Comment on Joan Thirsk's Review Article

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

Comment on Joan Thirsk's Review ArticleAuthor(s): Jan de VriesSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Oct., 1980), pp. 633-637Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178472 .

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RETRENCHMENT IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE 633

by its superbly skilled gardeners, its growers of woad, mulberries, and

high quality fruit, and its pioneer experimentalists in Normandy with sainfoin and lucerne. From what communities did they come? How did they influence their compatriots? How did intensive cultivation of vegetables, fruit, and industrial crops affect French economic and social life? But to put these questions is simply to underline the main argument of this review that some of the best policies for seventeenth-century retrenchment in England were quite different from those required for economic growth. Was this perhaps true also for France? Was not a precious pearl of wisdom handed to economic man in the seventeenth

century in the words of the two French authors of Maison Rustique in 1600 when they urged farmers to take their living from a multitude of small things: 'a good farmer will make profit from everything, and there is not (as we say) so much as the garlic and onion which he will not raise gain of by selling them at fairs most fitting for their time and season, and so help himself thereof and fill his purse with money'. Such words betoken an economic reality far more complex than anything as yet encompassed in our economic models.

Comment on Joan Thirsk's Review Article

JAN DE VRIES

University of California, Berkeley

If the writing of a book steeped in grievous error were the only way to

provoke Joan Thirsk to direct her erudition and thoughtful analysis to major issues of the preindustrial European economy it would be a good enough reason to write another one. I have no difficulty in saying that her remarks here, just as her studies of English agrarian society, have proved highly instructive to me. They were not, however, all convincing, and I should like to take up several of the points raised in her review essay. A few substantive points are raised first, followed by my position on her more theoretical criticisms.

With regard to Professor Thirsk's criticisms of my treatment of agriculture, industry, and trade, I fear I must react, rather tiresomely, with the wounded innocence of the politician who opens his newspaper to find himself quoted as an opponent of motherhood and an advocate of quadrupled taxation: 'Where did they ever get that? That's not what I meant at all!' Professor Thirsk's general theme is that I avert my eyes from the dynamic sectors of the seventeenth-century European economy, that is, labour-intensive commercial crops, the lesser consumer


by its superbly skilled gardeners, its growers of woad, mulberries, and

high quality fruit, and its pioneer experimentalists in Normandy with sainfoin and lucerne. From what communities did they come? How did they influence their compatriots? How did intensive cultivation of vegetables, fruit, and industrial crops affect French economic and social life? But to put these questions is simply to underline the main argument of this review that some of the best policies for seventeenth-century retrenchment in England were quite different from those required for economic growth. Was this perhaps true also for France? Was not a precious pearl of wisdom handed to economic man in the seventeenth

century in the words of the two French authors of Maison Rustique in 1600 when they urged farmers to take their living from a multitude of small things: 'a good farmer will make profit from everything, and there is not (as we say) so much as the garlic and onion which he will not raise gain of by selling them at fairs most fitting for their time and season, and so help himself thereof and fill his purse with money'. Such words betoken an economic reality far more complex than anything as yet encompassed in our economic models.

Comment on Joan Thirsk's Review Article

JAN DE VRIES

University of California, Berkeley

If the writing of a book steeped in grievous error were the only way to

provoke Joan Thirsk to direct her erudition and thoughtful analysis to major issues of the preindustrial European economy it would be a good enough reason to write another one. I have no difficulty in saying that her remarks here, just as her studies of English agrarian society, have proved highly instructive to me. They were not, however, all convincing, and I should like to take up several of the points raised in her review essay. A few substantive points are raised first, followed by my position on her more theoretical criticisms.

With regard to Professor Thirsk's criticisms of my treatment of agriculture, industry, and trade, I fear I must react, rather tiresomely, with the wounded innocence of the politician who opens his newspaper to find himself quoted as an opponent of motherhood and an advocate of quadrupled taxation: 'Where did they ever get that? That's not what I meant at all!' Professor Thirsk's general theme is that I avert my eyes from the dynamic sectors of the seventeenth-century European economy, that is, labour-intensive commercial crops, the lesser consumer



634 JAN DE VRIES

goods industries, and in my treatment of trade, the domestic markets. In so doing, she concludes, I fail to see the real possibilities for growth that existed in the difficult economic environment of seventeenth-century Europe and, consequently, I misidentify the best paths toward economic advance.

I am prepared to concede that more emphasis could have been given to the labour-intensive commercial crops in the restructuring of the rural economies. Still, I hardly 'passed them over'. For example, instead of judging all of Italy by its grain-producing areas, as Thirsk asserts, I treated the North and the South separately, called attention to Northern Italy's diversified, labour-intensive agriculture, and concluded that her problems stemmed not from farming practices but from the economic and social environment in which they were carried out (p. 54). Likewise, with Western Germany. The Thirty Years' War is important precisely because it forced a retreat into less-diversified, less labour-intensive types of farming (pp. 60-61).

Much important work has recently been done, by Professor Thirsk among others, on the labour-intensive farming of Europe's small peasant farmers. Commercial crops certainly formed a bright spot in seventeenth- century agriculture. But they could not by themselves overcome the structural problems of that age, and in seeking to place them in their context, one is ineluctably drawn back to the dominant grain and live- stock sectors of the mixed farming systems that prevailed in most of non-Mediterranean Europe.

Professor Thirsk's claim with regard to industry is that I dwell on the large, problem-ridden woollen textile industry to the neglect of the many smaller, fewer industries that enjoyed strong demand as domestic markets grew. Questions of emphasis are never easy to resolve, but surely my major point, that industrial organization, location, and output-mix experienced profound alterations, is consistent with her view. Thirsk's point here is closely linked to her criticism of my discussion of trade. And here I can only regret that my capacity for clear expression was apparently inadequate to the task of conveying to Professor Thirsk a major theme of my book. In the chapter on foreign trade I offer a critical scrutiny of the proposition that overseas trade functioned as an 'engine of growth'. I conclude by rejecting this (on both historical and theoretical grounds) and affirming that the regional markets and ordinary Europeans' developing tastes for new consumer goods hold the key to understanding the economic achievements of the period. Not content to leave it at this, I then add two chapters, one on regional markets and one on consumer demand, to develop this into a centrepiece of the book.

As far as I can tell, Professor Thirsk and I see eye to eye on most of the substantive points raised in her review article. She has made a great deal




of (what in my opinion are) minor matters of emphasis because she detects in some of my formulations the heavy, anachronistic hand of the economist. Economic theory, it seems, is harmful to one's health, specifically to one's vision, which it blinkers, cabins, and confines. Economic thinking, says Thirsk, has led me to see specialized large-scale enterprise, or large capital investment as offering the clearest path to the long-term economic growth that brought industrialization. She goes on to argue that the seventeenth-century economic reality, complex beyond the capacity of economic models, gave encouragement to the creation of economically diversified households, where the family members pieced together a livelihood through the balanced pursuit of numerous, highly labour- intensive occupations.

Now, the functional meaning of the word 'specialization' can give rise to confusion. A nation, or region can be specialized in the sense that its

prosperity depends on a narrow range of industries or crops, 'yet the individuals within that economy may all be 'jacks-of-all-trades'. At another extreme, individuals, or even households, may be specialized cogs in an economy with an articulated division of labour in the organization of production and a market orientation of the economy's households. yet, the economy as a whole could be highly diversified. In Dutch Rural Economy I explicitly distinguish among these sorts of specialization; in Age of Crisis I rely on the context to clarify my usage of the term.

Highly specialized national economies were rare before the nineteenth century. Poland and the Dutch Republic come to mind as possible examples. I certainly did not mean to argue that an economy that finds a niche in the world economy and single-mindedly pursues it should be held up as uniquely blessed. On the contrary, I specifically argue (as Thirsk also argues in her review essay) that in the Dutch Republic 'intense specialization in one direction effectively closed the door. to the kinds of social structure and economic policies required for industrial growth' (p. 252). Elsewhere I have extended this sort of argument to speculate that 'over' specialization might be the disease of the open economy (examples: Dutch Republic, nineteenth-century England, twentieth- century Japan [?])which brings short-run growth at the expense of long- run structural obsolescence.

The sort of specialization of greater importance to my analysis of the seventeenth century European economy is household specialization and associated market dependence. It is not, as Thirsk seems to suggest, necessarily associated with large-scale enterprise and capital investment. Nor does it imply that seventeenth-century households were as functionally specialized as the wire cutters and point filers in Adam Smith's pin factory. My discussion could certainly have benefitted from a



636 JAN DE VRIES

more explicit definition of this concept, but throughout Age of Crisis I emphasized the importance of the small-scale initiatives of obscure individuals. Professor Thirsk apparently regards a subsistence farming household that becomes dependent, over time, on, say, tobacco cultivation, market gardening, and, in the winter, spinning, as an example of 'wilful movement in the opposite direction [from increased specialization]'. Yet, in the latter circumstance, the 'balanced household

economy' is also purposefully engaged in the production of commercial products and is dependent on other 'specialists' for the goods not-no

longer-produced within the household. The fact that all members of the household are not doing the same thing throughout the year does not, to my mind, preclude the use of the concept of specialization. 'Balanced', in Thirsk's usage, does not imply 'non-specialized', but rather 'viable' in the context of seventeenth-century conditions.

Until quite recently (and it is not altogether absent even now) the economics of households and the economics of the larger society possessed a great deal of autonomy. The two impinged on each other at various points, of course. It seems to me that Professor Thirsk's argument at the end of her review essay looks at the economy through the ingenious, resourceful efforts of households to solve their economic problems by making use of such opportunities as the larger economy made available consonant with an acceptable level of risk. My macro- economic perspective in Age of Crisis focused more attention on the ways in which alterations in household demography, man-land ratios, relative prices, taxes, among other factors, affected the terms and character of household participation in the larger economy. What is specialization from this latter perspective can be viewed from the former as simply a strategy for domestic survival.

Professor Thirsk is certainly correct to stress that the self-exploitation of the peasant household gave seventeenth-century farming a special character that it would gradually lose only after the Agricultural Revolu- tion. But I must conclude with the question, how, in the absence of rudimentary economic concepts, can one hope to understand (as opposed to describe) the market behaviour of seventeenth-century workers and farmers? It is, after all, not true that these workers 'did not heed the law of diminishing returns to labor'. It was not theirs to heed. What Professor Thirsk probably means is that they (all of them? all the time?) were prepared to combine labour with the other factors of production in proportions that drove labour's marginal product to (what we regard as) very low levels. These people were not "heedless" of economic forces, they were (often tragically) enmeshed in them. The historian of the preindustrial economy who pays no heed to such basic concepts as price and income elasticities of demand, productivity of labour as opposed to




productivity of land, and who is content to call prices 'high' or productivity 'high' without further qualification, runs the risk of being wrong in spite of his imposing documentation or of being right in spite of himself.

Reply JOAN THIRSK

Critical review articles that spark off further debate can sometimes throw

large issues into sharper relief than the original books and reviews themselves. I believe that Professor de Vries's reply to my review of his two books is constructive in this way. In exploring the different meanings and representations of specialization, he clears the way for a more lucid

analysis of that phenomenon in the seventeenth-century economy. But I

hope that readers of this discussion will not assume, from Professor de Vries's reply, that I am opposed to the use of basic economic concepts in

analysing economic development. What does trouble me is the way certain judgments regularly keep company with those concepts. Most of the economists' tools were forged in the period after 1750, and were used to analyse a certain type of economic situation. Judgments were passed on that situation that do not necessarily apply to other periods. Yet they have become assumptions about what does and does not constitute economic advance, and tend to colour the assessment of all and every period. The economic concepts and the judgments have become

inseparable companions. I can only discuss with any authority the agricultural and industrial

developments described in Professor de Vries's work, and then only from a knowledge of the English experience. Nevertheless, the English led the

way to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and hence the road

they took tends to be regarded as the right one, of which economists

approve. Professor de Vries gave a richly varied account of Europe's economic performance before 1750, but in his judgments he seemed always to measure progress through the evidence of capital accumulation, capital investment, and economies in labour. Thus, to take one particular illustration, the highly successful expansion of wine

production in France provoked this judgment in The Economy of Europe: 'Unfortunately for France . . . [it] did not seriously affect the structure of the agrarian society. Viticulture is highly labour-intensive; this militates against its being conducted on large, well-capitalized farms'

(p. 67). He went on to explain that, whereas grain production had the

potential to effect a major change of the agrarian structure, vine growing had none. The English experience of other equally labour-intensive


productivity of land, and who is content to call prices 'high' or productivity 'high' without further qualification, runs the risk of being wrong in spite of his imposing documentation or of being right in spite of himself.

Reply JOAN THIRSK

Critical review articles that spark off further debate can sometimes throw

large issues into sharper relief than the original books and reviews themselves. I believe that Professor de Vries's reply to my review of his two books is constructive in this way. In exploring the different meanings and representations of specialization, he clears the way for a more lucid

analysis of that phenomenon in the seventeenth-century economy. But I

hope that readers of this discussion will not assume, from Professor de Vries's reply, that I am opposed to the use of basic economic concepts in

analysing economic development. What does trouble me is the way certain judgments regularly keep company with those concepts. Most of the economists' tools were forged in the period after 1750, and were used to analyse a certain type of economic situation. Judgments were passed on that situation that do not necessarily apply to other periods. Yet they have become assumptions about what does and does not constitute economic advance, and tend to colour the assessment of all and every period. The economic concepts and the judgments have become

inseparable companions. I can only discuss with any authority the agricultural and industrial

developments described in Professor de Vries's work, and then only from a knowledge of the English experience. Nevertheless, the English led the

way to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and hence the road

they took tends to be regarded as the right one, of which economists

approve. Professor de Vries gave a richly varied account of Europe's economic performance before 1750, but in his judgments he seemed always to measure progress through the evidence of capital accumulation, capital investment, and economies in labour. Thus, to take one particular illustration, the highly successful expansion of wine

production in France provoked this judgment in The Economy of Europe: 'Unfortunately for France . . . [it] did not seriously affect the structure of the agrarian society. Viticulture is highly labour-intensive; this militates against its being conducted on large, well-capitalized farms'

(p. 67). He went on to explain that, whereas grain production had the

potential to effect a major change of the agrarian structure, vine growing had none. The English experience of other equally labour-intensive



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