Abstract
There exists a widespread belief that England’s economic achievements were based on its spectacular progress in agriculture, in which primitive peasant cultivation was replaced by far the economically more successful large-scale cultivation by farmers. History, however, has a different tale to tell. Agriculture in England did not achieve any particular efficiency before the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century. No particular progress in agricultural techniques was observed before the eighteenth century, during which the entire English peasantry was uprooted to make way for ‘farmers’, employing wage labour.
Introduction
Political philosophy informs political praxis whose purpose is to change society in a direction indicated by such philosophy. This direction in turn is derived from an analysis of the pre-existing society, in which, at least in modern times, economics plays a prominent role. Economics, political philosophy and political praxis are inextricably linked and constitute an integrated triad. In fact, economics as a discipline emerged precisely because of this link, which forced many political philosophers, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, to analyse the economy as a means of understanding society for advocating particular forms of political praxis.
The essence of liberalism as a political philosophy is the belief that human freedom is achievable within capitalism not necessarily capitalism as it actually exists at a given time, but capitalism as it can be shaped through appropriate reforms undertaken by a democratic state that can respond to popular aspirations and popular pressures. The essence of liberalism, in short, is the belief that capitalism is a malleable system that can be shaped to conform to social demands.
As against this, Marxism holds that capitalism is a self-driven (or spontaneous) system governed by certain immanent tendencies, where the individual economic agents are themselves coerced by competition to act in specific ways that are not of their own volition and that the state itself is governed by this spontaneity of capitalism and cannot intervene as it may wish to. In case the state does intervene to reform the system, then the system becomes dysfunctional, which places a choice before the state either to go in for further reform to overcome this dysfunctionality or to go back on the reform originally undertaken. The former course would recursively lead to transcending capitalism, but the latter course prevails because one of the immanent tendencies of capitalism, viz., centralisation of capital, creates larger and larger blocs of capital. This tendency cannot be prevented, and it invariably tilts the balance in favour of rolling back reforms.
Capitalism, facing an existential crisis in the post-Second World War conjuncture, had been forced to essay a set of reforms that created the impression that it had changed from a predatory system to a welfare-augmenting one, but these reforms have been rolled back in varying degrees in the neo-liberal period that has followed, which only lends further credence to this Marxist perception of capitalism.
We will not, however, go into this issue here. The contrast between malleability and spontaneity corresponds to another contrast between the Liberal and Marxist perspectives on capitalism: the former sees capitalism as a voluntary coming together of economic agents to constitute the system, while the latter sees coercion of economic agents not just as characteristic of capitalism in its quotidian functioning but also as underlying its origin. In particular, the emergence of wage labour is seen by the former as arising from the fact that the class of wage labourers became better off compared to their original state as petty producers, while the Marxist perspective sees the emergence of wage labourers as the result of a process of primitive accumulation of capital that was based on a sheer exercise of coercion. Primitive accumulation, though based on such coercion, was undertaken not necessarily out of any vile intention on the part of the dispossessors but because competition on the market engendered and precipitated it; that is, the coercers themselves in a sense were coerced.
The Liberal perspective on the origin of capitalism must necessarily imply that some improvements occurred in the methods of production that were only available to the large proto-capitalist commodity producers and could not be accessed by small producers because of which the latter preferred to become wage labourers to the former; or that these methods could only be implemented through a pooling of resources by large and small producers, in which the latter had to carry the bulk of the burden of manual labour. In either case, the formation of wage labour according to the Liberal perception, whether this fact is acknowledged or even recognised by Liberal writers or not, must necessarily be conditional upon, and hence accompanied by, some technical progress. And this, since we are here concerned with the origin of capitalism, must have occurred in the agricultural sector.
In the present article, we discuss whether such a voluntarist view of the genesis of capitalism is borne out by European economic history.
An Assessment of Indirect Evidence
There is, to begin with, a problem here. Wage labour of some kind had existed long before capitalism made its appearance. We are not talking therefore, strictly speaking, of the origin of wage labour, such as what John Locke or Adam Smith was writing about. The confrontation of their theories with historical data is not a simple matter for this reason. We can, however, leave aside issues of the origin of wage labour and still ask the question: is there any historical evidence that exists to support the view that innovations in production practices in agriculture were responsible for a voluntary transition on the part of many independent producers to the status of wage labourers?
Any story about a voluntary transition from pre-wage labour to a wage-labour-based society, or for a voluntary transition towards greater use of wage labour, requires for its validity an increase in land productivity. The question being discussed can therefore be alternatively stated as: what historical evidence has there been of an increase in land productivity?
One can answer this question in two ways: in an indirect manner (since direct evidence is hard to come by) and in a direct manner wherever possible. The indirect manner consists of this: had wage employment increased because independent petty producers preferred to become wage labourers, despite not undergoing any process of destitution and only because of the attractive wages they expected to get as labourers, then we would have found wage employment to have increased alongside the real wage rate. When the real wage rate increased, then according to this hypothesis, it would have been more attractive for petty producers to turn into wage labourers, in which case there would have been an increase in wage employment. Likewise, when the real wage rate went down, then it would be less attractive for independent producers to take up wage employment, in which case wage employment would have shrunk if not absolutely then at least relatively.
Put differently, if the taking up of wage employment is a voluntary decision with no coercive antecedents, then the magnitude of such employment would be expected to vary directly with the level of the real wage rate. What we do for testing this theory, therefore, is to examine whether the real wage rate and the magnitude of wage employment moved up together. This is the indirect way of testing. The direct way of testing is by looking at whatever evidence we can find on land productivity. Our focus in what follows will be on Britain, though developments on the continent were generally in sync with what was happening in Britain.
What we find from the history of Britain and of Western Europe in general, however, is just the opposite of this; that is, we find that periods when the real wage rate went up were periods when there was a (relative) contraction in wage employment, while periods when the real wage rate went down were periods when there was an expansion (in relative terms) in wage employment. This is not very surprising, for it amounts to saying that in very long booms (we are talking here of booms and slumps that are far longer than even the Kondratieff cycles whose length is between 40 and 60 years), the real wage rate goes down, while in very long slumps the real wage rate goes up.
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially the period between 1150 and 1300, constituted a period of boom in Western European agriculture, when not only was there a rapid rate of population growth but also a rapid expansion in the supply of money. Whether the boom was stimulated by these factors, as some historians have suggested, or by something else, is not a matter for discussion here; the main fact is that the boom was widespread across Western Europe. Cereal prices rose rapidly, much more rapidly than money wages. The rise in population led to an expansion in arable area, a shift of the margin of cultivation to less and less fertile land, and also a subdivision of holdings resulting in a fall in average farm size. In fact, it was not possible to support a family on the small farms, which meant that many small farmers supplemented their incomes by working as agricultural labourers as well. There was thus a rise in output and employment over this period, with wage employment increasing relative to the total, which simultaneously however witnessed a reduction in the real wages (for which we take money wages divided by wheat prices as a proxy). Hence, the extent of wage employment was negatively correlated with the level of real wages. 2
By contrast, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially the years between 1300 and 1450, formed a period of prolonged slump. The Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century was by no means the main cause of this contraction, which had begun even earlier. There was an absolute decline in the population of Europe, from 73 million in 1300 to 60 million in 1450, according to one estimate. But this hides a sharp fall because of the Black Death till the middle of the fourteenth century, followed by some recovery, especially in the fifteenth century. At the same time, there was a reduction in the net availability of precious metals in Europe, which characterised this long Depression.
We obviously do not have country-wide data for the movement of real wages, but there are records of individual farms from which we can get a picture of what was happening to real wages. The wheat wages (i.e., the money wage divided by the wheat price) on the estate of the Bishop of Winchester (England) for the years 1320–479, taking two-decade averages, were as follows:
We have taken 1320 as our starting point rather than 1300 because the early years of the century were marked by famines in 1315 and 1316 when wheat prices were exceptionally high; this would overstate the subsequent decline in wheat prices and hence the rise in real wages, giving exaggerated support to our argument. Starting with 1320 avoids this exaggeration.
The real wage trends elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, were also similar. The real wages, in short, rose notably when there was a long recession, just as they had gone down quite sharply when there had been a prolonged period of boom.
The rise in real wages was not confined only to the agricultural sector. Industrial prices relative to agricultural prices were higher almost throughout this period compared to 1300, reaching in England the ratio that prevailed in 1300 only towards the middle of the sixteenth century. Since industrial wages more or less moved in tandem with industrial prices, these wages too, deflated by agricultural prices, which figured prominently in the cost of living, went up during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It follows that the real wages in the industrial sector too must have gone up noticeably over this long period of recession.
The rise in real wages was accompanied by a decline in the total cultivated area, with many farms remaining fallow because of the fall in farm prices.
Reclamation and polder-making had come to a stop… The cultivated area shrank in almost all the countries of Europe; in many parts, farms, and even whole villages, were abandoned. In England these are known as ‘lost villages’, in Germany as ‘Wustungen’. The same phenomenon was seen in France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Alpine Regions and Hungary. (Slicher van Bath 1963, 142)
This, in turn, must have meant an increase in the extent of unemployment, especially a decline in wage employment. The period of rise in real wages in other words could hardly have been one when peasants abandoned their own lands to work for an employer, since the prospects of finding employment as a wage labourer would have been particularly bleak.
At the most, they could have supplemented their incomes from cultivation with income from supplementary work, but that is a reflection of the distress to which the peasantry had been reduced, not of ‘wage employment through assimilation’ which the Liberal perspective believes in. In fact, there would be a reversion from such supplementary work to greater engagement with agricultural work by cultivators when agricultural prices started rising again.
The period after the middle of the fifteenth century marked a revival from the Depression. Silver mining revived in Central Europe in 1460, and the population too started increasing. This revival was sustained by the subsequent inflow of gold from the New World conquered by Spain, which caused the sixteenth-century price inflation that lasted into the seventeenth century. Once again, we find a fall in real wages during the boom. The price indices for food and industrial products along with the index of money wages of builders (which more or less reflected the movement of money wages in general) for three European countries for the period 1475–620 were as follows (1451–75 = 100):
The point to note here is, again, the coexistence of lower real wages along with boom conditions entailing an increase in output and employment, especially wage employment. This runs completely contrary to the view that the boom, associated with technical progress, induces an increase in wage employment at the expense of independent petty production through a rise in real wages.
From around 1650, however, European agriculture once again moved into a slump that was to last a whole century. Slicher van Bath sums up the general picture as follows:
The depression was of a far milder sort than the serious economic decline of the late middle ages, but its chief symptoms were the same: falling cereal prices, relatively high real wages, little reclamation activity, conversion of arable to pasture, expansion of animal husbandry, cultivation of fodder crops and various industrial crops, in some parts a transition from agriculture to rural industry, few innovations in farming technique and little interest in questions of an agrarian nature. Even those most characteristic and distressing features of the late medieval depression, the lost villages, the empty farms and neglected fields, were not absent. (Slicher van Bath 1963, 206)
From the reference mentioned above to the growth of industry at the expense of agriculture, one may get the impression that higher industrial wages during the agricultural depression, while it reduced wage employment in agriculture, actually enlarged wage employment outside agriculture in industry, thereby, in a sense different from the way we have understood till now, validating the classical Liberal view of ‘wage employment through assimilation’. But this impression is erroneous: first, the decline of agricultural population was accompanied by either a decline in overall population (Germany and Spain) or an absolute stagnation in it (Western Europe as a whole), so that wage employment even outside agriculture would have increased little if at all; second, even the diversification towards industry that occurred was a forced diversification that came about because of agrarian distress: when the depression came to an end around the middle of the eighteenth century, a good deal of such rural industry did not survive.
Direct Evidence
Let us now move to whatever direct evidence exists. In fact, the increase in land productivity in Europe over the entire period of the Middle Ages appears to have been quite insubstantial. Sporadic data, again from individual farms, exist, which suggest that while there was a certain change in the pattern of crops cultivated, with barley and pulses, for instance, being produced to a greater extent in England than before, there was little evidence of any significant increase in productivity per acre either of particular crops or of food grains as a whole.
An increase in manure use was one reason for whatever increase occurred in land productivity in particular crops. This was also the main reason why the increase in productivity was more pronounced during the Depression period than in the Boom years. During the Depression period, since cereal prices were low, there was a tendency to move towards nurturing livestock, by shifting land use from cereals towards pastures. This had the effect of raising the input of manure on the residual land that still remained devoted to cereals, and hence the increase of cereal output per hectare on that land. But aside from such fluctuations and the incidental consequences of changes in cropping patterns, there does not seem to have been any noticeable changes in the technology of production.
For instance, on the land belonging to the Bishop of Winchester, the average amount of wheat given by a hectare of land over the period 1200–499 was 815 L. The maximum and minimum yields were 849 and 733 L, respectively, which are not too far apart. For individual periods, the average figures are as follows:
The average productivity for England as a whole in modern times (1895–914) was 2,817 L, which is more than three times what it was in the medieval period on this particular farm. But for an entire period spanning three centuries between 1200 and 1499, the increase in yield, even if we take the ratio of the maximum and the minimum as an approximation to it, was a mere 15.8%. The idea of yield-raising technological progress in medieval European agriculture, therefore, seems to be quite far-fetched. This direct evidence throws doubt on the view that the transition from independent petty production to wage employment could have occurred because of the increase in productivity per hectare, which supposedly made higher output and hence higher wages on such advanced farms possible; there was in fact very little increase in output per hectare during the period.
This conclusion remains unaffected even when we look at the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The period until the middle of the seventeenth century had witnessed, as we have seen, a significant ‘profit inflation’, during which real wages had fallen; even though the agricultural depression after 1650, marked by falling cereal prices, started raising real wages, the level of real wages in 1700, according to Keynes (1979, 141), citing ‘expert opinion’, was still about 50% lower than in 1500. Innovations in farming techniques during the depression were insignificant, which means that land productivity enhancements because of technological innovations were also insignificant; the observed increases in land productivity, which were associated with slumps, occurred because, apart from greater manure use on the remaining farms, in the less fertile farms cultivation tended to be abandoned owing to falling prices.
In booms, the opposite happened, with cultivation being extended to newer and less fertile areas, which could become viable because of the high agricultural prices. At any rate, there could hardly have been many prospects of attracting independent petty producers to become wage labourers through the lure of real wages being higher on wage-labour-based farms: the increase in land productivity being limited, the wage-labour-based farms could hardly have provided a higher wage rate than the incomes of independent petty producers. Indeed, increases in land productivity were hardly a significant factor till the end of the seventeenth century.
Evidence for the Eighteenth Century
What is more surprising, however, is that even for the eighteenth century, for which we have proper country-wide data for Britain, there is little evidence of any significant increase in land productivity. This is surprising because there is supposed to have been an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ in Britain preceding the Industrial Revolution, which, if the supposition was true, could have provided prima facie support to the idea of a voluntary transition to wage labour at least for that period, though not for the earlier one. However, the data from the period 1700–800 provides little support for any such idea of an Agricultural Revolution (Patnaik & Patnaik 2021).
Between 1701 and 1801, the total cereal output, in terms of volume, in Britain, increased by only 43%, according to Chambers and Mingay (1966). Since the population over the same period increased by 73%, according to the estimates of Lee and Schofield (1981), the per capita cereal output declined over the century as a whole. This per capita decline, which was almost 20% between 1701 and 1801, caused rapid food-price inflation towards the end of the eighteenth century and imposed a drastic squeeze on the living standards of the working class, which created a strong and persistent demand for the repeal of the Corn Laws that had stood in the way of cheap imports of corn from abroad. This became the most prominent political issue for almost half a century between the 1790s and the actual repeal of the Corn Laws in the teeth of bitter opposition from the landlords in 1846.
Even the value of agricultural output as a whole at constant prices in Britain, according to Cole (1981), went up by about 80% over the entire century, which meant, in view of the 73% increase in population, a very marginal increase, indeed a virtual stagnation, in per capita terms.
But, of course, our concern has been with productivity per acre and not with per capita output. Productivity per acre hardly increased over the century as a whole. Over the entire eighteenth century, we find, according to estimates by Turner, Beckett and Afton (2001), that the area under wheat in England and Wales together increased by about 25%, while gross output per acre went up only by about 11%. The overall increase in net output over the century as a whole was 37%, which means again an increase in net output per acre of a little over 10% over the entire century.
Obviously, if over the entire century there was just a little over 10% increase in output per acre of wheat, which was the most important food crop, then the question of there being any radical introduction of productivity-raising agricultural technology simply does not arise. Much the same can be said of non-foodgrain crops as well, namely that while the yield per acre of some of them may have been higher than of food grains, this yield did not go up much during the eighteenth century.
It can, of course, be argued that 10% represents the increase in land productivity over time, but it does not represent the cross-sectional difference in land productivity across farms, which could have been larger and hence provided an incentive to independent farmers to seek employment as labourers in high-land-productivity farms. But, if at all, these cross-sectional differences arose because of differences in technology (and not just land quality differences), then the period we are talking about is long enough for this technology to have got diffused across the entire land area, and hence the average land productivity to have asymptotically approached the highest level prevailing among farms at the beginning of the period. An observed 10% increase in land productivity over the eighteenth century therefore does not suggest significant technological differences across farms at the beginning of the century. Of course, if technological change occurred towards the end of the period, then the cross-sectional difference in land productivity towards the end of the period could still be quite high without being reflected in a general rise of land productivity. But that would still not negate the proposition that for much of the eighteenth century, there was little innovation that raised land productivity in Britain.
Even the marginal absolute increase in constant-price value of agricultural output in the eighteenth century that we mentioned earlier was because of a shift to higher-value crops on larger, capitalist farms that had already come into being through processes other than the voluntary transformation mentioned above, that is, through processes other than those that entailed that some petty producers voluntarily became agricultural labourers while others became their employers.
The point to note is that we have to be careful not to take the observed tendency towards capitalist farming as vindication ipso facto of the liberal perception of the process of the shift to capitalist farming.
It is true that by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, notable land productivity increases had indeed occurred in Britain compared to medieval times. The question would then arise: how do we square this with our argument about the stagnation in land productivity until the eighteenth century and even over much of the eighteenth century? This could partly, of course, be the result of the introduction of modern scientific agricultural methods during the nineteenth century; but this could also be because the British economy had by this time diversified substantially from its dependence on agriculture that had characterised it during the medieval period. This must have entailed moving cultivation away from less fertile marginal lands and concentrating it only on more fertile lands, a tendency that is likely to have been strengthened to a great extent after the repeal of the Corn Laws.
Britain’s sluggish agriculture during the eighteenth century, which necessitated the repeal of the Corn Laws, also resulted in substantial dependence upon the conquered colonies to meet its food-grain requirements. This had an added advantage for Britain since the imports from the colonies of conquest were in effect not paid for (Patnaik & Patnaik 2021): they were financed from the appropriation of economic surplus through the taxation mechanism, constituting the commodity form of the ‘drain’ of surplus that has been much discussed. So, Britain could avoid not just any serious inflation in food prices in the latter half of the nineteenth century but also any serious strains on its balance of payments.