Long ago I raised the question of whether economic growth may be explained in part by the stripping away of impediments.1 I had in mind, âthe removal of tolls, internal tariffs, gilds, debasements, forced loans, confiscations, monopolies, settlement laws, sumptuary legislation and the other paraphernalia of absolutist monarchs and would-be absolutists like the Stuartsâ. Conventional approaches are quite different; almost all claim to have found the prime mover. Shifting attention to negative gains from the removal of blockages implies a bolder claim. It is that an impulse to get rich was latent all along and was sufficiently widespread (which is not to say universal in time and space) to have had a big effect when unleashed. In an earlier book I considered the implications on the global stage but wish to examine it more closely here by exploring the slow dissolution of barriers in English history.2
My suggestion has rarely been followed but a large literature may be brought to bear on the topic. The sources drawn on here are sometimes long-standing, widely different in date and not always familiar; this should not matter if they are pertinent and have not been surpassed by more modern publications. The econometric tests now commonly applied in economic history have their merits, give or take objections to unreliable data sets and the furore in the social sciences about the meaning of statistical significance, but I prefer to cite representative examples from actual historical sources.3 Local evidence sometimes alters oneâs mind about relative significance and I do not always discern the world of my ancestors in the abstractions of my profession.
The following discussion moves from early and broad developments in the economy to later more specific ones. They include the reduction of materially unproductive expenditures on religious structures; unlocking land resources by means of the Dissolution of the Monasteries; ending the medieval cycle of destructive civil wars; struggling to abolish maladministration in its many forms (censorship, protectionism, corruption and so forth); lifting a vexatious levy on agriculture by means of the Tithe Commutation Act; and observing the decay of institutions which had allocated resources in a productively inefficient fashion. To these are added discussions of the economic shocks from epidemics, epizootics, weather shocks, flood, fire and so forth, and the curbing of related losses by better disaster management. Not all reported shocks or disasters prove to have been nationally important, although they were likely to have been at their most damaging in early periods. Nor could every type of shock be satisfactorily parried, at least in the period before industrialisation, but problems that threatened to reduce output seem worth investigating to assess how damaging they may have been.
This book contains a larger component of âreal worldâ processes than is usually found in economic history. Partly it reflects topics on which I have worked throughout my career; many have attracted interest only in specialist quarters but deserve more attention. The emphasis on agriculture will not surprise because it has always been a fairly substantial subfield within economic history. Landscape history, environmental history and disaster studies, on which I began to write early, have at long last become expanding fields. This is a healthy development even if modern practitioners move the baseline forward by scouting earlier contributions. A greater problem comes from the narrowness of conventional historians and even economic historians, whoâas the new specialists are starting to lamentâhave seldom absorbed these topics.4 To quote an outsider to the world of scholarship, âit has never occurred to me that the problemâor at least the limitationâof history is that it is written by historians, scholars with a predisposition towards a particular kind of narrative. So along comes someone who knows a lot about geology and geography, and history looks completely differentâ.5
England had an intermittent but benign history of lifting burdens and reducing the impact of shocks to the economy. This was not dramatic or abrupt yet was quietly formative in releasing capital, land and labour for productive ends. When industrialisation did come about, through innovations like canalised rivers, canals and railways and the use of coal in manufacturing, this benefited from emerging in an already flexible economyâone less troubled by waste than before, as well as possessing richer and more open markets. Without this, the eventual birth of industrialisation would have been far more troubled.
Modes of economic coordination fall into the standard categories of custom, command and market. Over time the proportions changed in the direction of market allocation, which is the history of growth in a nutshell. Allocating resources and effort along customary lines had meant suppressing inequality of income at the cost of restricting individual endeavour. Historically, the market gradually, unevenly and incompletely replaced custom and may therefore be credited with opening the way for industrial growth. Command systems likewise had held back growth, since in them activity was dominated by the ruler or landowner. These men had secured their positions because their ancestors had fought for them, which meant that command systems were operated by people who did not necessarily possess commercial or managerial expertise. They had an incentive to obtain a large slice of output for themselves as rent-seekers and were not inspired to innovate in the technological sphere.
If we focus on medieval and early modern landowners in England, we find them well able to accumulate wealth. The wool trade was profitable and through it they became ever more involved with the market although using their non-market powers of command to smooth the path. They began to see the little arable holdings of the peasantry as barriers to maximising their own wealth and expelled villagers in order to turn their holdings into sheep pasture. The market thus intruded in more than an abstract sense and the process was fossilised in the ridge-and-furrow visible to this day beneath so much Midlands grass. The lantern towers of the wool churches soared up in the pastoral regions and the great rebuilding of Midlands manor houses began. The theme will recur of how many historical processes are embodied in the landscape. It is supposed that dispossessed ploughmen swelled the ranks of masterless wanderersâhence the well-known saying âhark, hark the dogs do bark, the beggars are coming to townâ.
An intriguing take on these formative processes was expressed in 1779 by Gloucestershireâs topographer, Samuel Rudder.6 In former times, Rudder proclaimed, two things operated very powerfully to hinder agriculture, meaning cultivation: the great barons preferred grazing because it released labourers to become fighting men while before the reign of Elizabeth exporting raw wool to Flanders promised huge benefits. Agriculture was neglected, causing frequent famines and great pestilence. It is not necessary to accept Rudderâs stylised model or attribution of motive to see that he was making a serious effort to explain how arable farming had been held back. There was no special return to ploughing in the Midlands triangle after the mid-sixteenth century, when rising prices might seem to have prompted it; arable expanded instead in fresh parts of the country. âMen could decide what was the optimum useâ, said Maurice Beresford, âwith a freedom which they had never previously hadâŠâ when land-hunger, tradition and fear of bad harvests had bound them to growing cereals.7 This involved exposing traditional allocations of land to market decisions.
Barriers raised the costs of investment and innovation, and when they were vanquished costs fell. Command systems could sweep some away but were better at redistributing wealth towards the powerful than at creating it. The pie was sliced rather than a larger one being baked, although the inadvertent effect was to accustom society to greater competitiveness. Over the post-medieval centuries, as we shall see, a long list of depressants was eroded or extirpated, increasingly by feedback from the forces of growth itself. The resources released might be used up in current consumption or eaten by larger and longer-lived populations, but when they did not have to be spent on repairing an endless cycle of damage they were in principle free for productive activities. So much âunblockingâ took place over the late pre-modern centuries and so many sources of loss were eliminated to make England an easier and easier venue for investment. Each episode may have been a struggle but each as an unintended consequence advanced development a little; the effects were as fruitful as many a technical breakthrough.
Only in the development economics taught in the 1950s were explicit treatments of disabilities to be found. At that period university courses quite often started with the eighteenth century, the English industrial revolution being treated as an abrupt break of trend even before Walt Rostow put the indelible label of âtake-offâ on the process. Courses then jumped to the so-called Third World but when it dawned that England was not a good model for those regions the approach was abandoned. Why was England not a good model? Already too wealthy by the eighteenth century, too long supplied with functioning institutions, and uniquely supplied with inventions? Poverty in medieval or early modern times might have seemed a better analogy with contemporary less-developed countries but economics students were thought to have no appetite for syllabuses that included periods so remote. Next, any suggestion that the seventeenth-century Civil War might be an appropriate starting point faced the charge of being a covert Marxist endorsement of revolution. During the Cold War that accusation was tantamount to stifling enquiry. Instead, the industrial revolution was taken as its own starting point and presented as more or less arriving out of thin air. Cursory pronouncements about origins aside, it was virgin birth. Scholarly effort became mesmerised by any eighteenth-century innovation which might be thought (once all else was held constant) to have propelled growth.
Yet any economy suffers from multiple distortions and needs freeing from them. All resources are never fully employed or allocated to their optimal uses and old techniques are never instantly replaced by superior ones. Impediments are continually recreated; protectionism and rent-seeking are perennial. The fact that obstacles were so various and sources of physical harm so diverse has worked against thinking about the cumulative advantage of dismantling them.
Complications may seem to arise from the current opinion that world economic growth did not arrive first in England or Europe and cannot be attributed to their intrinsic features. Some other societies achieved growth earlier, China being the prime example. To what extent this really raised per capita income in China as opposed to expanding the ...