Abstract
Around the middle of the seventeenth century in Northwestern Europe economic thought was gradually becoming less concerned with monetary issues; even in the field of art money was being represented less frequently. The nightmares of the Flemish painters and the torment of their subjects, poised in a never-ending tension between the spiritual and the worldly, gave way to the geometry of rural landscapes and the reassuring routine of scenes depicting themes like work and trade.
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Notes
At the height of the English agricultural revolution (around 1815), despite low yields (0.64 tons per hectare, compared with 1.16 tons in England) France was producing 2960 thousand tons of grain compared with England’s 1184 thousand. Thus the English per capita output (103.01 kg) only just exceeded the French (100.74 kg). But if the data for Scotland (which produced food cereals on a small scale) is included in the calculation then the French situation would appear even better. France was never to give up her vocation for agriculture: between 1850 and 1900 production continued to grow, running counter to trends in industrial Europe. The following were used for the calculations: B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe 1750–1993 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 79, 216, 273;
M.E. Turner, J.V. Beckett and B. Afton, Farm Production in England, 1700–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 218, Tab. 7.1.
F. Caron, ‘La Grande-Bretagne 1815 vers 1850’, in P. Léon (ed.), Histoire économique et sociale du monde, vol. III (Paris: Colin, 1978), p. 389. In 1811, while 30 per cent of the active population was occupied in industrial and mining activities English agriculture still employed about 33 per cent. In 1841 this figure fell to 22 per cent, while industry gained 10 percentage points. At this point, its overall weight is practically double that of the agricultural sector (calculated on the data given ibid.).
See F. Boldizzoni, ‘Davanzati e Hobbes: nascita e diffusione di un paradigma (XVI–XVIII secolo)’, Il pensiero economico italiano, 13.1 (2005), pp. 9–29.
A.-M. Piuz, ‘Les économies traditionnelles en Europe’, in P. Bairoch, Victoires et déboires: histoire économique et sociale du monde du XVIe siècle à nos jours, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 169.
Although the interpretations put forward are at times questionable, see the interesting study by S. Fiori in this connection: ‘Immagini organiciste della produzione di ricchezza nell’economia politica preclassica’, Storia del pensiero economico, 45 (2003), pp. 115–145.
J. Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, in Id., Two Treatises of Government, ed. by P. Laslett with an introduction and apparatus criticus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 311.
Young’s contemporary John Arbuthnot, a tenant-farmer at Mitcham in Surrey, also reminds us that the greatest nightmare of rural societies was de-population. J. Arbuthnot, An Inquiry into the Connection between the present Price of Provisions, and the Size of Farms. With Remarks on Population as affected thereby. To which are added, Proposals for preventing future Scarcity (London: Cadell, 1773), p. 2. On pre-Malthusian thought see C.E. Stangeland, Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population: A Study in the History of Economic Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1904);
and G. Gioli (ed.), Le teorie della popolazione prima di Malthus (Milan: Angeli, 1987).
R. Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, ed. and with an English translation by H. Higgs (London: Frank Cass for the RES, 1959 [1755, written c. 1732]), p. 3. Passage later reproduced by Mirabeau, L’ami des hommes, p. 22.
A.-R.-J. Turgot, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses [1769– 1770, written 1766], in Oeuvres de Turgot, ed. by G. Schelle, vol. II (Paris: Alcan, 1914). In later references to this work the Roman figures refer to the sections that Turgot himself set. The quotations in English are taken from Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth, in The Economics of A.-R.-J. Turgot, ed. and transl. with an introd. by P.D. Groenewegen (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977).
See M. Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (Paris: Colin, 1987).
T. Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (New York: Kelley, 1968 [1664]), ch. 19.
This reflected a fairly widespread opinion among the gentlemen of the period. In Timothy Nourse’s work Campania Foelix (1700), the open fields were described as ‘Seminaries of a lazy Thieving sort of People’. Quoted by R.E. Prothero (Lord Ernle), English Farming Past and Present (London: Heinemann and Cass, 1961), p. 150.
There is a famous passage in which the Anglo-Dutch Mandeville describes the land as mean and hostile towards man, for whom work is a necessary torment (B. de Mandeville, An Essay on Charity, and Charity-Schools [1723], in The Fable of the Bees, vol. I, p. 286). It is worth recalling that ‘Even Bacon recommended torturing Nature (“torquere naturam”), proposing the model of the judicial system of his day, to bring Nature up for trial and force her to reveal her secrets, setting this against the traditional school, which preferred to intervene in harmony with natural forces’, M. Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe 1350–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 401.
N. Barbon, A Discourse of Trade [1690], in J.H. Hollander (ed.), A Reprint of Economic Tracts (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1905), pp. 10–11.
Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown, ch. 3; T. Kjærgaard, ‘A Plant that Changed the World: The Rise and Fall of Clover 1000–2000’, Landscape Research, 28.1 (2003), pp. 43–44.
A.J. Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1967).
R. Stone, Some British Empiricists in the Social Sciences 1650–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 5.
L. Brunt, ‘Rehabilitating Arthur Young’, Economic History Review, 56.2 (2003), pp. 265–299.
M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 3–4.
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© 2008 Francesco Boldizzoni
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Boldizzoni, F. (2008). Land and Labour, 1650–1800. In: Means and Ends. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584143_3
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