The Development of Agrarian Capitalism
... Some lived with their parents; others accused of running 'from place to place like a rogue' nonetheless had a parish of residence. 70 Instead they were defined by being relatively poor, often young, and not actively seeking to enter service. ...
Economic historians have tried to better understand how and why land was redistributed in rural communities, although our empirical insights have been limited by a lack of serial evidence for land distribution within the same locality across a long period. This article exploits the unusual survival of Veldboeken (field books), which allow a careful annual reconstruction of land distribution within an unremarkable seventeenth‐century village in the south of the modern‐day Netherlands. We show that, despite high levels of dynamism in the local land markets, including high and changing levels of leasehold, varying and flexible tenancies, and frequent transfers of land between parties, the overall aggregate distribution of land did not change very much over time. Employing a systematic lifecycle analysis of active land‐market participants, we advance a broader concept of pre‐industrial ‘decumulation’ – where landowners and land users used adaptive mechanisms within the land market to not just consolidate land but also work out ways of getting rid of it and achieve optimal (and often smaller) farms and estates. Accordingly, we do not find any social logic or natural tendency towards accumulation, consolidation, and greater inequality.
The history of political freedom in Europe has long been articulated within a genealogical scheme that interprets the nature of contemporary freedom starting from its remote origins. This explains the adoption of a teleological approach: from the freedom of the ancients to that of the moderns; from positive to negative freedom; from libertas ecclesiae to religious tolerance. Awareness of the crisis of the great narrative of freedom invites us to broaden the field of analysis, rejecting a linear history of the notion and its expressions, less and less capable of accounting for the discontinuities and tensions between different meanings and models. The volume reintegrates the theme of freedom within the framework of the practices of political actors in the late Middle Ages, taking into consideration the multiple declinations of the ideas of freedom in Europe with a specific attention to the Italian realities.
El artículo propone una revisión de la problemática de las relaciones asalariadas premodernas y de su relación con la transición del feudalismo al capitalismo. A partir de un extenso comentario de la compilación de Whittle y Lambrecht (2023), se analiza el derrotero seguido por la historiografía sobre la transición. Luego se procede a un análisis detallado del concepto de trabajo asalariado en Marx, para concluir que la continuidad de las formas de explotación asalariadas surgidas en el feudalismo explica mejor la transición, antes que la supuesta sustitución de la servidumbre por el trabajo “libre”.
The responses of labour markets to global pandemics are attracting renewed interest, although the English labour laws in response to the Black Death of 1348/9 – capping wages, imposing annual contracts, and restricting mobility – have a long and established scholarship. The conventional wisdom is that the legislation represented an extension of existing local practices and created common cause among all categories of employer. Yet this view is hard to reconcile with the fact that, despite subsequent revisions, the legislation soon failed. These arguments are tested through original research into how the legislation was actually enforced in a variety of legal tribunals (manorial, borough, and royal). A clear distinction is maintained between public presentments and private litigation, and a robust methodology is pursued to record their absence as well as quantifying their presence. This casts new light on the novelty of the labour laws, the reasons for their failure, and their influence on contract law. The analysis exemplifies the potential for short‐term legal responses to infectious diseases to have unintended and unanticipated long‐term consequences.
From the thirteenth until the 18th century, the county of Flanders knew a special citizen status for rural residents. Country dwellers, normally residing under the jurisdiction and fiscality of lordships, could register themselves as external citizens or ‘ outburghers’ . Outburghership has primarily been researched within the context of state building and urban studies. This contribution prioritizes the perspective of the countryside. Studies on premodern Flanders have shown that the counts and cities tried to undermine the power of local lords by providing as many seigneurial subjects as possible with fiscal and judicial exemptions to the lords’ justice and taxes. The accessibility of outburghership and its varying appeal along time and space has not been adequately researched. This study argues that the heyday of outburghership in Flanders was between 1300 and 1550. After 1600, outburghership endured as defence mechanism against seigneurial lordship until both institutions met their demise in 1795.
A dataset of just under 10,000 work tasks gleaned from court depositions that records women's as well as men's work, and unpaid as well as paid activities, prompts a reassessment of the transformation of the early modern economy and women's role within it. Rather than sectoral change in production activities with a growth of manufacturing at the expense of agriculture, the evidence suggests that work tasks changed little over time despite occupational specialization increasing. Women's labour force participation is shown to contribute 44 per cent of work in the economy, rather than 30 per cent as in previous estimates. This is partly because of the importance of commercialized housework and care work, which has been largely overlooked in existing models of the early modern economy. Turning to waged work, findings confirm that men's and women's participation in paid agricultural work were linked, with women being employed in greater numbers when men were not available. However, these trends had a strong relationship with access to land, a factor that has been neglected in comparison with demographic trends and the cost of consumables. The organization of work was transformed in the seventeenth century as the number of completely landless households increased rapidly.
The dawn of the Tudor regime is one of most recognisable periods of English history. Yet the focus on its monarchs' private lives and ministers' constitutional reforms creates the impression that this age's major developments were isolated to halls of power, far removed from the wider populace. This book presents a more holistic vision of politics and society in late medieval and early modern England. Delving into the rich but little-studied archive of the royal Court of Requests, it reconstructs collaborations between sovereigns and subjects on the formulation of an important governmental ideal: justice. Examining the institutional and social dimensions of this point of contact, this study places ordinary people, their knowledge and demands at the heart of a judicial revolution unfolding within the governments of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Yet it also demonstrates that directing extraordinary royal justice into ordinary procedures created as many problems as it solved.
The term feudalism appeared in the seventeenth century. It derives from the Latin feudum and its cognate feodalitas , words meaning fiefs and the services tied to them, whose precise meaning varied during the Middle Ages. The writings Constitutiones Feudorum and Consuetudines Feudorum , on property and service obligations, appeared before 1200 and subsequently were taught for legal training in universities. Scholars currently use the term feudalism to isolate and interpret aspects of the Middle Ages. Medieval people would not have understood the term or have had a conscious idea of their society and economy.
Providing a new narrative of how local authority and social structures adapted in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation, Spike Gibbs uses manorial officeholding – where officials were chosen from among tenants to help run the lord's manorial estate – as a prism through which to examine political and social change in the late medieval and early modern English village. Drawing on micro-studies of previously untapped archival records, the book spans the medieval/early modern divide to examine changes between 1300 and 1650. In doing so, Gibbs demonstrates the vitality of manorial structures across the medieval and early modern era, the active and willing participation of tenants in these frameworks, and the way this created inequalities within communities. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
The rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain is usually told as a story about markets, land and wages. The Enclosure of Knowledge reveals that it was also about books, knowledge and expertise. It argues that during the early modern period, farming books were a key tool in the appropriation of the traditional art of husbandry possessed by farm workers of all kinds. It challenges the dominant narrative of an agricultural 'enlightenment', in which books merely spread useful knowledge, by showing how codified knowledge was used to assert greater managerial control over land and labour. The proliferation of printed books helped divide mental and manual labour to facilitate emerging social divisions between labourers, managers and landowners. The cumulative effect was the slow enclosure of customary knowledge. By synthesising diverse theoretical insights, this study opens up a new social history of agricultural knowledge and reinvigorates long-term histories of knowledge under capitalism.
This paper seeks to show that due to the transformations of the working class in seventeenth-century England, a discursive tradition emerged in devotional literature and servant manuals that valorized a specific form of servitude. By embodying the will of their masters, servants were free. By resisting their master's will, they resembled either African slaves forced to toil on the plantations or galley slaves compelled to row for Muslim masters. These racialized forms of slavery were designed to generate a powerful intuition of idealized servitude. Servants who complained or those who sought to become hirelings, or independent free labourers, risked becoming worse than a slave. The imagery of plantation and galley slaves was strategically utilized to construct a pliable and obedient working class in England. In short, by accepting one's station and willingly submitting to a master English servants performed Christian liberty.
This article analyses the impact that wealth and power inequality had on vulnerability to natural hazards. It analyses how the rising wealth and power of manorial lords and their flock masters affected the prevention and mitigation of sand drifts. In addition, it questions what type of society was able or willing to invest in a robust ecosystem. Via the case study of pre-modern Breckland (East Anglia, England), this article shows that it was only when high levels of wealth inequality was combined with an uneven distribution of power, that Breckland society became incapable of preventing and mitigating the threat of the most important natural hazard in the region: sand drifts. Vulnerability, however, did not become a universal feature in this society. Whilst cottagers and smallholders were badly affected, rural elites could thrive thanks to their involvement in economic activities that were not hindered by the drifting sand.
This article discusses the complex issues behind the relation between national and global economic histories and the challenges of a comparative approach. On examining different national approaches (Italian and English) to the management of the early modern maritime sector, it will argue that this comparison allows a privileged view into different varieties of capitalism, highlighting fundamental differences in attitudes toward wage labor and risk management that still influence different approaches to economic activities today.
Objectives:
The presence of kin is often, but not always, associated with higher fertility in historical populations. However, the effect of other household members on fertility is less frequently studied. While not genetically related, life-cycle servants lived and worked alongside household members and may have provided assistance to reproducing families. Female servants in particular may have helped mothers with small children through direct help with childcare activities or by replacing the economic effort of mothers whose work was not compatible with childcare. This study examines the presence of servants in the households of married women of reproductive age to assess whether households with young children are more likely to also have servants.
Materials and methods:
This study uses individual-level census data from North Orkney, Scotland (1851-1911) to investigate the relationship between the presence of servants in households and a measure of recent net marital fertility, the number of women's own-children under age 5, using logistic regression models.
Results:
Households with young children were more likely to have a female, but not male, servant in the household after controlling for the effects of other possible helpers, including older children, mothers, and mothers-in-law.
Discussion:
These findings are consistent with prior research that indicates the importance of female labor to smallholder agricultural households and suggests that female servants may have provided support to reproducing families. Life-cycle servants should be considered one component of biocultural reproduction in historical Northwest Europe. The use of hired help is not restricted to contemporary or elite groups.
The three introductory chapters on how to study production, market, and money and credit provide frames for the reviewed sample studies in Chaps. 6, 7 and 8. They offer some guidance to find your bearings in the jungle of concepts and debates which makes premodern economic history such an interesting, but challenging subject to study. Each chapter structures important and current debates in the field and explains the basic concepts used in these discussions. Most debates concern the premodern European economy in general. Whenever possible, we refer to corresponding studies for the Holy Roman Empire. We point to classic texts as well as to newer studies but offer no exhaustive compilation of all the research done in the area.
Objective:
The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between network centrality and living standards as measured by fertility and mortality responses to short-term economic stress.
Methods:
Cox proportional hazard models estimate the effects of staple grain price variation and eigenvector and beta centrality within marriage and labor networks on the timing of births and child mortality (1-14 years) in a historical demographic data set from North Orkney, Scotland, 1851-1911.
Results:
Households that are peripheral to the marriage and labor network experience lower chances of a birth when food prices are high. The fertility of more central households is less sensitive to price changes. A similar, but weaker, pattern holds for child mortality, which is also sensitive to price fluctuations, although the social gradient is not as clear.
Conclusions:
Marriage and labor network centrality is an indicator of standard of living in this remote, agricultural population. Households that are firmly embedded in the network are able to overcome and adjust to short-term economic stress without demographic consequences, while those at the edges of the community experience delayed reproduction in poor years consistent with unplanned responses to stress.
It is often assumed that the market economy and the open society reinforce each other and have risen together. Even those who are more skeptical about their long-run compatibility will usually agree that the rise of the two was part of a process of modernization, starting in early modern England and unfolding in the modern West. This article builds on the latest historical research to reject this assumption. It shows that several market economies existed much earlier in history. These were all preceded by social movements generating a more open society. In each of these cases, the functioning of the market economy slowly eroded social and, next, political openness, and later shriveled itself again. This endogenous, cycle-like process, in which the interaction of the market economy and the open society developed from positive to negative, may also be seen in modern cases, including the present USA.
This article demonstrates, using evidence from church court depositions, that women's experience of service in early modern England was more varied than scholarship suggests. Moving beyond its conception as a life-cycle annual occupation, the article situates service within individual life-stories. It argues firstly, that service extended across the whole of women's working lives and secondly, that employment arrangements took a wide range of forms. Service for women is shown to have been flexible, varied and contingent, employing a diversity of individuals under a variety of different employment agreements.
We know very little about the unlanded population (obesuttna) in Sweden before 1750. Still, knowledge of this group is vital not only to our understanding of the proletarianization proces, but also to the understanding of rural Sweden before the changes of the 18th and 19th centuries. This article takes a step towards filling this gap. Tax registers and church records from 17th-century Västmanland shows substantial proportions of unlanded people, i.e. crofters, cottagers, soldiers, artisans, and lodgers, around 1640 and 1690. The age structure of this group, which can be studied for the latter part of the period, shows that it mostly consisted of people in working age. In conclusion, the article argues that there was a significant group of smallholders and wage labourers in 17th-century Sweden, comparable to the labouring poor of other European countries. © 2018, © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
A customary tenant's widow in County Durham had a right to his holdings for her life, and did not forfeit the lands for remarriage or fornication in contrast to customs found elsewhere in England. In this case study of three neighbouring villages, more than 80 per cent of widows with the option exercised this right, and did so consistently over three centuries. The persistence of this pattern indicates that widows as tenants were common and capable of cultivating or managing holdings. It suggests complex interconnections of gender with local social and economic structures, which include marriage, migration, and household formation.
Aneivas and Nisąncioǧlu's provocative book, How the West Came to Rule, attempts to provide an alternative account of the origins of capitalism to both 'Political Marxism' and 'World-Systems Theory'. By making uneven and combined development a universal dynamic of human history and by utilising a flawed concept of 'Eurocentrism', however, they introduce a high degree of causal pluralism into their analysis. Despite important insights into the specific dynamics of different pre-capitalist forms of social labour, their account of the origins of capitalism in How the West Came to Rule suffers from causal indeterminacy and historical inaccuracies.
Spencer Dimmock has produced a convincing restatement, defence and update of Robert Brenner's influential work on the origin of capitalism in England. The book productively engages with many Marxist and non-Marxist critics of the so-called 'Brenner Thesis', and presents fresh secondary and primary evidence in favour of it. This review sketches the theoretical background of Brenner's intervention, summarises Dimmock's take on Brenner, and comments on a few notable contemporary critiques of Brenner's general framework which are not explicitly engaged with by Dimmock.
Late medieval church courts frequently excommunicated debtors at the request of their creditors. Tyler Lange analyzes over 11,000 excommunications between 1380 and 1530 in order to explore the forms, rhythms, and cultural signifi cance of the practice. Three case studies demonstrate how excommunication for debt facilitated minor transactions in an age of scarce small-denomination coinage and how interest-free loans and sales credits could be viewed as encouraging the relations of charitable exchange that were supposed to exist between members of Christ’s body. Lange also demonstrates how from 1500 or so believers gradually turned away from the practice and toward secular courts, at the same time as they retained the moralized, economically irrational conception of indebtedness we have yet to shake. The demand-driven rise and fall of excommunication for debt reveals how believers began to reshape the institutional Church well before Martin Luther posted his theses.
This chapter examines a sector of the seventeenth-century credit market in which a specific group in English rural society, who held real property by copyhold of inheritance tenure, used their land as security to raise mortgage loans. A number of authors from Tawney onwards have observed copyholder mortgages in passing, but there has been no previous detailed study of them. The chapter therefore examines how these mortgages were arranged and recorded; the details of who borrowed; how much, when and the terms of repayment; and their possible motives for doing so. Similarly, the activity and nature of the lenders are explored and the relationship, if any, between them and the borrowers. The picture which emerges is of a widespread and significant credit market amongst chiefly the middling sector of rural society. Copyholder mortgages represented a particularly attractive and secure way to borrow and lend during a century before formal financial institutions such as banks had been established and yet after the reform of the usury laws permitted interest to be charged. The latter provoked a flowering of mortgage activity after 1600, and the former meant that interpersonal lending was the usual method of effecting it.
The history of the labouring family has gained increasing attention among European scholars in the last decades, but in Sweden, it remains an under-researched topic. Still, in the early modern period, labourers and their families made vital contributions to the country’s important mining industry. This paper examines the household economy of labouring families related to the mining industry in two Swedish areas in the late seventeenth century. On the basis on account books and court records, combined with demographic data, we explore the diversity of livelihoods and the complex web of interdependencies that made this economy feasible. We show that, while monetary remuneration was limited, wage labour in mines and metalwork gave the labouring family access to resources in the form of land, labour and credit beyond its own assets. Within the household, the man generally worked for wages, while his wife made use of the use-rights that came with his employment. The mining industry, and thereby also Swedish state finances, depended on this diverse family economy. In conclusion, interdependence, rather than the independent economic position described by classical models of early modern households, characterized the household economy of the labouring family.
The purpose of the Norfolk case studies presented in this chapter is to describe the context in which sharefarming existed and developed during the course of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Sets of agreements from four Norfolk estates show why landowners resorted to these methods, how they adapted them to particular circumstances, the problems they encountered, the success they achieved, and why they abandoned them in the early eighteenth century. The case studies, drawn primarily from estate records, inevitably present farming, or letting, to halves from the landowners’ perspective. However, they still provide insights into forms of sharefarming at a lower social level, between tenant and sub-tenant, yeomen and husbandmen, and generally within rural communities. Norfolk landowners used farming to halves throughout this period, firstly, as a device for effecting expansion and improvement from the 1600s, and, secondly, as a way of dealing with vacant farms and falling rents from the late 1660s. The driving force behind the improvements of early 1600s, was the inflation of the late sixteenth century. Prices accelerated rapidly in the 1580s and continued rising until the 1640s, leaving landowners in a vulnerable position. To maintain their incomes, they needed to modernize their procedures, place their rents and tenures on a commercial footing, and exploit their demesnes.
This paper analyses the long-term evolution of an ecclesiastical estate in order to shed light on estates in Leonese Extremadura. In particular, we consider an estate belonging to the cathedral chapter of Salamanca between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, seeking to demonstrate that it did not possess an identical structure throughout this period and that its transformations can be explained by a complex combination of variables. These changes exerted an impact on social structures, and especially on peasant social differentiation processes. We demonstrate that specific rent collection methods had the capacity to modify the social structure of communities and that the development of wage labour was closely linked to economic trends and to the possibilities and constraints of seigniorial management. Lastly, we show that social transformation was not always irreversible and that its consolidation depended on the inability of the lords to exercise their political powers.
Based on a synthesis of the empirical scholarship on England and Germany, this paper demonstrates that in both regions, rural socio-economic developments from c.1200 to c.1800 are similar: this period witnesses the rise to numerical predominance and growing economic significance of the ‘sub-peasant classes’, which had a growing impact on the market as a result of their increasing market dependence, and from which – towards the end of the period – a rural proletariat emerged. Against the influential theory of Robert Brenner, it is argued that the period c.1200–c.1400 cannot really be categorized as ‘feudal’ according to Brenner's definition; and ‘agrarian capitalism’ does not adequately describe the socio-economic system that obtained by the end of the sixteenth century. A genuine transition to capitalism is only evident from after c.1750, and can be found in Germany as well as in England; it is predicated both on ideological shifts and on the evolution of the rural proletariat, which is only found in large numbers by or after c.1800.
The view of the commons as archaic, ‘backward’ and ‘irrational’ institutions for the management of resources has now been revised in favour of a more positive one, for both past and present societies. Indeed, it is clear that the commons had multifarious ecological and economic benefits for both medieval and early modern rural societies in Western Europe. That being the case, many scholars have seen the increasing expropriation of the commons in the transition to the early modern period as a sign of increasing inequality characterizing pre-industrial Europe, and many have lamented the loss of communal grazing privileges connected to processes such as land enclosure – pushing poor peasants into the ‘abyss’ with the removal of their final form of welfare. However, in this paper it is argued that the social distribution of the benefits to the commons were rarely, if ever, entirely equitable. In fact, in many historical contexts the benefits of the commons could also be highly restricted – crystallizing and entrenching stratifications themselves, and even serving as the ‘vehicle’ of further inequality. The expropriation of the commons did not necessarily make Western European rural societies any more unequal.
This reply defends the need for a specifically materialist historiography of modes of production other than capitalism; argues that Marxists should see history as being driven by the state as much as it is by classes; defends the scientific value of the category 'merchant capitalism'; and explains why Marx came around to seeing the slave plantations as part of 'total capital'. It concludes by suggesting both that Marx allowed for different levels of determination when thinking about the origins of capitalism, and that Brenner's account of the transition in English agriculture has now been seriously weakened by Jane Whittle's critique of it.
Late medieval England's rural economy and society remain the focus of energetic and creative study by historians. Punctuated by demographic catastrophes such as the Great Famine and the Black Death, England's late Middle Ages serves as a virtual laboratory for analysis of historical change as scholars trace the unraveling of the manorial socioeconomic arrangements and the emergence of a brand of agrarian capitalism. To make sense of a wealth of royal and local sources, scholars employ a range of theoretical approaches drawn from economics, namely a population-and-resources model, a neo-Marxist thesis, and a commercialization hypothesis, among others. Sociological approaches are also found in the late medievalist's analytical toolbox. Current research particularly focuses on the excavation of lord–peasant relations, the nature of the peasantry's agriculture, and the relative affluence and poverty of the late medieval peasant.
Although the importance of the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development is widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess, let alone to quantify the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets in this era. In this paper we demonstrate to what degree our empirical research on the rise of markets in late medieval Holland can illuminate the factors behind the development of the specific institutional framework of markets for land, labour, capital and goods, and the effects of these institutions on the actual functioning of the markets. The findings are corroborated by a comparative approach focusing on Flanders and Eastern England: the parts of Northwest Europe where, next to Holland, economic development was most precocious. Both regions, however, were hit hard by the effects of the Black Death, whereas Holland after the mid-fourteenth century underwent remarkable further growth, even despite ecological difficulties. The favourable organisation of markets, enabled by an exceptional balance in Holland society, played a key role in this success
From the late middle ages onwards, many regions of western Europe experienced heightened inequality in the distribution of land via consolidation of property in the hands of interest groups. What happened to those unfortunate rural people who lost their land to wealthier or more powerful interest groups? Commonly a connection has been drawn between land accumulation and population decline or stagnation in the countryside, yet this outcome was not always inevitable, as demonstrated in this article. While land consolidation was sometimes the motor setting in motion outward migration to the cities, for example, this comparative study shows that some rural societies were better 'set up' to retain their landless populations than others.
This article introduces a new source for assessing the distribution of wealth in early modern England derived from witness depositions taken by the church courts. It discusses the accuracy of statements of ‘worth’ provided by thousands of witnesses between the mid-sixteenth and later seventeenth centuries, and uses the monetary estimates of worth in goods that the majority of deponents supplied to assess the changing distribution of personal wealth. We argue that this data supports recent claims that the pre-industrial English economy experienced significant levels of economic growth, while showing that its benefits were increasingly unevenly distributed between different social groups. In particular, the century after 1550 witnessed spectacular increases in yeoman worth that outstripped inflation by a factor of 10. The relative wealth of yeomen was also underpinned by its more secure distribution over the life cycle which further compounded the differences between them and other social groups.
The focus of the essay is one specific theme pursued by Rodney Hilton: that of differentiation of the English feudal peasantry and the implications this had for the development of capitalism in England. His contribution on this, along with those of E. A. Kosminsky and of Maurice Dobb, are considered and are contrasted with the view of Robert Brenner. For Brenner peasant differentiation has no causal importance: it is an outcome of transformation and not a driving force in its securing. For Hilton, it is central to transformation: it is not an outcome but a determining variable, a causa causans rather than a causa causata. The Brenner position, it is argued, is incomplete in its ignoring of peasant differentiation in feudal England. It was one of Hilton's accomplishments to explore this in scholarly detail, and with analytical precision. It is suggested that if this is abstracted from an adequate examination of the transition to capitalism in England cannot proceed.
Between 1200 and 1349, villeinage was not prominent in Suffolk, and, even in those places where it was locally significant, many of its exactions were lightly enforced. The gap between the theory and practice of villeinage was maintained by custom, although this article emphasizes both the importance of regional custom and its mutability. The relative insignificance of villeinage here has two main implications: first, villeinage cannot have caused any crisis of agrarian productivity before the Black Death; and second, its subsequent dissolution cannot have been the prime mover behind the transformation of the landholding structure and the emergence of agrarian capitalism.
The three examples considered – England, France and Prussia – are all very important instances of capitalist agrarian transformation. They illustrate, moreover, strikingly different paths of agrarian transition. These are termed, respectively, landlord-mediated capitalism from below, capitalism delayed, and capitalism from above, and an explanation is offered of how these different outcomes came to pass and of why there was such a marked divergence in the nature of agrarian transition. It is argued that the character of the landlord class and of class struggle have determined both the timing of each transition and the nature of the transition. Both the quality of the landlord class and the manner and outcome of the class struggle have sometimes delayed, perhaps for prolonged periods, and sometimes hastened transition; and have had profound implications for the nature and quality of the transformation and how reactionary or progressive it has been. In this the state has always played a prominent part. It is further argued that differentiation of the peasantry is central to transformation: it is not an outcome but a determining variable, a causa causans rather than a causa causata. Differentiation of the peasantry feeds into and interacts with the landlord class and class struggle, these three being critical to the eventual outcome. The distinctly varying trajectories in the three crucial instances are explained in these terms.
Earls Colne first came to the notice of historians through Macfarlane's study of its seventeenth-century vicar, Ralph Josselin, and then Macfarlane's use of evidence from the village in his The origins of English individualism (1978). This article presents preliminary results drawn from a computer-based reconstruction of the copyhold land market, 1546-1750, to contest Macfarlane's reading of the family-land bond in the manor. The familial possession of land over long periods is shown to be normal, and consistent with an active land market predominantly in smaller parcels. Little consolidation took place in the manor although some growth in holding size was achieved through subtenancy. Finally, the article asks whether the experience of copyholders is typical of the general.
Historians have documented rising farm sizes throughout the period 1450–1850. Existing studies have revealed much about the mechanisms underlying the development of agrarian capitalism. However, we currently lack any consensus as to when the critical developments occurred. This is largely due to the absence of sufficiently large and geographically wide-ranging datasets but is also attributable to conceptual weaknesses in much of the literature. This article develops a new approach to the problem and argues that agrarian capitalism was dominant in southern and eastern England by 1700 but that in northern England the critical developments came later.
Servants were an important part of the northwestern European household economy in the preindustrial past. This study examines household-level characteristics that are predictive of the presence of rural servants using data from Orkney, Scotland. The number of servants present in a household is related to household composition, landholding size, and the marital status of the household head. In addition, the sex of the particular servant hired reveals that the labor of male and female servants is not fungible. The sex of the servant hired is related to the ratio of male and female household members of working age, the occupation of the head, household composition, and the size of the household's landholding.
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