The Compass of the Commodity

The launching of the new market society in England was a work of blindness, an interpretation of the sale of labor that followed one of imagination. William Petty was perhaps the first British economist to combine a focus on labor as a creator of wealth with a systematic account of the determination of a commodity's exchange value.^[18] All too often his ideas appear as precursors to more refined theories of labor rather than as signals of abiding features of British commercial thinking. In A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions , published in 1662, Petty judged that both land and labor served as "natural denominations" of the value of all goods: "that is, we ought to say, a Ship or garment is worth such a measure of Land, with such another measure of Labour."^[19] The dual standards of land and labor remain a part of his thinking even when he focuses upon the more specific question of the principles that determine the relative prices of commodities:

Suppose a man could with his own hands plant a certain scope of Land with Corn, that is, could Digg, or Plough, Harrow, Weed, Reap, Carry home, Thresh, and Winnow so much as the Husbandry of this Land requires; and had withal Seed wherewith to sowe the same. I say, that when this man hath subducted his seed out of the proceed of his Harvest, and also, what himself hath both eaten and given to others in exchange for Clothes, and other Natural necessaries; that the remainder of Corn is the natural and true Rent of Land for that year.  . . . But a further, though collateral question may be, how much English money this Corn or Rent is worth? I answer, so much as the money, which another single man can save, within the same time, over and above his expence, if he imployed himself wholly to produce and make it; viz. Let another man go travel into a Countrey where is Silver, there Dig it, Refine it, bring it to the

[18] Marx called Petty the founder of political economy. Theorien über den Mehrwert (Stuttgart: J. H. W. Dietz, 1919), Volume I, p. 1.

[19] Charles Henry Hull, editor, The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), Volume I, pp. 44, 68.

same place where the other man planted his Corn; Coyne it &c the same person, all the while of his working for Silver, gathering also food for his necessary livelihood, and procuring himself covering, &c. I say, the Silver of the one, must be esteemed of equal value with the Corn of the other.^[20]

Commentators unable to divest themselves of prior acquaintance with Marx are wont to assume that Petty anticipates Marx's premise that goods produced with equal amounts of labor have matching values.^[21] But Petty asserts only that the value of one commodity, corn, equals the value of another, silver, if the time spent producing them is equal, after deducting the expense, in labor and seed, of their production.^[22] He adds, "The neat proceed of the Silver is the price of the whole neat proceed of the Corn."^[23] There is no assurance that the prior expenses of the corn farm and the silver business are equal or that the labor expended by the producers for subsistence is on average equal. In fact, Petty's descriptions make this improbable, because the land makes an independent addition to the subsistence of the husbandman. Petty does not offer a theory in which the value of a product can be determined by adding up the costs of its components. He contends that the value of the product is determined by the surplus land and labor devoted to its production—a tracer for identifying original features of the British concept of labor as a commodity.^[24]

[20] A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions , in ibid., p. 43.

[21] Marx himself misconstrued Petty so. Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert , op. cit., Volume I, p. 1. Shichiro Matsukawa, "An Essay on the Historical Uniqueness of Petty's Labour Theory of Value," Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics Volume 5, Number 2 (January 1965), p. 3. Alessandro Roncaglia summarizes Petty's reception by economists familiar with the Marxist tradition in Petty: The Origins of Political Economy (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), pp. 79, 112. Marx found unresolvable contradictions in Petty's account: on the one hand, Petty seems to imply that the magnitude of a product's value is determined by labor time; on the other, land makes a contribution of its own to exchange value. Marx supposed that this inconsistency appeared because Petty appreciated labor only hazily. In his view, Petty merged two aspects of it which ought to remain separate: "Labour as a source of exchange value," Marx wrote, "is confused with labor as the source of use-value; in this case it presupposes material provided by nature (land)." Theorien op. cit., Volume 1, p. 11.

[22] Here I follow the noteworthy lead of David McNally in Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 51.

[23] Ibid., p. 43. My own emphasis.

[24] Petty attempts to equate the value of land and labor in several manuscripts. But in so doing he shifts from looking at labor as the determinant of the relative prices of commodities to looking at labor as the real standard of those prices. See Shichiro Matsukawa, "Sir William Petty: An Unpublished Manuscript," Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics Volume 17, Number 2 (February 1977), p. 48.

Most wage earners and petty commodity producers in seventeenth-century Britain derived part of their subsistence from farming their own parcels, as did Petty's father, who combined agriculture with weaving.^[25] Analysts of early industrialization and the putting-out system have long observed that laborers in these situations do not receive equal returns on the time they spend on subsistence farming and that spent on manufacture for exchange. Depending on the sufficiency of their holdings, they can earn far more or far less per unit of time devoted to manufacture than to agriculture at home.^[26] Adam Smith commented upon one side of the anomaly: where cottagers derived their subsistence from their own agriculture, he said, their manufacture "comes frequently cheaper to market than would otherwise be suitable to its nature."^[27] The price of the product need not cover the labor invested in it, because it does not cover the workers' subsistence. Marx, too, observed that production was not governed by the laws of exchange value if independent workers directly produced their own means of subsistence.^[28] What seemed an incidental exception in Smith's century and Marx's was still a frequent occurrence in Petty's. Rather than formulate a "law" of value that was anything but, Petty's examples assume that laborers may have an independent means of subsistence outside the market.^[29]

[25] E. Strauss, Sir William Petty: Portrait of a Genius (London: Bodley Head, 1954), p. 20; David Seward, "The Devonshire Cloth Industry in the Early Seventeenth Century," in Roger Burt, editor, Industry and Society in the South-West (Essex: University of Essex, 1970), p. 42; John T. Swain, Industry Before the Industrial Revolution: North-East Lancashire c. 1500–1640 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 121; Ian Blanchard, "Labour Productivity and Work Psychology in the English Mining Industry," The Economic History Review Second series, Volume XXXI, Number 1 (1978), pp. 11, 13.

[26] The weavers who set up the first trade union in Lancashire in 1756 complained that the labor of those who relied mostly on inherited farms "can never be reckoned upon an Average with those who have nothing but their Trade to subsist themselves and their family by." Alfred P. Wadsworth and Julia de Lacy Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire 1600–1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), p. 317.

[27] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976 [1776]), pp. 130–131. Smith consigned the division between subsistence farming and manufacture for exchange to "ancient times" and "poor countries."

[28] Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980), Volume I, p. 184.

[29] By far the most thorough and acute analysis of Petty's economic theories appears in Silva Kühnis's Die wert- und preistheoretischen Ideen William Pettys (Winterthur: P. G. Keller, 1960). Part of Kühnis's contribution consists in showing that the standard interpretations of Petty start from incorrect premises: Petty, she shows, does not try to establish labor as a measure of relative exchange values, nor does he consider the exchange value of labor equal to the costs of laborers' subsistence, nor does he aim at showing that the value of a product can be deduced by some formula from the cost of the land and labor employed upon it (pp. 161, 190, 81). Instead, in an exhaustive survey of his ideas, she shows that Petty takes on an impossible task, that of arriving at a universal measure of use value based on land, labor, and their products.

The manufacturer of silver in Petty's excerpted paragraph is not a wage earner but an independent producer who covers the expenses of his undertaking.^[30] He has the capital on hand for maintaining himself, lays out the capital needed for the production process, and manages the transport of the goods. By comparison, Petty banished the propertyless wage-earner from the liberal commercial order.

It is observed by Clothiers, and others, who employ great numbers of poor people, that when corn is extremely plentiful, that the Labour of the poor is proportionably dear; And scarce to be had at all (so licentious are they who labour only to eat, or rather to drink). Wherefore when so many Acres sown with Corn, as do usually produce a sufficient store for the Nation, shall produce perhaps double to what is expected or necessary; it seems not unreasonable that this common blessing of God, should be applied to the common good of all people  . . . than the same should be abused, by the vile and brutish part of mankind.^[31]

Petty dismissed wage labor as something inferior, which ought not be treated as a market commodity at all. He recommended instead that the government fix wage rates by law.^[32] "The Law that appoints such Wages," he concluded, "should allow the Labourer but just wherewithall to live."^[33] From Petty's standpoint, what an outsider might call labor power has no price set by the market.

In fine, Petty's text marks the emergence of a concept of labor as a commodity restricted to surplus labor traded freely in a market, embodied in a product, and vended by independent commodity producers.^[34] Petty was not alone among seventeenth-century writers in assuming that labor as a marketable commodity was traded between self-employed workers. Nicholas Barbon, a successful building contractor, is remembered for picturing trade

[30] I owe this observation to M. Beer, Early British Economics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 168.

[31] "Political Arithmetick," originally published 1690, reprinted in Hull, editor, op. cit., Volume 1, pp. 274–275.

[32] A Treatise of Taxes , op. cit., p. 52.

[33] Ibid., p. 87. If the justices allow wages to rise to double the level needed for subsistence, Petty adds, the laborer "works but half so much as he could have done, and otherwise would; which is a loss to the Publick of the fruit of so much labour." Does not Petty exclude the laborer from the "public"?

[34] The emphasis upon the free exchange of labor when it is above that required for subsistence appears also in Dudley North's tract of 1690. Beer, Early British Economics , op. cit., p. 210.

as "nothing else but an exchange of one mans labour for another."^[35] Barbon assumed that this trade took place between independent tradespeople, such as butchers, bakers, and drapers. In the confused succession of oppositional religious and political ideas of the seventeenth century, labor acquired diverse meanings. But the critics of the old order, from worldly critics of idle monks to the Puritan theorists, were united in one supposition: when they contrived explanations for the dignity of labor, they sanctified only the free craftspeople. Their formulations, which amounted to crude versions of a labor theory of value, rested upon the proprietorship of one's person and capacities that the dependent wage laborers, by contrast, had in the popular opinion forfeited once and for all.^[36]

These writers may have occupied themselves with general principles, but they did not try to establish a systematic science. Most of the economic thinkers per se were entrepreneurs who wanted to enrich themselves by convincing others of the advantages of adopting certain policies.^[37] Petty may have written his most notable work, A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions , in the hope of advancing his fortune as surveyor general in Ireland.^[38] Petty and the clever marketers of the time drew upon premises that they expected others to understand easily. They did not create, but expressed, the assump-

[35] In Nicholas Barbon, An Apology for the Builder (London: For Cave Pullen, 1685), p. 67.

[36] The preceding comment draws upon Christopher Hill's studies in Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), pp. 133–134, 143–144, and his comments in "Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labour in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in C. H. Feinstein, editor, Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth: Essays Presented to Maurice Dobb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 347. See also Beer, Early British Economics , op. cit., pp. 174–175. Several interpreters have concluded that John Locke could not admit the contractual sale of labor power, only the sale of the produce or completed service of labor. The servant who sold labor power itself had, like a slave, lost juridical autonomy. Locke also suggested that independent artisans who merchandized their own products were singularly productive for society. Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money , 1696, reprinted in Patrick Hyde Kelly, editor, Locke on Money (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), Volume One, pp. 241–242; James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 138, 142; Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 48–51.

[37] For Josiah Child, Nicholas Barbon, and Dudley North, see William Letwin, The Origins of Scientific Economics (London: Methuen and Co., 1963), pp. 37, 54–55, 184–189.

[38] Letwin, op. cit., p. 141; Strauss, op. cit., pp. 123, 176. Petty reflected upon a general denominator of values of goods not as a theorist but as an advocate with a practical goal before him. To rebut claims that England's economy was in decline, he sought a measure of value apart from the fluctuating worth of currency.

tions of their age.^[39] Their ideas about labor corresponded to those held by many common people, as is confirmed in the popular sentiments that came to the surface following the crisis of 1640.

The Levellers, the most inventive publishers of democratic tracts during the revolutionary period, were united by aspirations for change rather than by a coherent program. Nonetheless, the statements of the Levellers about the franchise reveal that for the common people of Britain, the divide between the sale of wage labor and of products made with labor was fraught with significance. As C. B. Macpherson perceptively observed, the Levellers supposed that the capacity to labor was a form of property "not metaphorically but essentially."^[40] People who sold their labor power for a wage lost their birthright and claim to freedom, as if they had permanently alienated a piece of land.^[41] They no longer had the right to exclude others from the use and enjoyment of their labor power, and so they had forfeited their property in it altogether. Macpherson adduces evidence that prominent spokespersons for the Levellers used this reasoning to deny the franchise to wage earners.^[42] By the same logic, independent artisans, however penurious, sold only the products of their labor and thereby retained a claim to freedom and voice in government.^[43]

[39] No wonder some of the most notable economic treatises of the seventeenth century have remained anonymous. J. R. McCulloch, editor, Early English Tracts on Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954 [1856]), p. xiii.

[40] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 153.

[41] Christopher Hill, "The Poor and the People," in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 250. Hill, "Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen," op. cit., pp. 342–346. Through the end of the seventeenth century, the term to employ applied to the recruitment of an abject servant rather than to the wage-labor relation in general. E. J. Hundert, "Market Society and Meaning in Locke's Political Philosophy," Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume XV, Number 1 (January 1977), p. 41.

[42] See also Keith Thomas, "The Levellers and the Franchise," in G. E. Aylmer, editor, The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1972), p. 68. Christopher Hill has endorsed Macpherson's interpretation, but others contend that the evidence can be read several ways. See the literature cited in ibid., p. 208. Macpherson's interpretation of the franchise proposals supposes that the locution servants referred to all wage laborers. He defends his position in "Servants and Labourers in Seventeenth-Century England," in his Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 207–223, and in The Rise and Fall of Economic Justice and Other Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 153. Christopher Hill unearths evidence in support of Macpherson in "Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen," op. cit., pp. 341–342.

[43] The political theorist James Harrington also excluded wage laborers from the franchise on the grounds that they were not "freemen." C. B. Macpherson, "Harrington's 'Opportunity State,'" in Charles Webster, editor, The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 42. J. G. A. Pocock sketches the intellectual setting for reasoning about the franchise in Eugene Kamenka and R. S. Neale, editors, "Early ModernCapitalism—The Augustan Perception, "in his Feudalism, Capitalism and Beyond (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1975), p. 65.

The outlook of the Levellers, C. B. Macpherson has suggested, reflected their experience of freedom and competition in the market.^[44] Among their ranks were many small craftsmen who lacked freehold land or membership in a chartered trading corporation.^[45] They learned all too well that workers retained their liberty and self-direction only on condition that they protected their status as independent producers.^[46] The semi-servile position of wage earners influenced the vision of the most revolutionary segment of the Levellers' movement. Gerrard Winstanley, a leader of the Diggers, declared it iniquitous for people to work for wages.^[47] "We can as well live under a foreign enemy working for day wages," he said, "as under our own brethren." He recommended that the law forbid the institution of wage labor altogether.^[48]

When political advisers, merchants, and poor artisans converged upon the view that the only kind of labor sold with a proper commercial value was that of the independent producer, all did so for the same reason: the institutions of work in Britain appeared to reveal labor as a commodity only under this guise. By 1690, according to Gregory King's appraisal, the total of la-

[44] Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism , op. cit., pp. 121, 150.

[45] Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 130–131; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking Press, 1972), pp. 91–94. Fenner Brockway, Britain's First Socialists: The Levellers, Agitators and Diggers of the English Revolution (London: Quartet Books, 1980), p. 116; G. E. Aylmer, "Gentlemen Levellers?" Past & Present Number 49 (November 1970), pp. 121, 124.

[46] George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), pp. 200–201. Pamphleteers of many sorts commented that people who did not have the working capital needed to maintain their independence could not exchange their labor at its true commercial value. The economist Andrew Yarranton, for example, advanced a plan in 1677 to protect from this abuse laborers who lacked funds. He proposed that a national bank be established from which common people could receive loans. Yarranton told workers that after receipt of some capital, "thy fingers and hands are thy own, and now they are employed for thy benefit and advantage, and not for others." The handicraft makers who lacked sufficient capital could not command the full value of their labor in the market: the "poor Man is forced many times to buy his Materials he makes his Commodity with, with some his own Trade, and is thereby forced to buy dear, and sell cheap.  . . . The poor Handicraft Man is forced to let part of that which is gained in the Commodity, go to one of his own Trade." Andrew Yarranton, England's Improvement by Sea and Land (London: R. Everingham, 1677), pp. 169, 172. Without sufficient working capital, workers sacrificed the labor they invested in the product.

[47] Hill, World Turned Upside Down , op. cit., p. 103.

[48] Quoted by Christopher Hill in "Discussion," of "Conference Paper" by Keith Thomas, "Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society," Past & Present Number 29 (December 1964), p. 63.

boring people and out-servants had reached one-quarter of the population. This group did not on average earn enough, he thought, to cover the price of their subsistence.^[49] Latter-day research confirms the dismal view that people who depended only on wages could not maintain themselves. How they survived remains as much a riddle for modern economists as it was for contemporaries.^[50] Roger North complained that the clothiers of their day kept dependent laborers "but just alive," so that the desperate employees resorted to theft or escaped starvation only by receiving poor relief.^[51] Wage earners were called, not "workers," but "the poor," those in need of benefactory employment or handouts.^[52]

The low remuneration for wage earners could not help but shape the development of notions of labor as a commodity. People viewed wage labor not as a means of supporting themselves but as a supplement to a primary source of sustenance such as a smallholding.^[53] One retrospective calculation of the incomes of the common people found that a licensed beggar in the seventeenth century could expect higher proceeds than the average wage-

[49] See chart in Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen and Co., 1971), p. 36.

[50] Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1968 [1919]), pp. 69–90. Historians have corroborated King's estimates of the proportions of the laboring poor among the total population. D. C. Coleman, "Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century," The Economic History Review Second series, Volume VIII, Number 3 (April 1956), p. 283.

[51] Cooper, "Economic Regulation," op. cit., p. 94. "Many poor," said Matthew Hale in 1683, "must take such wages as they are not able to live upon." Matthew Hale, A Discourse Touching Provision for the poor (London: H. Hills, 1683), p. 18.

[52] David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 34; Gustaf F. Steffen, Studien zur Geschichte der englischen Lohnarbeiter (Stuttgart: Hobbing & Büchle, 1901), Volume One, p. 483; J. Haynes, Great Britain's Glory; Or, an Account of the Great Numbers of Poor Employ'd in the Woollen and Silk Manufactories (London: J. Marshall, 1715), p. 85. As wage labor and poor relief were fused in public perception, taxpayers feared the introduction of new industries. Roger North, A Discourse of the Poor Shewing the Pernicious Tendency of the Laws Now in Force (London: M. Cooper, 1753), p. 62. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714 (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), pp. 26–27. In Wiltshire, large clothiers had to grant a security deposit for permission to settle employees in a parish. G. D. Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1965), p. 129. "Those places, where there are the most Poor," Matthew Hale wrote, "consist for the most part of Trades-men." Op. cit., p. 7. The "Trades-men" themselves were distinguished from their employees by the circumstance that they did not have to depend upon their labor for subsistence.

[53] A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 26; Donald Woodward, " Wage Rates and Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England," Past & Present Number 91 (May 1981), p. 43; Smith, Wealth of Nations , op. cit., p. 130.

earner.^[54] Wage laborers as such could not survive as market actors.^[55] People in trade and industry who pictured the emerging commercial society saw labor as the wellspring of prosperity,^[56] but under these historical circumstances the sale of labor power was ill suited to serve as a model for the exchange of labor as a commodity in general.

The depressed level of wages in England represented a work of political art. The process of enclosing land, which continued through the seventeenth century, deprived people of their livelihood in the countryside faster than new possibilities opened up in urban or rural industry.^[57] Where a balance between the labor supply and need for labor did reappear, the employing class used the machinery of local government to restrain any wage increases.^[58] The Statute of Apprentices, dating from Elizabeth's reign, gave justices of the peace the responsibility for fixing wage rates for common occupations. These officials were supposed to set minimum levels of remuneration in times of need. In practice, during the seventeenth century they generally confined their efforts to setting maximum rates.^[59] Employers who violated the standards by paying a higher wage were subject to fines.^[60] The justices set wages at low levels with the expectation that wage earners would find additional support as agricultural tenants or as beneficiaries of poor

[54] Beier, op. cit., p. 27.

[55] James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labour (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1884), p. 353. So closely did writers associate poverty with manufacture that they oscillated between asserting that the poor were needed to work up tradespeople's materials and that the materials were important for giving the poor something to do. "Manufacture seems a kind of debt to the laborious part of the people," wrote William Petyt in 1680. William Petyt, Britannia Languens; Or, A Discourse of Trade (London: For T. Dring and S. Couch, 1680), pp. 26–27. See also Haynes, op. cit., pp. 83, 85. Robert Reyce said of Suffolk in 1618, "Where the clothiers do dwell or have dwelt, there are found the greatest number of the poor." Quoted by Hill, The Century of Revolution , op. cit., p. 25.

[56] John Bellers, Essays About the Poor, Manufactures, Trade, Plantations, and Immorality (London: T. Sowle, 1699), p. 10; North, op. cit., p. 66.

[57] E. C. K. Gonner, "The Progress of Inclosure During the Seventeenth Century," The English Historical Review Volume XXIII (July 1908), p. 495.

[58] Michael Walzer emphasizes that this legislation was composed in response to the growth of a class of wage laborers who were perceived as "masterless men." The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 200. Dobb shows that diverse legislative measures to lower wages were invoked whenever the supply of labor became inadequate. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1946), p. 234.

[59] Herbert Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries (2d ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 112.

[60] Even during the dislocations of the Interregnum, the machinery of government enforced official maximum wage rates. Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution 1640–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 175.

relief.^[61] In some instances, local officials did not simply block pay increases; they specified a new standard that fell below the previous average.^[62] Alice Clark, after comparing the cost of food with the legislated wages, concluded, "The Justices would like to have exterminated wage earners, who were an undesirable class in the community."^[63]

Especially in the fledgling textile industries, employers used the statutory restrictions on wages to impede the development of a market in wage labor. In 1673 the justices of Lancashire supported the employers by republishing maximum legal wage rates in the textile trade "to the end that masters and mistresses of families shall not soe frequently tempte a good servante to leave his service by offering more or greater wages than the law permits."^[64] Magistrates responded to employers' reports of workers' dickering over wages by ordering strict enforcement of the maximum rates, which covered men and women regardless of the form of wage.^[65] In the textile regions justices issued and revised wage assessments most frequently, and in greatest detail, in areas such as Wiltshire, where the small independent clothier was fast disappearing and the divide between master and journeyman had grown widest.^[66] Exactly

[61] North, op. cit., p. 43; Rogers, op. cit., p. 422.

[62] Unwin, op. cit., pp. 119–120., W. G. Hoskins, Industry, Trade and People in Exeter 1688–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968), p. 22.

[63] Clark, op. cit., p. 90. See also James E. Thorold Rogers's comparison of living costs with mandated wages in A History of Agriculture and Prices in England , Volume V: 1583–1702 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), pp. 830, 832. Yet some economic theorists cautioned that wage lists should not make laborers destitute. Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 147–148.

[64] Wadsworth and de Lacy Mann, op. cit., p. 50. The word industry remained synonymous with textile manufacture in the seventeenth century. C. H. Wilson, "Trade, Society and the State," in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe , Volume IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 491.

[65] The magistrates at the Doncaster sessions received complaints in the 1640s that "servants refuse to worke for reasonable wages, and cannot be hired for competent allowance as formerlye, makeing advantage of the much business of the times." Heaton, op. cit., pp. 111, 114. Herbert Heaton, "The Assessment of Wages in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," The Economic Journal Volume XXIV, No. 94 (June 1914), p. 219. In the textile trade, the wages approved by the justices often applied to men and women alike. In agricultural work, women's wages were established below men's. For an example of women spinners appealing for a new official wage, see Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 78. For women's wage assessments in other endeavors, see Clark, op. cit., pp. 66, 72.

[66] In Wiltshire wage rates were proclaimed each year and the small, independent textile entrepreneurs comprised a dying class. Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry , op. cit., pp. 125, 129. On the early demise of the small producer in the West of England, see Wadsworth and de Lacy Mann, op. cit., p. 386.

in the regions where the first groups of people dependent on only their wages emerged, there statutory restrictions ensured that labor power was not treated or conceived of as a market commodity.^[67] The mass of rural laborers were "brutally repressed," in Walzer's words, but "they were not integrated into a modern economic system."^[68]

The reflections of Rice Vaughan brilliantly illustrate how people of the era segregated labor power from market commodities. In one of the earliest analyses of monetary value, published in 1655, Vaughan sought to measure changes in the worth of money due to changes in its supply over more than a century. The prices of commodities—"Cloth, Linnen, Leather, and the like," he said—varied in response to the oscillations of fashion, the supply of raw materials, and improvements in manufacturing technology. On these grounds, fluctuations in the cost of buying these ordinary goods could not measure changes in the purchasing power of money. Vaughan reckoned that labor was unique because its real price was untouched by supply and demand. The "Wisdom of the Statute" fixed wages at the bare level needed for the necessaries of life. So "there is only one thing, from whence we may certainly track out prices," he concluded, "and that is the price of Labourers and Servants Wages, especially those of the meaner sort."^[69] Vaughan reversed the modern technique of consumer price indexing. Instead of recording changes in prices to calculate the real purchasing power of wages, he used adjustments in the money wages of labor over decades to chart the shifting value of money.^[70] Labor power served as the only orienting point,

[67] Compare C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Volume II, pp. 12, 93 with Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries , op. cit., p. 114; Rogers, op. cit., p. 428.

[68] Walzer's interpretation emphasizes the exclusion of wage laborers from the new regime of disciplined work. Op. cit., p. 230. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism , op. cit., pp. 215–220, presents John Locke as a kind of bourgeois theorist who takes for granted the free marketing of both products and of labor power. E. J. Hundert has convincingly shown that, to the contrary, the concept of a free market in labor power is absent from Locke's writings. Locke assumed that laborers could not conduct themselves as reasonable market actors; coercion and imprisonment were necessary to improve productivity. E. J. Hundert, "The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke Between Ideology and History," Journal of the History of Ideas Volume XXXIII, Number 1 (January–March 1972), pp. 5, 17; Hundert, "Market Society and Meaning," op. cit., pp. 33–34, 40–44. Perhaps due to the fact of wage regulation, Locke referred to agricultural workers who bargained over the harvest they would accept in lieu of a money wage but not over the money amount of the wage. Locke, op. cit., pp. 237–238.

[69] Rice Vaughan, A Discourse of Coin and Coinage , 1675, reprinted in J. R. McCulloch, editor, A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Money (London: Political Economy Club, 1856), pp. 58–59.

[70] This thought comes from Marian Bowley's article "Some Seventeenth Century Contributions to the Theory of Value," Economica Volume XXX, Number 118 (May 1963), p. 137.

because it comprised the only money good excluded from market fluctuations. Until the early eighteenth century, not only people of genius like Vaughan and Petty but almost everyone who speculated about the proper determination of wages endorsed stringent regulation.^[71]

By the laws of preindustrial England, persons not lawfully retained, apprenticed, or claiming an agricultural holding were compelled to serve any farmer or tradesman needing labor.^[72] Especially if a temporary scarcity of labor arose, the local authorities forced unoccupied men and women into useful occupations.^[73] The economic compulsion of a market economy did not suffice for the procurement of labor; extra-economic sanctions made work a legal obligation.^[74] Accordingly, Sir William Blackstone, in his famous Commentaries on English law, published from 1765 through 1769, treated the relation between the employer and the laborer as one based not on contract but on status. The labor transaction, Blackstone averred, was "founded in convenience, whereby a man is directed to call in the assistance of others, where his own skill and labour will not be sufficient to answer the cares incumbent upon him."^[75] Here, as in the remainder of his discussion of the labor transaction, Blackstone fails to specify whether the subordinate satisfying this "call" for aid does so by consent. To the contrary, Blackstone's treatment of the matter, the definitive codification of mid-eighteenth-

[71] Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism. A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), pp. 168–169; Roll, op. cit., p. 97. William Sheppard, Englands Balme (London: J. Cottrel, 1657), p. 165. Jürgen Kuczynski cites a revealing body of primary sources: Die Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter in England von 1640 bis in die Gegenwart (2d ed. Berlin: Tribüne, 1954), Volume IV, Part One, pp. 226–230.

[72] W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law , Volume IV (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1924), pp. 380–381; W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law , Volume XI (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1938), p. 475. The law applied to both men and women. George Howell, Labour Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), pp. 39 ff.

[73] For examples from the second half of the seventeenth century, see Keith Kelsall, Wage Regulation Under the Statute of Artificers (London: Methuen & Co., 1938), p. 30. Daniel Defoe thought it advisable that persons be compelled to work in the particular occupations where they were most needed, even if they were not on public relief. See The Great Law of Subordination Consider'd , 1724, reprinted in Stephen Copley, editor, Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 147. Dobb supplies examples of coerced labor. Op. cit., pp. 234–235.

[74] For evidence of an ordinance in Wiltshire from 1655 requiring young "men and maids" to leave home and "with all convenient speed betake themselves to service for the wages aforesaid, which if they refuse to do the justices shall proceed against them," see James, op. cit., p. 178.

[75] Quoted by Otto Kahn-Freund, "Blackstone's Neglected Child: The Contract of Employment," Law Quarterly Review Volume 93 (October 1977), p. 511.

century legal thought, created a category of "permanent" servants, a label which referred not to the length of their employment for a particular master but to an inherent condition in their person which compelled them to work for others. According to Blackstone, custom set some standard hours of work, but an employer could require his laborers to do his bidding at any moment, night or day, as if they were serfs with no time unconditionally their own.^[76] In practice as in the collective imagination, only independent producers could treat their labor as if it were freely alienable, individual property; otherwise, labor could be commanded.^[77]

At least the group of workers coerced by the local justices to work for an employer had one protection denied those who fell into their jobs by other means. If the workers had been drafted into service by statute, local justices who fixed the wage rates had clear authority to issue orders forcing employers to disburse the wages owed to workers.^[78] Otherwise, legal remedies were uncertain and numerous masters fell weeks—even months—behind in paying their subordinates.^[79] Some masters forced their workpeople to take promissory notes in lieu of wages.^[80] Yet there was more to the legal subservience of labor. When an employer accused his workers of having neglected their duty, claiming that they had left their employment or performed unsatisfactorily, the alleged misdeed was classified not as a breach of a civil contract but as criminal misbehavior.^[81] If the obligation to serve arose from

[76] Kahn-Freund, op. cit., p. 521. See Charles Peard, The Woollen Labourer's Advocate (London: Printed by the author and sold by J. Dormer, 1733), p. 4. Naturally contemporaries referred to the sale of "time and labor," but within a relation created by ascribed status. Hundert, "Market Society and Meaning," op. cit., p. 41.

[77] The reduction of idle persons to the semi-servile status of a wage earner became not just a legal but a moral injunction. Bishop Berkeley, for example, reasoned in the mid-eighteenth century that public law should sentence lazy persons to a term of "temporary servitude." Quoted by T. W. Hutchison, "Berkeley's Querist and Its Place in the Economic Thought of the Eighteenth Century," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Volume IV, Number 13 (May 1953), p. 61. The term did not denote a prison sentence, simply wage labor. Ordinary wage workers in the textile industry who labored on the employer's premises were said to be in "servitude." Anonymous, The Linnen and Woollen Manufactory Discoursed (London: G. Huddleston, 1698), p. 11. The term servitude was well chosen. Peard complained that some masters in the wool trade compelled dependent employees to "make their Hay, without recompense" Op. cit., p. 4.

[78] Holdsworth, op. cit., Volume XI, p. 467.

[79] Hill, "Pottage," op. cit., pp. 339–340; Kelsall, op. cit., pp. 47, 52; Julia de Lacy Mann, The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1640 to 1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 108; John Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850 (London: Longman, 1986), p. 117.

[80] Lipson, op. cit., p. 278.

[81] Daphine Simon, "Master and Servant," in John Saville, editor, Democracy and the Labour Movement (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1954), p. 160.

workers' status rather than by agreement, it was only consistent to enforce the obligation to serve through the mechanism of criminal law. Offenders were incarcerated for weeks or months.^[82] The alternative of paying money damages to an employer allegedly injured by a worker's absence, as if the labor power withheld were a commodity like any other, was proscribed.^[83] The law denied labor power the status of a simple ware.

Meanwhile the sale of manufactures took place in a comparatively unrestricted market. To be sure, foreign commerce remained the monopoly of government-chartered companies until 1689.^[84] But competition in domestic trade, despite the ancient licensing of trading corporations, was opened to almost all challengers during the seventeenth century.^[85] During this period, the powerful London merchants succeeded in breaking down provincial barriers against traders from distant cities who wished to contract for work in the countryside.^[86] Thus the London merchants expanded to include the whole of the country in their commercial web.^[87] This provided the stuff for writers to envision society as a network of market exchanges. "The free circulation of trade among the common people," wrote T. Tryon in 1698, "hath made England exceed all here Neighboring Nations in Riches."^[88] Catchpenny reasoning was threaded into all layers of the social fabric. "Facts relating to Commerce," opined a commentator in 1680, "branch into almost

[82] Kelsall, op. cit., p. 37.

[83] Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1894), p. 233.

[84] Hill, The Century of Revolution , op. cit., p. 213; Dobb, op. cit., p. 176.

[85] Unwin says that in London as early as the time of Elizabeth, "As a general rule it was impossible to prevent a citizen who was free of any company from carrying on the trade of any other company, if it seemed in his interest to do so." Op. cit., p. 105. Hill, "A Bourgeois Revolution?" op. cit., p. 118. For the eighteenth century, see Ray Bert Westerfield, Middlemen in English Business Particularly Between 1660 and 1760 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915), p. 347. On the absence of restrictions in Lancashire, see Wadsworth and Mann, op. cit., p. 55. For a contemporary description of free domestic trade, see Joan Thirsk and J. P. Cooper, Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 59. The grain trade, on which E. P. Thompson focused his model of the "moral economy," remained a limited exception. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 207.

[86] J. R. Kellett, "The Breakdown of Gild and Corporation Control over the Handicraft and Retail Trade of London," The Economic History Review second series, Volume X, Number 3 (April 1958), p. 384.

[87] R. H. Tawney, editor, Studies in Economic History: The Collected Papers of George Unwin (London: Macmillan and Co., 1927), p. 281. John Lie, "Embedding Polanyi's Market Society," Sociological Perspectives Volume 34, Number 2 (Summer 1991), pp. 228–230.

[88] T. Tryon, Some General Considerations Offered, Relating to Our Present Trade. And Intended for Its Help and Improvement (London: J. Harris, 1698), p. 7.

as many parts as there are humane Actions."^[89] The term market price no longer referred to the tangible location at which merchandise changed hands, but to the determination of value by abstract forces operating independently of the wills of individuals.^[90] In Britain (but not in Germany or France) the development of market thinking followed a separate chronology from the commercialization of labor power.^[91]

The views of labor as a commodity invented concurrently with the rise of liberal commercialism in Britain retained their essential form during the eighteenth century. Until the monumental work of Adam Smith appeared, the economist most celebrated by intellectual and financial speculators was Sir James Steuart. Steuart divided the agents of production into two groups: slaves, under either feudal or colonial orders, and workmen. Workmen labored as independent commodity producers. "Those who want to consume," Steuart wrote in his treatise of 1767, "send the merchant, in a manner, to the workman for his labour, and do not go themselves; the workman sells to this interposed person and does not look for a consumer."^[92] In Steuart's analysis, the workman covers the entire production expense of the finished ware he sells to the merchant, including tools and materials. This autonomous artisan ordinarily turns a profit for his products above their "prime cost"—that is, beyond the labor and material invested.^[93] The laborer who is dependent upon a wage contract is conspicuously absent in this theory. Steuart's division of producers into feudal slaves and masterless workmen illustrates the prevailing assumption that labor entered the market as a free

[89] William Petyt, Britannia Languens , op. cit., Preface, p. iv. E. P. Thompson presents the claims of the common people in the eighteenth century to a "moral economy" as a paternalist ideal revived principally in times of severe food shortages. E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present Number 50 (February 1971), p. 88.

[90] Mann, op. cit., p. 105; Ronald Meek, "Ideas, Events and Environment: The Case of the French Physiocrats," in Robert V. Eagly, editor, Events, Ideology and Economic Theory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968), pp. 48–49.

[91] Furniss, in his now classic study of seventeenth-century mercantile writers in England, was forcibly struck by their combination of liberalism in the product market and intrusive legislation in the labor market. Furniss, op. cit., p. 225. G. D. Ramsay remarks upon this combination of product laissez-faire and labor regulation in textiles. Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry , op. cit., pp. 124–125. Joyce Appleby presents an analysis of the forces that delayed the acceptance of a market in labor power in "Ideology and Theory: The Tension Between Political and Economic Liberalism in Seventeenth-Century England," The American Historical Review Volume 81, Number 3 (June 1976), especially pp. 511–515

[92] Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy , edited by Andrew Skinner (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), p. 150.

[93] Ibid., p. 192.

commodity only when it was incorporated into a finished good and vended by independent manufacturers.