Chapter 36 Part Two Results Chapter Eight Land 5

5 The revolution in land ownership is the political aspect of the disintegration of traditional agricultural society; the new rural economy and the penetration of the world market are its economic aspects.During the period 1787-1848, this transformation of the economic face was incomplete, as measured by very limited immigration rates.It wasn't until after the Great Agricultural Depression of the late 19th century that railroads and steamships began to establish a single world market for agriculture.Thus, local agriculture was largely free from provincial or even international competition.Industrial competition has hardly yet seriously affected the innumerable rural handicrafts and home manufactures, if any it has only converted some of them to produce for a wider market.Outside areas of successful capitalist agriculture, new farming methods penetrated the countryside only very slowly.Although Napoleon's discrimination against (British) sugar and new food crops (mainly maize and potatoes) led to the dramatic development of new industrial crops, especially sugar from beets.The new rural economy and the world market, taking a special economic combination, such as the close combination of high industrialization and inhibition of normal development, brought about a real upheaval in agricultural society by purely economic means.

Such combinations did exist, and such upheavals did occur in Ireland and, to a lesser extent, in India.The changes that took place in India were pure destruction.The household and rural industries that once flourished as a subsidy to rural incomes were wiped out in a matter of decades; in other words, this was the deindustrialization of India. From 1815 to 1832, the total value of cotton textiles exported by the country dropped from 1.3 million pounds to less than 100,000 pounds, while the import of British cotton textiles increased by more than 16 times.By 1840, one observer was already warning of the disastrous consequences of turning India into an "English farm": "She is a highly manufactured country, her manufactures have existed for centuries, and if fair She has never been challenged by any country... Now it is very unfair to India to reduce her to an agricultural country." Such a description is misleading, because in India it is like The potential influence of manufacturing is in many ways an integral part of the agricultural economy, as in many other countries.As a result of deindustrialization, the countryside will become more dependent on unpredictable harvest luck.

The situation in Ireland is more dramatic.The small local tenant farmers with a small population, backward economy, living only on farming, and extremely insecure had to pay the highest taxes they could afford to a small group of foreign landowners who did not work on farming and usually did not live in the area.With the exception of the north-east (Ulster), the country, as a British colony, had been deindustrialized for a long time under the British government's mercantilist policy, which was further aggravated by competition from British industry.A simple technological innovation, the substitution of the potato for the staple crop that had previously prevailed, has made possible a substantial increase in population, since a hectare of land planted with potatoes is much larger than a hectare of land planted with pasture, or indeed most other crops. Can feed more people.Landlords' need for the largest number of tenant farmers, combined with the subsequent need for more labor to be invested in new farms for export to the expanding British grain market, led to an increase in numerous small holdings: Counting the countless small croplands under one hectare, 64 per cent of the large croplands in Connacht are under five hectares.Thus, when the population of these small holdings multiplied in the 18th and early 19th centuries, each person lived on only 10-12 pounds of potatoes a day and (at least until the 1820s) some milk, and the occasional taste of codfish. students, whose poverty is unmatched in Western Europe.

Since there were no alternative forms of employment (since industrialization was ruled out), the outcome of this development was certainly predictable.Disaster struck once the population had grown so large that it could no longer feed the last potato in the last barely arable swamp.Not long after the end of the Anti-French War, the precursors appeared.Scarcity of food and epidemics of disease again began to decimate the population, most of them from the insufficiency of the land, which needs no explanation. Harvest failures and crop pests and diseases in the 1840s only made things worse.No one knows or knows exactly how many people died during the Irish Famine of 1847.It was the worst human catastrophe in European history during the period covered by this book.A rough estimate puts about 110,000 people dying of starvation.Between 1846 and 1851, another million people immigrated from the troubled island. Ireland had fewer than 7 million inhabitants in 1820, perhaps 8.5 million in 1846, dwindling to 6.5 million in 1851, and its population has been steadily declining since then by immigration. "Woo hoo, poor peasants!" wrote a parish priest, in the tone of a medieval chronicler of the Dark Ages. Not a single child was baptized in Mayo because no babies were born.

India and Ireland were perhaps the worst countries for farmers in the period 1789-1848, but no one would have been a farmhand in England if given the choice.It is generally believed that the condition of this unfortunate class deteriorated markedly after the mid-1790s, partly because of economic forces and partly because of the impoverishing "Spinhamland system" (1795).This is a well-intentioned but trial-and-error system.The idea of ​​using the poor tax subsidy to secure a minimum wage to the workman has been to encourage farmers to lower their wages, and to demoralize their hired hands.The impotent resistance of the hired hands to riots manifested itself in increasing lawlessness in the 1820s, arson and property destruction in the 1830s and 1840s.But the most important of them all was the helpless "last uprising of the hired hands".This riot, which spread spontaneously from Kent, spread to many counties by the end of 1830 and was brutally suppressed.Economic liberals, in their usual snarky way, propose their solution to the labor problem, which is to force workers to find jobs at low wages or to migrate. The New Poor Law of 1834 was an extremely brutal statute.It stipulated that poor allowances could only be paid for work in the newly built workhouses for the poor (where the poor had to live separately from their wives and children, so as to curb indiscriminate and uncontrolled births.), and revoked the parish minimum living allowance.As a result, the cost of enforcing the New Poor Laws fell sharply (although by the end of our period at least 1 million Britons were still poor.), and hired workers began to slowly migrate.Due to the depression of agriculture, the situation of hired labor is still very miserable.Things didn't improve much until the 1850s.

The condition of the farm laborers has deteriorated markedly everywhere, though in the most isolated and backward areas it is not so much worse as in general.The unfortunate discovery of the potato made it very easy for rural laborers in large areas of northern Europe to suffer a decline in their standard of living, while a substantial improvement in their situation, in the case of Prussia, did not begin until the 1850s and 1860s.The self-sufficient farmer was probably much better off, although the situation of the small owner farmers in times of famine was still very hopeless.Peasant states like France were probably less affected than others by the general agricultural depression that followed the Napoleonic War boom.Indeed, a French peasant who looks across the Channel and compares his situation in 1788 with that of the English farm laborer in 1840 will hardly doubt which of the two is better off. ("Because I have long been among the peasants and hired laborers at home and abroad, I must honestly say that a man who is better educated, neater, industrious, thrifty, conscientious, or better dressed than the French In a group of people in a situation . . . I have never found. In these respects the French peasant stands in stark contrast to the overwhelming majority of the scruffy Scotch farm-hands; and also to the slavish, disheartened, and materially miserable English farm-hands. ; and in stark contrast to the poor Irish hired laborers, disheveled and miserable conditions..." H. Colman, The Agricultural and Real Economy of France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, 1848, pp. 25-26 .) Meanwhile, American ranchers watching Old World farmers across the Atlantic congratulate themselves on their non-Old World luck.