Grantham: > 6. Since average yields in northern Europe were lower than > good (though not best) practice by at least 50 percent, we > need to ask why the potential was not exploited at an > earlier date and why it was not exploited more > continuously. Here, I think, we must turn to the economic > connection between farming and the rest of the economy. > For too long this connection has been viewed through the > distorting lens of Malthusian and Ricardian economics, > which took the agricultural production function to be the > chief constraint on the possibilities of economic progress. > My view of the evidence and the economics is that this > position can no longer be sustained. Should I follow the party line of Blaut and argue that, if he agrees with Grantham's views on medieval European agriculture, he is also a Smithian? Of course not. Am skipping point 5 in Grantham as it adds little to the argument. I looked at his article in EHR, 1993, which he mentioned in point 5, but I could not see its relevance to the discussion here. Point 6 continues on the idea that Europe, "by the early Christian era" (point 1), had the technological potential to attain yields "typical of good eighteenth-century English practice" (point 3), but that such potential was not exploited because of lack of "market opportunity" (point 7). But he now adds that historians have failed to notice this because they have wrongly accepted the Malthusian-Ricardian economics "which took agricultural production to be the chief constraint on the possibilities of economic progress." That is, the M-R model assumed that there were inherent limits to growth, because sooner or later all agrarian systems would experience diminshing returns. If medieval Europe suffered periodic subsistence crises, it was because agrarian growth had reached a limit beyond which it could not grow anymore. But Grantham now insists that European agriculture long had an unexplored potential - that the technology which we associate with the 'agricultural revolution' of the 18th century was always there, ready to be exploited if only there were markets to motivate its use. My view is: 1) mixed husbandry (which implies a three field system) was "in place" around 1100, not in the early Christian era, or in Antiquity; and it was in place in some places (mostly large estates), with many peasants still operating under a two field-system. 2) The question of diffusion cannot be underestimated, by which I mean that, even if mixed husbandry was available, it does not follow that everyone "potentially" could have access to such a technology, if only because such a technology had not been generally diffused for you to have access to it, or because you did not have the means to practice it. 3) All pre-industrial change is slow and gradual, and small steps do matter. If historians have spoken of the "new husbandry" that was beginning to be practiced in the "closing" of the medieval period, it is because some new alternating crops (alfalfa, clover, artificial grasses, turnips) were added, fallowing was reduced, animals were better fed, and the supplies of fertilizers increased (Mokyr, 1990). Again, agrarian change thereafter meant the slow, uneven diffusion of this new husbandry.
