I wrote:.David Friedman asks:>In Britain, factory owners imported labor from Ireland to prevent labor from
>effectively organizing and to keep wages down to subsistence levels.
What dates are you thinking of? As best I recall from Ashton, realEd here:
wages were rising from about 1840 on. Checking the _Atlas of World
Population History_, the population of England and Wales rose from
about 1400 on, with the increase becoming much steeper starting about
1750-1800, which seems inconsistent with "subsistence wages." Roughly
the same thing is true of the graph for the British Isles as a whole,
so it isn't just a matter of moving people from Ireland to England.
An interesting historical study of the early 19th century is contained in the *The Reason Why* written by Cecil-Woodham Smith around 1950-52. This story details how England's military adventures in the Crimea were financed (to a considerable extent) by rackrents charged Irish tenant farmers. Few could pay the rents and were expelled from their plots of land. Many perished, many others migrated, in large numbers to the factories of England. Their arrival drove down wages in the factories to subsistence level. Rising unemployment and worsening conditions sent large numbers of English, Scot and Welsh (as well as Irish) to the Americas, to Australia, to South Africa and to New Zealand. Smith's book also presents what might be described as a worst-case direct correlation between impoverishment and population growth. High infant mortality, the lack of opportunity for education or employment, short life expectancy -- all contribute to poor families being large even after the benefit of a large family disappeared with the enclosures and transition from subsistence to commercial (sheep and cattle) agriculture.
England inadvertently ran its colonial empire a bit more prudently than did the French, Spanish or Portuguese. England exported people to, in effect, recreate smaller versions of English communities. In North America, the period up to the late 1750s was called by historian Charles Andrews, the era of "salutary neglect," ending because of the huge debt incurred during the Seven Years War (i.e., the French and Indian War). The landed aristocracy and financiers of England were not about to tax themselves to pay off this debt and so decided their lesser counterparts in the Americas ought to bare the burden. You know what happened after that.
Mr. Kasbekar asked:> > Also, a question: How vital was the economic exploitation of its colonies
>> (esp. India) to the growth and development of British capitalism? Some
>> people seem to believe it was extremely vital. Some that the British economy
>> was already well-developed by the time the exploitation took effect.
>
>I responded:
>The question is, "vital to whom?" The costs of maintaining an imperial empire
>are clearly far greater than any aggregate financial gains that accrue to the
>general citizenry. The financial benefits are attached to monopoly licenses
>granted by government to certain individuals or entities.
David Friedman responds:
I don't know about "clearly." There's no a priori reason why robbery
can't be profitable.I remember hearing a talk a very long time ago by someone who had
tried to estimate the costs and benefits to Britain (meaning, I
think, everyone in Britain) of the empire, and concluded that on net
it cost more than it was worth. But I'm afraid I don't remember who
gave the talk, let alone whether the work was published and where.
Ed Dodson here:
There are a number of excellent sources for the details, from Adam Smith
in *The Wealth of Nations* to Ferdinand Lott's description of the fall
of the Roman empire, to Will and Ariel Durant's detailed studies. If we
put the various empire-building countries on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being
the worst in terms of laws that transferred the costs of empire to those
who benefitted least, perhaps England would appear somewhere in the 4-5
range, while Spain and Portugal would appear at 9-10. The Spanish people,
during Spain's empire-building era, suffered from very heavy taxation (remember
that neigher Spain's aristocracy nor the Church were taxed to pay for the
adventures of its monarchy). And, the treasure brought from the New World
had to be exchanged, in part, for food and other basic goods the heavily-taxed
Spanish could not produce for themselves.
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