Agrarian roots of capitalism in England, c. 1550-1850
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In this blog, Joshua Rhodes of Durham University describes his research on the agrarian roots of capitalism in the early-modern period, which was financially supported by the Economic History Society’s Carnevali Small Research Grants Scheme.
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The past structure of the English economy was radically different compared to today. One of the most striking differences is that today agriculture accounts for just 0.5% of GDP, while in the mid 1800s it accounted for 22%. Go back to 1600 and it was 41% of GDP. At least 1 in 3 people worked in agriculture before 1800. [Broadberry et al., 2015] Despite the importance of farming to the pre-industrial economy, some big unanswered questions remain. One especially thorny issue is how the size of farms changed in the past, which my new project on the ‘Agrarian roots of capitalism in England, c. 1550-1850’ addresses.
Why is farm size so important? Larger farms mean less land to go around and can be evidence that the small-scale farmers have been pushed out. Losing access to land in pre-industrial England was significant because farming was one of the sure-fire ways of earning a living and feeding yourself and your family. Small farmers who got kicked off their land (sometimes because of enclosure) or had to give up farming because their farms were too small to be economically viable often ended up working on other people farms. These farmers were proletarianized – they went from being employers or self-employed to waged workers (employees) on other peoples’ farms. Farm size also determined the overall productivity and efficiency of the agricultural sector. Although the jury is still out on whether bigger farms are always better. Large farms might have used their workers more efficiently than smaller farms so that each acre required fewer labour inputs. But small farms could achieve higher outputs per acre because they were worked very intensively (often by family members for free).
Who had access to land? To what extent had rural society been proletarianized? How productive and efficient were farms? These questions underpin our understanding of how English agriculture became increasingly commercialised and capitalist by the nineteenth century. The aim of my new project is to reconstruct the structure of farming to offer some fresh answers to these questions. My aim is to produce a national dataset of farm sizes from 1550 to 1850. This will capture the long-run economic development of England before and during industrialisation.
This is a period before the routine centralised collection of statistics. Nowadays the government collects data on farm size through an annual agricultural census (which started in 1865) and the Farm Business Survey. Modern data involves the collection of much more than just the size of farms. It includes information on their income from livestock and crops, their outputs, productivity, and employees. Working in the past means both having to simplify what we are calculating and finding inventive ways of collecting data from historic documents that were never intended to be used for the purposes that historians ascribe to them. My new project uses a mixture of records that indirectly capture farm sizes. Happily for us, but unhappily for them, farmers had to pay taxes. The amount and type of taxes changed over time and a long-run project like mine that is looking at change from 1550 to 1850 means using different sources for different periods. Two of the longest running and most abundant are tithes (a tax on farmers’ produce, e.g. crops, animals etc) and poor rates (a tax levied for the support of the poorest in society). It was not a requirement for tithe or poor rate records to record the size of farms but occasionally they did. The challenge is finding the records that contain farm size among the thousands scattered in archives across England. Generous funding from the Economic History Society is enabling me to search through more of these records to produce a systematic farm size dataset. I aim to report back what I find in the near future.
References
Broadberry, S., Campbell, B. M. S. , Klein, A., Overton, M. & van Leeuwen, B., British Economic Growth 1270-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
To contact the author:
Joshua Rhodes
@joshrhodes12
Durham University
