Chapter 5 Part One Development Chapter One The World in the 1780s 3

3 The problem of agriculture was thus the fundamental problem of the world in 1789, and it is easy to see why the first systematic Continental school of economics was the French Physiocrats, who took for granted that land and rent were the only source of net gain. source.Moreover, the crux of the agricultural problem is the relationship between the cultivator and the owner of the land, between the producer of wealth and the accumulator of wealth. From the perspective of land ownership relations, we can divide Europe—more precisely, the economic complex centered on Western Europe—into three major regions.In the west of Europe, there are overseas colonies.In the overseas colonies, with the notable exceptions of the northern part of the United States of America and some less significant independent farming areas, the typical cultivators were Indians as forced laborers or serfs, and Negroes as slaves; Such cultivators are relatively few. (In the colonies of the East Indies, direct cultivation by European plantation owners is rare, and the typical form of coercion by land managers is to force the cultivators to hand over a certain percentage of the harvest, such as spices or coffee in the Netherlands Islands. .) In other words, the person of the typical cultivator is not free, or under political coercion.Typical landowners were semi-feudal owners of large estates (plantations, estates, pastures), and plantation owners who practiced slavery.The economy characteristic of the semi-feudal latifundium was primitive, self-sufficient and, in short, purely for local needs: the producers of the mineral products exported by Spanish Latin America were in fact Indian serfs, produced in the same way as agricultural products .The large-scale plantations that practiced slavery are mainly distributed in the West Indies, the northern coast of South America (especially the northern part of Brazil), and the southern part of the United States. Their economic characteristics are the production of some extremely important export crops-sugar, followed by Tobacco, coffee, dyes, and since the industrial revolution, mainly cotton.Therefore, the slave plantation economy became an integral part of the European economy and became an integral part of the African economy through the slave trade.During the period covered in this book, the history of the region can largely be written in terms of the decline of sugar production and the rise of cotton production.

East of Western Europe, especially along the Elbe River, east of the line that divides eastern and western Austria into two halves, the western border of present-day Czechoslovakia and then southward to the port of Trieste in Italy. , the serf system prevailed.Socially, Italy and southern Spain south of Tuscany and Umbria fall into this category, although Scandinavia (with the exception of parts of Denmark and southern Sweden) other than) does not belong to the serf system.In this vast area, there are still plots cultivated by free farmers.These freeholders included German agricultural colonists scattered across lands from Slovenia to the Volga; virtually independent families living in the barren hills of the Illvrian interior; Infantry (Pandurs: known for their brutality in the 18th century) were almost as aggressive as Cossack cavalry Armed peasants (who operated on what until recently was a military frontier between Christians and Turks or Tatars above); free settlers who squatted and colonized land where lords and governments were beyond their reach; and people who lived in vast forests where large-scale farming was impossible.But in any case, the typical cultivator of this area appears to be, on the whole, illiberal.In fact, almost all of them were submerged in the non-stop flood of serfdom that had arisen since the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.This situation is less obvious in the Balkans, because there was or is still under the direct rule of the Turks. In the original agricultural system of pre-feudalism in Turkey, the land was roughly divided, and each land To bear the livelihood of a non-hereditary Turkish warrior, this primitive agricultural system degenerated into a hereditary landed system under the rule of the big landowners, and the Islamic landowners who rarely practiced farming did everything possible to squeeze the peasants.This is why the Balkans, south of the Danube and Sava, were essentially agrarian states when they were liberated from the Turks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and despite their extreme poverty they were not Not a country with a concentration of agricultural property.As a Christian, the Balkan peasant was still not free de jure, and in fact, as a peasant, at least while he was still under the control of the lord, he was not free either.

In other areas, however, the typical peasant was a serf, who was forced to spend most of the week on the land of his lord, or to perform other equivalent duties.His personal freedom is so great that it is difficult for us to distinguish serfs from slaves. For example, in places where serfdom was practiced in Russia and Poland, serfs could be sold separately from the land. An advertisement in the Gazette de Moscou in 1801 read: "Three coachmen and two girls are for sale. The coachmen are well trained and excellent. The girls are 18 years old and 15 years old, both of them are good-looking and proficient in handwork. The family still has two barbers for sale, one of them is 21 years old, can read, write, play musical instruments, and is competent as a coachman. A good hairdresser for ladies and gentlemen, who can also play the piano and the accordion." (A large proportion of serfs served as domestic servants. In Russia in 1851, domestic servants accounted for almost 5% of all serfs.) In the Baltic Sea - leading to The important trade routes of Western Europe - the inland areas, agriculture using serf labor, produced most of the export crops for the importing countries of Western Europe: cereals, flax, hemp, and forest products mainly used for shipbuilding.Elsewhere, the agricultural economy was more dependent on local markets, at least in areas with good transport links, reasonably developed manufacturing, and urban development, such as Saxon and Bohemia and the metropolis of Vienna.However, most of the places here are still very backward.The opening of the Black Sea route and the increasing urbanization of Western Europe, especially the UK, have just begun to stimulate the export of grain from the Russian Black Soil Belt. Before the Soviet Union achieved industrialization, export grain was still a staple commodity in Russia’s foreign trade.The serf-served eastern region supplied Western Europe with raw food and thus was seen as a "dependent economy" of Western Europe, similar to its overseas colonies.

Serfdoms in Italy and Spain had similar economic characteristics, although the legal status of their peasants differed.These are, by and large, areas where aristocratic large estates prevailed.In Sicily and Andalusia, many large manors were directly inherited from Roman manors. The original slaves and outsiders (coloni) became characteristic hired labor in these areas. They did not have land and were paid by the day.Livestock farming, food production (Sicily is an ancient granary for exporting grain), and what was obtained from the pressing of miserable peasants all provided sources of income for the landowning princes and nobles.

Where serfdom was practiced, the typical landlord was an aristocrat, a cultivator or exploiter of a large estate.The vastness of its territory is unimaginable: Catherine the Great gave each favorite 40,000 to 50,000 serfs; the estate owned by the Radziwills in Poland was half as large as Ireland; Potocki (Potocki) In Ukraine they own 3 million acres; in Hungary the Esterhazy family (protectors of the musician Haydn) once owned almost 7 million acres.Properties ranging in size to hundreds of thousands of acres abound. (After 1918, Czechoslovakia confiscated 80 large estates exceeding 25,000 acres [10,000 hectares], of which one in Schoenborn and one in Schwarzenberg 500,000 acres of large estates were confiscated, Liechtenstein and Kinsky had 400,000 and 170,000 acres, respectively.) Although these large estates Often unmanaged, poorly run, and inefficient, they can, however, produce regal returns.As a French visitor remarked of the deserted estate of Medina Sidonia, the Spanish nobleman was "like a lion who reigns in the woods, whose roar terrifies all who come near him."However, he was not short of money, and even by the standards of the British rich gentry, he was still rich.

Beneath these land magnates, exploiting the peasants was a class of country gentlemen of varying sizes and economic resources, large and small.In some countries this class is enormous, and consequently destitute and disaffected, and their main difference from non-aristocratic persons is their political and social privileges, and their aversion to menial tasks such as labour. In Hungary and Poland, the number of this class about one-tenth of the total population.In Spain at the end of the eighteenth century the gentry class numbered almost 500,000, and in 1827 it comprised 10 per cent of all European nobility, whereas elsewhere it was much smaller.