Economic History: Transitions to Capitalism

Flashcards for reviewing key vocabulary and concepts related to the transition to capitalism.

Capitalism

An economic system characterized by private property, markets, specialization, trade, and firms where labor sells its labor to the market to survive, and firms must accumulate, cut costs, and innovate or fail.

Before Capitalism

Markets are embedded in social relations.

With Capitalism

Social relations are embedded in markets.

Roman Empire

8th C BCE to 5th C E; Extensive Mediterranean and long-distance trade; Roman law, roads, engineering, science, and culture.

Latifundia

Large agricultural estates using slave labor in the Roman Empire, as well as tenant farming.

Rise of West European Feudalism

The weakening of the Western Roman Empire in 286 CE, with the split into East and West, led to the former's decline due to invasions, plague, and economic issues.

Roman Collapse and Rise of Feudalism

The collapse of centralized governance and a security crisis led to lords granting land (fiefs) to vassals for military service, creating chains of personal loyalty.

Manorialism

Collapse of Roman trade networks led to self-sufficient estates, local production, subsistence agriculture, and peasants bound to land, forming the economic foundation for feudalism.

The Middle Ages

5th to 15th Centuries; period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, characterized by largely isolated Europe and the rise of Christianity reinforcing hierarchies.

Norman

Vikings who had settled France; They conquered England in 1066, leading to new land concentrations, harsher feudalism, and more exactions from peasantry.

Domesday Book

A comprehensive survey of land ownership in England in 1086, documenting households, resources, land ownership, and taxes.

Open Field System

System prevalent in Europe during the Middle Ages, where each manor had 2-3 open fields divided into narrow strips of land.

Emergence of Manorial System

Evolved from the late Roman villa system and Anglo-Saxon settlements, with local landlords taking on protective roles; a legal, economic, and administrative unit.

Land Tenure and Labor Services

Lords had rights granted by the King, sub-tenants rented land, and serfs were bound to the land with obligations of rent, fines, and labor-services; complex system of rights and obligations; customary tenants replaced serfdom.

The Commercialization (neo-Smithian) Model

Stresses population, markets, and technology as drivers of institutional change; argues serfdom was a contractual arrangement that changed with demographic pressures; institutions held back improvement and trade.

Marxist Perspectives

Gives prominence to class conflict and the 'balance of class forces;' argues landlords gained power and converted free peasants into serfs; low wages explained by exploitation rather than Malthusian factors.

Robert Brenner and the Political Marxists

Argues class conflict is largely 'autonomous' of demographic and technological factors; lords extracted surplus from peasants via extra-economic means; capitalism emerged in England because landlords dispossessed peasants from the land.

Villeins

Serfs or unfree tenants; Could not move away, marry, inherit or sell without the lord's permission.

Freeholders

Had free tenure; Owed fixed rent to the lord but few feudal services; They could sell or inherit without lord's permission.

Cottars

Occupied cottages and cultivated small land lots; Free and unfree tenants often had significant holdings (30 acres or more).

Waste Rights

Technically ownership vested in the lord, but the lord's ability to change use by enclosure restricted by common rights of tenants (e.g., to take wood, peat, pasture).

Manorial Officials

Bailiffs (paid official) and Reeves/Graves (usually a tenant who collected the rents and fines).

Merchet

Fine paid upon marriage

Leyrwite

Fine paid for bearing a child outside of wedlock.

Statute of Quia Emptores 1290

Forbids further subinfeudation; Allowed tenants to sell tenancy to another but not create further vassal sub-tenants.

Black Death

1348-1350; subsequent population collapse

Neo-institutional and Marxist Focus

Property rights and political economy; economics has gained the title of queen of the social sciences by choosing solved political problems as its domain.

Efficient economic organization is key to growth.

Need PR incentives "that bring the private rate of return close to the social rate."

Latitude

Easy to determine (Pole Star angle).

Longitude

Requires precise time accuracy because of Ships motion, changing temperature & humidity, etc.

Types of Goods

Private Goods, Club Goods, Common Resources, Public Goods

Institutional Arrangements

Enables units to realize economies of scale (joint-stock companies, corporations), to encourage innovation (prizes, patent laws), to improve the efficiency of factor markets (enclosures, bills of exchange, the abolition of serfdom), or to reduce market imperfections (insurance companies).

Government

View government simply as an organization that provides protection and justice in return for revenue. Pay government to establish and enforce property rights.

Neo-Smithian Interpretation

North and Thomas and neo-institutionalists; Costs of creating/enforcing PRs may exceed benefits to any group or individual; inexorable trend toward more efficient PRs.

The Commercialization or neo-Smithian model

Presupposes it is the natural outcome of human practices; requires only maturation and removal of external obstacles;

The later Marx of Capital insists that capital is a new social relation.

Critical transformation of social property rights: expropriation of direct producers. Dispossessed became wage laborers;

What is the Tragedy of the Commons?

Was this a problem in English manors/villages?

Property Rights

What are the different types/dimensions of property rights to land? Bundles of rights: to use, inherit, exclude, alienate… Exclusive, secure, alienable.

Evolutionary Theories of Property Rights

Establishing and enforcing property rights is costly; property rights only worth enforcing where benefits exceed the costs.

Domar's trilemma

Can only have two of the following three: Free Land, Free Labor, A Rentier landlord class.

Open Access/Commons

Any one can enter and use; Captures the average product of labor (APL)

Enclosure/Private Owner

One owner has the right to exclude others. Cost of enclosing/protecting

Land insecurity (use-it-or-lose-it)

The worker who enters the unenclosed commons earns an implied land rent.

Evolutionary Theories of Property Rights

Benefits of enclosure fall short of costs. More efficient to keep lands unenclosed (customary tenures). Potential efficiency gain but also rent-shifting gain to encloser. Too much or too little enclosure.

Class-Conflict Centered Explanations

Capitalism was not a natural outcome of economic development, but a political project and new social relations that destroyed the peasantry

Brenner

Robert Brenner argued that shift in the balance of class forces happened primarily in England

Customary Rights

"Peasant rights in forests and woodland… grew out of persistent, everyday friction with their lords".

Land Enclosures

Refers to the fencing or hedging off areas of land for private use that had once been available for common use.

Popular and societal resistance to enclosures

They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities.

Kett's Rebellion (1549)

Peasants in Norfolk and Suffolk, led by yeoman Robert Kett, rebelled against enclosure of common lands and clergy.

Protestant clergyman Robert Crowley (1550)

They take our houses over our heads, they buy our lands out of our hands, they raise our rents, they levy great (yea unreasonable) fines, they enclose our commons!

Religious opposition to enclosures

Hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment

Tudor Enclosures

Rapid economic growth and state expansion; Dissolution of the monasteries Henry VIII 1530s

The Diggers 1649

Advocated for common ownership of land and an end to private property

The English Agricultural Revolution

1520 estimate 80% farmers subsistence, selling little to market; Most open fields had been enclosed small peasant holdings into large farms leased to tenants who cultivated them with wage labor.

By 1851 Agricultural Census

Britain had strongly concentrated land ownership

Traditional/Triumphalist accounts of the Agricultural Revolution

Swept aside backward and inefficient agriculture (peasant and/or feudal remnants); Landowners consolidate holdings and experiment with modern agricultural techniques.

Agrarian Fundamentalists (Allen's term)

Improved farming, modern agrarian institutions, increase in inequality, and the first industrial revolution are connected.

Tory Triumphalists

claim enclosures maintained or increased farm employment.

Criticisms of Open Field System

Overcommitment to Corn growing; Slow introduction of new crops and methods due to group decision-making

Marx

The expropriation and expulsion of the agricultural population, intermittent but renewed again and again, supplied … the town industries with a mass of proletarians

Allen's view and findings

two agricultural revolutions, one by yeomen farmers in the seventeenth century and another by landlords in the eighteenth,

Debated 'agricultural revolution'

Slow and steady vs. 'revolution'

Push

Rising ag productivity released labor for industry.

Pull

Rising wages in industry attracted labor from agriculture.

Green Revolution

new fertilizers; European continent built agricultural extension services to help farmers adopt new technologies.

Enclosures and Agricultural Productivity

Challenged the traditional view that enclosures were necessary for agricultural productivity.

Agrarian Fundamentalism

Criticized the "agrarian fundamentalism" of Alwyn Young and other champions of enclosure

British Agricultural Revolution 1500-1800

Transition from organic ag system to more energy-intensive inputs

Land Reclamation

Acts of Parliament 1740 to 1840 drained 1.5 million acres of land.

Agricultural Statistics

Sparse