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International Journal of the Commons
Vol. 7, no 1 February 2013, pp. 209–229
Publisher: Igitur publishing
URL:http://www.thecommonsjournal.org
URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-114412
Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
ISSN: 1875-0281
Tine De Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’. Reconsidering her
theoretical framework for explaining the emergence of
institutions for the collective management of resources
Daniel Robert Curtis
Research Institute for History and Culture, Utrecht University, Netherlands
d.r.curtis@uu.nl
Abstract: Tine De Moor has developed a bold and robust scholarly framework
for explaining the emergence of institutions for ‘corporate collective action’ in her
‘Silent Revolution’ article of 2008; the significance of which may serve to be the
foundation of a research agenda on the commons for years to come. However, as
revealed in this review piece, there are some fundamental flaws in the framework,
which need to be ironed out first. There remains a problem with causality – in
particular, no logical connection in the framework between the ‘conditions
necessary to make collective action possible’ and the ‘reasons to opt for collective
action’. In summary, this review suggests De Moor’s framework is an important
step forward for those researching the commons, though it needs to be modified
to become more receptive to the socio-political configurations that gave each pre-
industrial society its character.
Keywords: Commons, De Moor, Silent Revolution, socio-political structures
Acknowledgements: With thanks to Professor Dr. Tine De Moor for her
response and comments on past papers, and the International Journal of the
Commons referees for their insightful comments.
1. Introduction: pre-industrial responses to resources under
pressure
Some resources such as peat or coal are finite: they can be extracted to extinction.
Other resources are renewable but take a long time to be replenished, such as
trees. Resources can also be irrecoverably ruined, for example, in the polluting
of streams and rivers. That being so, pre-industrial societies reliant on these
210 Daniel Robert Curtis
resources for prosperity or mere subsistence had to manage them carefully.
The problem was, however, that resources often came under pressure of being
over-exploited, particularly in light of population pressure. To guard against
over-exploitation, many pre-industrial societies all across Western Europe
devised systems for the collective management of resources – often referred to
as ‘the commons’. These commons took two basic forms (although there were
numerous different subtle ways they could be arranged): they could represent
cultivated arable land farmed collectively (the common fields), or they could
represent a number of shared but rationed and regulated rights and obligations
over resources such as pastures, forests, wastes, and marshes (De Moor et al.
2002, 18–19). Even water could be collectively shared (Gunawardana 1971,
16).
The emergence of the commons in Western Europe cannot be explained by
merely highlighting increased pressure on limited resources, however. Although
upward demographic trends may have been a general trend across most of
Western Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the commons did
not appear everywhere here – far from it. Population pressure on resources may
have stimulated the formalisation of institutions necessary for collective action
in some areas, but other societies formulated alternative responses. Another
tactic was to increase the basic amount of resources. Some societies decided
to bring more land under productive use through reclamation. This included
assarting of woodlands and wastes or the draining of wetlands in order to create
new fields for arable or pastoral farming. Land was even ‘won’ back from the sea
using networks of dikes, ditches, and mills (Squatriti 2000). Another way was
to intensify production (essentially getting more out of the existing resources).
This could be achieved through more intensive forms of husbandry and larger
labour inputs, or it could be done through more intensive use of capital and
reinvestment to support technological innovations such as wells, mills, dikes,
and new ploughing or storage equipment (Boserup 1965; Campbell and Overton
1993, 95–99). Another tactic was to ease pressure on resources by simply
adapting production – establishing new ventures to save dwindling resources. In
medieval Holland, rural producers negated the effects of soil oxidisation caused
by peat cutting by turning towards proto-industries (van Zanden 1991, chp. 1;
2001; van Bavel 2003). In some cases the State could step in with protective
legislation, as what happened in seventeenth-century Japan in the context of
commercial pressures through a timber trade (Totman 1985, chp. 3.; 1998, chp.
3; Saito 2009).
Alternatively, resources could be protected and managed by instead focusing
on the population side (reducing the numbers of people). Pre-industrial societies
knew different methods of birth control (Biller 1982; Wolf and Engelen 2008). In
pre-industrial society, this could be achieved through simply deciding to marry
later, abstaining from sex, and extended breast feeding (Klemp and Weisdorf 2011,
7–13). Furthermore, immigration could be regulated and stopped (Wunder 1986, 46;
Endres 1989, 87; Cohn 2007, 468–473), and some places even resorted to
Tine De Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’ 211
infanticide (Kirch 1982). Of course, pre-industrial societies did not just stop at one
method of managing resources under pressure – they often used a combination of
methods; for example, in medieval Midland England population pressure between
the eleventh and thirteenth centuries induced reclamation of new arable – yet it
was cultivable land subject to common rights and which often became extensions
of the common field system (Oosthuizen 2006).
2. The emergence of collective resource management in
Western Europe: the De Moor explanatory framework
described
Thus, the reasons behind the emergence of collective resource management in
some parts of Western Europe in the pre-industrial period are not obvious. In a
recent article, however, Tine de Moor has attempted to get to the bottom of the
problem. Indeed, she has developed a bold scholarly framework for explaining
the emergence of institutions for ‘corporate collective action’ (2008). In fact, her
framework goes further than the simple traditional definition of ‘the commons’
offered above. Within the explanatory framework, she asserts that the emergence
of a number of different institutions such as common fields and pastures, guilds,
beguinages, and water boards, can be grouped together as bottom-up collective
institutions which all emerged around an important defining period identified as
the high Middle Ages and represented what she terms as a ‘Silent Revolution’ (De
Moor 2011).
De Moor’s model has three major facets, which taken together, can explain
why formalised commons appeared in Western Europe from roughly the high
Middle Ages onwards. First, there were the exogenous motors which pressurised
natural resources; identified as ‘population growth’ and ‘market development’.
De Moor takes care to emphasize that population pressure and commercialisation
were only outside stimulants for implementing collective institutions – the mere
presence of these motors just taken on their own would not necessarily have
been enough to encourage new bottom-up solutions such as the commons. That
being so, in a second phase she offers a set of reasons for why pre-industrial
societies may have opted for collective management of resources; identified as
‘risk avoidance and sharing’, ‘advantages of scale’, and ‘transaction costs’.1
These represent the incentives for employing collective action. Third and finally,
De Moor offers a number of clear conditions that needed to be met if collective
action was to happen; identified as a ‘tolerant state’, ‘space for non-kinship-
based relationships’, and the ‘legal recognition of alliances’. The outline of the
framework is reconstructed below (Figure 1).
The appearance of De Moor’s framework in a top international journal
highlights the importance of her work, and the significance of which may serve to
1 Curiously, ‘potential other advantages’ were listed but these are not elucidated upon.
212 Daniel Robert Curtis
be the foundation of a research agenda on the commons for years to come.2 The
intention of this short review paper, however, is to consider how convincing this
framework really is. This is achieved by focusing in more detail on just one of
De Moor’s identified ‘institutions for collective action’ – the common fields and
pastures.
3. Strengths and limitations of the De Moor explanatory
framework
The reasons why societies opt for the commons as a form of resource management
have been well discussed, both for the common fields and the imposition of
common rights over the wastes. Risk avoidance and sharing, advantages of scale,
2 In particular, see the European Research Council-funded project at http://www.collective-action.
info/_PRO_Main.
Reasons to opt for
collective action
Emergence of
institutions for
corporate collective
action
Tolerant state
Space for non-
kinship-based
relationships
Legal recognition
of alliances
Population growth
and resource
scarcity
Market
development
Risk avoidance
and sharing
Advantages
of scale Transaction costs Potential other
advantages
Conditions: What is
necessary to make
collective
action possible?
Motors: What
encouraged collective
action to develop in
Western Europe?
Figure 1: Motives, motors, and conditions for the emergence of institutions for corporate
collective action (taken from De Moor, ‘The Silent Revolution’, 209).
Tine De Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’ 213
and transaction costs (the reasons De Moor invoked) have commonly arisen in the
literature. The common fields allowed for a more egalitarian division of land as
every household’s landholding was divided up into small morsels and scattered
across the fields, while the community often lived in a concentrated village at the
heart of these fields (Hoffmann 1975).3 Often the strips were regularly distributed
in the fields (Meibeyer 1972). Not only did this make transport and labour costs
more equal, but it was also an exercise in risk-management as no single person
could monopolise the best soils; if one harvest failed, this was not disastrous
(McCloskey 1976; 1991; Dahlman 1980, 111–114; Fox 1984; Bailey 2010,
160). Furthermore, it allowed for collective regulation of the harvest and ensured
orderly grazing on the stubbles (Ault 1972, 27–40; Va r d i 1 9 9 3, 1424–1427). Local
people had the opportunity to band together into small groups to manage plough-
teams and oxen were sometimes collectively acquired (often too expensive for
one person) (Rösener 1985, 151). The common fields were often designed for
sustainable ecological management as well, for they frequently allowed one of the
fields (often one of three, but could be fewer or more) to spend time fallow, thus
not exhausting the nutrients of the soil (Pretty 1990; Campbell 1995). With regard
to common rights, this system helped balance population and resources by putting
restrictions on grazing, limiting the felling of trees for private gain (Sommé 1990),
and regulating water supplies and sources. Formal institutions such as forest courts
were developed in order to examine infringements made on the commons (Hayhoe
2002, 52; Schütte 2004). As a result of this adaptive strategy, societies were better
protected from the avaricious exploitation of resources by interest groups, which
if unchecked, could have brought ruin to whole communities. In that sense, De
Moor is right to highlight the importance of risk-sharing, advantages of scale, and
transaction costs, as tangible reasons why societies would want to employ the
commons.
Nonetheless, although there is much logic in De Moor’s framework, there are
some considerable shortcomings, in particular with the supposed conditions which
made collective action possible. This short review piece first of all takes issue with
the selection and rationale behind these conditions. The first problematic condition
is that of ‘tolerant states’. Tolerant states could encompass large geographical
areas in the pre-industrial world. Yet within an area falling under state dominion,
there could be a wide variety of societies pursuing very different methods of
resource management. The commons were not employed in every society that
fell under a particular tolerant state. For example, the colonising peasant farmers
of medieval Holland had almost unprecedented freedoms and autonomy granted
by the concessions offered by the Count of Holland or the Bishop of Utrecht (van
Bavel 2010) – yet these societies chose not to use the commons as a method of
resource exploitation. Indeed, these territorial lords did not even care about the
3 However, it must be acknowledged that there was a wide variety of arrangements in the communal
systems pertaining over medieval arable and pasture, not always conforming to a standard open-field
and concentrated village structure.
214 Daniel Robert Curtis
type of agricultural exploitation undertaken in their newly colonised territories –
they simply wanted a consistent flow of standard land rents (van der Linden
1956). The tolerance of the Count of Holland in the reclamation context led to
extreme levels of freedom and flexibility in Holland rural society, but this did not
convert to any move towards collective exploitation of resources. A number of
other problems with the choice of this condition have been identified, which run
counter to the historical evidence.
To take a first example, common management of resources existed from at least
the eleventh century (probably earlier) all the way up to the eighteenth century in
parts of Tuscany (Central Italy) which comprised the Florentine territorial state.
Indeed, the commons were highly prevalent and resilient in the mountainous
regions of northern and eastern Tuscany (Gualteri 1992, 60; Bicchierai 2007;
Abatantuono 2004, 75–76; Licciardello and Scharf 2007; Zagnoni 2007). Signorial
lords, ecclesiastical institutions, and village communities combined to regulate
activities in the dense, ancient woodlands. Do we think that (particularly the
late-medieval) Florentine State was tolerant towards the continual functioning of
common-property systems within their territorial state? The answer is of course, no.
Everywhere they could, they quashed existing peasant common rights, and wealthy
urban burghers by the late Middle Ages were encroaching into the common lands
and expropriating them from the rural producers (de la Roncière 1997; Balestracci
1999, 14–15; Malvolti 2003). The point is that the commons persisted in many parts
of the Florentine territories, despite the fact that the Florentine government and the
powerful mercantile and burgher interest groups who supported it, were not tolerant
of common lands – and in fact were entirely antagonistic towards it. Indeed, in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Florence did everything it could to act against the
remaining signorial strongholds and their village communities (Wal ey 19 88, 84–85;
Osheim 2004, 166). In this case then, the commons emerged, were crystallised,
and remained resilient in many parts of the Tuscany, despite the fact that the State
had economic and political ambitions which did not fit with collective management
of resources. More important for the emergence and success of the commons in
Tuscany was instead the fact that the Florentine State failed to penetrate those
areas characterised by common property systems, even though urban interests were
antithetical to the commons (Curtis 2012). It was the resilience of rural societies
rather than the objectives of higher overarching political powers that were more
important here – it did not matter whether the State was tolerant or repressive.
This was not just a Florentine phenomenon; it happened elsewhere in Tuscany,
for example in the contado of Siena (Isaacs 1979), but also further north in the
city-states of the Po Valley (Panjek 1981; Chiappa Mauri 1985, 129; Menant
1993). Urban governments of various city-states all across the Po Valley and
beyond were entirely antagonistic to the interests of rural communities which
wanted to preserve their valuable common rights (Comino 1992; Grillo 2001; Rao
2005, 2006). Indeed, the right to hunt and fish in the marshes clashed with wealthy
urban investors desire to reclaim more land and establish large commercialised
tenant farms with complex hydrological innovations. On these commercialised
Tine De Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’ 215
farms created through urban investment, see Sella (1987, 491); Dowd (1961, 148–
149, 154); De Angelis Cappabianca (1988); Chittolini (1978); Occhipinti (1989).
However, at the same time, some rural communities showed great resilience
against outsider intolerance of their persistent collective exploitation of resources.
One of the most famous cases is that of the commune of Nonantola, where
villagers from the high Middle Ages right into the early modern period were able
to defend and preserve their interest in the commons, in the face of firstly monastic
and then urban political pressures (Cremonini 1987; Debbia 1992; Alfani 2011;
Tagliapietra 2011). Particular rural societies were better placed to exploit and
continue to defend their commons, regardless of political intolerance from above.
Related examples can be found all across the Massif Central in Southern France
where village communities in the late eighteenth century still stood in defiance
and often appeared unaffected by the state’s revolutionary legislation calling for
dismantlement of the commons (Jones 1983; Vivier 1998, 164).
Rather than the emergence and longevity of the commons being highly
dependent on the whims of tolerant or intolerant states, rural communities
themselves determined the future of their resource-exploitation strategies – often
based around political and power alignments made at the local level. For example,
the communities of the Campine area of the South-Eastern Low Countries
successfully implemented the commons over the long term, benefitting from their
heterogeneity and demonstrating an even balance between all social groups –
which prevented the commons from being manipulated by dominant forces or
being dismantled altogether (De Keyzer 2012). An alignment of interests formed
a protective shield. This situation could be contrasted with areas further north in
the Low Countries such as in Overijssel, where the increased social and economic
disparaties at the local level between interest groups weakened the commons as
an institution, and led by the seventeenth century to malfunction and eventual
environmental degradation (Van Zanden 1999). The point put forward here then is
that rural societies themselves dictated their path towards the commons (or not) –
and certain societies were arranged in such a way that they could better stave off
attacks and negative impact on collectively managed resources.
The second condition is equally problematic. De Moor uses the hypothesis put
forward by Michael Mitterauer (2003) about the disappearance of family bonds
and the European Sonderweg to argue that the emergence of the commons was
linked to the amount of leeway available for the establishment of non-kinship-
based relationships. Part of the problem here is that it is difficult to quantify or even
formulate a reasonable definition of ‘space for non-kinship-based relationships’ – at
least not how De Moor uses it in her article. If on the extreme end of the spectrum,
this so-called ‘space for non-kin relationships’ refers to the establishment of the
European Marriage Pattern (EMP), which began in the Middle Ages in North-
Weste rn E ur op e ( De Moor and van Zanden 2010), this brings up some problems
when considered in conjunction with the commons. It is quite clear that the
commons of Western Europe were not confined to areas of North-West Europe, such
as England or the Low Countries. Furthermore how can we square the emphasis on
216 Daniel Robert Curtis
the ‘space for non-kinship-based relationships’ with historical evidence which has
shown that family structure and relations to former members of the common were
necessary in some places for inclusion in the common (Hoppenbrouwers 2002)?
Other problems still occur when incorporating this condition into the
framework for explaining the emergence of institutions for collective action.
Indeed, the commons also appeared in areas of Western Europe, which apparently
had less room for ‘non-kinship-based relationships’. For example, Southern Italy
and Spain fall outside the Hajnal line used to demarcate the areas of Europe which
employed all the characteristics of the late marriage pattern (1965). Yet it would
be entirely wrong to suggest that these areas of Europe (perhaps typified by closer
kinship networks) did not establish institutions for the collective management of
resources. In fact, in Apulia (Southern Italy), the Royal Customhouse of Naples
formalised the largest collectively-managed system of transhumant pasturing
between the mountains of the Abruzzo and the plains of the Tavoliere, in the whole
of Europe (Marino 1988; Nardella 1989)! Furthermore, this collectively-managed
system of transhumant pasturing did not just begin in the late Middle Ages after
formalisation, but had been exploited in some form since the Roman period (at
least) (Nicolet 1977, 107; Lomas 1993, 122–123). Of course, the Tavoliere offered
a very particular form of communal management of resources; combining local
negotiation between Apulian farmers and Abruzzese shepherds with top-down
management from the government in Naples. Perhaps De Moor’s framework
did not include this type of communal arrangement, but we simply do not know
because De Moor never mentions it, tending to focus on restricted areas of North-
Western Europe, her geographical area of expertise. In any case, there is evidence
for the collective management of land and resources in Sicily (Corrao 1988;
Genuardi 1911) and Apulia (Bulgarelli 2011; Cascella 1991). In Spain, the Mesta
was a large collective institution for grazing similar to the Royal Customhouse of
Naples (Pastor de Togneri 1974), but other strong systems of commons emerged
all over the Iberian Peninsula in Andalucía (Bernal Rodríguez 1997), Navarra
(Arizkun Cela 1985), in the Asturias (Barreiro Mallón 1997), and Aragon (Pascua
Echegaray 2011). Formalised commons also appeared east of the Hajnal line in
areas now known as Romania (Panaitescu 1964) and the mountain regions of the
Weste rn Ad ri at ic ( Panjek 2011), to name but two examples. Again then, De Moor
has invoked a necessary ‘condition’ for the emergence of the commons, which
when explored a little further, becomes quite problematic.
The problem with using these kinds of conditions in a framework for
explaining the emergence of the commons is that they are too macro and too vague.
Neither the ‘tolerant state’ nor the ‘space for non-kinship-based relationships’
are conditions which can be invoked at the micro-level – at the level needed to
understand the reasons why commons were employed in one society and in a
neighbouring society were not. A tolerant state and a non-kinship-based set of
social and economic relationships may have characterised, for example, large
parts of the Low Countries during the late-medieval and early modern periods.
This did not mean the commons were employed all over the Low Countries to
Tine De Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’ 217
manage resources, or to the same extent (for the overview see De Moor et al.
2002).
4. Critically amending the De Moor framework
Probably the greatest problem with De Moor’s framework, however, is that there
is absolutely no causal connection between her ‘conditions’ necessary to make
collective action possible and her ‘reasons’ to opt for collective action. In order
to create these causal connections, the framework needs to be modified to make
it more receptive to the local or regional conditions that gave each pre-industrial
society its character. The problem with the framework is that it is implicitly
accepted that ‘risk avoidance and sharing’, ‘advantages of scale’, and ‘(lower)
transaction costs’ are all things that every pre-industrial society aimed to achieve
or benefited from. This is a shaky assumption as explained in the passages below.
In fact, things like ‘risk avoidance and sharing’ were only beneficial for some
societies. Other societies were arranged in such a way that they did not care
for or were not interested in the sharing of risks – in effect making collective
management of resources less likely. The point being made here then is that the
macro-conditions that De Moor used (‘tolerant states’ and ‘non-kinship relations’ –
the choice of which has already been criticised in section three) should be replaced
by a number of more regionally-specific conditions; the arrangement of which
dictating whether or not the so-called ‘reasons to opt for collective action’ were
actually beneficial to a particular society.
Some societies were more interested in ‘risk avoidance and sharing’ than
others; indeed, more important for the emergence of the commons was not ‘risk
avoidance’ per se but rather the social distribution of risk, in turn driven by local
or regional constellations in property structure, access to and the arrangement of
markets, and the diversity of economic portfolios. Those societies which had a
large number of smallholding farmers or peasants would have been interested
in any kind of resource management which reduced their susceptibility to going
below the subsistence line. Indeed, if property was arranged in this way, these
kinds of rural people benefited most from the risk avoidance strategies associated
with, for example the common fields, because being smallholders, they were
most susceptible to poor harvests and environmental disasters which could wipe
them out. It is no coincidence that, for example in the Low Countries, the most
dominant common-property systems appeared in areas with high numbers of
small peasant farmers (see Stol 1991; Hoppenbrouwers 1993; van Zanden 1999;
Tukker 2010; De Moor 2011; Kos 2011; De Keyzer 2012). Similarly, some
societies were characterised by households engaged in wide and varied economic
portfolios (employing a range of economic activities) so as to negate the effects
of crisis in one sector. If the cultivation of grains failed, or the price of wool
declined sharply, they could fall back on fishing, bee-keeping, or the timber
trade, to name just a few examples (Hoffmann 1996). The risk-management ethos
connected with the commons would have fitted well with societies engaged in
218 Daniel Robert Curtis
this type of exploitation. Further, collective management of resources may have
interested those societies which had poor access to markets for commodities, or
at least could not fall back on the market to save them in times of crisis due to
taxes, tolls, and coercive signorial or urban monopolies stopping rural producers
searching for the best price. In that sense, it can be clearly seen that certain sorts
of constellations (in property structures, economic portfolios, arrangements of
commodity markets) were more influential in pushing societies towards more
collective management of resources.
‘Risk avoidance and sharing’ did not interest all societies though, and even if
it did, collective management of resources was not necessarily the obvious option.
For example, the smallholding farmers of medieval Holland were interested in
reducing the risk to their harvests – particularly in light of the difficult ecological
conditions they faced with poor drainage, the oxidisation of the soils, and
flooding (de Boer 1978, 222; van Dam 2001). The commons had almost no role
to play in the history of the Holland peatlands however. Instead, small farmers
managed risks through private property ownership and favourable jurisdictions
over the wastes. To reduce the risks of harvest failure and to equally distribute
the different qualities of soils, each farmer cultivated a long narrow strip instead
of the common fields – sometimes extending for kilometres in length (van der
Linden 1956, 160–182; 1982; Henderikx 1989). Other pre-industrial societies
around Lingnan and Guangdong in pre-industrial Southern China instead fell
back on both State-, city- and gentry-funded granaries as a way of lowering the
risks involved with unpredictable agriculture (Marks 1998, 229). In many parts
of Inland Flanders, smallholding farmers did not collectively exploit resources as
a way of limiting risk (although the commons did exist in certain places (see De
Moor 2009)), but instead embarked on a ‘commercial-survival’ policy of highly
labour intensive cultivation of tiny plots of cash crops to be sold in the large
and close-by urban markets – effectively a way of dealing with the problems of
extreme land fragmentation and population pressure (Thoen 1997, 2001; Thoen
and Vanhaute 1999).
Elsewhere, some societies were simply arranged in such a way that ‘risk
avoidance and sharing’ was a peripheral interest. For example, the large landlords
who came to dominate landownership in Coastal Flanders by the late Middle Ages
had little interest in sustainable management of resources or limiting risks – as
evidenced by the decreased proportion of income devoted to water management
structures. Large landlords who invested in new tracts of land here just accepted
that if their acquired land was suddenly submerged by water (rendering it
worthless), they could just reclaim new polders elsewhere (Soens 2011, 348–
350). Similar philosophies can be seen elsewhere. In the highlands of the lower
part of the Yangtze River (China), risk avoidance and sustainable management
of resources was not considered. Instead peasants decided it was more in their
interests to simply employ shifting cultivation methods using the ‘slash and burn’
technique (Osborne 1994). In the absence of clear or well-defined property rights
in the woodlands, migratory peasants known as ‘shack people’ simply cut down
Tine De Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’ 219
trees, intensively exploited their soil to ruination for short-term gain, and then
moved on to new plots. Not only did the so-called ‘shack people’ not care for the
sustainability of their own highland communities, but land reclamation and the
erosion of the hillsides also endangered farms on the plains below – particularly
in Hunan (Perdue 1987).
Furthermore, certain modes of exploitation and property structures did
not support the kinds of risk avoidance that would be taken from collective
management of resources. In those areas dominated by large landownership
and early moves towards indirect exploitation and tenant farming (for example
short-term leasehold), the risk-limitation benefits associated with the commons
would have been non-sensical. Indeed, those areas which made an early switch
to leasing often created a socially and economically polarised society which
simply did not support the commons – large landowners and commercially-
orientated farmers from the late Middle Ages onwards had no interest in
supporting risk-averse peasant modes of exploitation such as the commons
(van Bavel 1999, 2001; 274–278). Any small vestiges of common land were
quickly usurped (Koch and Maris 1949, 193–194), and poor agriculturalists
instead had to secure subsistence through wage labour on large farms instead.
That is not to say commercialised farms and common field systems could not
co-exist at all. Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries in England,
many commercially-orientated farmers operated alongside common fields and
pastures (Allen 1992; Overton 1996). But the point is that these larger tenant
or yeoman farmers were often antagonistic towards the common field system,
but it was outside of their power to dismantle highly entrenched and resilient
open field structures which had been persistent over a number of centuries
already (perhaps encroachments, but no complete dismantlement). It was not
until landownership became entirely polarised between large tenant or yeoman
farmers and a group of landless agricultural proletarians that the real enclosure
movement took off (Neeson 1996). Property structures and distribution were
vital to the success and direction of the commons.
Similar problems exist when considering other ‘reasons to opt for collective
action’, such as ‘advantages of scale’. Relatively egalitarian societies of
smallholding farmers and peasants certainly would have benefited from the
collective pooling of resources and the collective investments made in the
common. Indeed, one small peasant cultivator did not have the resources to
acquire oxen or horses on his own, let alone a whole plough. Thus, by clubbing
together and pooling their resources, small peasants were able to afford a plough,
which in turn they pulled and operated together in teams, and which in turn fed
into a system based around the collective management and cultivation of the
fields (Rösener 1985, 151; Langdon 1986). This kind of situation was even
more applicable in societies marked by poor or distorted access to credit and
capital facilities – indeed rural credit did not permeate through to the medieval
countryside of Western Europe in equal measure (Schofield and Lambrecht
2009; Zuijderduijn 2009). At the same time, in societies characterised by a
220 Daniel Robert Curtis
large proportion of their inhabitants with access to the modes of production,
a wide section of the population had interests in collective investments which
would directly benefit them such as drainage facilities and the fencing-off of
pastures.
However, again, many pre-industrial societies were arranged in such a way
that rendered the advantages of scale through collective investments obsolete.
Indeed, by the time of the so-called formalisation of institutions for collective
action (i.e. the high Middle Ages in De Moor’s or Avner Greif’s view (Greif 2006)
(for timing, also see Reynolds 1997 and Blickle 1998)), societies had become
increasingly stratified. The relationship between cities and towns and their rural
hinterlands had grown stronger in many parts of Western Europe, and urban capital
and investment flooded into the countryside (Epstein 2001, 4–9). Through the
process of urban expropriation of rural producers’ land, many of the investments
that in peasant-dominated areas may have been made through the commons
were instead made by wealthy urban investors – restructuring the landscape and
rearranging it into enclosures, and laying down new water management features.
In certain contexts such as the central sharecropping areas of Tuscany, all capital
investments in animals, water management, boundaries, and equipment were made
by the landlords themselves on behalf of their subordinate tenants (Emigh 1996).
Similarly with regard to the modes of production, if all the resources were in the
hands of a few interest groups in a society, few people had an interest in the fate
of the resources (i.e. not interested in maintaining them over the long-term being
divorced from the production process), a situation not favourable to collective
management. This is a similar argument used in the declining commitment to
water management structures (Soens 2006a; 2006b; 2011; van Tielhof 2009; van
Dam 2009). In Northern Italy, economic polarisation and rural-urban migration in
fact led to the complete unravelling of important collective systems for managing
water resources through village communities (Curtis and Campopiano 2012).
5. Conclusion
De Moor has done much to alter substantially the ways we approach and think about
the emergence of corporate collective action in Western Europe. In particular, the
clear separation of motors, reasons, and conditions in the framework is something
to be applauded. It has most of all forced home the notion that demographic and
commercial pressures did not dictate how societies from the past chose to manage
their resources. They were only motors or stimulants. Not just in reference to her
‘Silent Revolution’ article, but her publications taken as a whole have also done
much to show that (given the right conditions) institutions for collective action
were not static, cumbersome, or bound for failure, but actually a preferential
option chosen by many people within pre-industrial Europe (De Moor 2012). The
old ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ mantra (Hardin 1968) has finally been quashed.
There are problems with the framework that De Moor has adopted for
explaining the emergence of the commons in Western Europe from the high
Tine De Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’ 221
Middle Ages, however, which can be addressed on two levels. First, the choice of
‘favourable conditions’, as explained in section three, has many flaws. Essentially
they are too macro. A tolerant state and a non-kinship-based set of social and
economic relationships may have characterised large parts of the pre-industrial
Low Countries, to use just one example. This did not mean the commons were
employed all over the Low Countries to manage resources, or to the same
degree.
Second and more importantly, there is no causal link created between De
Moor’s ‘conditions’ and her ‘reasons’ for why collective management of resources
emerged; indeed, we are given almost no information on the mechanisms linking
her variables, in that respect reducing the framework to a mere list of factors.
As mentioned already, this can be put down to the implicit assumption in the
explanatory framework that her ‘reasons to opt for collective action’ were things
every pre-industrial society would benefit from. This appears to be false, since
the social distribution of risk differed greatly between societies. The way the De
Moor framework can be improved is by making it more receptive to the variety
of local and regional constellations which distinguish one pre-industrial society
from another. By replacing the very vague and ultimately problematic ‘conditions’
De Moor suggested such as ‘tolerant states’ and ‘non-kin-based relationships’
with an array of power and property structures, modes of exploitation, economic
portfolios, factor markets and markets for commodities, we might come closer to
understanding why the commons came to be used in some societies of Western
Europe but not in societies elsewhere. In that way, the motors, conditions, and
motives that De Moor referred to in her article become more closely and logically
connected to each other: adding these local and regional constellations to the De
Moor framework increases its explanatory power. Essentially the key point that
this article puts forward, is that we need to move away from implicitly accepting
the benefits of market-, state-, or commons-based solutions to resources problems,
but accept that different resource-management strategies suited different societies,
according to their inherent characteristics. While the risk-limitation feature of the
commons may have benefited a set of communities in one part of Western Europe,
in another part of Western Europe, risk-limitation was not high on the agenda,
making the commons unsuitable.
Accordingly, a useful future direction to take the framework may be to
compare these regional configurations which made the collective management
of resources more of a feasible and beneficial option to certain pre-industrial
societies with other areas of Western Europe which took alternative routes towards
easing demographic or commercial pressure on their resources – for example,
in intensification of production, land reclamation, or diversification of economic
portfolios. In that sense, unlocking some of the mystery as to why the commons
emerged in certain parts of Western Europe may actually be achieved by taking
a step back from the commons. Perhaps the question posed should be as follows;
if the commons had so many benefits to pre-industrial societies (as De Moor
and other authors repeatedly assert – see positivist interpretations in the recent
222 Daniel Robert Curtis
Rodgers et al. 2011; Poteete et al. 2010) – why did so many societies choose not
to employ collective management of resources?
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