England: Towards Agrarian Capitalism

Following the decimation of the labouring population during the Black Death, the English aristocracy launched an offensive to com-

pensate for the fall in noble incomes brought about by the reduction in their workforce. One analyst has estimated that manorial income in the 1370s was only 10 percent below its level of the 1340s. Since the population had fallen by at least 30 percent, there must have been a substantial increase in the level of exploitation of the English peasantry. This increased exploitation stimulated widespread peasant resistance and led ultimately to the massive peasant uprising of 1381. The rebellion of 1381 was directed against the lords' attempts to increase money rents and to maintain village assessments for the poll tax despite the decline in population. Although the rebellion failed to achieve its objectives, on-going peasant resistance did win substantial economic concessions from the lords.^[8] In these circumstances, the conditions of agricultural labourers improved markedly. In fact, farm labourers experienced a 50 percent rise in wages during the period 1380–1399 relative to the period 1340–1359. Overall, there was a shift of national income away from lords and towards peasants and labourers.^[9]

Under these conditions, the situation of the peasantry improved substantially. Incomes rose, obligations were lightened, and a growing amount of land was let out to peasants on a copyhold basis, which was accepted increasingly as legal tenure under common law. As a result of the breakup and leasing out of the big demesnes, the size of manors contracted and on average peasant holdings grew. The fifteenth century, therefore, has correctly been called "the golden age of the English peasantry."^[10] At the same time that they were obtaining increased security of tenure, English peasants were winning stable, long-term leases (often as long as ninety-nine years) and, moreover, prices for agricultural products were rising. Between 1500 and 1640, for example, food prices in England rose by 600 percent. With rising prices for their marketed produce and relatively stable money rents, many richer peasants began to accumulate a growing surplus above their own costs of production (including subsistence and rent). The drive to small-scale accumulation and expansion of holdings followed logically from the ever-present threat of contraction in bad years. Petty investment and accumulation insured against the future; a system of simple reproduction (where the basic drive is to maintain the peasant farm, not endlessly to expand it) does not reproduce itself evenly over the years but, rather, through a cycle of small-scale expansion and contraction which may always be halted

by a profound secular crisis. In the unique economic circumstances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was possible for petty accumulation to become a remarkably sustained process, at least for the better-off peasants. These peasants were able to buy up small pieces of land and invest in livestock (the most important source of fertilizer) and improved implements. While increased rents did take a share of the growing output, rents generally failed to keep pace with the level of increases in the prices of farm produce. Furthermore, the gap between agricultural and industrial prices also moved in favour of the agricultural producers, thus reducing their relative costs of production.^[11] Thus, the richer peasants producing for the market were in a uniquely favourable situation—characterized by rising prices, falling relative costs of production, and stable or declining real rents—to use a share of their rising income for investments that would expand their base of production, raise the productivity of land, and increase the surplus product in their possession. In this way, the diversion of income from lords to peasants contributed to petty accumulation and a steady rise in agricultural productivity.

This expansion of petty commodity production enabled the richer peasants to emerge as independent commodity producers, increasing the productive resources at their disposal. Buying land from poor, indebted peasants, the top stratum of peasant society emerged as a group of petty commodity producers sometimes called yeomen .^[12] The yeomanry has been described as "a group of ambitious, aggressive small capitalists."^[13] The term "capitalists" must be used with enormous care since, as I have suggested, a cycle of petty accumulation could emerge within the logic of the feudal mode of production itself and need not presuppose a new, capitalist economic logic. Nevertheless, within an economic system reshaped by profound crisis and a changed balance of class relations, the yeomanry emerged as a small but dynamic rural middle stratum, exploiting its advantage throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to improve its social and economic position. Thus, it was among the yeomen that enclosure first began. The early enclosure movement involved the formation of compact fields out of fragmented strips of land, the redivision and reallotment of land, or what Tawney called "a spatial rearrangement of property."^[14] The bulk of enclosure by peasants was by agreement. Sometimes it also involved a collective decision by the villagers to divide the commons; in other cases it involved simply the exchanging or buying of land.

Ironically, it was sections of the landlord class which reaped the greatest long-run benefits from the early enclosure movement and the rise of the yeomanry from the ranks of the English peasantry. One effect of the social differentiation of the peasantry was the dispossession of many small tenants and the creation of a new class of rural poor. By the early seventeenth century, both an indigenous gentry and an indigenous proletariat had emerged from the newly differentiated village community. Its traditional solidarity undermined, the village was now increasingly divided between rich and poor. As one historian has stated, "It was the consolidation of the yeoman oligarchies that decisively changed the realities of village life."^[15] This transformation of the village community opened up opportunities for those gentry and noble lords who saw a gain to be made through enclosure on a large scale. As a result, it was these enclosing and improving landlords who were, in the long run, to be the main beneficiaries of those economic processes which enriched the upper section of the peasantry and sealed the fate of the traditional peasant village community.^[16] And it was these members of the landed class who were the main agents in the emergence of a full-fledged system of agrarian capitalism.

From the late sixteenth century onwards, sections of the gentry took advantage of the weakened status of the village community to launch a sustained offensive against the rights of the small tenants. Increasing numbers of lords attacked peasant rights, trying to halt the decline in their incomes as their more or less stable revenues clashed with ever-rising prices. They attempted to break the grip of copyhold agreements and to turn them into forms of leasehold renewable only at the will of the lord. They drove up rents every year or every few years ("rack-renting"). They attempted to supplement income by increasing fines and enforcing obsolete obligations. And, most important, they undertook to enclose and reorganize lands—a path which tended to raise the productivity of the land by 50 percent on average. Contrary to older views which saw the eighteenth century as the great age of enclosure, modern research suggests that by 1700 three-quarters of all enclosure had already taken place. As a result of this multifaceted offensive, rents doubled during the half century from 1590 to 1640.^[17]

The landlords' offensive often involved a shift to large-scale capitalist farming in the form of pasturage as well as new crops and rotation patterns which brought more land into productive use year in

and year out.^[18] At the same time, the farm was being transformed into an economic unit specializing in a limited number of productive activities (especially of foodstuffs) geared to the market. More and more, the market dictated the internal organization of the English farm: prices, profits, wages, and rents were increasingly determined by market conditions. Having enclosed and consolidated their estates, a growing number of landowners rented them out to prosperous tenant farmers who hired rural labourers, made substantial annual investments, and paid large rents. Thus emerged the classic capitalist structure of English farming characterized by the tripartite relationship of landlord, capitalist tenant, and wage labourer in which the farm became a specialized productive unit geared to the market. The landowner was now a new economic agent, one whose wealth depended upon the surplus product of capitalist agriculture. This transformed ruling class now sought to ensure that the property rights and political "liberties" of landowners would be protected by (and from) the state.

The processes described above occurred at a time when the landed classes were growing enormously—they tripled in size between 1536 and 1636—and in which there was a major shift of land into the hands of the gentry. In the century after the seizure of church lands by the Crown during the religious Reformation almost one-quarter of the land of England was sold on the market at a cost of six and one-half million pounds. At the same time, there appears also to have been a flow of land from the aristocracy to the gentry between 1559 and 1602.^[19] The increasing social importance of the gentry was expressed in political terms. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the House of Commons grew from three hundred to five hundred members, while the gentry's component of the House increased from 50 to 75 percent.

Following the rise of faction and intraclass conflict that led to the virtual breakdown of government during the middle of the fifteenth century, Tudor governments encouraged the expansion of the power of the gentry, in order to undermine the local power of large nobles. A stable and—at least initially—self-sufficient monarchy was constructed by the early Tudors, who used increased parliamentary representation and low levels of taxation to win the gentry's support as an important counterbalance to the traditional power of the upper nobility. The Tudor monarchy, therefore, relied increasingly on new

sources of landed wealth and political power in exchange for concessions to the gentry, such as low taxation and increased powers at the local level, particularly in the administration of justice. The result was a significant weakening of the independent powers of the Crown, a strengthening of the political power of the landed proprietors, and a departure from the absolutist path.^[20] By the beginning of the seventeenth century, then, England was undergoing the transition to agrarian capitalism in the context of a nonabsolutist state which relied upon the participation of broad sections of the landed classes in the affairs of state. Participation of landed gentlemen in the exercise of political power was increasingly seen as a right which flowed directly from ownership of property. Such "liberties" were considered inherent rights of property. Thus, any attack on the participation of landed gentlemen in affairs of state was seen as an attack on property itself.

The Stuart reaction of 1603–1640 was a response to the dispersion of political power in England and an attempt to reconstruct centralized monarchical power. In part, the English Revolution can be seen as a rebellion by landed gentlemen against this tendency towards absolutism and in defence of rights that had been won during the previous one hundred fifty years. To be sure, significant sections of the landed class perceived rebellion against the Crown to be a greater danger than absolutism, since it might ignite a rebellion of the lower orders against authority and property. But it seems fair to say that, although many opposed the road of revolution, the majority of landed gentlemen were markedly hostile to absolutism. Thus this "bourgeois revolution" was a revolution against centralized state power. This characteristic of the English Revolution is perfectly explicable if we see it as an attempt by agrarian capitalist landowners to preserve and protect their property rights, their newfound forms of surplus extraction (and these very surpluses themselves), and their right to participate in the "committee of landlords" ruling England at the local level and increasingly shaping events at the national level (and which they perceived as vital to protect their property and their rents).^[21]

The "revolution from below" unleashed by the English Civil War did indeed pose a threat to the traditional privileges of men of property. The popular mobilizations in London and other cities, the formation of Parliament's New Model Army, the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords, and the execution of the king all contrib-

uted to an often-millenarian sense that the old order was finished and that it would be replaced by a democratic and highly egalitarian form of society.^[22] Faced with such an upsurge of popular radicalism and an army drawn from the lower orders which opposed a return of the traditional social order, the bulk of the propertied class chose to support a restoration of monarchy and the House of Lords. Even then, however, when Charles II, who took the throne in 1660, attempted to pursue an absolutist policy, he incited the great wave of Whig agitation of 1679–1681 against the court, which culminated in 1688 in the overthrow of his successor, James II.^[23]

The drive against the independent powers of the monarchy became even more powerful following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Despite the fact that 1688 was an event carefully orchestrated to avoid renewed rebellion from below, and despite the fact that the Bill of Rights of 1689 did not go nearly as far as the Whig radicals desired, the bill reinforced the trends towards limiting the powers of the Crown by making extraparliamentary taxation illegal; by ensuring that there should be no standing army without parliamentary approval; and by abolishing the Crown's suspending and dispensing powers.^[24] The Triennial Act of 1694 guaranteed regular parliaments and abolished the royal prerogative of summoning and dissolving Parliament. Finally, the Act of Settlement of 1701, subtitled "an act for the further limitation of the Crown and the better preserving the liberties of the subjects," provided that the tenure of judges would be permanent, subject only to good behaviour, and not dependent upon the Crown.

Having achieved a state responsive to their interests, after 1688 the large landowners moved with a passion to enclose and concentrate holdings. Between 1690 and 1750 there was a major shift of property away from the peasantry and lesser gentry and towards the large landowners. The century after 1690 experienced a dramatic decline in the percentage of land held in farms of less than one hundred acres and a sharp rise in the share held by farms of one hundred acres or more. This shift in land ownership involved a doubling of rents, in part a result of the increased productivity of the land brought about by enclosure and improvement.^[25] For financial considerations such as these, landlords turned to enclosure on a vast scale. Having taken the reins of government into their hands, they used acts of Parliament to legalize expropriation that has been accurately described as a

"massive violence exercised by the upper classes against the lower."^[26] In 1710 the first private enclosure act was presented to Parliament. Between 1720 and 1750, 100 such acts were passed. Some 139 acts followed in the subsequent decade. Another 900 acts were passed between 1760 and 1779. The movement reached its peak between 1793 and 1815, when 2,000 acts of enclosure were approved by Parliament. As a result, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more than 6.5 million acres of common fields and commons were enclosed by acts of Parliament—an area equal to nearly 20 percent of the total land of England. In some areas, the amount of land enclosed went as high as 50 percent of the total. The change was thus massive—and, for the small tenant, catastrophic.^[27]

Modern historical research has demonstrated the shortcomings of the view that enclosure directly provided the labour force for urban industrialization. In reality, the majority of those who suffered at the hands of enclosure appear to have stayed on the land. This fact has led some writers to claim that the dislocation caused by enclosure has been exaggerated; they have asserted that enclosure and innovation provided work for those members of rural society who no longer held sufficient land or access to land (for example, commons) to support themselves. In this interpretation, enclosure was a largely technical process which benefited most members of the village community through higher levels of output and new prospects for employment.^[28] Such an approach so minimizes the social consequences of enclosure as to distort the whole process. Whatever the shortcomings of some Marxist interpretations of the relationship between enclosure and industrialization, the great strength of the Marxist approach has been to see in enclosure a crucial element in a process of social transformation in which the fabric of traditional rural society was rent asunder and a new social structure, based on a propertyless proletariat, created. Enclosure was, after all, as W. G. Hoskins described its effects on the Leicestershire village of Wigston, "the destruction of an entire society with its own economy and traditions, its own way of living and its own culture."^[29]

What took place in England during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is what Marx described as the "primitive accumulation of capital." In a nutshell, primitive accumulation refers to those historical processes by which direct producers were separated from the land and transformed into "free" wage labourers.

The freedom of wage labour was for Marx a two-sided phenomenon: on the one hand these workers were "freed" from the land—they neither owned nor controlled means of production adequate to their own subsistence; on the other hand, they were juridically "free" individuals able to enter voluntarily into an agreement to work for an employer. At the heart of primitive accumulation, therefore, is "the historical process of divorcing the producers from the means of production." The separation of labourers from means of production is the crucial historical process which makes capitalist accumulation and production possible. Primitive accumulation creates the unique commodity, labour power that is bought and sold on the market, which distinguishes capitalism from all other modes of production. The creation of a propertyless class of wage labourers establishes the social relationship within which capitalist exploitation and accumulation can develop. The great strength of Marx's analysis was to recognize the critical importance of this social relationship and to grasp the historical fact that "the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process."^[30]

However, those most directly affected by enclosure did not, as many early Marxists believed, move in large numbers to urban centers to labour in the workshops of the industrial revolution. Their rural existence was nonetheless radically altered; they became the rural proletariat of the farms and village industries. What many Marxists have failed fully to appreciate is that agrarian capitalism formed the connecting link between primitive accumulation and industrial capitalism. By agrarian capitalism we refer to that situation in which large farms (usually of two hundred acres or more) were leased out to prosperous tenant farmers who hired wage labourers; and produced an agricultural product for sale on a market. The surplus above costs of production (including wages) was then divided between the farmer and the landowner in the forms of profit and capitalist ground rent (as Marx called it). Primitive accumulation thus contributed directly to the creation of a rural proletariat and a system of agrarian capitalism.

Having said this, we must emphasize that the development of agrarian capitalism was neither as direct or unambiguous a process as the economic data alone might suggest. The emergence of agrarian capitalism was constrained by the traditional force of customary rights, to which the small tenant and labourer clung tenaciously. In a

very real sense, the full flowering of agrarian capitalism in the eighteenth century represents the victory of property rights over customary rights; but the complete victory of property over custom took place only over centuries in the course of often bitter social conflicts. Agrarian capitalism was anything but a pure social species which leaped fully formed onto the stage of history. On the contrary, it emerged in a hesitant—but nonetheless forcible and sometimes violent—step-by-step process in which it was invariably coloured by the traditional society it was leaving behind.^[31]

Proletarianization occurred in a context in which customary rights continued to play an important part in the lives of the direct producers. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in particular, perquisites and customary rights on common lands constituted a significant supplement to the wage. Such rights and perquisites to some extent kept the village labourer from complete subjection to the vagaries of the labour market. For this reason, village labourers objected not so much to their status as wage labourers but rather to those measures which threatened to eliminate such customary rights. This objection is only natural, given that the disappearance of such rights represented their complete proletarianization, the restriction of their sources of livelihood to the price which they could command for their ability to work. It represented, in other words, their total subordination to the rhythms of the capitalist labour market. The parliamentary enclosure in the eighteenth century, therefore, centred as it was on common lands, truly completed the process of proletarianization. For this reason we can echo E. P. Thompson's statement that in the eighteenth century "agrarian capitalism came fully into its inheritance." For it was then that the conflict between property rights and customary rights was resolved decisively in favour of the former.^[32]

The growth of large farms and the displacement of small tenants also expanded the home market. The decline of self-sufficient family farming and the growth of specialization forced capitalist farmers, labourers, and landowners to turn to the market to meet their needs for producer and consumer goods. In large measure, the rural proletariat (including semiproletarianized cottagers and the like) provided the labour force for those industries which grew up in response to the demands of England's growing domestic market. In active farming areas, local industries grew up which were devoted pri-

marily to the production of farm and domestic products. Lace-making, straw-plaiting, nailing, needle-production, paper-making, and framework-knitting were the most common industries in such areas. The most significant economic growth took place in less arable areas, such as the Midlands. Here tanners, leatherworkers, fullers, weavers, shearers, clothworkers, and ironmongers dominated the industrial scene.^[33] During the sixteenth century, increasing numbers of yeomen and small farmers were drawn into industries such as these. And in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, displaced peasants often found employment in these trades as agricultural specialization increased demand for these industrial products. The decline of rural self-sufficiency thus increased the industrial market. In this way, the growth of agrarian capitalism accelerated the growth of an industrial market.

The growth of agricultural productivity, especially during the eighteenth century, played a decisive role in expanding the home market and more than doubling corn exports in the first sixty years of the century. Unprocessed agricultural products as a share of English manufactured exports rose from 4.6 percent in 1700 to 11. 8 percent in 1725 and to 22.2 percent by 1750. During this same period, there was no significant increase in industrial exports. As output grew, corn prices fell. In fact, by the 1730s and 1740s, prices were 25 to 33 percent lower than the average for the 1660s. Lower prices for corn contributed to a rise in the real wage and thus brought about an increase in the demand by labourers for domestic manufactures. The terms of trade also moved in favour of manufacturers and gave a boost to the industrial sector, in relatively lower costs of production. By the 1750s, there was a permanent flow of population from the countryside to urban centres like London, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Manchester. Agricultural improvement was thus contributing to the growth of an urban proletariat.^[34]

At a certain point—recent research has suggested the 1760s—the expansion of markets and high labour costs induced manufacturers to introduce labour-saving machinery of production .^[35] And, once introduced, machinery became central to the process of accumulation. Technological innovation designed to reduce costs became an integral part of capitalist competition. Industrial capitalism—what Marx called "the specifically capitalist mode of production," in which the machinery of production is continually revolutionized in an effort to

raise productivity^[36] —thus became the order of the day. England had crossed the frontier into the age of modern capitalism. Agrarian capitalism had, however, been the vessel of its crossing.