Joseph Green is right on in his observation that Frank runs into a major difficulty in speaking of Europe as both a high wage and a low per-capita/low productivity region. Let's not call this a contradiction yet, but certainly a major problem, which unfortunately, as Green later noted, Frank does not deal with. (He does add, however, that workers in China "were still able to draw on family support" (306). But before moving into China, I want to continue the comments I made last Friday about rising English wage rages in the last half of the 18th century. We all know how intractable that debate about the standard of life of wage workers in England in the 1750-1850 period has become for the non-specialist. Some (Ashton, 1949) say that the lives of workers saw improvements if not in the 1790s certainly by the 1820s. Others like Eric Hobsbawm insist "there is not much evidence that real wages in Europe began to go up significantly until the later part of the 1860s..." (The Age of Capital, 259). Which is to say that Mathias (1983), the source I used last time, is only one source. But I have another, more recent source (most sources cited so far are my own which sometimes I forget I have) by E.A.Wrigley, the foremost authority on British population history and all that that entails. In Peoples, Cities, and Wealth, The Transformation of Traditional Society (1987) there is, even though Wrigley does not directly deal with wage rates, a graph which measures real wage trends in England showing that, from 1600 onwards, real wages move steadily upward to fall after 1750, to rise, substantially and steadily, after 1800. So, obviously this suggests, against Mathias, who may still be right about the cities he provided data for, that in the early phases of the revolution wages declined, increasing only after 1800. This, of course, does not disqualify the home market thesis in the sense that this was the bulk of the market, with a rising population, and steady increases in wages from 1600 to 1750, and after 1800. But more importantly, and this is the key point we must never miss, the world of the peasants was rapidly being transformed into a world of capitalit relations. Looking at this sector will clarify this whole business about the "superior" productivity of China's (or India's) agriculture. First, to narrow our focus to Britain, I think that despite, but also in tandem with, the enclosure movement there was a sizable class of middling peasants (the so-called yeomen) which played an undeniable role as a both an internal market and source of accumulation. Looking at Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, would seem to suggest otherwise, for then nobles and gentry are said to have owned as much as 69% of the land (as compared to say Prussia, that land of the Junkers, were surprisingly 40% was in their hands, or, less surprisingly, France, where 20% was in the hand of big landlords, or Russia, surprisingly again, were it was 14% (Price in Aldcroft, 1994, 75). But what one has to keep in mind is that the enclusure movement really gathered momentum in the 18th century, and not before as Brenner, or Moore earlier, had claimed. In fact, if in the mid-19th century 50% of the farmland was held in units of over 80 ha, and 1/5 in units of less than 40 ha, 42% of the land was still held in units of less than 20 ha occupied by *independent farmers* who "did not regularly hire labour" (76). It was really in the last quarter of the 19th century that 88% of the land came to be held in terms of a landlord-tenant relation, with only 12% of the land owned by independent farmers. England always had a large free peasantry going back to the middle ages, out of which an upper, enterprising stratum emerged in the 15th-16th centuries, something the Marxist Rodney Hilton wrote much about. But the point I want to make now - as it challenges directly Frank's thesis on productivity - is that English agricultural ouput increased per year over the periods 1710-40, 1740-80, and 1780-1800 by 0.9, 0.5, and 0.6 respectively. (Craft's calculations as cited by Wrigley, who also provides a detailed table on this same question with similar conclusions as those of Craft, p. 170-171). Wrigley says that this "implies a total increase in output of almost exactly 80% over the 90-year period as a whole" adding that, if we agree that the agricultural population increase by 13% over the century, then the increase in per capita output could be calculated at 59%. Next we go back to Frank's argument that Asia suffered a comparative disadvantage in the world economy because its population/land resource ratio was relatively higher than Europe's (which is connected to the observation that Asia saw no need in introducing cost-saving technology because it had lower wages.
