The Codification of a Market in Products

As in the commercially advanced Italian cities, so in Britain the rise of trade in the products of wage labor coincided with the first reflections on labor as a source of wealth. Clement Armstrong, writing in 1535, concluded in the language of his day that "artificialites"—that is, products manufactured by artisans—provided the mainstay of Britain's foreign-exchange earnings. "Suerly the common weale of England muste rise out of the workes of the common people," he said; " . . . the workes of artificialite encressith plenty of money."^[10] Although human industry had emerged as a focus of attention for Armstrong, it did not appear to him as something conveyable as a com-

[9] Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), p. 25.

[10] R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, editors, Tudor Economic Documents (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924), Volume III, p. 127.

modity or as an ingredient that determined the relative prices of goods.^[11] When the revolution initiated in 1640 swept away restrictions on internal trade, labor time emerged as a national resource with a metric and as the standard of the value of transmittable goods.^[12]

Britain drifted into the waters of a formally free market by default.^[13] In the course of the revolution, the executive government lost its arbitrary powers over local authorities.^[14] The dismantling of the prerogative courts made economic regulation a matter for Parliament.^[15] But Parliament, in contrast to the Privy Council, proved too unwieldy a body to pass significant bills of regulation for the country as a whole.^[16] The tortuous history of legislation after the Restoration shows that corporate regulation ended not because of a growing allegiance to laissez-faire but as a result of the deadlock between diverse commercial interests.^[17]

Britain's unintended transition to a formally free commercial regime was fundamentally different from the more abrupt entry experienced on the Continent. There the passage to a new order could be debated in some measure and decreed. In France the revolutionary legislation of 1791, which abolished provincial and urban guild restrictions on trade, may not have transformed business mentality overnight; nonetheless, these laws marked

[11] Armstrong did not conceive of labor as an item with a cost. The advantage of the growth of trade and industry is that it sets "common people daily to worke in a right ordre of the common weale to kepe theym out of idelnes frome working syne and myschif." Ibid.

[12] M. Beer, Early British Economics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), pp. 170, 172–174, 215.

[13] Harold Laski, The Rise of Liberalism: The Philosophy of a Business Civilization (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), p. 117. "Private enterprise," Hobsbawm reminds us, "was and is blind." E. J. Hobsbawm, "The Seventeenth Century in the Development of Capitalism," Science and Society Volume XXIV, Number 2 (Spring 1960), p. 101. Eric Roll, A History of Economic Thought (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1942), pp. 51–52.

[14] G. D. Ramsay, "Industrial Laisser-Faire and the Policy of Cromwell," The Economic History Review Volume XVI, Number 2 (1946), pp. 108–109.

[15] Christopher Hill, "A Bourgeois Revolution?" in J. G. A. Pocock, editor, Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 117–118.

[16] B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England 1600–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 231.

[17] J. P. Cooper, "Economic Regulation and the Cloth Industry in Seventeenth-Century England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Fifth series, Volume 20 (London: Printed for The Society by Butler & Tanner, 1970), pp. 93–99. Lawrence Stone emphasizes the unintended consequences of the revolution in "The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth-Century England Revisited," in Geoff Eley and William Hunt, editors, Reviving the English Revolution (London: Verso, 1988), p. 287. Some legislation of local or restricted application continued to stray from the rules of formally free exchange. As late as 1773, Parliament passed an act regulating wages on behalf of the journeymen silk weavers of London and Middlesex. Ephraim Lipson, The Economic History of England , Volume III (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1948), p. 270.

a dramatic break in the comprehension of commercial intercourse. In Prussia the bold edicts of 1810 serve as a signpost for the shift to a formal market society. The experience of discontinuity on the Continent versus a prolonged transition in Britain also points to a conjunctural difference in the institutional settings under which tradespeople came to envision the conveyance of labor as a commodity.