The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism: Agrarian Politics in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and the US

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These factors led to a decline in agricultural production. In response, feudal lords sought to expand agricultural production by expanding their domains through warfare; they therefore demanded more tribute from their serfs to pay for military expenses. In England, many serfs rebelled. Some moved to towns, some purchased land, and some entered into favorable contracts to rent lands from lords who needed to repopulate their estates.

The collapse of the manorial system in England enlarged the class of tenant farmers with more freedom to market their goods and thus more incentive to invest in new technologies. Lords who did not want to rely on renters could buy out or evict tenant farmers, but then had to hire free labor to work their estates, giving them an incentive to invest in two very different kinds of commodity owners: The free workers were "free workers" in the double sense that they neither formed part of the means of production nor did they own the means of production that transformed land and even money into what we now call "capital".

In effect, feudalism began to lay some of the foundations necessary for the development of mercantilism , a precursor of capitalism. Feudalism was mostly confined to Europe [ citation needed ] and lasted from the medieval period through the sixteenth century. Feudal manors were almost entirely self-sufficient, and therefore limited the role of the market.

This stifled any incipient tendency towards capitalism. However, the relatively sudden emergence of new technologies and discoveries, particularly in agriculture [56] and exploration, facilitated the growth of capitalism. The most important development at the end of feudalism [ citation needed ] was the emergence of what Robert Degan calls "the dichotomy between wage earners and capitalist merchants". England in the 16th century was already a centralized state, in which much of the feudal order of Medieval Europe had been swept away.

This centralization was strengthened by a good system of roads and a disproportionately large capital city, London. The economic foundations of the agricultural system were also beginning to diverge substantially; the manorial system had broken down by this time, and land began to be concentrated in the hands of fewer landlords with increasingly large estates. The system put pressure on both the landlords and the tenants to increase agricultural productivity to create profit; the weakened coercive power of the aristocracy to extract peasant surpluses encouraged them to try out better methods, and the tenants also had an incentive to improve their methods, in order to succeed in an increasingly competitive labour market.

Land rents had moved away from the previous stagnant system of custom and feudal obligation, and were becoming directly subject to economic market forces. An important aspect of this process of change was the enclosure [59] of the common land previously held in the open field system where peasants had traditional rights, such as mowing meadows for hay and grazing livestock.

Once enclosed, these uses of the land became restricted to the owner, and it ceased to be land for commons. The process of enclosure began to be a widespread feature of the English agricultural landscape during the 16th century. By the 19th century, unenclosed commons had become largely restricted to rough pasture in mountainous areas and to relatively small parts of the lowlands. Marxist and neo-Marxist historians argue that rich landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land for their private benefit.

This created a landless working class that provided the labour required in the new industries developing in the north of England. Other scholars [62] argue that the better-off members of the European peasantry encouraged and participated actively in enclosure, seeking to end the perpetual poverty of subsistence farming. The earliest recorded activity of long-distance profit-seeking merchants can be traced back to the Old Assyrian merchants active in the 2nd millennium BCE. However, while trade has existed since early in human history, it was not capitalism. An early emergence of commerce occurred on monastic estates in Italy and France and in the independent city republics of Italy during the late Middle Ages.

Innovations in banking, insurance, accountancy, and various production and commercial practices linked closely to a 'spirit' of frugality, reinvestment, and city life, promoted attitudes which sociologists have tended to associate only with northern Europe , Protestantism and a much later age.

The city republics maintained their political independence from Empire and Church , traded with North Africa , the Middle East and Asia , and introduced Eastern practices. They were also considerably different from the absolutist monarchies of Spain and France, and were strongly attached to civic liberty. Modern capitalism, however, only fully emerged in the early modern period between the 16th and 18th centuries, with the establishment of mercantilism or merchant capitalism.

Early evidence for mercantilistic practices appears in early modern Venice , Genoa , and Pisa over the Mediterranean trade in bullion. The region of mercantilism's real birth, however, was the Atlantic Ocean. England began a large-scale and integrative approach to mercantilism during the Elizabethan Era. An early statement on national balance of trade appeared in Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England , Queen Elizabeth promoted the Trade and Navigation Acts in Parliament and issued orders to her navy for the protection and promotion of English shipping.

These efforts organized national resources sufficiently in the defense of England against the far larger and more powerful Spanish Empire , and in turn paved the foundation for establishing a global empire in the 19th century. It was written in the s and published in Numerous French authors helped to cement French policy around mercantilism in the 17th century.

French mercantilism was best articulated by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in office, — , although his policies were greatly liberalised under Napoleon. Under mercantilism, European merchants, backed by state controls, subsidies , and monopolies, made most of their profits from the buying and selling of goods. In the words of Francis Bacon , the purpose of mercantilism was "the opening and well-balancing of trade; the cherishing of manufacturers; the banishing of idleness; the repressing of waste and excess by sumptuary laws; the improvement and husbanding of the soil; the regulation of prices However, under mercantilism, given the contemporaneous rise of absolutism , the state superseded the local guilds as the regulator of the economy.

Among the major tenets of mercantilist theory was bullionism , a doctrine stressing the importance of accumulating precious metals. Mercantilists argued that a state should export more goods than it imported so that foreigners would have to pay the difference in precious metals. Mercantilists asserted that only raw materials that could not be extracted at home should be imported; and promoted government subsidies, such as the granting of monopolies and protective tariffs , were necessary to encourage home production of manufactured goods.

Proponents of mercantilism emphasized state power and overseas conquest as the principal aim of economic policy.

If a state could not supply its own raw materials, according to the mercantilists, it should acquire colonies from which they could be extracted. Colonies constituted not only sources of supply for raw materials but also markets for finished products. Because it was not in the interests of the state to allow competition, to help the mercantilists, colonies should be prevented from engaging in manufacturing and trading with foreign powers.

Mercantilism was a system of trade for profit, although commodities were still largely produced by non-capitalist production methods. According to Polanyi, "not until was a competitive labor market established in England, hence industrial capitalism as a social system cannot be said to have existed before that date.

The Muscovy Company was the first major chartered joint stock English trading company established in with a monopoly on trade between England and Muscovy. This was the precursor to a type of business that would soon flourish in England, the Dutch Republic and elsewhere. Recognized as chartered joint-stock companies by the state, these companies enjoyed power, ranging from lawmaking, military, and treaty-making privileges. Mercantilism declined in Great Britain in the midth century, when a new group of economic theorists, led by Adam Smith , challenged fundamental mercantilist doctrines as the belief that the amount of the world's wealth remained constant and that a state could only increase its wealth at the expense of another state.

However, in more undeveloped economies, such as Prussia and Russia , with their much younger manufacturing bases, mercantilism continued to find favor after other states had turned to newer doctrines. The midth century gave rise to industrial capitalism, made possible by 1 the accumulation of vast amounts of capital under the merchant phase of capitalism and its investment in machinery, and 2 the fact that the Enclosures meant that Britain had a large population of people with no access to subsistence agriculture, who needed to buy basic commodities via the market, thus ensuing a mass consumer market.

During the resulting Industrial Revolution , the industrialist replaced the merchant as a dominant actor in the capitalist system and effected the decline of the traditional handicraft skills of artisans , guilds , and journeymen. Also during this period, capitalism marked the transformation of relations between the British landowning gentry and peasants, giving rise to the production of cash crops for the market rather than for subsistence on a feudal manor.

The surplus generated by the rise of commercial agriculture encouraged increased mechanization of agriculture. The productivity gains of capitalist production began a sustained and unprecedented increase at the turn of the 19th century, in a process commonly referred to as the Industrial Revolution. Starting in about in England, there was a steady transition to new manufacturing processes in a variety of industries, including going from hand production methods to machine production, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power , the increasing use of steam power and the development of machine tools.

It also included the change from wood and other bio-fuels to coal. In textile manufacturing, mechanized cotton spinning powered by steam or water increased the output of a worker by a factor of about , due to the application of James Hargreaves ' spinning jenny , Richard Arkwright 's water frame , Samuel Crompton 's Spinning Mule and other inventions.

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The power loom increased the output of a worker by a factor of over Large gains in productivity also occurred in spinning and weaving of wool and linen, but they were not as great as in cotton. The growth of Britain's industry stimulated a concomitant growth in her system of finance and credit. In the 18th century, services offered by banks increased. Clearing facilities, security investments, cheques and overdraft protections were introduced.

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Cheques were invented in the 17th century in England and banks settled payments by direct courier to the issuing bank. Around , they began meeting in a central location, and by the 19th century a dedicated space was established, known as a bankers' clearing house. The London clearing house used a method where each bank paid cash to and then was paid cash by an inspector at the end of each day. The first overdraft facility was set up in by The Royal Bank of Scotland. Older innovations became routine parts of financial life during the 19th century. The Bank of England first issued bank notes during the 17th century, but the notes were hand written and few in number.

After they were partially printed, but cashiers still had to sign each note and make them payable to a named person. In , parliament passed the Bank Charter Act tying these notes to gold reserves , effectively creating the institution of central banking and monetary policy.

The notes became fully printed and widely available from Growing international trade increased the number of banks, especially in London. These new "merchant banks" facilitated trade growth, profiting from England's emerging dominance in seaborne shipping. Two immigrant families, Rothschild and Baring , established merchant banking firms in London in the late 18th century and came to dominate world banking in the next century.

The tremendous wealth amassed by these banking firms soon attracted much attention. The poet George Gordon Byron wrote in The operation of banks also shifted. At the beginning of the century, banking was still an elite preoccupation of a handful of very wealthy families. Within a few decades, however, a new sort of banking had emerged, owned by anonymous stockholders , run by professional managers , and the recipient of the deposits of a growing body of small middle-class savers.

Although this new breed of banks was new in prominence, it was not newly invented — the Quaker family Barclays , had been banking in this manner since At the height of the First French Empire , Napoleon sought to introduce a " continental system " that would render Europe economically autonomous, thereby emasculating British trade and commerce.

It involved such stratagems as the use of beet sugar in preference to the cane sugar that had to be imported from the tropics. Although this caused businessmen in England to agitate for peace, the government was able to persevere, in part because the United Kingdom was well into the industrial revolution. The war had the opposite effect — it stimulated the growth of certain industries like pig-iron output, which was just 68, tons in and soared to , tons by In , David Ricardo , James Mill and Robert Torrens showed that free trade would benefit the industrially weak as well as the strong, in the famous theory of comparative advantage.

In Principles of Political Economy and Taxation Ricardo advanced the doctrine still considered the most counterintuitive in economics:. By the mid 19th century, Britain was firmly wedded to the notion of free trade and the first era of globalization began. In line with the teachings of the classical political economists, led by Adam Smith and David Ricardo , Britain embraced liberalism , encouraging competition and the development of a market economy.

Industrialization allowed cheap production of household items using economies of scale , [ citation needed ] while rapid population growth created sustained demand for commodities. Globalization in this period was decisively shaped by nineteenth-century imperialism.

After the First and Second Opium Wars and the completion of British conquest of India, vast populations of these regions became ready consumers of European exports. It was in this period that areas of sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific islands were incorporated into the world system.

Meanwhile, the conquest of new parts of the globe, notably sub-Saharan Africa, by Europeans yielded valuable natural resources such as rubber , diamonds and coal and helped fuel trade and investment between the European imperial powers, their colonies, and the United States. The global financial system was mainly tied to the gold standard in this period. The United Kingdom first formally adopted this standard in Should Africa protect its farmers to revitalise its economy? Food Security by Niek Koning 1 edition published in in English and held by 17 WorldCat member libraries worldwide.

A Jongeneel Book 4 editions published in in English and held by 8 WorldCat member libraries worldwide.

Books by Niek Koning (Author of Food Security, Agricultural Policies and Economic Growth)

Ruilverkaveling en landinrichting Book 1 edition published in in Dutch and held by 6 WorldCat member libraries worldwide. Wageningen views on food security by Niek Koning Book 2 editions published in in English and held by 4 WorldCat member libraries worldwide Report that integrates the proceedings of a number of multidisciplinay expert workshops on food security at Wageningen UR.

Rural livelihoods and agricultural commercialization in colonial Uganda: Technokratie kritiek by Joost Mertens Book 1 edition published in in Dutch and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide. Bescherming biedt Afrikaanse landbouw nieuwe kans by Niek Koning 1 edition published in in Dutch and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide. Enkele kritische kanttekeningen bij de hedendaagse theorievorming over de Westeuropese landbouwcooperaties by Niek Koning Book 1 edition published in in Dutch and held by 2 WorldCat member libraries worldwide.

Agricultural trade policies and development: Email alerts New issue alert. Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic. Related articles in Google Scholar. Citing articles via Google Scholar. The free-rider deficit in the demand for farm animal welfare-labelled meat. The relationship between price and retail concentration: The trade effect of private standards. Technology heterogeneity and policy change in farm-level efficiency analysis:

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