Barkley:
Haven't time to deal adequately with your points. Two brief comments and
then (slyly) I'll post another message on the ag revo, from still another
real, genuine economist, Greg Clark.
Theres no question about the importance of those inventions in 1760-80 or
thereabouts. Traditional econmomic historians (I think Nef among them?)
claim to find much simpler precursdors to thos inventions, using this as
evidence that the industrial revolution was starting much earlier than the
18th century. This ain't my field but my hunch is: they're right, but the
same development of mechanical devices, e.tc., was taking place elswere.
However, the argument fits my speculation that, in this arena, great oaks
from little acorns grew. Also, most of the inventions were specific to the
cotton textile industry, which was by far the most important part of the
early IR.
American crops indeed were profoundly important. A great swathe of norhtern
Europe from Ireland across the North European Plain was very sparsely
settled until the white potato arrived becasue wheat didn't do well in this
rainy climate and on these generally wet soils (gleys and podzols). Did
this produce an abundance of food whichb helped to free part of the
population from food-producing? I don't know. In China, the introduction of
the Sweet potato, corn, and other American crops is sometimes considered
part of the explanation for the huge increase (spike) in populatioin that
took place in trhe 18th century. Don't know.
Now Gregory Clark:
Subject: EH.R: Forum: Agricultural Revolution Date:
09-Nov-98 at 11:14 Sender: Gregory Clark
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
SAYING GOODBYE TO THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION
. INTRODUCTION
British population more than doubled between 1770 and 1850,
and living standards improved. This implies domestic food
output at least doubled between 1770 and 1850, even
allowing for imports. Agricultural workers were 50% of all
labor in 1770, but 25% in 1850. Thus each farm worker fed
twice as many people by 1850. Food output per worker must
similarly have doubled.
Together these simple arguments generate an agricultural
revolution precisely in the Industrial Revolution period.
Britain was twice touched in the Industrial Revolution
years by the hand of providence. This is remarkable given
that there was no connection between the events of the two
revolutions, the one founded on the mechanical innovations
of a bright few artisans in textiles in the north west, the
other on the small scale improvements of literally hundreds
of thousands of farmers throughout the land. The
Industrial Revolution must not be an accident, but the
result of economy wide forces that favored growth.
. FIVE THESES
Having assembled a mass of data on land rents, returns on
capital, wages, and prices I have come to the following
conclusions about the agricultural revolution.
1. There was no agricultural revolution. Not in
1770-1850, not in 1600-1770, and not in 1200-1600. Instead
from 1500 to 1850 there was a long slow process by which
measured agricultural productivity drifted upwards at an
average rate of less than 10% in each 50 years - a process
so incremental that it would be largely unnoticeable in any
persons lifetime. This drift began long before the
Industrial Revolution, and had no connection with the
Industrial Revolution. Its cause seems to be largely an
improvement in grain yields, some of which may stem from
the decline in interest rates between 1600 and 1750 which
encouraged more investment in soil fertility.
The rent, wage and price data tell us nothing much
happened because productivity growth has to show up in
higher net payments to the factors of production. Yet in
1700-49 wages relative to agricultural prices were at 90%
of the level in the 1860s, land rents were at 65%, and
returns on capital were at 120%. Thus in net there was
little productivity growth no more than a 25% gain.
2. Correcting the estimates of the growth of output
from agriculture leads to much slower growth rates of
output per person in England from 1700 to 1860. At first
it might seem mysterious that removing the agricultural
revolution threatens the Industrial Revolution.
Agriculture is, after all, reckoned as only 18% of GNP by
1861. But it turns out that given the way output growth is
calculated in the Industrial Revolution period, removing
the agricultural revolution from the scene cuts the growth
of income per capita from 1760 to 1860 from the already
pessimistic 65% estimated by Crafts and Harley to a mere
31%. Crafts and Harley, to our surprise, are wild
optimists! For a slower growing agriculture gets much more
weight in national income in 1760 or 1700. Correspondingly
the fast growing industrial sector gets much less weight.
The Industrial Revolution looks more and more like an
isolated phenomena of the textile industries, as opposed to
an economy wide transformation.
3. The urbanization and industrialization of Britain
in 1760 to 1860 was not spurred by the release of labor by
capitalist agriculture. Instead it was compelled by the
failure of agriculture to increase output in line with
population, which led to huge imports of food and raw
materials from abroad, and from the domestic coal industry.
These imports had to be paid for by the production of
tradable industrial products. Many of these products were
made in the new power factories. They would have been made
in the old hand workshops had there not been the mechanical
advances of the Industrial Revolution.
4. The logic of the simple argument in the
introduction fails because it equates food output with
agricultural output. British agriculture did produce a lot
more food in 1850 than in 1770, but it did so in part by
reducing its output per head of the population of wood for
building and fuel, of fiber and dyes for clothing, and of
fodder for horses. If we do an accounting of total
domestic consumption of food, fuel, and raw materials in
England in 1700 versus Britain in 1850 we find that in 1700
agriculture produced 95% of domestic consumption, while by
1850 it was producing only 49%.
5. The reason researchers such as Bob Allen, Mark
Overton, and Michael Turner have found confirmation on the
ground that an agricultural revolution did indeed occur as
expected is that they all have focused on grain yields in
measuring output. Grain yields did increase. Yet by 1870
grain was only about a third of net agricultural output.
People focus on grain yields because the physical output of
meadow and pasture land has been impossible to measure. Yet
price data suggests that in this large section of
agriculture there were no gains from 1600 to 1860. The
ratio of the price of animal products to the price of hay
changes little over these years, suggesting no gains in
conversion efficiency between feed and output. And the
rent of meadow in terms of hay increases little suggesting
little increase in yields.
Subject: [PEN-L:12063] Re: China's post-1400 technological stagnation
Date: 30-Sep-99 at 16:45
From: INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED],
INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
TO: INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jim B.,
I find this to be a very interesting and informative
posting. I learned some things I did not know, but I
have some questions about it, especially given the
paucity of references in some parts.
One is the claim that essentially not much of
importance was going on in the British countryside
in the early 1700s. Now, I don't have a handy source
to throw out and so may be just suffering from faulty
memory, but I do remember reading in at least more
than one source that there were major increases in
ag productivity, by any measure, and that there were
also major changes in practice, if not of actual machinery
or capital equipment, in the British countryside during
that period. Is this claim not true?
Reading into this posting of Grantham's, perhaps
he would argue that what was going on was an intensification
of existing techniques in response to rising population. Maybe.
But I would be interested to see some more support for that.
An observation I would add regarding this tendency for
productivity to decline with distance from population centers
(I would warn for those Paris cases, that soil quality is
exceptionally high in l'Ile de France near Paris), is that even
on farms such a pattern has been observed. Braudel argues
that technical innovations and crop experimentation tends
to go on in the garden adjacent to the farmhouse, which
receives the most attention and intensity of labor input. Things
get less intense as one moves out. This underlay the model
of von Thunen in his _Der Isolierte Staat_ of 1826, the book
that is the fountainhead of most modern location theory and
urban land rent theory, even though it was a model of how
to allocate production in an essentially medieval estate. Braudel
makes that link as well.
Of course another matter of some significance was the
introduction of American crops into the Old World. Potatoes
and maize certainly profoundly influenced agriculture and diets
throughout much of Europe, Asia, and Africa, not to mention
the peanut.
Finally, and here I may be putting words in Ricardo's
mouth (who is a big boy and should defend himself anyway),
it has seemed that he has ultimately focused on the technical
changes in manufacturing industry in Britain in the late 1700s
as being the actual industrial revolution. One can argue all
day long about whether or not technical or social changes
in British ag fed these changes or not, or whether it was due
to profits from the slave, sugar , or cotton trades (quite aside
from the issue of lower cost inputs, especially for cotton). But,
whatever, there remains this question of Arkwright and all
those characters who invented new machinery that was adopted
for use in the textile industry. What triggered that? Were all
those inventions just sitting around waiting to be picked up
once demand rose sufficiently?
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: James M. Blaut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: INTERNET:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thursday, September 30, 1999 3:31 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:12048] China's post-1400 technological stagnation
>Ricardo:
>
>I don't have time now to respond to your long and very nearly collegial
>message, but I'll try to do that tonight, and thank you for spelling my
>name right.
>
>I'll begin however, by postting the following email sent by George
>Grasntham to the EH-R list last year on the subject of that supposed
>agricultural revolution.
>
>I hope Jim Devine and Rod Hay are reading this. It has a Canadian
>connection. / Jim
>
>From: "Prof. G. Grantham" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On the Agricultural Revolution
>Subject: EH.R: Re: EH.RES digest 473 Date: 25-Nov-98 at
>13:59
>If one defines the agricultural revolution as a
>technological event, I think a good case can be made for
>Greg Clark's argument that no such event occurred between
>the later middle ages -- I would put it back to classical
>antiquity -- and the early nineteenth century. My reasons
>for arguing this point are the following:
>
>1. The fundamental elements of European mixed husbandry,
>which consisted in the intensive utilization of animals for
>draft power and manure, were in place by the early
>Christian era, by which time the technology of smelting and
>forging iron required for plough shares and far more
>crucially, scythe blades, was fully diffused throughout
>western and northern Europe.
>
>2. The forage legumes -- alfalfa, the various clovers, and
>sainfoin-- were diffused throughout the western
>mediterranean in the first centuries AD. It is unclear to
>what extent they were diffused northward, but by the 13th
>century, clover was being sown in the Rhineland.
>
>3. Such yield records as survive or can be inferred
>indicate that yields typical of good eighteenth-century
>English practice were achieved by Carolingian times (and
>surely earlier). By the thirteenth century, two to
>three-tonne per hectare yields were not uncommon in
>Flanders, northern France and England. As the records of
>these yields come from large farms, they cannot be
>attributed to gardening.
>
>4. The cross-section pattern of yields and productivity
>indicates a steep gradient descending outward from urban
>centres. The pattern shows up at different levels of
>aggregation. Perhaps the best evidence so far is Hoffman's
>study of total factor productivity on farms owned by the
>Cathedral of Notre Dame, which were situated around Paris.
>Since the area is too restrained for this pattern to be
>explained by incomplete diffusion of technology, and as all
>the farms in question were commercial producers of grain or
>wine, we may presume that the factor produtivity gradient
>must reflect differences in the exploitation of
>technological potential that are correlated with the
>distance from a major market outlet.
>
>5. I have found from a reconstruction of the production
>function for small grains along the lines of the
>Parker-Klein exercise for the United States that by the
>thirteenth century (I now believe much earlier), existing
>agricultural technology could support a non-food- producing
>population of up to 70 percent of the total population. I
>also find that cities of up to 250,000 could be supported
>from hinterlands of no more than 60 kilometers in diameter
>under that technology. These results are to be found in
>Economic HIstory Review (August 1993) and Annales,
>Histoire, sciences Sociales (June 1997).
>
>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.
>
>7. We now have two excellent studies of large-scale
>farming around Paris (J.-M. Moriceu, Les fermiers de l'Ile
>de France, and J-M. Moricea and G. Postel-Vinay, Ferme,
>entreprise, famille), which reveal the extent to which a
>growing market opportunity could induce productivity growth
>among the farms that served it. The sources of this growth
>are multiple: rearrangement of plots--often by sub- letting
>and exchanges--in order to reduce the time required to
>plough and sow; increased investment in carts and weagons;
>new barns and hangars; increased sales of by-products like
>straw to urban and noble stables; multiplied ploughing, and
>sowing more legumes. All of these are associated with the
>agricultural revolution. What is interesting is that the
>same responses have been detected in medieval accounts on
>farms subject to the same kind of market opportunity. The
>time series indicate that when these opportunities
>contracted, as they did in northern Europe after 1300 and
>around Paris for about 80 years after 1660, productivity
>tended to fall off.
>
>8. This brings me to the main point. Agriculture, like
>manufacturing, though perhaps not to the same degree, also
>possessed scope for productivity growth through increased
>division of labour. Bob Allen has found evidence of this
>in one possible response--the enlargement of farms and
>their transformation into specialized producers of grain or
>livestock products. By the eighteenth century English
>farming was more specialized than most farming in northern
>Europe, with the exception the cheese-producing districts
>of the Netherlands. This is, I believe, the principal
>reason for the statistical finding of relatively high
>labour productivity in England. The growing division of
>labour within agriculture was in turn an endogenous
>response to the growth of commercial outlets for produce,
>most prominently in and around London, but from the late
>seventeenth century in the industrializing regins of
>central and northern England.
>
>9. The Ricardian paradigm has trapped economic historians
>into supposing that traditional agriculture had no
>exploitable slack. This was certainly not the view held
>by Adam Smith, nor was it shared by Alfred Marshall more
>than a century later, when one might suppose that the
>market had weeded out most of England's inefficient
>farmers. As long as we persist in the old-fashioned notion
>that pre-industrial economies were constantly on the margin
>of subsistence and that they fully exploited their
>productivity opportunities, Greg Clark's findings will
>remain a paradox. The paradox can, however, be resolved if
>one is prepared to break away from the full-equilibrium
>approach that subtends the price-dual estimates of
>productivity change. We need to look harder at the
>cross-sections and the spatial productivity distributions.
>The time series that have been employed to sustain the
>Ricardian paradigm compress all this information into
>means. Take yields, for example. The spatial
>distributions are right-skewed, with pre-industrial maxima
>around 30 bu per acre or 3 to 3.5 tonnes per hectare. The
>tip of this tail does not move from classical antiquity to
>the early nineteenth century, but the mode does. In
>prosperous times, the mode moves to the right, and the tail
>thickens; in depressions, it moves back to the left and the
>tail thins. These are statistical reflections of endogenous
>responses by farmers to market opportunity.
>
>10. Finally, it would be useful to set a date at which
>things actually do change. I would put it around 1825-40,
>or perhaps 1800- 1840. It was in these decades that the
>falling price of iron started to make a difference in the
>construction of agricultural machinery, especially ploughs
>and cultivators. It made them stronger, lighter, and more
>precise. It also dates the appearance of concentrated
>fertilizers, which removed an important constraint on crop
>rotations. At the end of this period, we see the first
>attempts at systematic agricultural experimentation--Lawes
>estate at Rothamsted, and Boussingault's in Alsace. Within
>five years the first state- supported experiment station
>was founded in Saxony. I would argue that technologically
>speaking, these events constitute the only agricultural
>revolution since the diffusion of iron-making in the
>European countryside between 700 and 200 BC.
>
>George Grantham Department of Economics McGill University
>Montreal, Quebec, CANADA
>
>
>
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From: "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [PEN-L:12063] Re: China's post-1400 technological stagnation
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