THE AGRARIAN ORIGINSOF CAPITALISM

by ELLENMEIKSINS WOOD

IOne of the most well established conventions of Western

culture is the association of capitalism with cities. Capitalism issupposed to have been born and bred in the city. But more banthat, the implication is that any city-with its characteristic J rrac-tices of trade and commerce-is by its very nature poten I iallycapitalist from the start, and only extraneous obstacles have Sl oodin the way of any urban civilization giving rise to capitalism. ( mlythe wrong religion, the wrong kind of state, or any kim L ofideological, political, or cultural fetters tying the hands of Ul banclasses have prevented capitalism from springing up anywlereand everywhere, since time immemorial-or at least since tech-nology has permitted the production of adequate surpluse;

What accounts for the development of capitalism in theWest, according to this view, is the unique autonomy of its ci tiesand of their quintessential class, the burghers or bourgeois Inother words, capitalism emerged in the West less because ofwhat was present than because of what was absent: constraints onurban economic practices. In those conditions, it took oniY amore or less natural expansion of trade to trigger the devel )p-ment of capitalism to its full maturity. All that was needed wasa quantitative growth which occurred almost inevitably with .hepassage of time (in some versions, of course, helped along hutnot originally caused by the Protestant Ethic).

There are many things to be said against these assumptic nsabout the natural connection between cities and capitalis m.Among them is the fact that they tend to naturalize capitalis m,to disguise its distinctiveness as a historically specific social for TI,

with a beginning and (no doubt) an end. The tendency to

Ellen Meiksins Wood is co-editor of Monthly Review.

14

iT H E A G RA R I A NOR I GIN S 1 5

ider tify capitalism with cities and urban commerce has gener-ally been accompanied by an inclination to make capitalismapp -ar as a more or less automatic consequence of practices asold as human history, or even the automatic consequence ofhun Ian nature, the "natural" inclination, in Adam Smith'swor Is, to "truck, barter, and exchange."

Perhaps the most salutary corrective to these assump-tior s-and their ideological implications-is the recognitionthai capitalism, with all its very specific drives of accumulationand profit-maximization, was born not in the city but in thecou ntryside, in a very specific place, and very late in humanhistory, It required not a simple extension or expansion ofbarer and exchange but a complete transformation in the mostbas c human relations and practices, a rupture in age-old pat-ten is of human interaction with nature in the production oflife smost basic necessities. If the tendency to identify capitalismwit 1cities is associated with a tendency to obscure the specificityof « apitalism, one of the best waysof understanding that speci-fici':Y is to consider the agrarian origins of capitalism.

What Was "Agrarian Capitalism"?For millennia, human beings have provided for their ma-

ter I al needs by working the land. And probably for nearly aslor.g as they have engaged in agriculture they have been dividedint J classes,between those who worked the land and those whoap )fOpriated the labor of others. That division between appro-pr ators and producers has taken many forms in different timesan d places, but one general characteristic they have had inco.nmon is that the direct producers have typicallybeen peas-an ts. These peasant producers have remained in possession ofth: means of production, specificallyland. Asin all pre-capital-ist societies, these producers have had direct access to the meansof their own reproduction. This has meant that when theirsu rplus labor has been appropriated by exploiters, it has beendone bywhat Marx called "extra-economic" means-that is, byill eans of direct coercion, exercised by landlords and/ or statesemploying superior force, privileged access to military,judicial,ar I d political power.

Here, then, is the most basic difference between all pre-e<pitalist societies and capitalism. It has nothing to do withw tether production is urban or rural and everything to do withdie particular property relations between producers and appro-p 'iators, whether in industry or agriculture. Only in capitalism

16 MONTHLY REVIEW / JULY-AUGUST 1 ()98

is the dominant mode of surplus appropriation based 01 L the]dispossession of the direct producers whose surplus lab or is]appropriated by purely "economic" means. Because direct pro-]ducers in a fully developed capitalism are propertyless, and]because their only access to the means of production, tr the i.

requirements of their own reproduction, even to the meal is of]their own labor, is the sale of their labor-power in exchang ~for ia wage, capitalists can appropriate the workers' surplus l.ibor i

without direct coercion.This unique relation between producers and appro] iria-

tors is, of course, mediated by the "market." Markets of val' ouskinds have existed throughout recorded history and no dr ubtbefore, as people have exchanged and sold their surpluse-s inmany different ways and for many different purposes. But themarket in capitalism has a distinctive and unprecedented finc-tion. Virtually everything in capitalist society is a commo iityproduced for the market. And even more fundamentally, b othcapital and labor are utterly dependent on the market for themost basic conditions of their own reproduction.] ust as worl ersdepend on the market to sell their labor-power as a commoc ity,capitalists depend on it to buy labor-power, as well as the me.insof production, and to realize their profits by selling the go, Idsor services produced by the workers. This market-dependencegives the market an unprecedented role in capitalist societ. es,as not only a simple mechanism of exchange or distribution hutas the principal determinant and regulator of social reprod rc-tion. The emergence of the market as a determinant of soc ialreproduction presupposed its penetration into the productionof life's most basic necessity, food.

This unique system of market-dependence entails SOl nevery distinctive "laws of motion," specific systemic requiremei itsand compulsions shared by no other mode of production: t teimperatives of competition, accumulation, and profit-maxn u-zation. And these imperatives, in turn, mean that capitalism can,and must, constantly expand in ways and degrees unlike a lyother social form-constantly accumulating, constantly sean h-ing out new markets, constantly imposing its imperatives on ne 'W

territories and new spheres of life, on human beings and tJlenatural environment.

Once we recognize just how distinctive these social rel a-tions and processes are, how different they are from other soci 11forms which have dominated most of human history, it becomesclear that more is required to explain the emergence of th is

THE AGRARIAN ORIGINS 17

idisti ictive social form than the question-begging assumptionIthat it has alwaysexisted in embryo, just needing to be liberatedIfrorr unnatural constraints. The question of its origins, then,Ican I)eformulated this way:given that producers were exploited[by a ipropriators in noncapitalist waysfor millennia before the'adve nt of capitalism, and given that markets have also existedI "tirr e out of mind" and almost everywhere, how did it happenthat producers and appropriators, and the relations betweentheri, came to be so market dependent?

Now obviously the long and complex historical processesthat ultimately led to this condition of market dependencecou d be traced back indefinitely. But we can make the questionmoi e manageable by identifying the first time and place that a

i new social dynamic is clearly discernible, a dynamic that derivesi fror.i the market dependence of the main economic actors. Andwe ,:an then explore the specific conditions surrounding thatuni lue situation.

As late as the seventeenth century, and even much later,mot of the world, including Europe, was free of the market-drii en imperatives outlined here. Avastsystemof trade certainlyexi-ted, by now extending across the globe. But nowhere, nei-the:' in the great trading centers of Europe nor in the vastCOl imercial networks of the Islamicworld or Asia,waseconomicact vity,and production in particular, driven by the imperativesof «ompetition and accumulation. The dominant principle oftra. le everywhere was "profit on alienation," or "buying cheapan. l selling dear"-typically, buying cheap in one market andsel ing dear in another.

International trade was essentially "carrying" trade, withmerchants buying goods in one location to be sold for a profit inan, ither, But even within a single, powerful, and relativelyunifiedEu!'opean kingdom like France, basicallythe same principles ofno ncapitalist commerce prevailed. There wasno single and uni-tie 1market, a market in which people made profit not by buyingcheap and selling dear, not by carrying goods from one marketto another, but by producing more cost-effectively in directcompetition with others in the same market.

Trade still tended to be in luxury goods, or at least goodsde stined for more prosperous households or answering to theneeds and consumption patterns of dominant classes. Therew: s no mass market for cheap everyday consumer products.Peasant producers would typicallyproduce not only their ownfood requirements but other everydaygoods like clothing. They

18 MONTHLY REVIEW I JULY-AUGUST 1 )98

might take their surpluses to local markets, where the pro. eedcould be exchanged for other commodities not produc -d ahome. And farm produce might even be sold in markets fu theafield. But here again, the principles of trade were basicall y thesame as in manufactured goods.

These noncapitalist principles oftrade existed side-by -sidewith noncapitalist modes of exploitation. For instance, in vest-ern Europe, even where feudal serfdom had effectivelyd csap-peared, other forms of "extra-economic" exploitation stillprevailed. In France, for example, where peasants still consti-tuted the vast majority of the population and still rernained inpossession of most land, office in the central state served a S aneconomic resource for many members of the dominant cla ;ses,a means of extracting surplus labor in the form of taxes f 'ompeasant producers. And even rent-appropriating landlords ypi-cally depended on various extra-economic powers and privi-leges to enhance their wealth.

So peasants had access to the means of production, theland, without having to offer their labor-power as a marketcommodity. Landlords and office-holders, with the helj ofvarious "extra-economic" powers and privileges, extracted .ur-plus labor from peasants directly in the form of rent or tax Inother words, while all kinds of people might buy and sell allkinds of things in the market, neither the peasant-proprietorswho produced, nor the landlords and office-holders who apFro-priated what others produced, depended directly on the mal ketfor the conditions of their self-reproduction, and the relationsbetween them were not mediated by the market.

But there was one major exception to this general n Ie.England, already in the sixteenth century, was developing inwholly new directions. Although there were other relativelystrong monarchical states, more or lessunified under the m. m-archy (such asSpain and France), none wasaseffectivelyunif edas England (and the emphasis here is on England, not otlerparts of the "British Isles"). In the sixteenth century, England-already more unified than most in the eleventh century, wh enthe Norman ruling classestablished itselfon the island as a fai 'lycohesive military and political entity-went a long way towa rdeliminating the fragmentation of the state, the "parcellizedsovereignty" inherited from feudalism. The autonomous pow-ers held bylords, municipal bodies, and other corporate entiti esin other European states were, in England, increasingly beii Lgconcentrated in the central state. This was in contrast to oth er

iT H E A G RA R I A NOR I GIN S 19

I·Eun .pean states where even powerful monarchies continuedfor 1 long time to live uneasily alongside other post-feudal

I mili .arypowers, fragmented legal systems, and corporate privi-lege, whose possessors insisted on their autonomy against thecen ralizing power of the state.

The distinctive political centralization of the English statehad material foundations and corollaries. First, already in theIfitl i century, England had an impressive network of roads andwan-r transport that unified the nation to a degree unusual forthe period. London, becoming disproportionately large in re-lati-m to other English towns and to the total population ofEnsland (and eventually the largest city in Europe), was alsobecoming the hub ofa developing national market.

The material foundation on which this emerging nationalece nomy rested was English agriculture, which was unique insev -ral ways. The English ruling class was distinctive in twom<l:lorand related respects: on the one hand, as part of anincreasingly centralized state, in alliance with a centralizingme narchy, they did not possess to the same degree as theirCoitinental counterparts the more or less autonomous "extra-economic" powers on which other ruling classes could rely toext ract surplus labor from direct producers. On the other hand,lar d in England had for a long time been unusually concen-trared, with big landlords holding an unusually large propor-tion of land. This concentrated landownership meant thatEn glish landlords were able to use their property in new anddis tinctive ways.What they lacked in "extra-economic" powersof surplus extraction they more than made up for by theiriru Teasing "economic" powers.

This distinctive combination had significant consequences.0: 1 the one hand, the concentration of English landholdingm -ant that an unusually large proportion of land was workednot by peasant-proprietors but by tenants (the word "farmer,"incidentally, literally means "tenant"-a usage suggested byphases familiar today, such as "farming out"). This was trueeven before the waves of dispossession, especially in the six-teenth and eighteenth centuries, conventionally associated with"enclosure" (about which more in a moment), in contrast, fore) ample, to France, where a larger proportion of land re-rr ained, and long continued to remain, in the hands of peasants.

On the other hand, the relatively weak "extra-economic"p rwers of landlords meant that they depended less on theira1iility to squeeze more rents out of their tenants by direct,

20 MONTHLY REVIEW / JULY-AUGUST 1 ;>981

\

coercive means than on their tenants' productivity. Land ord~had a strong incentive, then, to encourage-and, whe 'eve~possible, to compel-their tenants to find ways of incre. lsin~their output. In this respect, they were fundamentally diff .rent]from rentier aristocrats who throughout history have depei ldedlfor their wealth on squeezing surpluses ou t of peasan tsbymeansof simple coercion, enhancing their powers of surplus ex trac-ltion not by increasing the productivity of the direct prodi cersbut rather by improving their own coercive powers-mili tary,judicial, and political.

As for the tenants themselves, they were increasingly sub-ject not only to direct pressures from landlords but to rna rketimperatives which compelled them to enhance their produ ctiv-ity. English tenancies took various forms, and there were n anyregional variations, but a growing number were subjec: toeconomic rents, that is, rents not fixed by some legal or cust om-ary standard but responsive to market conditions. By the e arlymodern period, even many customary leases had effecti relybecome economic leases of this kind.

The effect of the system of property relations was that m myagricultural producers (including prosperous "yeomen") "eremarket-dependent, not just in the sense that they were obli, ~edto sell produce on the market but in the more fundarnei.talsense that their access to land itself, to the means of producti m,was mediated by the market. There was, in effect, a marke inleases, in which prospective tenants had to compete. Wheresecurity of tenure depended on the ability to pay the going rent,uncompetitive production could mean outright loss ofland. Tomeet economic rents in a situation where other potential t.m-ants were competing for the same leases, tenants were cern-pelled to produce cost-effectively,on penalty of dispossessio 1.

But even those tenants who enjoyed some kind of custo n-ary tenure which gave them more security, but who might s illbe obliged to sell their produce in the same markets, could ~ounder in conditions where competitive standards of product iv-ity were being set by farmers responding more directly andurgently to the pressures of the market. The same would incre: lS-ingly be true even oflandowners working their own land. In tl iscompetitive environment, productive farmers prospered ardtheir holdings were likely to grow, while less competitive pI)-ducers went to the wall and joined the propertyless classes.

In all cases, the effect of market imperatives was to intensi cyexploitation in order to increase productivity-whether expk i-

· jH E A G RA R I A NOR I GIN S 2 1

ation of the labor of others or self-exploitation by the farmer

.~md l: is family. This pattern would be reproduced in the colo-ties,md indeed in post-Independence America, where therdet endent small farmers who were supposed to be the back-~one of a free republic faced, from the beginning, the stark~hoie,~ of agrarian capitalism: at best, intense self-exploitation,and , t worst, dispossession and displacement by larger, morefrod ictive enterprises.

the ~ise of Capitalist Property)0 by the sixteenth century English agriculture was marked

~y a unique combination of conditions, at least in certainregie os, which would gradually set the economic direction of,the 'Thole economy. The result was an agrarian sector moreprod uctive than any other in history. Landlords and tenants~likc became preoccupied with what they called "improve-men," the enhancement of the land's productivity for profit.

lt is worth dwelling for a moment on this concept of'''im] -rovement, " because it tells us a great deal about Englishiagril ulture and the development of capitalism. The word "im-Iprm e" itself, in its original meaning, did not mean just "makingIbett -r" in a general sense but literally (based on the old Frenchi for 'into," en, and "profit," pros, or its oblique case, preu) doingi som ething for monetary profit, and especially cultivating land! for ]lrofit. By the seventeenth century, the word "improver" was! firrr ly fixed in the language to refer to someone who renderedland productive and profitable, especially by enclosing or re-clai ning waste. Agricultural "improvement" was by then a wellesta blished practice, and in the eighteenth century, in thegoh len age of agrarian capitalism, "improvement," in word anddeed, came truly into its own.

The word was, at the same time, gradually acquiring a moreger eral meaning, in the sense that we know it today (we mightlike to think about the implications of a culture in which theWOl d for "making better" is rooted in the word for monetarypre fit); and even in its association with agriculture, it eventuallylos: some of its old specificity-so that, for example, somerae ical thinkers in the nineteenth century might embrace "im-pnvement" in the sense of scientific farming, without its con-no ation of commercial profit. But in the early modern period,pre .ductivity and profit were inextricably connected in the con-cept of "improvement," and it nicely sums up the ideology of aris ng agrarian capitalism.

22M 0 NTH LY REV lEW / J U LY - AUG U S T 9 91::\

In the seventeenth century, then, a whole new b :)dy-literature emerged, a literature spelling out in unprece( lent .:detail the techniques and benefits of improvement. Irrprov ..ment wasalso a major preoccupation of the RoyalSociety,whi ]Ibrought together some of England's most prominent scientist:(Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle were both members ofSociety) with some of the more forward-looking membersEngland's ruling classes-like the philosopher John Locle anfhis mentor, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, both of whorr wer~keenly interested in agricultural improvement.:

Improvement did not, in the first instance, depeid o~significant technological innovations-although new (qui~.ment was used, like the wheel-plow.In general, it was more ~matter of developments in farming techniques: for exainPle1"convertible" or "up and down" husbandry-alternating cultivation with fallowperiods, crop rotation, drainage of mars!1anplowlands, and so on. I

But improvement meant something more than new r ieth]ods and techniques of farming. It meant, even more funda nen1tally, new forms and conceptions of property. "Improvedffarming, for the enterprising landlord and his prosperouscapitalist tenant, ideally required enlarged and concentr atedlandholdings. It also-and perhaps even more-demar dedthe elimination of old customs and practices that interf eredwith the most productive use of land.

Peasant communities have, since time immemorial, em-ployed various means of regulating land use in the interes 's ofthe village community. They have restricted certain praCiicesand granted certain rights, not in order to enhance the wealthof landlords or states but to preserve the peasant communityitself, perhaps to conserve the land or to distribute its f uitsmore equitably, and often to provide for the community's lessfortunate members. Even "private" ownership of property hastypicallybeen conditioned by such customary practices, gi' ingnon-owners certain use-rights to property "owned" by some.meelse. In England, there were many such practices and custo rns.There existed common lands, on which members of the 0 im-munity might have grazing rights or the right to collect f .re-wood, and there were alsovarious kinds of use-rights on privateland-such as the right to collect the leavings of the han estduring specified periods of the year.

From the standpoint of improving landlords and capita listfarmers, land had to be liberated from any such obstruction to

· IH E A G R A R I A NOR I G I 1'-1S 23

eir oroductive and profitable use of property. Between the; xtee nth and eighteenth centuries, there wasgrowing pressure: ex inguish customary rights that interfered with capitalistccur iulation. This could mean various things: it might meanispu ting the communal ownership of common lands andlaimmg private ownership; it might mean eliminating variousse-rights on private land; or it might mean challenging theusto mary tenures which gave many smallholders rights ofOSs(ssion without unambiguous legal title. In all these cases,adii ional conceptions of property had to be replaced by new,apit Jist conceptions ofproperty-property asnot only "private"ut ;dso exclusive, literally excluding other individuals and the

Fom nunity, by eliminating village regulation and restrictionsfonIe nd use, by extinguishing customary use-rights, and so on.i These pressures to transform the nature of property

Iman ifested themselves in various ways,in theory and in prac-tice. They surfaced in court cases, in conflicts over specificlpro] .erty rights, over some piece of common land or some

!priv lte land to which different people had overlapping use-,rigb ts. In such cases, customary practices and claims ofteni dire ctly confronted the principles of "improvement"-and[judues often recognized reasons of improvement as legiti-I mate claims against customary rights that had been in placeI as I, mg as anyone could remember.I New conceptions of property were also being theorized

Imoe systematically,most famously inJohn Locke's Second Trea-tiseif Government. Chapter 5 of that work is the classicstatement

I of a theory of property based on the principles of improvement.I Bee, property as a "natural" right is based on what Locke

I, reg.rrds as the divine injunction to make the earth productiveand profitable, to improve it. The conventional interpretation of

I Lo- .ke's theory of property suggests that labor establishes theI rig it to property, but a careful reading of Locke's chapter onI pn'perty makes it clear that what really is at issue is not labor asI sur h but the productive and profitable utilization of property,

its improvement. An enterprising, improving landlord estab-lisJies his right to property not by his own direct labor but byth.. productive exploitation of his land and other people's laboron it. Unimproved land, land not rendered productive andpr ifitable (such as the lands of indigenous peoples in theAr.iericas), is "waste," and it is the right, even the duty, ofirr provers to appropriate it.

24 MONTHLY REVIEW / JULY-AUGUST 199~,

I

The same ethic of improvement could be used to. USti1certain kinds of dispossession not only in the colonies rut 1

home in England. This brings us to the most famous rec .efinition of property rights: enclosure. Enclosure is often thou; ~ht 0

as simply the privatization and fencing in of formerly cor irnonland, or of the "open fields" that characterized certain p, rts o]the English countryside. But enclosure meant, more pa rticu]larly, the extinction (with or without a physical fencing of and)of common and customary use-rights on which many pcoplddepended for their livelihood. "

The first major wave of enclosure occurred in the sixte entl1century, when larger landowners sought to drive cornmc ners!off lands that could be profitably put to use as pasture fo~increasingly lucrative sheep farming. Contemporary I:om-!mentators held enclosure, more than any other single fa ctor.]responsible for the growing plague of vagabonds, those dis-]possessed "masterless men" who wandered the coun tq side iand threatened social order. The most famous of these ( orn-:mentators, Thomas More, though himself an encloser. de-]scribed the practice as "sheep devouring men." These s( -cial \critics, like many historians after them, may have overestim ited ithe effects of enclosure alone, at the expense of other fa<tors Ileading to the transformation of English property relati ins. I.

But it remains the most vivid expression of the relent less iprocess that was changing not only the English country: idebut the world: the birth of capitalism.

Enclosure continued to be a major source of conflic: inearly modern England, whether for sheep or increasingly p 'of-itable arable farming. Enclosure riots punctuated the sixtee rthand seventeenth centuries, and enclosure surfaced as a m. jorgrievance in the English Civil War. In its earlier phases, hepractice was to some degree resisted by the monarchical st. .te,if only because of the threat to public order. But once helanded classes had succeeded in shaping the state to their 0 vnchanging requiremen ts-a success more or less finally C4 10-

solidated in 1688, in the so-called "Glorious Revolution' -there was no further state interference, and a new kind ofenclosure movement emerged in the eighteenth century, t aeso-called Parliamentary enclosures. In this kind of enclosure,the extinction oftroublesome property rights that interferedwith some landlord's powers of accumulation took place )yacts of Parliament. Nothing more neatly testifies to the t ,i-umph of agrarian capitalism.

-I H E A G RA R I A NOR I GIN S 25

~o in England, a society in which wealth still derived1red( .minantly from agricultural production, the self-repro-1ucti m of both major economic actors in the agrarian sec-~or- direct producers and the appropriators of their~urpllses-were, at least from the sixteenth century, increas-L!Uglydependent on what amounted to capitalist practices: therjnaximization of exchange value by means of cost-cutting~nd mproving productivity, by specialization, accumula-[ion, and innovation.. This mode of providing for the basic material needs?f Euglish society brought with it a whole new dynamic ofself-s rstaining growth, a process of accumulation and expan-~ion' ery different from the age-old cyclicalpatterns that domi-rate d material life in other societies. It was alsoacco mpanied by the typical capitalist processes of expro-priat ion and the creation of a propertyless mass. It is in this~ens: that we can speak of "agrarian capitalism" in earlymodern England.1

Was Agrarian Capitalism Really Capitalist?Weshould pause here to emphasize twomajor points. First,

it was not merchants or manufacturers who were driving thisIprocess. The transformation of social property relations was

!firm y rooted in the countryside, and the transformation ofEng]ish trade and industry was result more than cause of Eng-Ilands transition to capitalism. Merchants could function per-!fectl! well within noncapitalist systems. They prospered, for[exar rple, in the context of European feudalism, where theyIproflted not only from the autonomy of cities but also from theIfrag nentation of markets and the opportunity to conduct trans-!actipns between one market and another., Secondly, and even more fundamentally, readers will! have noticed that the term "agrarian capitalism" has so far)bee 1 used without reference to wage-labor, which we have allI leaned to think of as the essence of capitalism. This requiresI som e explanation.. It should be said, first, that many tenants did employ wagelabc .r, so much so that the "triad" identified by Marx andoth. .rs-s-the triad of landlords living on capitalist ground rent,cap talist tenants living on profit, and laborers living on wages-has been regarded by many as the defining characteristic ofagr:Irian relations in England. And so it was-at least in thosepar s of the country, particularly the east and southeast, most

26 MONTHLY REVIEW / JULY-AUGUST 99!(

noted for their agricultural productivity. In fact, the new ec~.,nomic pressures, the competitive pressures that drove c ut u~.productive farmers, were a major factor in polarizirg t .'agrarian population into larger landholders and prope rtyles:wage laborers, and in promoting the agrarian triad. A ad, rcourse, the pressures to increase productivity made thenselv ;felt in the intensified exploitation of wage labor.

It would not, then, be unreasonable to define E aglisagrarian capitalism in terms of the triad. But it is import ant tt.keep in mind that competitive pressures, and the new "l.rws .motion" that went with them, depended in the first instan .e ndon the existence of a mass proletariat but on the existei ice :.market-dependent tenant-producers. Wage laborers, ano espcially those who lived entirely on wage labor, depending on '1

for their livelihood and not just for seasonal supplement; (thkind of seasonal and supplementary wage labor that has e.dstesince ancient times in peasant societies) remained very m uchminority in seventeenth century England. ~'

Besides, these competitive pressures operated not jl st 0

tenants who did employ wage laborers but also on fa: merwho--typically with their families-were themselves direc :prolducers working without hired labor. People could be m arkedependent-dependent on the market for the basic conditionof their self-reproduction- without being completely d.spossessed. To be market dependent required only the loss of c irec~non-market access to the means of production. In fact, onemarket imperatives were well established, even outright ot mership was no protection against them. And market depend encewas a cause, not a result, of mass proletarianization. !

This is important for various reasons-and I'll have Iaorelto say later about its broader implications. For the momen, theimportant point is that the specific dynamics of capitalism verealready in place, in English agriculture, before the proletar iani-zation of the work force. In fact, those dynamics were a najorfactor in bringing about the proletarianization of laber inEngland. The critical factor was the market dependenc e ofproducers, as well as appropriators, and the new social im] ,era-tives created by that market dependence.

Some people may be reluctant to describe this social for-mation as "capitalist," precisely on the grounds that capital-ism is, by definition, based on the exploitation of wage la bor,That reluctance is fair enough-as long as we recognizethat, whatever we call it, the English economy in the e irly !

if-1E ~GRARIAN ORIGINS 27

[~odem period, driven by the logic of its basic productive.ctor agriculture, was already operating according to prin-

t ples and "laws of motion" different from those prevailingan) other society since the dawn of history. Those laws of

lotio n were the preconditions-which existed nowhere else-I r th ~development of a mature capitalism that would indeedII ba:ed on the mass exploitation of wage labor.

I ",That, then, was the outcome of all this? First, English; L rict lture wasuniquely productive. Bythe end of the seven-Ii enth century, for instance, grain and cereal production had. sen 0 dramatically that England became a leading exporter

"f those commodities. These advances in production were;,l hie led with a relatively small agricultural labor force. This

what it means to speak of the unique productivity of<ngli;h agriculture.I ~ orne historians have tried to challenge the very idea ofgrar: an capitalism by suggesting that the "productivity" of_rene h agriculture in the eighteenth century wasmore or lessqual to that of England. But what they reallymean is that totalgriCL ltural production in the two countries was more or lessqual What they fail to point out is that in one country, thatvel )f production was achieved by a population the vast ma-rity ofwhich still consisted of peasant producers, while in thether country, the same total production was achieved by aucl smaller work force, in a declining rural population. Inther words, the issue here is not total output but productivity inhe srnse of output per unit of work.

C I'he demographic facts alone speak volumes. Between500 and 1700, England experienced a substantial growth inopu lation-as did other European countries. But Englishopu lation growth was distinctive in one major respect: theercrntage of the urban population more than doubled in thateric d (some historians put the figure at just under a quarterf th-.population alreadybythe late 17thcentury). The contrastith .'rance is telling: here, the rural population remained fairlytable, still about 85 to 90 percent at the time of the Frenchevolution in 1789 and beyond. By 1850, when the urbanOpt lation of England and Wales was about 40.8 percent,ran .e's wasstill only 14.4percent (and Germany's 10.8).

-\griculture in England, already in the early modern pe-iod, was productive enough to sustain an unusually largeurnber of people no longer engaged in agricultural produc-

ion. This fact, of course, testifiesto more than just particularly

28M 0 NTH LY REV lEW / J U LY - AUG U S T I 9 91 :

efficient farming techniques. It also bespeaks a revolu lion linsocial property relations. While France remained a COD ntry ~Ifpeasant proprietors, land in England was concentratec in fF:rfewer hands, and the propertyless mass was growing 1 apidl..While agricultural production in France still follower trad i-tional peasant practices (nothing like the English bod) of i* il-provement literature existed in France, and the 1illagi:~community still imposed its regulations and restrictir .ns q-_production, affecting even larger landholders), Englisl farn.ing was responding to the imperatives of competition aq, •.improvement.

It is worth adding one other point about England's c istinrtive demographic pattern. The unusual growth of the urbanpopulation was not evenly distributed among English town s. Elsf'where in Europe, the typical pattern was an urban populationscattered among several important towns-so that, for ex; unple 'Lyons was not dwarfed by Paris. In England, London b ~canil:disproportionately huge, growing from about 60,000 i ihabitants in the 1520s to 575,000 in 1700 and becoming the ,arge$city in Europe, while other English towns were much small er; i

This pattern signifies more than is apparent at first ganc~It testifies, among other things, to the transformation of sociaproperty relations in the heartland of agrarian capitalism, th]south and southeast, and the dispossession of small prod lcer~a displaced and migrant population whose destination \'oul~typically be London. The growth of London also represer ts thegrowing unification not only of the English state bU1 of ~national market. That huge city was the hub of English conj-merce-not only as a major transit point for nationa andinternational trade but as a huge consumer of English products,not least its agricultural produce. The growth of Londr .n, ii'other words, in all kinds of ways stands for England's erne rgincapitalism, its integrated market-increasingly, a single unified, and competitive market; its productive agriculture; a rd i~dispossessed population. 1

The long-term consequences of these distinctive pal ternshould be fairly obvious. Although this is not the pla :e texplore the connections between agrarian capitalism and England's subsequent development into the first "industrial zed'economy, some points are self-evident. Without a prodi ctivagricultural sector which could sustain a large non-agricu turaworkforce, the world's first industrial capitalism would havbeen unlikely to emerge. Without England's agarian capita lism,\

THE AGRARIAN ORIGINS 29

Ither,. would have been no dispossessed mass obliged to sell its)labo '-power for a wage. Without that dispossessed non-agrarianIwod force, there would have been no mass consumer market(for tne cheap everyday goods-such as food and textiles-thatidrov e the process of industrialization in England. And withoutlits gmwing wealth, together with wholly new motivations forcolorial expansion-motivations different from the old formsof te rritorial acquisition-British imperialism would have been

i a vely different thing than the engine of industrial capitalism itIwas 0 become. And (this is no doubt a more contentious point)with out English capitalism there would probably have been nocapi talist system of any kind: it was competitive pressures ema-nati ilgfrom England, especially an industrialized England, thatCOil pelled other countries to promote their own economicdev -lopment in capitalist directions.

The Lessons of Agrarian CapitalismWhat, then, does all this tell us about the nature of capital-

ism' First, it reminds us that capitalism is not a "natural" andine- 'itable consequence of human nature, or even of age-oldsoc al practices like "truck, barter, and exchange." It is a lateane localized product of very specific historical conditions. TheeXfansionary drive of capitalism, to the point of virtual univer-sali y today, is not the consequence of its conformity to humannat 'He or to some trans historical natural laws but the productof ;ts own historically specific internal laws of motion. Andthe se laws of motion required vast social transformations andup ieavals to set them in train. It required a transformationin he human metabolism with nature, in the provision oflift's basic necessities.

The second point is that capitalism has from the beginningbe.:n a deeply contradictory force. We need only consider theme st obvious effects of English agrarian capitalism: on the oneha id, the conditions for material prosperity existed in earlyme dern England as nowhere else; yet on the other hand, thoseco iditions were achieved at the cost of widespread disposses-sion and intense exploitation. It hardly needs to be added thatth- -se new conditions also established the foundation for newan i more effective forms of colonial expansion and imperial-isr 1, as well as new needs for such expansion, in search of newm: .rkets and resources.

And then there are the corollaries of "improvement": onth ~one hand, productivity and the ability to feed a vast popu-

30M 0 NTH LY REV lEW / J U LY - AUG U S T l? 9 81!

\

lation; on the other hand, the subordination of all othei considerations to the imperatives of profit. This means, ai nonother things, that people who could be fed are often I :ft tstarve. In fact, it means that there is in general a great dis] laribetween the productive capacities of capitalism and the qnaliof life it delivers. The ethic of "improvement" in its ori 5inasense, in which production is inseparable from profit, is als o th~ethic of exploitation, poverty, and homelessness. I

The ethic of "improvement," of productivity for pro it, isalso, of course, the ethic of irresponsible land use, mad cowdisease, and environmental destruction. Capitalism was bo matthe very core of human life, in the interaction with nature oniwhich life itself depends. The transformation of that intera. tion Iby agrarian capitalism revealed the inherently destructivr im-Ipulses of a system in which the very fundamentals of existence iare subjected to the requirements of profit. In other woreIs, it Irevealed the essential secret of capitalism.

The expansion of capitalist imperatives throughout theworld has constantly reproduced some of the effects that it hadat the beginning within its country of origin. The proce~s ofdispossession, extinction of customary property rights, the im-position of market imperatives, and environmental destruc ionhas continued. That process has extended its reach from therelations between exploiting and exploited classes to the 1 ela-tions between imperialist and subordinate countries. More re-cently, the spread of market imperatives has taken the form forexample, of compelling (with the help of international cap tal-ist agencies like the World Bank and the International Mone I aryFund) farmers in the third world to replace strategies of a sri-cultural self-sufficiency with specialization in cash crops for theglobal market. The dire effects of these changes will be explo oedelsewhere in this issue.

But if the destructive effects of capitalism have constantlyreproduced themselves, its positive effects have not been ne: rlyas consistent. Once capitalism was established in one coun tryand once it began to impose its imperatives on the rest ofEurope and ultimately the whole world, its development inother places could never follow the same course it had in itsplace of origin. The existence of one capitalist society thereaf .ertransformed all others, and the subsequent expansion of ca pi-talist imperatives constantly changed the conditions of eco-nomic development.

TIHE AGRARIAI"J ORIGINS!

3 1

"N«: have now reached the point where the destructiverffec s of capitalism are outstripping its material gains. No third

~

Or1dcountry today, for example, can hope to achieve evenhe «ontradictory development that England underwent.ith the pressures of competition, accumulation, and exploi-

atio 1 imposed by other more developed capitalist systems,.he <:ttempt to achieve material prosperity according to capi-

falis! principles is increasingly likely to bring with it only theeg<:tive side of the capitalist contradiction, its dispossessionnd destruction without its material benefits, at least for

[the last majority.I There is also a more general lesson to be drawn from the

/exp( rience of English agrarian capitalism. Once market im-pera lives set the terms of social reproduction, all economiclacto rs-s-both appropriators and producers, even if they retainpossession, or indeed outright ownership, of the means ofpro( .uction-are subject to the demands of competition, in-creasing productivity, capital accumulation, and the intenseexp oitation of labor.

For that matter, even the absence of a division betweenappropriators and producers is no guarantee of immunity(an 1this, by the way,is why "market socialism" is a contradic-tior in terms): once the market is established as an economic"di..cipline" or "regulator," once economic actors becomemal ket dependent for the conditions of their own reproduc-tiOII, even workers who own the means of production, indi-vidually or collectively, will be obliged to respond to themaket's imperatives-to compete and accumulate, to let"ur.competitive" enterprises and their workers go to the wall,anc I to exploit themselves.

The history of agrarian capitalism, and everything thatfollowed from it, should make it clear that wherever marketimj ieratives regulate the economy and govern social reproduc-tio 1 there willbe no escape from exploitation.