Ricardo: This is over!!!! The subject is exhausted.
Ricardo Duchesne wrote:
> So the English feudal ruling class was unique in that its extra-
> economic powers were "increasingly concentrated in the central
> state" beginning with the Norman conquest in the eleventh century.
> Long before their continental counterparts, English lords were
> "demilitarized" and deprived of autonomous judicial powers, and
> other corporate privileges. But what this ruling class lacked in extra-
> economic powers, they made up in "economic powers", because
> "land in England had for long time been unusually concentrated,
> with big landlords holding an unusually large proportion" (75).
>
> In other words, the mysterious "economic" power English lords had
> was none other than a higher degree of ownership of the land.
> "[T]he concentration of English landholding meant than an
> unusually large proportion of land was worked not by peasant-
> propriertors but by tenants..." Notice she says "tenants", not
> landless labourers, which she defines as farmers to whom land is
> farmed out; and, as you might recall from an earlier post, many of
> these farmers were yeomen. Indeed, see page 52 where she
> acknowledges that "yeomen played a leading role in the history of
> capitalism" insofar as they were the tenants to whom lanlords
> rented their lands.
>
> We are being told, in other words, that, before peasants were
> separated from the land, *before the enclosures*, landlords were in
> possession of an inordinate proportion of the land, land which they
> decided to rent to tenants in the form of economic leases.
>
> Only when these lands were rented to tenants as market leases,
> were the yeomen, now turned into tenants, compelled to act in
> capitalistic ways. Wood is far from precise when these leases were
> imposed, except that she says on various times that England "by
> the sixteenth century, was developing in wholly new directions"
> (74), or that "already in the sixteenth century, England had an
> impressive network of roads and water transport that unified the
> nation...", or, more to the point, that "farming out" "was true even
> before the waves of dispossession, especially in the sixteenth and
> eighteenth centuries" (75). The landlord-tenant capitalistic relation
> was true before the sixteenth century, before the "waves" of
> enclosures. By 1500, the logic of capitalist accumulation was in
> full gear in England: "Where security of tenure depended on the
> ability to pay the going rent, uncompetitive production could mean
> outright loss of land. To meet economic rents in a situation where
> other potential tenants were competing for the same leases,
> tenants were compelled to produce cost-effectively, on penalty of
> dispossession" (76).
>
> Here, of course, we have to ask: were not these tenants, as prior
> (or still independent prosperous farmers), already in possession of
> their own lands? This question does appear to pop into her mind
> right at this moment, for she next adds "The effect of the system of
> property relations was that many agricultural producers (including
> prosperous 'yeomen') became market dependent in their access to
> land itself..." But who are these "agricultural producers" who were
> not yeomen? Other unasked questions remain: what percentage of
> the total arable land did landlords own compared to the prosperous
> yeomen?
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
