Article contents
Lessons from History, or the Perfidy of English Exceptionalism and the Significance of Historical France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2011
Abstract
Theories of development are derived from readings of history. Modern historical research challenges many of the basic beliefs about how economies develop. More specifically, recent research suggests that the lessons drawn from the history of industrialization in England are highly misleading. The article thus challenges the empirical foundations for much of classical and Marxian development theory.
- Type
- Review Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1988
References
1 Toennies, Ferdinand, Community and Society, trans, and ed. by Loomis, Charles B. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1937)Google Scholar; Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1956).Google Scholar
2 Marx, Karl, Capital (New York: Clark A. Kerr, 1906)Google Scholar, and esp.Grundrisse [Outlines] (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1973).Google Scholar
3 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Parsons, Talcott, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1964).Google Scholar
4 Wolf, Eric R., Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969)Google Scholar; Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Peasant Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Migdal, Joel S., Peasants, Politics, and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).Google Scholar For more recent works, see Wolf, Eric R., Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and Scott, James C., Weapons of the WeaK. Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
5 See, for example, Tilly, Charles, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).Google Scholar
6 See, for example, the materials in Tilly (fn. 5); Tilly, Louise A., “The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1971), 23–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Stevenson, J., “Food Riots in England, 1792–1818” in Quinault, R. and Stevenson, J., eds., Popular Protest and Public Order: Six Studies in British History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974)Google Scholar. Critical to the interpretation of these riots is Thompson, Edward P., “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 52 (1971), 76–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Rude, George, “La taxation populaire de mai 1775 è Paris et dans la region Parisienne” [The common taxation of May 1775 in Paris and in the Paris region], Annales Historiques de la Revolution Francaise 28 (1956), 139–79.Google Scholar
7 See also the materials in Louise Tilly (fn. 6), and Stevenson (fn. 6).
8 For the correlation between unrest and the price of food, see Rude, George, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (London: Collins, 1970).Google Scholar
9 The picture is further complicated by the fact that members of the aristocracy who lived in Paris also owned land in the grain-growing areas. In their capacity as local elites, they often ruled against the right of grain “exports” to Paris and in favor of the paramountcy of local markets. The political interests of the aristocracy thus conflicted with their economic interests in shipping grain to high-priced markets; and their interests as producers, which were enhanced by high prices, conflicted with their interests as urban consumers, which were enhanced by low prices. These complexities should make the analyst suspicious of any simplistic rendering of the class interests of the aristocracy.
10 For France, see Louise Tilly (fn. 6), 25. Stevenson too stresses that food riots occurred even after subsistence crises had ended in England (fn. 6, pp. 40ff).
11 Louise Tilly (fn. 6), 52.
12 As noted above, members of the agrarian community would on occasion be net purchasers of food, and therefore would resist higher prices for it. This was particularly true of cottagers and farm laborers, who at times of subsistence crises faced both a lowering of the wage rate and higher food prices; they would therefore be particularly motivated to resist the “exportation” of food. For a brilliant analysis, see Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).Google Scholar
13 Bloch, Marc, French Rural History, trans, by Janet Sondheimer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, Histoire de la France Rurale [History of rural France], ed. by Duby, Georges and Wallon, Armand, 4 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1976)Google Scholar; Soboul, Albert, “Problemes paysannes de la communaute rurale (xviiie–xixe)— [Peasant problems of the rural community, i8th–i9th century], inProblemes paysannes de la Revolution 1778–1848 (Paris: Maspero, 1975).Google Scholar
14 J. L. and Hammond, Barbara, The Village Laborer 1760–1832 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970)Google Scholar; Thompson, Edward P., The Maying of the English Wording Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1962).Google Scholar
15 See, for example, Scott (fn. 4, 1974).
16 This line of historical interpretation was provided by Cobban, Alfred in The Social History of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)Google Scholar. In addition to the recent work of Norberg and Hoffman (fns. 17, 18, and 19), see Root's discussion in Peasants and King, pp. 16, 95–97, 125, 153ff, and 216–17.
17 Hoffman, Philip T., “Institutions and Agriculture in Old-Regime France,” paper prepared for the Caltech-All University of California Group in Economic History Conference on Pre-Industrial Developments in Peasant Economies (Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA), May 22–24, 1987.Google Scholar
18 Kathryn Norberg, “The Struggle Over the Commons: Antiseigneurialism and Social Tension in the Peasant Community,” pp. 26–27. The work of Hoffman (fn. 17) and Norberg (fns. 18 and 19) is to be featured in a special edition of the journalPolitics and Society, editeby Margaret Levi and Robert H. Bates. Also see Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar, which makes a comparable argument based on data from contemporary Vietnam.
19 Kathryn Norberg, “Dividing up the Commons: The Political Economy of EighteenthCentury French Agriculture,” paper prepared for the Caltech-All University of California Conference (fn. 17).
20 Twenty-seven had no knowledge of the law.
21 Norberg (fn. 19), 7.
22 Also see the discussion in Bates, Robert H., “Some Conventional Orthodoxies in the Study of Agrarian Change,” World Politics 36 (January 1984), 234–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is not to deny that there were cases where the poor depended upon common rights, for pasture, for forest products, or for gleaning, and where they allied themselves with those who resisted the break-up of common lands. In general, however, it appears to have been the local elites who dominated the commons.
23 See, for example, the discussion in Bates, Robert H., Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).Google Scholar
24 See the discussion and review of this debate in Jones, William O., Marketing Stable Food Crops in Tropical Africa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972)Google Scholar. Allan, William, The African Husbandman (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965)Google Scholar remains the classic argument of this position.
25 The intellectual background is brilliantly presented in Kaplan (1976). See also the thoughtful review in Lipton, Michael, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).Google Scholar
26 See Young, Arthur, Six Weeks Tour Through the Southern Counties of England and Wales (London: W. Strahan, 1768)Google Scholar; A Six Months Tour Through the North of England, 2nd ed. (London: W. Strahan, 1771)Google Scholar; and A Farmer's Tour Through the East of England (London: W. Strahan, 1771).Google Scholar
27 See Meek, Ronald L., The Economics of Physiocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).Google Scholar
28 Kaplan's work, esp. 1976, provides valuable insights into the influence of economic technocrats upon policy making in 18th-century France. Also see Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans, by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor Books, 1955).Google Scholar
29 See the materials gathered in Ter-Akopyan, Norire, ed., Marx, Engels: Pre-Capitalist Socio-economic Formations (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979).Google Scholar
30 Marx, Capital (fn. 2), part VIII. Subsequent Marxian theorists attributed the relative stagnation of Eastern and Central Europe to the prevalence of peasant agriculture; they located in large-scale farming the motor force for the rise of capitalism. A useful review is contained in Mitrany, David, Marx Against the Peasant (New York: Collier Books, 1961)Google Scholar. See also Lenin, V. I., The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1956).Google Scholar
31 Schultz, Theodore W., Transforming Traditional Agriculture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Hayami, Yujiro and Ruttan, Vernon W., Agricultural Development: An International Perspective (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Sen, Amartya K., “Size of Holding and Productivity,” The Economic Weekly 16 (1964), 323–26.Google Scholar
32 Jack Goldstone, “Regional Ecology and Agrarian Change in England and France, 1500–1700,” paper presented at the Caltech-All University of California Conference (fn. 17), 24. A revised version of this paper is scheduled to appear in a special edition of Politics and Society (see fn. 18).
33 Allen, , “Enclosure and Productivity Growth, 1459–1850,” typescript (Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, 1984)Google Scholar. Allen's data remain controversial.
34 For data on the rate of enclosure, see Wordie, J. R., “The Chronology of English Enclosure 1500–1914,” Economic History Review 36 (November 1983), 483–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
35 For data on these differences, see Wrigley, Anthony, “Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the Early Modern Period,” Journal ofInterdisciplinary History 15 (1985), 716–21.Google Scholar
36 Allen, Robert C., “Enclosure, Farming Methods, and the Growth of Productivity in the South Midlands,” Discussion Paper No. 86–44(rev.) (Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, January 1987), 16.Google Scholar See also Yelling, J. A., Common Field and Enclosure in England 1450–1850 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Turner, M., “Agricultural Productivity in England in the Eighteenth Century: Evidence from Crop Yields,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 35 (1982), 489–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
37 See Marjorie Mackintosh, “Economic Change in Southeast England, 1350–1600,” paper presented at the Caltech-All University of California Conference (fn. 17).
38 See Appleby, Andrew, “Grain Prices and Subsistence Crises in England and France, 1590–1740,” Journal of Economic History 39 (December 1979), 865–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, Roger, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Weir, David, “Markets and Mortality in France,” 1600–1789,” manuscript, n.p., n.d.; Thirsk, Joan, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
39 See the excellent discussion in Janvry, Alain de, The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. The central issue of whether industrialization resulted from the transfer of resources from agriculture is addressed in Crouzet, Francois, Capital Formation in the Industrial Revolution (London: Methuen, 1972)Google Scholar, and RFlood, oderick and McClosky, Donald, eds., The Economic History of Britain since lyoo, I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
40 The history of these ideas is ably reviewed in Lipton (fn. 25). See also Preobrazhensky, E., The New Economics, trans, by Brian Pearce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Erlich, Alexander, The Soviet Industrialization Debates, 1924–1928 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
41 Marshall, Leon S., “The Emergence of the First Industrial City: Manchester 1780–1850,” in Ware, Caroline F., ed., The Cultural Approach to History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 158Google Scholar. A sophisticated treatment is provided by McKeown, Timothy J. in “The Politics of Corn Law Repeal Reconsidered,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, September 3–6, 1987Google Scholar. In this paper, McKeown reanalyzes the famous Aydelotte data set. See Aydelotte, William, “The Country Gentlemen and the Repeal of the Corn Laws,” English Historical Review 82 (1967), 47–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
42 See in particular Mitra, Ashok, Terms of Trade and Class Relations: An Essay in Political Economy (London: Frank Cass, 1977).Google Scholar
43 See Erlich (fn. 40), as well as Dobb, Maurice, Soviet Economic Development Since tgiy (New York: International Publishers, 1948).Google Scholar
44 See the discussion in Schultz, Theodore W., ed., Distortions of Agricultural Incentives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
45 Heckscher, Eli F., Merchantilism, II (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931)Google Scholar, 80ff.
46 Gras, N.S.B., The Evolution of the English Corn Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ponko, V., “N.S.B. Gras and Elizabethan Corn Policy: A Re-examination of the Problem,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 17 (1964), 24–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Outhwaite, R. B., “Dearth and Government Intervention in English Grain Markets, 1590–1700,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 34 (1981), 380–406Google Scholar, and “Food Crises in Early Modern England: Patterns of Public Response,” in Proceedings of the Seventeenth International History Conference, ed. Flinn, Michael (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
47 See the discussion in Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar, Book I, pp. 2igff.
48 See, for example, Weir (fn. 38); the contributions in Rotberg, Robert I. and Rabb, Theodore K., Hunger and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Appleby (fn. 38).
49 See Smith (fn. 47), Book I, pp. 219ff.
50 As Rude has shown, the rebellions by the London mob correlated with the price of bread. See Rude (fn. 8).
51 Robert Brenner, forthcoming.
- 16
- Cited by