from
placing depictions of complex systems of property rights side by side. Even
then the variance in laws and customs across, and even within, countries
will be difficult to 'sum up' in ways that might do justice to the complexity
of evolving and locally constructed systems of tenure and land ownership.*^
That is why it is imperative to keep attention focused on the survival of
French and British peasantries. That debated and over-defined category
includes farmers and their families engaged in the cultivation of differentiated,
but nevertheless smaller scale holdings, which could be operated with
negligible recourse to hired labour. Without relatively secure access to
sufficient land, either as freeholders or as some category of copyholder,
leaseholder, and sharecropper, cultivating land at sustainable levels of rent
and taxation, peasants disappeared slowly into the ranks of dependent
imperfect and restrictive to provide secure opportunities for their talents and savings outside agriculture.
See Lescure, Les banques, l'état et le marché; Lévy-Leboyer and Lescure, 'France'; Alliline, Banquiers et
batttseurs; Gueslin, Les origins du crédit agricole. See also Turner, 'Output and prices'.
™ Goldstone, Revolution and rebellion.
»' Craigie, 'Agricultural holdings'; Flavigny, La régime agraire; Moulin, Peasantry.
" Aston and Philpin, eds.. The Brenner debate; Warner, Agrarian conditions.
" As Bloch's own classic study reveals: Bloch, Seigneurie française. An earlier attempt, Probyn, ed..
Systems of land tenure, is also illuminating.
233
labour. They were transformed into hands hired by larger farmers who
could both afford the rents and meet the contractual conditions demanded
by aristocrats, gentry, ecclesiastical institutions, merchants, and other
bourgeois proprietors, who owned and ultimately controlled the disposition
ofland.«-*
But at what point should we begin to compare the frameworks of property
rights, tenurial contracts, and labour controls surrounding the British
and French peasantries? Perhaps 1066 is not inappropriate because the
consolidation of Norman rule apparently led to major shifts in the distribution
of landownership and in the status of the indigenous Anglo-Saxon and Celtic
populations. The Conquest created both a strong monarchy and a cohesive
aristocracy with extensive domains as well as considerable juridical powers
over rights of access to cultivable land, and to the labour time of the
colonized and enserfed population under their control.^'
Between the Conquest and the Black Death English lords (lay and clerical)
continued to maintain control of a greater share of the cultivated area in
the form of demesne land, and to command higher proportions of the labour
time available for agricultural work (in the form of compulsory unfree
labour services) than their counterparts—the seigneurs, urban bourgeois,
and ecclesiastical corporations of France.^* As early as the twelfth century,
serfdom had waned over large areas of France and by the late thirteenth
century something like 80 per cent of the land was akeady being cultivated
by peasants under several secure forms of tenure.*^ When the Black Death
brought about fundamental changes in the land-labour ratios in both
countries, it did so in France in the context of an agrarian system where
family farms had become more widespread, where demesne land represented
a smaller proportion of the cultivated area, and where power over land had
shifted further than it had in Britain in favour of the peasantry.^*
After the Plague, which marked the beginning of the end of servile labour
and unfree forms of tenure in Britain as well as France, the agrarian histories
of the two countries allow us to formulate 'impressions' of how variations
in the ratios between peasants and hired agricultural workers employed
outside kinship based farms for wages and/or payments in kind changed
over time. Measurement is not possible but if they could be 'conjectured'
such ratios would reflect the supply of viable farms available in relation to
fluctuations in aggregate demand for family operated holdings. On the
demand side, long swings in population growth between the Black Death
and the onset of the industrial revolution are well known.^' In Britain,
where population recovered more slowly, the demand for farms became
*" Wolf, Peasants; Holton, Transition; Shanin, ed.. Peasants.
" The effects of the conquest are a subject of continuing controversy. For a recent interpretation
which argues: 'There is, however, a stack of contemporary evidence that marks the io6os, 70s and 80s
as a period of jarring and violent discontinuity', see Fleming, Kings and lords and Barlow, The Norman
Conquest.
*« Brenner, 'Agrarian roots'. Compare Miller and Hatcher, Medieval Erstand, chs. i, 5, 6, 7 with
Fourquin, 'Le sort des paysans', and Neveux, 'L'âge classique des paysans'.
" Bois, Feudalism; Duby, Rural economy.
«* Compare chs. vu (i) on France and vii (7) on England in Postan, ed., 'Agrarian Ufe'.
*' See Neveux, 'L'âge classique des paysans'; Bridbury, English economy, pp. 180-218.
© Economic Hùtoiy Sode^
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234
attenuated still further by higher rates of migration to towns and other
opportunities for employment outside agriculture.^ On the supply side the
relative size of a peasantry toiling on family holdings, compared to a waged
and virtually landless workforce employed on capitalist farms, depended
basically on the shares of a rather stable acreage of cultivable land (including
common and waste land) that became available to these two sectors of
agriculture over time.
In legal terms two kinds of farmland are involved in any attempt to
formulate perceptions about its allocation over time: freehold and rented
land. Freehold land could pass from peasants to landowners and to their
capitalist tenants and vice versa in two ways. First through expropriation,
but that became increasingly rare. After 1500 market transactions or
voluntary exchanges became statistically more significant. Such transactions
occurred, for example, when peasants sold a family farm to an aristocrat or
to a capitalist owner-occupier in order to invest or to work outside agriculture.
Alternatively, transfers went the other way when larger landowners sold
their estates in small plots, which then passed into the control of peasant
farmers. Markets for freehold land operated ineffectively on both sides of
the Channel. There is no way of reconstructing the aggregate number of
hectares transferred through land sales between the two sectors over time.
Historians can only speculate about potential outcomes with reference to
the legal and other institutions which facilitated the development of markets
for land in both countries.''
Over large parts of France, legal and customary codes defining possibilities
for transactions in land look more restrictive.^^ In Britain, although the
powers of families over their patrimonies varied from manor to manor,
rights to trade in land probably became more widespread much earlier.^^
Partible inheritance codes and customs covered more of the land in France.
They tended to reinforce the powers of families over the disposition of
property.^'* Wherever collective agreements were required to sell land the
volume of transactions would usually be constrained except when tendencies
to morcellement were pushed to the point of endangering the viability of
peasant holdings.'^ Crises caused by morcellement occurred whenever the
hectares of land inherited under systems of partible inheritance became too
small to create farms capable of providing tolerable standards of living for
rural families. Then unviable 'plots' had to be sold, and such sales could
augment the cultivable area controlled by the capitalist sector. Morcellement
has also been perceived more optimistically as providing peasants with
'" Bolton, Medieval English economy; Wrigley, 'Urban growth'; Goose, 'In search of the urban
variable'.
" On the land market, landownership, and English individualism, Macfarlane, Ongins of English
individualism and his reply to his critics in Culture of capitalism, chs. i , 8 are central. See also Harvey,
ed.. Peasant land market; Hyams, 'Origin of the peasant land market'.
'^ Thirsk, 'European debate'.
'3 This is the burden of Macfarlane's thesis: Macfarlane, Origins of English individualism; idem. Culture
of capitalism. On the English land market, see Mingay, Gentry; Roebuck, Yorkshire baronets. Britnell's
discussion of the land market in England is excellent: Britnell, Commercialization, chs. 3, 6, 9.
*• Van der Walle and Hermalin, 'Civil code'; Berkner and Mendels, 'Inheritance systems'.
'^ For sympathetic British analyses of the French system, see Coleman, Agricultural and rural economy,
pp. 27-40; Cliffe-Leslie, 'The land system in France'. Legoyt, Du morcellement, is the classic study.
235
possibilities on the death of a paterfamihas to reconstitute farms for the
families concerned, or to sell land which in effect augments the farms of other
peasant families. In France the grid of inheritance provided opportunities to
reconstitute and maintain a peasant sector for generation after generation.
In Britain the prevalence of common laws and customs (such as primogeniture,
entail, strict settlement, and other strong forms of impartible inheritance)
operated to strengthen the initial (or feudal) inequahties in the distribution
of landownership and to constrain sales of land in small parcels to peasant
farmers.'^
Statistically, freehold land and freeholders are not, however, at the core
of a comparison of property rights to land in Britain and France. Most land
continued to be cultivated century after centvuy by 'tenants' operating under
a complex variety of contractual and customary conditions. Alas, legal
histories of British and French tenure which would allow us to draw salient
contrasts in the evolution of two different institutional frameworks providing
for tenants' rights of access to farmland from, say, 1348 to 1789 hardly
exist.'^ Political and social historians of class struggles between 'lords and
peasants' in the two countries have, however, concentrated upon the relative
powers of landowners to determine conditions for the use of cultivable land
and to alter rents as well as the scale and layout of farms on their estates.'*
Their work suggests that attempts by seigneurs to curtail the customary
rights of peasant families to use arable, pasture, common, and forest land
seem to have been more successftilly resisted in France than in other
European kingdoms.'' This may not be because the British were more
docile but because the early successes of the French peasantry in their
struggle to achieve quasi-proprietorial rights over land, owed something to
the advantages they derived from long periods of internecine strife among
the French nobility. It could also be due to the related failiure of that
economically weakened aristocracy to resist monarchical claims to levy direct
taxes on 'their' lands farmed by 'their' peasants.'°° As it evolved royal
taxation gave French kings a stake in the long-term viabihty of farmers
engaged in the production and sale of food and agriculttural raw materials.
Anxious to preserve their tax base against rival 'noble or bourgeois predators',
French monarchs protected the rights of peasants more consistently and
effectively than the Lancastrian, Yorkist, Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian
** Thompson, 'Grid of inheritance'; Beckett, 'Pattern of landownership'; Bloch, Seigneurie française;
Meuvret, La production des céréales, pp. 71-82.
^ SUcher van Bath, Agrarian history of Western Europe, is thin on tenurial frameworks. North and
Thomas, Rise of the western world, contains a chapter on 'Property rights in land and man' which is
entirely theoretical. Levi, 'Transformation of agrarian institutions', sets up the taxonomy but contains
almost no history. Kieman, 'Private property in history', represents the kind of research that needs to
be undertaken.
'« Moore, Social origins of dictatorship; Aston, ed.. Landlords; Dyer, Lords and peasants; Holton,
Transition. Bloch's analysis of agrarian laws and institutions has not yet inspired a research programme
in comparative legal histories of tenure. See Bloch, Seigneuxiefrançaiseand idem. Feudal society. See
also Chirot, 'Social and historical landscape'.
" Tilly, Contentious French; Brenner, 'Agrarian roots'. The most historically specific analysis of these
struggles through time is Bois, Crins of feudalism. See also Le Roy Ladurie and Morineau, 'Les masses
profondes'.
"» Martin, Feudalism; Bush, 'Tenant right'.
© Economie Hiaoiy Society 1996
236
regimes of England.'°' Indeed, before the Glorious Revolution English
aristocrats and gentry resisted the attempts by their sovereigns to raise the
share of agricultural output appropriated in the farm of direct taxes for
purposes of royal government.*"^ During the Reformation they extended
their estates by purchasing lands expropriated from the church at knockdown prices.'"^ Over time, and taking advantage of the crown's pressing
needs for cash, they also encroached steadily on the royal demesne or crown
estates.'"^ Again in contrast to France their powers to bring land (especially
common and waste land with indeterminate title) under their ownership
and control and to alter the layout or conditions for access to farms on their
estates seem stronger.
English historians have recognized, however, that the balance of power
between the peasantry on the one side and the aristocracy and gentry on
the other changed through time. For example, during the long sixteenth
century Tudor and Stuart legislation and the royal courts protected the
customary rights of copyholders and leaseholders. Tawney's perception that
this period witnessed fundamental shifts in the distribution of land ownership
and the size of farms has now been qualified.'"' Nevertheless, examples of
engrossing landlords, tenant eviction, shifts of tillage to pasture, and the
continued rise of a virtually landless agrarian proletariat available for work
on larger capitalist farms are still strongly represented in recently published
local and regional histories of the period.*"^ Enclosure, as well as the
contingent shifts to larger farms, to pastoral agriculture, and to less secure
forms of tenure may have been checked but not reversed. After all, Tudor
policies to deal with the persistent problem of landless families by interfering
with customary property rights were recognized to have failed when
Elizabeth's ministers substituted a national system of poor relief for the
preservation of a rural economy dominated by family farms.'"''
With the institution of a system of poor relief locally financed by those
with access to land, preconditions for good order in the countryside had
been established which then allowed for more fundamental shifts in the
reorganization and reallocation of the country's farmland. At the beginning
of the seventeenth century although the majority of farms required almost
no recourse to hired labour, the families they sustained occupied a mere
third of the cultivated area. Capitalist enterprises, almost totally dependent
on hired labour, occupied another third. Holdings between these two
extremes employing a combination of hired and family labour cultivated the
rest of the nation's farmland.'"* At that juncture something like 45 per cent
of all farmland had already been removed from the open fields, much of it
'<" Bonney, King's debts; idem. Economic systems; idem, 'State and its revenues'; Root, Peasants.
•»^ O'Brien and Htmt, 'England, 1485-1815'.
'"^ Youings, Dissolution of the monasteries; Scarisbrick, Henry VIH; Jordan, Edward VI; Batho,
'Landlords in England'.
"» Wolffe, Royal demesne; Hoyle, Estaus of the English crown.
'<" Thirsk, Rural econonty; Outhwaite, 'Progress and backwardness'; PaUiser, 'Tawney's century'.
" " Spufford, Contrasting communities; Hoskins, The midland peasant; Martin, Feudalism.
'"' Clay, Economic expansioi, ; Hoyle, 'Tenure'.
">« Allen, Enclosure.
© Hcommu Htslm Society li)i)6
237
before and during the first wave of enclosure between 1450 and 1525.'°'
Thereafter the pace of enclosure slowed, partly because incentives to shift
agrarian resources to the production of animal produce diminished, and
partly t)ecause the state provided greater security of tenure for peasant
families holding land under beneficial leases and varieties of copyhold
agreements with manorial lands and other proprietors.""
Between 1660 and 1815 agrarian reorganization accelerated again. Land
ownership became more concentrated. Parliamentary enclosure virtually
extinguished customary rights to common and waste land. Yet large numbers
of small scale peasant farmers certainly survived the final waves of enclosure
over the eighteenth century."* According to Allen's data for the south
midlands, about one-third of all farms still remained under 60 acres in size
around 1800; but that ratio compares with 62 per cent two centuries earlier.
In terms of land (and by implication output and capacity to sustain labour)
the significance of peasant farms had surely diminished sharply. In the early
seventeenth century they had occupied nearly one-third of the cultivated
area. By 1800 peasant families managed only 8 per cent of all farmland.
Meanwhile, capitalist farms of 100 acres and above, representing only
14 per cent of all farms in the 1600s but 52 per cent two centuries later,
had multiplied and controlled two-thirds of the cultivated acreage in the
early nineteenth centiuy."^
Over the very long run from 1450 to 1850 enclosure facilitated the
reorganization of Britain's tenurial system into a system of larger scale farms
employing hired labour. During the first wave (c. 1450 to 1525) peasants
lost land and jobs through eviction."' Thereafter, enclosed villages (particularly those where the ownership of land became dominated by cartels of
proprietors) remained hostile to the settlement of families on sniall plots of
land with rights to poor relief payable from local rates."'*
British peasants survived longest in open field villages as freeholders or
as copyholders with inherited rights to tenure on payment of fixed entry
fines to their manorial lords."' Most peasants never enjoyed full or quasiproprietorial rights either as freeholders or as copyholders by inheritance.
British landowners retained strong legal rights to renegotiate the terms for
access to land which they used to enlarge their estates decade after decade
in the post-Restoration period."^ For example, copyholders and beneficial
lessees could be squeezed out by landowners determined to raise entry fines
and rents or to reassert latent property rights over common and waste land.
Peasants with security of tenure could be bought out by larger landowners
with improved access to mortgage finance and/or from revenues derived
'«' Wordie, 'EngUsh enclosure'; Blanchard, 'Population, enclosure'.
•"> Thirsk, 'Enclosing and engrossing'; Hoyle, 'Tenure'.
' " Neeson, Commoners, common right; Turner, Enclosures in Britain.
' " Allen, Enclosure.
>" Beresford, Lost vOlages; Blanchard, 'Population enclosure'.
"-• Yelling, Common field; Holdemess, 'Open and closed parishes'.
" ' Neeson, Commoners, common right.
"« Chambers and Mingay, Agricultural revolution; Bush, English aristocracy; Beckett, Arùtocra<y in
England.
© Ecoiwmc Himr)
Socitty 1996
238
from diversifying their portfolios of wealth into urban housing, mineral
rights, or commercial and industrial assets.''•'
Their growing incentives to reorganize their estates have now become
clearer. After 1660 (and with more certainty after the Glorious Revolution)
royal and arbitrary interference with property rights in the countryside and
the imposition of enhanced burdens of direct taxation upon income and
wealth disappeared.^'^ During the industrial revolution landownership
continued to confer status, but also developed into a passport for the exercise
of political and economic patronage on behalf of a rapidly expanding and
increasingly powerful imperial state."' Above all, the ownership of land
provided the kingdom's aristocrats, gentry, and bourgeois proprietors with
opportunities to extract ever increasing amounts of real rent per acre from
the reorganization of their landed estates into larger scale consolidated farm
units. Such opportimities developed partly because such farms raised total
returns per acre cultivated, but emerged basically from the enlargement of
estates and their redesigned layout into larger holdings which saved both
labour and capital inputs per acre cultivated.'^" Larger farms did not (as
Arthur Young and other proponents of enclosure claimed) maximize grain
yields, or the rate of growth of output, or even represent the preconditions
required to meet the demands for foodstuffs and raw materials which
increased when population growth and urbanization accelerated over the
course of the industrial revolution.'^' As Allen has now demonstrated, the
impetus to reorganize English agriculture after the Restoration developed
apace because larger landowners (who benefited most from change) had
already carried enclosure, consolidation into larger farms, and the shift to
tenancies at will a long way forward. They met little real resistance from
smallholders, squatters, or others adversely affected. After the civil war the
gentry and aristocracy suffered no more from the interposition of royal
authority between lords and peasants.'^^ On the contrary, England's
parliaments of landowners facilitated enclosure, extinguished customary
rights to common and waste land, and cheapened the process of agrarian
reorganization which provided them with higher rents and supplied capitalist
farmers with an elastic and cheap supply of hired labour.'^'
Operating within a different and more rigid framework of property rights
(as well as a totally different system of social-ciun-political secvurity), the
incentives for French landowners to reconstruct their estates, to alter
conditions of tenure, and even to add common land to their domains look
altogether weaker. Whenever they needed extra income they could activate
the collection of seigneurial dues—an option not open to English landlords.'•^'*
" ' Wordie, Estate management; Roebuck, Yorkshire baronets; Hainsworth, Stewards, lords and people.
"« Beckett, Aristocracy in England.
"" O'Brien, 'Modern conceptions'.
'^^ Allen, Enclosure; an excellent case study is Beastall, A north country estau.
'^' O'Brien, 'Agriculture'; idem, 'Quelle a été exactement la contribution', reviews the secondary
literature on the role of great estates and larger landowners during the industrial revolution.
•" Allen, Enclosure; Wordie, Estate management; Clay, 'Leasehold'.
'^' Martin, Feudalism; Neeson, Commoners, common right; O'Brien, 'Central government and the
lomy'.
'" O'Brien and Heath, 'EngUsh and French landowners'.
239
Since a higher proportion of the agricultural siuplus in the form of direct
taxes went into the coffers of the king, they could recoup by garnering
royal favours at court, by purchasing sinecured offices from the crown, or
by become functionaries of a state better fimded than English monarchs for
long stretches of time before 1688 to dispense patronage and employment. ^^^
Prudentially, they remained reluctant to push the indigent rural underclass
over the edge to rebellion.
At this point in the argument it is also important to recognize the
symbiotic nature and the circular arguments that attend the analysis of
structural change. For long stretches of history urban demand for food and
raw materials increased more rapidly in England. That pressure raised farm
gate prices and created a climate of incentives for the reorganization of
agriculture that operated to the detriment of England's peasantry. ^^^ Markets
also emerged in France (particularly northern France) but in England the
earlier and easier release of food, raw materials, labour, and investible funds
from agriculture fed back and generated a greater momentiun for sustained
institutional reform. At the same time jobs available in London and other
cities attracted smaller peasants at the bottom of the tentirial ladder towards
towns, and reduced resistance to enclosure and consolidation among the
most vulnerable groups of the rural workforce.'^^
When the growth of the British population accelerated in the eighteenth
century, a distribution of property rights, a tenurial system, way of farming
the land, and system of poor relief had already evolved that then imderpinned
and withstood pressures and incentives to shift to a more labour intensive
spectrum of techniques or back to peasant farming. Between 1750 and 1914
the English population grew at two to three times the French natural rate
of increase; but that demographic upsurge moderated upward pressure on
agricultural wage rates in an economy already undergoing industrialization.
Meanwhile, agrarian development moved towards techniques of cultivation
which focused more on the use of animals and were increasingly landintensive because in British geographical conditions such techniques continued
to be efficient. Indeed, with the diffusion of larger scale farms after 1660
and the tendency of capitalist fanners to use less labour per unit of output,
the British way of fanning became steadily more profitable.'^^ British
fanners experienced less difficulty than the French peasantry in generating
or borrowing the funds required to invest in new courses, animals, and
machinery. Despite migration from agricultvu-e and unlike their counterparts
(the capitalist fiarmers of France) they did not encounter very serious
problems related to inelastic labour supplies. In any case seasonal inelasticities
in labour supplies required to harvest âin had long been less serious for
the more pastoral agriculture of Britain. Pools of underemployed farm
' " Chaunu, 'L'état'. Chaussinand-Nogaret, French nobüity; O'Brien and Heath, 'EngUsh and French
landowners'; Brenner, 'Agrarian roots'; Root, Peasants.
'^* Crafts, 'Parliamentary enclosure'.
'^'Grantham, 'Agricultural supply'; Barker, 'London and the industrial revolution'; Beier and
Findlay, eds., London 1500-1700; Schofield, 'British population change'; Corfield, Impact of English
toums.
"^ Allen, Enclosure.
© Ecofumk Hismy Sociee> 1996
240
labour available for hire in British villages were not seriously depleted
through absorption into an alternative economy of peasant farms. On the
contrary they stayed where they were for generations, and well into the
nineteenth century, and provided seasonal labour at relatively low wages.'^'
That supply (replenished with migrants from the Celtic fringe) reminded
those with regular employment that they could be replaced. For farmers
this situation brought obedience, deference, and possibilities for extracting
optimal work loads.'^^ A more elastic supply of labour at the going wage,
a new and harsher poor law, and the imcertainties of unskilled urban
employment provided Hanoverian and Victorian farmers with a workforce
more pliable and harder working than the labourers of rural France.
Throughout the industrial revolution the British teniuial system maintained
its traditional advantages for the promotion of structural change. Patience
is needed in the restoration, maintenance, and augmentation of soil fecundity
through the nitrogen cycle to realize the long-term gains of higher returns
per hectare. Aristocratic landowners with their more distant time horizons,
positional advantages, and concepts of lineage, seem less inclined than
peasants to maximize short-term profits by depleting the fecundity of
farmland imder their control.''* Time preference for returns is to some
extent a function of behaviour linked to structure. Britain's larger landowners
and their tenants not only appear to have been more prone to take a longer
view, they could afford to wait a few seasons for increased yields. Larger
units of ownership encouraged the sharing of risks between gentry and their
tenants. Great estates acted as a diffusion network for improved techniques
of cultivation and generated investible surpluses for capital formation not
only in agriculture but in networks of commimication which supported
trade between towns and villages. British tenants developed into a more
professional body of farmers than their French coimterparts. They allied
capital with expertise. Rather than dissipating profits in land transactions
like peasants in France, they reinvested their savings in animals and working
capital.*'^
In France the peasant sector continued to harbour labour and to constrain
advance towards an animal intensive agrarian system. Many farmers
experienced greater difficulties in generating the investible surpluses required
for the shift to new rotations, for soil amelioration, and for investment in
buildings and equipment needed for mixed husbandry and new courses.*''
Few peasants could afford to take the longer view. They invested at lower
rates in urban facilities and transport required to promote trade and
specialization within agriculture and between agriculture and industry. The
small-scale family farm system reduced the marginal product of labour
below what it might have been either in industry or on larger farms fully
'^' Jones, 'Agricultural labour market'; Snell, Anruils.
" " Clark, 'Productivity growth'; Snell, 'Deferential bitterness'; Bush, Social orders.
'" Offer, 'Farm tenure'; Wordie, Estate management; Beckett, Agricultural revolution; idem. Aristocracy:
Hainsworth, Stewards.
' " Atak, 'Tenants'; Wordie, Estau management.
" ' Agulhon et al., 'Apogée et crise de la civilisation paysanne'; Agulhon, La république au village.
24I
capitalized with animal power, heavy implements, and other complementary
inputs."'*
Peasant patrimony also diffused property income in France and exerted
some upward pressure on wage rates for hired labour in both the agrarian
and industrial sectors. The tendency to equalize the distribution of wealth
and to narrow differentials between wages and profits depressed the growth
of savings. Even during the era when banks and other institutions for the
allocation of investible funds developed, the savings of the French peasantry
proved difficult to collect. Their own investment horizons hardly included
the purchase of shares in canals, railways, and the rest of the infrastructure
required to commercialize agriculture, let alone contribute to capital formation
in urban housing and industry.*^' By retaining families on the land the
peasant sector encouraged industry to disperse into the countryside to seek
cheaper supplies of labour."^ Yet with under-utilized labour time at their
disposal for the domestic production of manufactured goods, peasants and
their families formed a less expansive and hospitable market for manufactures
than the masses of British wage earners who had migrated and committed
themselves to work in towns and cities within the realm and its expanding
empire overseas.
IV
Comparative histories of economic development are not really reducible
to agrarian fundamentals or preconditions. Nevertheless, the decision to
survey the long-term geographical and institutional constraints upon structural
change provides us with a coherent and consistent narrative ¿lat may turn
out to be as persuasive as traditional discourses upon the entrepreneurial,
technological, and political failures behind the slower industrialization of
France. Going back to the land is also, moreover, an attempt to historicize
and contextualize those hegemonic models of Smithian growth in which the
French (or that amoiphous entity French culture) somehow failed to embrace
competitive factor and commodity markets as enthusiastically as their more
enterprising neighbours.
At the conclusion of a speculative survey that begins and ends with the
evolution of traditional agricultures over centuries of time, I could not,
however, fail to be equally aware of alternative interpretations which present
British and French farmers allocating resources and British and French
agrarian institutions as evolving in response to 'exogenous' incentives
emanating from towns, merchants, industries, trade, and empires.''^ Indeed,
"" Hohenberg, 'Change in rural France'; Heywood, 'Peasantry'.
' « Lescure, Les banques, l'état et U marché; Uvy-Leboyer and Lescure; 'France'; Alliline, Banquiers
et battiseurs; Gueslin, Les origins du aédit agricoU; Lévy-Leboyer, 'Capital investment'.
"* Nye, 'Firm size'; Sicsic, 'EstabUshment size'; idem, 'City-farm wage gaps'; Lévy-Leboyer and
Bourguignon, French economy.
"'' Indeed my conversations with George Grantham, who applies neo-classical and new institutional
methodologies with real effect to the study of French economic history, have made me more acutely
aware of an alternative meta-narrative. I am very grateful for his comments on this article and for the
opportunity to read his 'Cliometrics in France: revolution or revolution manquee}' (unpub. paper, McGill
Univ., 1994).
© Econome Hismy Society 1996
242
I have more than once observed that the economic circxmistances for the
reorganization of tenure and for the consolidation of farms seemed from
cycle to cycle altogether more propitious in Britain, particularly between
1660 and 1815.
Economic historians who have invested intellectual capital in the study
of particular periods and places will not be convinced by structuralist and
longue durée modes of analysis because in their models and historical
representations markets not only work but work pretty quickly. The 'pull'
of markets emerges as all powerful even when it comes to the conquest of
nature or the dissolution of traditional property rights.'^^ As economists
they will be reluctant to accord weight to the forces of law and politics or
to the constraints of geography and natural endowments. Their educated
predilections will attract them to conjimctures, to shorter-run modes of
analysis for which statistics happen to be available and where testing might
be used with greater advantage simply to demonstrate market forces at
work. For historians there would seem, however, to be no scientific way of
choosing between two equally valid modes of historical reconstruction. This
article prefers to dwell, with Bloch, upon essential contrasts between two
agrarian economies which on one side of the Channel promoted, and on the
other restrained, the very long transition to urban industrial societies.'''
After all, even when markets are working it is also necessary to account for
lags and to deal with variations in elasticities of supply over time and across
countries. In travelling more slowing towards a more land and animal
intensive agriculture, structural change in France seems to have been
constrained by its natural endowments and by a political and legal heritage
that came into place in the eleventh and twelfüi centuries. Convergence
towards the English path could only be slow and difficult.
In a concluding paragraph might it be more than merely fanciful to reflect
that in Britain possibilities for a similar evolution of legal and customary
institutions for the defence of access to land might have been undermined
and (for the peasantry) pushed in a less favourable direction by Norman
invaders from France.''*" Perhaps economists will continue to insist there
are no lo-t^gue durée stories to tell. Then they must be challenged to explain
how, when, and why the different agrarian economies and regions of Europe
arrived at a plateau of possibilities whence rapid industrial and tirban growth
could proceed without Malthusian crises or agrarian and institutional
constrictions on the pace of structural change. At the present it is, to repeat
a rhetorical point, no longer clear that Britain's earlier industrial revolution
can be represented by even the most panglossian of its historians as the
best of all possible paths to the twentieth century!
Institute of Historical Research, University of London
"* These assumptions have been well criticized by Field, 'Neo-classical institutional economics' and
Basu et al., ' G r o w i and decay'.
' " Bloch, Seigneurie française; for Braudel on very long run evolution, see Stoianovich, French
historical method.
"^ I base these amateurish speculations on Clarke, English nobility; Fleming, Kings and lords; Bois,
Transformation of the year me thousand; Hudson, 'Anglo-Norman law'.
243
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