Abstract
In the last chapter we saw how the idea of wealth changed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Northwestern Europe; also how two factors of production — land and labour — subsequently gained importance. This chapter sets out to reconstruct the parallel developments in capital theory. We will need to understand how it came about that capital, previously not a factor of production but a commodity suited to reproducing itself (that is, to say money), could take on a productive value and totally subject to a physical process of the interaction between natural resources and labour. We will also need to clarify how, during this phase, it was essentially conceived as circulating capital in the form of wages.
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Notes
See the classic work of E. Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc (Paris: SEVPEN, 1966).
F. Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
See P.T. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside 1450–1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). In disagreeing with the historiography of the Annales school, the author actually hypothesizes sustained growth of the national income. Unable to use the abundant direct data for production, population and arable areas in the archives, which would have confirmed the traditional view, he bases his reasoning on indirect estimates and deductions. However, the calculation of the Total Factor Productivity for this period can hardly be considered anything other than ‘a picaresque adventure in pseudo-statistics’ (ibid., p. 82), as even Hoffman himself seems to admit, despite basing most of his speculations on it.
C. Heywood, The Development of the French Economy 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); see also the ‘comptes rendus’ in the Annales: 52.6 (1997); 53.3 (1998); 55.4 (2000).
A. Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), p. 261, Tab. B-18; p. 264, Tab. B-21.
P. Bairoch, Révolution industrielle et sous-développement (Paris: SEDES, 1963).
P.K. O’Brien, ‘Path Dependency, or Why Britain Became an Industrialized and Urbanized Economy Long before France’, Economic History Review, 49.2 (1996), pp. 216–217.
F. Caron, An Economic History of Modern France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 117.
J. Thirsk, ‘L’agriculture en Angleterre et en France de 1600 à 1800: contacts, coïncidences et comparaisons’, Histoire, économie etsociété, 18.1 (1999), p. 13.
This also applies more generally to technology, as C. MacLeod shows: ‘The European Origins of British Technological Predominance’, in L. Prados de la Escosura (ed.), Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and its European Rivals 1688–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 111–126.
Ibid., pp. 13–14. See also J. Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: A History. From the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
D. Woronoff, Histoire de l’industrie en France. Du XVIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 6.
T.H. Harris, ‘French Industrial Policy under the Ancien Regime and the Pursuit of the British Example’, Histoire, économie et société, 12.1 (1993), pp. 99–100.
This will be examined here and in Chapter 4, making use of the study F. Boldizzoni, ‘I limiti della crescita: i Classici dinanzi alla Rivoluzione industriale 1776–1836’, Storia del pensiero economico, n.s., 1.2 (2004), pp. 115–148.
As A. Smith puts it [An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. by R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 [1776]), vol. I, pp. 418–419], everything began when ‘For a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, [the landlords] exchanged the maintenance … of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them.’ Cantillon had not expressed himself very differently as far as content was concerned.
M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 203–204; Thirsk, L’agriculture, p. 22.
Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, chs 2, 5; M.E. Turner, J.V. Beckett and B. Afton, Farm Production in England, 1700–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 7.
P. Bairoch, ‘Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution 1700–1914’, in C.M. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. III (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1973), p. 453;
E.A. Wrigley, ‘The Transition to an Advanced Organic Economy: Half a Millennium of English Agriculture’, Economic History Review, 59.3 (2006), pp. 435–480.
B.H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500–1850 (London: Arnold, 1963), pp. 240ff.;
J. de Vries, Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974);
J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 6.
P. Bairoch, Victoires et déboires: histoire économique et sociale du monde du XVIe siècle à nos jours, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 304; Overton puts forward an estimate of 70 per cent (Agricultural Revolution in England, p. 82, Tab. 3.8c).
M. Berg, ‘New Commodities, Luxuries and their Consumers in Eighteenth-Century England’, in M. Berg and H. Clifford (eds), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 63–87;
M. Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 182.1 (2004), pp. 85–142.
J.-Y. Grenier, L’économie d’Ancien Régime: un monde de l’échange et de l’incertitude (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), p. 149.
A.-R.-J. Turgot, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses [1769– 70, written 1766], in Oeuvres de Turgot, ed. by G. Schelle, vol. II (Paris: Alcan, 1914), XXXIII.
F. Quesnay, Analyse du Tableau économique [1766], in Id., Oeuvres économiques et philosophiques, ed. by A. Oncken (Frankfurt and Paris: Baer & Peelman, 1888), pp. 310n, 313.
Cf. M. Bianchini, Bonheur public et méthode géométrique: enquête sur les économistes italiens 1711–1803 (Paris: INED, 2002), passim.
Cf. J. Keith, ‘Age in Social and Cultural Context: Anthropological Perspectives’, in. R.H. Binstock and L.K. George (eds), Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (San Diego: Academic Press, 1990), p. 92.
P. Sylos Labini, ‘Adamo Smith’, Rivista di storia economica, 17.2 (2001), p. 256.
This definition traces out a system marked by ‘Smithian growth’, which was limited growth based, from a physical and technical point of view, on the division of labour and the use of fossil fuels, and which is usually contrasted with the so-called ‘Schumpeterian growth’, based on technical progress and the exploitation of mineral resources. See E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
L.L. Pasinetti, ‘A Mathematical Formulation of the Ricardian System’, Review of Economic Studies, 27.2 (1960), pp. 78–98.
See D. Winch, ‘The Emergence of Economics as a Science 1750–1870’, in Cipolla (ed.), Fontana Economic History, vol. III, p. 531 and Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 337; E. Screpanti and S. Zamagni, An Outline of the History of Economic Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 73–74. The position of M. Berg also needs to be mentioned. By contrast, she portrays Ricardo as an optimist.
See M. Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 58ff.
T.R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, ed. by J. Pullen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1820, with alterations from the 1836 edn]), vol. I, p. 299.
C. Napoleoni, Valore (Milan: ISEDI, 1976), p. 34.
M. Berg, The Age of Manufactures 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain (London: Routledge, 1994).
D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ed. by P. Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951 [1821, 1st edn 1817]), pp.75–76.
R. Jones, An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation (New York: Kelley, 1964 [1831]).
See K.H. Hennings, ‘Capital as a Factor of Production’, in J. Eatwell et al. (eds), The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, vol. I (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 330ff.
E. Cannan, A History of the Theories of Production and Distribution in English Political Economy from 1776 to 1848 (New York: Kelley, 1967 [1917]), p. 54.
J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy [variorum edn, 1st edn 1848], ed. by J.M. Robson, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vols II–III (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 63–64, emphasis added. Cf. Cannan, A History of the Theories, p. 93.
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© 2008 Francesco Boldizzoni
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Boldizzoni, F. (2008). Reproduction and Transition. In: Means and Ends. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230584143_4
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