“So eager were poor farmers for dirty, dangerous factory jobs (...)”
There’s an underlying question on why those farmers were that poor and such dire need for those factory jobs. One reason I’ve seen given was in Hillaire Belloc’s 1912 book The Servile State, one of the first books of the Distributist school of economics. According him, the end of the feudal system in England, and its turning into a modern nation-state, involved among other things the closing off and appropriation, by nobles as a reward from the kingdom, of the former common farmlands they farmed on, as well as the confiscation of the lands owned by the Catholic Church, which for all practical purposes also served as common farmlands. This resulted in a huge mass of landless farmers with no access to land, or only very diminished access, who in turn decades later became the proletarians for the newly developing industries. If that’s accurate, then it may be the case that the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have happened had all those poor not have existed, since the very first industries wouldn’t have been attractive compared to condition non-forcibly-starved farmers had.
“By making wage labour attractive enough to draw in millions of free workers, higher wages made forced labor less necessary, and because impoverished serfs and slaves—unlike the increasingly prosperous wage labourers—could rarely buy the manufactured goods being churned out by factories, forced labour increasingly struck business interests as an obstacle to growth (especially when it was competitors who were using it).”
This is a common narrative about how chattel slavery came to an end, to the point it even sounds like common sense by now, but I haven’t actually seen strong evidence for this interpretation. Maybe this evidence exists and it’s just a matter of someone pointing it out for me, but so far I know three points of divergence about this narrative:
Force labor ended once before. During the Middle Age, as its complex farming hierarchies and belief-systems developed in the millennia following the fall of the Roman Empire, saw the descendants of the former Roman villas-turned fiefdoms’ slaves slooowly gaining more and more customary legal rights in their process of becoming serfs, rights feudal lords rarely refused them lest doing so hit their reputations hard. By the Late Middle Age this process had made serfs, while technically still property most everywhere, in practice free, with some places having outright forbidden literal slavery altogether by as early as the 12th century.
This was quite clearly recognized as such by the Catholic Church, who, once the new nation-states began their Great Navigations, and started the once mostly abandoned process of enslavement all over again, began to periodically issue papal bulls heavily condemning enslavers, the earliest of which in the 16th century. Not that the Church had effective power on the matter, all they could do was to tell enslaver they were going to Hell, a threat enslavers clearly give little attention to, but this at the very least shows that, culturally at least, there was a strong anti-enslavement cultural force in place amidst all that European agrarian ethos, and one that kept advancing in parallel and despite nation-states renewed push for slavery.
Notice that, while point 3 overlaps with the Industrial Revolution, the causality here would seem to me to be the opposite of how it’s usually depicted, that is, with abolitionism having helped to advance industrialization as an unintended side effect of its ideals cascading into practice, and not the other way around. Which, evidently, doesn’t prevent the usual narrative from being valid in other places, that is, countries in which slavery was still well accepted finding themselves forced, first militarily, then technologically, and finally economically, to adapt or perish. But the former case seems to me to have been the more prevalent, in the West at least, what with the Civil War in the US, and enlightened royals voluntarily giving up their crowns to end slavery on moral grounds.
Over millennia, such societies either had their tricks independently discovered or copies by others, or then outright went warpath to subjugate over societies to their rule – and, of course, preach their values, which (given human adaptability) they held sincerely, and with no idea that they thought differently from their distant ancestors.
I think at least some recognized quite clearly they thought differently. I don’t remember where I got this information, I think it was on Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, but I distinctly remember reading about how when Muhammad was young he was sent by his uncle to live among nomads for a few years, as it was considered part of the proper education of the young back then precisely because nomads were seen as the preservers of the old ways, keepers of strict adherence to proper moral values and work ethics, thus excellent examples to a young, impressionable mind compared to the lazy, inferior moral developed in the sedentary lifestyle of farms and villages (yes, laboring 12+ hours a day under backbreaking conditions was considered sedentary).
Now, while foragers and nomads aren’t the same category of wandering people, it’d seem to me that there was an awareness of the cultural differences between those who lived from the land and those who didn’t, in at least a roughly similar way to how those living in, and fully inserted into, modern, huge metropolitan areas nowadays are aware of the cultural differences between themselves and those living in the country.
(...) was the centralisation-vs-decentralisation tradeoff really so simple in the farming era that “godlike kings everywhere” was the only effective answer?
Perhaps it was seen as such by those involved. One interesting reference point is given in the Bible.
1 Samuel 8 narrates how at one point the Hebrews, envying their surrounding countries having kings, decided they wanted one too, so they demanded prophet Samuel to crown one. Samuel disliked this, prayed to God, and God told him to warn their fellow countrymen of all the very-bad-things that having a kingdom would result in (verses 11-18):
“This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
This suggests the system of government that existed before didn’t do those things. That system, called Judging, isn’t well known, but I remember reading a historian once explaining it was very decentralized. If I remember right, political power was intermittent and an all-or-nothing proposition, as some families had generational military duties that included, but only in war times, absolute power for the purposes of defense against external aggression. In times of peace, in contrast, those families had no power, having to tend to their lands and produce their won food or whatever by themselves, similar to everyone else. It therefore worked more as a loose, decentralized federation of micro-states that used militias for self-defense than as a big, integrated, centralized government with a permanente military force.
And yet, if there’s any truth left in the story after centuries of retellings until it was put into paper, the people saw their neighbors centralization and really wanted a piece of that for themselves. Alas the text doesn’t dwell on their reasons for that, but if I were to venture a guess it’d be that they saw their neighbors as having effective, deployable armies as threatening, and saw centralization as a means to more effectively defend themselves despite the listed drawbacks.
Regarding the end of slavery: I think you make good points and they’ve made me update towards thinking that the importance of materialistic Morris-style models is slightly less and cultural models slightly more.
I’d be very interested to hear what were the anti-slavery arguments used by the first English abolitionists and the medieval Catholic Church (religion? equality? natural rights? utilitarian?).
Which, evidently, doesn’t prevent the usual narrative from being valid in other places, that is, countries in which slavery was still well accepted finding themselves forced, first militarily, then technologically, and finally economically, to adapt or perish.
I think there’s also another way for the materialistic and idealistic accounts to both be true in different places: Morris’ argument is specifically about slavery existing when wage incentives are weak, and perhaps this holds in places like ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire, but had stopped holding in proto-industrial places like 16th-18th century western Europe. However I’m not aware of what specific factor would drive this.
One piece of evidence on whether economics or culture is more important would be comparing how many cases there are where slavery existed/ended in places without cultural contact but with similar economic conditions and institutions, to how many cases there are of slavery existing/ending in places with cultural contact but different economic conditions/institutions.
Thank you for this very in-depth comment. I will reply to your points in separate comments, starting with:
According him, the end of the feudal system in England, and its turning into a modern nation-state, involved among other things the closing off and appropriation, by nobles as a reward from the kingdom, of the former common farmlands they farmed on, as well as the confiscation of the lands owned by the Catholic Church, which for all practical purposes also served as common farmlands. This resulted in a huge mass of landless farmers with no access to land, or only very diminished access, who in turn decades later became the proletarians for the newly developing industries. If that’s accurate, then it may be the case that the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have happened had all those poor not have existed, since the very first industries wouldn’t have been attractive compared to condition non-forcibly-starved farmers had.
This is very interesting and something I haven’t seen before. Based on some quick searching, this seems to be referring to the Inclosure Acts (which were significant, affecting 1/6th of English land) and perhaps specifically this one, while the Catholic Church land confiscation was the 1500s one. My priors on this having a major effect are somewhat skeptical because:
The general shape of English historical GDP/capita is a slight post-plague rise, followed by nothing much until a gradual rise in the 1700s and then takeoff in the 1800s. Likewise, skimming through this, there seem to be no drastic changes in wealth inequality around the time of the Inclosure Acts, though share of wealth held by the top 10% slightly rise in the late 1700s and personal estates (note: specifically excludes real estate) of farmers and yeomen slightly drop around 1700 before rebounding. Any pattern of more poor farmers must evade these statistics, either by being small enough, or by not being captured in these crude overall stats (which is very possible, especially if the losses for one set of farmers were balanced by gains for another).
Other sources I’ve read support the idea that farmers in general prefer industrial jobs. It’s not just Steven Pinker either; Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization (my review) has this passage:
Moreover, the drudgery of field labor in the open is seldom preferable even to unskilled industrial work in a factory. In general, typical factory tasks require lower energy expenditures than does common farm work, and in a surprisingly short time after the beginning of mass urban industrial employment the duration of factory work became reasonably regulated
It’s probably the case that it’s easier to recruit landless farmers into industrial jobs, and I can imagine plausible models where farmers resist moving to cities, especially for uncertainty-avoidance / risk-aversion reasons. However, the effect of this, especially in the long term, seems limited by things like population growth in (already populous) cities, people having to move off their family farms anyways due to primogeniture, and people generally being pretty good at exploiting available opportunities. An exception might be if early industrialization was tenable only under a strict labor availability threshold that was met only because of the mass of landless farmers created by the English acts.
This was extremely informative! Thank you!
A few points I’d like to comment on:
There’s an underlying question on why those farmers were that poor and such dire need for those factory jobs. One reason I’ve seen given was in Hillaire Belloc’s 1912 book The Servile State, one of the first books of the Distributist school of economics. According him, the end of the feudal system in England, and its turning into a modern nation-state, involved among other things the closing off and appropriation, by nobles as a reward from the kingdom, of the former common farmlands they farmed on, as well as the confiscation of the lands owned by the Catholic Church, which for all practical purposes also served as common farmlands. This resulted in a huge mass of landless farmers with no access to land, or only very diminished access, who in turn decades later became the proletarians for the newly developing industries. If that’s accurate, then it may be the case that the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t have happened had all those poor not have existed, since the very first industries wouldn’t have been attractive compared to condition non-forcibly-starved farmers had.
This is a common narrative about how chattel slavery came to an end, to the point it even sounds like common sense by now, but I haven’t actually seen strong evidence for this interpretation. Maybe this evidence exists and it’s just a matter of someone pointing it out for me, but so far I know three points of divergence about this narrative:
Force labor ended once before. During the Middle Age, as its complex farming hierarchies and belief-systems developed in the millennia following the fall of the Roman Empire, saw the descendants of the former Roman villas-turned fiefdoms’ slaves slooowly gaining more and more customary legal rights in their process of becoming serfs, rights feudal lords rarely refused them lest doing so hit their reputations hard. By the Late Middle Age this process had made serfs, while technically still property most everywhere, in practice free, with some places having outright forbidden literal slavery altogether by as early as the 12th century.
This was quite clearly recognized as such by the Catholic Church, who, once the new nation-states began their Great Navigations, and started the once mostly abandoned process of enslavement all over again, began to periodically issue papal bulls heavily condemning enslavers, the earliest of which in the 16th century. Not that the Church had effective power on the matter, all they could do was to tell enslaver they were going to Hell, a threat enslavers clearly give little attention to, but this at the very least shows that, culturally at least, there was a strong anti-enslavement cultural force in place amidst all that European agrarian ethos, and one that kept advancing in parallel and despite nation-states renewed push for slavery.
This cultural force finally cascaded when, in the late-18th century, religious-based political abolitionist associations began developing and lobbying for the end of slavery and, in a mere 50 years, turned England from a heavy promoter of slavery into a country who spend huge amounts of money and military resources to hunt enslavers worldwide.
Notice that, while point 3 overlaps with the Industrial Revolution, the causality here would seem to me to be the opposite of how it’s usually depicted, that is, with abolitionism having helped to advance industrialization as an unintended side effect of its ideals cascading into practice, and not the other way around. Which, evidently, doesn’t prevent the usual narrative from being valid in other places, that is, countries in which slavery was still well accepted finding themselves forced, first militarily, then technologically, and finally economically, to adapt or perish. But the former case seems to me to have been the more prevalent, in the West at least, what with the Civil War in the US, and enlightened royals voluntarily giving up their crowns to end slavery on moral grounds.
I think at least some recognized quite clearly they thought differently. I don’t remember where I got this information, I think it was on Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, but I distinctly remember reading about how when Muhammad was young he was sent by his uncle to live among nomads for a few years, as it was considered part of the proper education of the young back then precisely because nomads were seen as the preservers of the old ways, keepers of strict adherence to proper moral values and work ethics, thus excellent examples to a young, impressionable mind compared to the lazy, inferior moral developed in the sedentary lifestyle of farms and villages (yes, laboring 12+ hours a day under backbreaking conditions was considered sedentary).
Now, while foragers and nomads aren’t the same category of wandering people, it’d seem to me that there was an awareness of the cultural differences between those who lived from the land and those who didn’t, in at least a roughly similar way to how those living in, and fully inserted into, modern, huge metropolitan areas nowadays are aware of the cultural differences between themselves and those living in the country.
Perhaps it was seen as such by those involved. One interesting reference point is given in the Bible.
1 Samuel 8 narrates how at one point the Hebrews, envying their surrounding countries having kings, decided they wanted one too, so they demanded prophet Samuel to crown one. Samuel disliked this, prayed to God, and God told him to warn their fellow countrymen of all the very-bad-things that having a kingdom would result in (verses 11-18):
“This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
This suggests the system of government that existed before didn’t do those things. That system, called Judging, isn’t well known, but I remember reading a historian once explaining it was very decentralized. If I remember right, political power was intermittent and an all-or-nothing proposition, as some families had generational military duties that included, but only in war times, absolute power for the purposes of defense against external aggression. In times of peace, in contrast, those families had no power, having to tend to their lands and produce their won food or whatever by themselves, similar to everyone else. It therefore worked more as a loose, decentralized federation of micro-states that used militias for self-defense than as a big, integrated, centralized government with a permanente military force.
And yet, if there’s any truth left in the story after centuries of retellings until it was put into paper, the people saw their neighbors centralization and really wanted a piece of that for themselves. Alas the text doesn’t dwell on their reasons for that, but if I were to venture a guess it’d be that they saw their neighbors as having effective, deployable armies as threatening, and saw centralization as a means to more effectively defend themselves despite the listed drawbacks.
Regarding the end of slavery: I think you make good points and they’ve made me update towards thinking that the importance of materialistic Morris-style models is slightly less and cultural models slightly more.
I’d be very interested to hear what were the anti-slavery arguments used by the first English abolitionists and the medieval Catholic Church (religion? equality? natural rights? utilitarian?).
I think there’s also another way for the materialistic and idealistic accounts to both be true in different places: Morris’ argument is specifically about slavery existing when wage incentives are weak, and perhaps this holds in places like ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire, but had stopped holding in proto-industrial places like 16th-18th century western Europe. However I’m not aware of what specific factor would drive this.
One piece of evidence on whether economics or culture is more important would be comparing how many cases there are where slavery existed/ended in places without cultural contact but with similar economic conditions and institutions, to how many cases there are of slavery existing/ending in places with cultural contact but different economic conditions/institutions.
Thank you for this very in-depth comment. I will reply to your points in separate comments, starting with:
This is very interesting and something I haven’t seen before. Based on some quick searching, this seems to be referring to the Inclosure Acts (which were significant, affecting 1/6th of English land) and perhaps specifically this one, while the Catholic Church land confiscation was the 1500s one. My priors on this having a major effect are somewhat skeptical because:
The general shape of English historical GDP/capita is a slight post-plague rise, followed by nothing much until a gradual rise in the 1700s and then takeoff in the 1800s. Likewise, skimming through this, there seem to be no drastic changes in wealth inequality around the time of the Inclosure Acts, though share of wealth held by the top 10% slightly rise in the late 1700s and personal estates (note: specifically excludes real estate) of farmers and yeomen slightly drop around 1700 before rebounding. Any pattern of more poor farmers must evade these statistics, either by being small enough, or by not being captured in these crude overall stats (which is very possible, especially if the losses for one set of farmers were balanced by gains for another).
Other sources I’ve read support the idea that farmers in general prefer industrial jobs. It’s not just Steven Pinker either; Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization (my review) has this passage:
It’s probably the case that it’s easier to recruit landless farmers into industrial jobs, and I can imagine plausible models where farmers resist moving to cities, especially for uncertainty-avoidance / risk-aversion reasons. However, the effect of this, especially in the long term, seems limited by things like population growth in (already populous) cities, people having to move off their family farms anyways due to primogeniture, and people generally being pretty good at exploiting available opportunities. An exception might be if early industrialization was tenable only under a strict labor availability threshold that was met only because of the mass of landless farmers created by the English acts.