Brenner
Brenner’s main argument is that it is the structure of class relations, of class power, which will determine the manner and degree to which particular demographic and commercial changes will affect long-term trends in the distribution of income an economic growth—and not vice versa. According to him, different class structures, once established, tend to impose rather strict limits and possibilities on a society’s economic development. Also that class structures are highly resilient and are not shaped by changes in demographic or commercial trends. Therefore it is necessary to analyze the autonomous processes by which particular class structures are established, and in particular the class conflicts to which they do (or do not) give rise. It is in the outcome of these conflicts, according to him, that is to be found perhaps the key to the problem of long-run economic development in early modern Europe, and more generally of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. He does this by first critiquing the Demographic and Commercial Models, and then putting forth his own model of Agrarian Capitalism to explain how it was the class relations which determined the failure or success of a society/state’s transition from a feudal state to a capitalist one.
The Demographic Model
Postan and Ladurie from the Annals school have put forth the Demographic model to explain the causes for the transition. Postan specified that he was only concerned with “the economic base” of medieval society, which he defined as population and land settlement, technique of production, and the general trends of economic activity: all those economic facts which can be discussed without concentrating on the working of legal and social institutions, and upon relations of class to class.
Brenner questions if “long-term movements” of social income can be abstracted or removed from “the working of social and legal institutions”, and if the problems of the development of Postan’s so-called “economic base” can be meaningfully considered apart from the relations of class to class.
On the one hand, the very distribution of ownership of the land between landlord and peasant was continually in question throughout the period. If the peasantry were to insist on their right to inherit the land, the very significance of rent would be transformed, and the viability of the landlord class put in jeopardy. On the other hand, could the landlords gain extra-economic power over the person of their tenants, control marriage, and in particular land transfers and peasant mobility? If so, the possibility would emerge of imposing extra-economic payments upon the peasantry. Any explanation of the progress of income distribution must therefore be able to interpret not merely the changing distribution of the immediate product of the land, but the prior questions of the distribution of property between lord and peasant, and of the direct applicability of force in the rent relationship.
Specifying conditions conducive to long term stagnation doesn’t necessarily explain the phenomenon, and is analogous to attempting to explain economic growth merely as a result of the introduction of new organizations of production, new techniques and new levels of investment. These factors do not explain economic development, but merely describe what economic development is. Brenner states that the Malthusian cycle of long-term stagnation can only be fully understood as the product of established structures of class relations, just as economic development can only be fully understood as the outcome of the emergence of new class relations more favourable to new organizations of production.
Demographic growth, according to Postan, characterizes the 12th and 13th centuries, leading to the occupation of marginal lands and the decreasing fertility of the soil, leading to rising food prices and rising rents. But the form of rent dealt with here is peculiar; it is a theoretically fixed, but actually fluctuating, structure of customary rights and obligations that define landholding arrangements. They often lay down in addition further conditions of landholding: the lord’s right to impose additional extraordinary levies (tallages and fines); the peasant’s right to use, transfer and inherit the land; and finally, the very disposition of the peasant’s own person, particularly his freedom of mobility.
The central point for Postan is that, due to developing pressure of population, the 13th century is a period in which the landlords’ position improves vis-à-vis the peasants not only in those few areas where what might be termed modern leaseholding had emerged, but also in the so-called customary sector. So in order to retain their land, the peasants must submit in particular to (1) increasing arbitrary taxes levied above and beyond the traditional rent; and (2) increasing labour services on the lord’s demesne.
The 14th and 15th centuries witnessed a decline in population as a result of falling productivity, famine and plague. Ultimately, demographic catastrophe led to a drastic reversal of the man/land ratio. Postan thus argues that this demographic change brought about precisely the opposite conditions to those which had prevailed in the 13th century. Scarcity of peasants meant a decline not only in the level of rent, but equally in the lord’s ability to restrict peasant mobility, and peasant freedom in general. Demographic catastrophe determines the fall of serfdom.
Ladurie takes up from where Postan leaves it—at the end of the 15th century. Serfdom is now no longer extant in either England or most of France. We have instead a society of free peasants in both England and France, some holding their land on a roughly contractual basis from the landlords; others having achieved the status of something like freeholders. There is a repetition of the two-phase movement from Postan’s period: first an upward push in population the 16th century leading to rising rents, falling wages and the disintegration of peasant holdings. Drastically declining productivity then leads to demographic catastrophes during the 17th century, a turning of the trend, and the opposite configuration in terms of the distribution of income and of land.
According to Brenner the obvious difficulty with this model is that it breaks down in the face of comparative analysis. Different outcomes proceeded from similar demographic trends at different times and in different areas of Europe. Thus the question asked is if demographic change can be legitimately treated as a cause, let alone the key variable. While it is true that in the 13th century the increase in population was accompanied by increasing rents and increasing seigneurial controls over the peasantry, not only in England but in parts of France, yet it is also the case that in other parts of France (Normandy, Picardy) no counter-tendency developed to the long-term trend which had resulted in the previous disappearance of serfdom.
These contrasting developments obviously had a powerful effect on trends of income distribution. Postan himself points out that landlords were able to extract far greater serfs than from free tenants—and were able to increase these significantly in the course of the 13th century.
Clearly, a growth of population leading to rising demand for land would tend to increase a lord’s power to extract rent, in whatever form, from the peasantry—but only if the lord had successfully established his right to charge more than a fixed rent. The very status of free tenant in the 13th century generally carried with it freedom from heavy labour service on the lord’s demesne, and freedom from payments.
Once free, peasants paid only a fixed customary rent; they could not be forced to pay additional, arbitrary rents. Moreover this trend towards restricting rent and establishing free tenure in the Paris region took place in the most heavily populated region in all of France. Thus the same upward pressure of population could, and did, lead to changes in the distribution of income favourable to the lords or to the peasants—opposite outcomes—depending on the social-property relationships and balances of class forces.
The demographic decline experienced throughout Europe which began at various points during the 14th century poses analogous problems. By 1500 the same Europe-wide trends had gone a long way towards establishing one of the great divides in European history, the emergence of an almost totally free peasant population in Western Europe, the debasement of the peasantry to unfreedom in Eastern Europe.
Another great divide during this period is one of continuing long-term stagnation accompanying the increase of population in some areas, the spectacular emergence of an entirely new pattern of relatively self-sustaining growth accompanying the increase of population in other areas. So, in France, as population increased, there was extreme fragmentation of holdings and declining productivity. But in England, by contrast, the dominant tendency was to build up larger and larger units; to consolidate holdings and to farm them out to a large tenant farmer who in turn cultivated them with the aid of wage labour. Hence, the demographic model isn’t empirically sound and other factors must be sought to explain the transition.
The Commercialization Model
Postan and Ladurie made powerful attacks on the commercialization model, which holds that the force of the market determines: first, the decline of serfdom, which was often simply identified as the change from labour rents to money rents and ipso facto the emergence of a free contractual tenantry; and second, the rise of capitalist agriculture, classically large-scale tenant farming on the basis of capital improvements and wage labour.
Postan has shown that in the medieval period the force of the market, far from automatically bringing about the dissolution of serfdom, might actually coincide with its intensification. In the east of Eastern Europe, the impact of the world market for grain gave a major impetus to the tightening of peasant bondage at the same time as it was stimulating the development of capitalism in the west.
According to Brenner, the decline of serfdom could not be achieved through simple commutation of money rent for labour rent, because what would still remain after commutation was the lord’s power over the peasant. Even where the lord did not take labour services, the peasant was still required to pay money fees to buy off his labour dues. What therefore had to be eliminated to bring about the end of serfdom was the type of unequal exchange which was manifested in the direct, forceful extra-economic controls exerted by the lord over the peasant.
Ladurie carried forward the critique of the trade-centered approach by showing that even following the downfall of serfdom a tendency towards capitalism could not necessarily be assumed, even under the impact of the market. But he des not specify why, during the 16th and 17th centuries, a new cycle of fragmentation and declining productivity was set off in some places, while consolidation and improvement took pace in others. Brenner argues that the answer of why one trend was victorious over another lies in the emergence of a structure of ownership of land which provided the peasantry in most of France (as contrasted to England) with relatively powerful peasant rights over comparatively large areas of the land. It was the predominance of petty proprietorship in France which ensured long-term agricultural backwardness.
The two fundamental problems according to Brenner that: 1) the decline vs. the persistence of serfdom and its effects, 2) the emergence and predominance of small peasant property vs. the rise of landlord/large tenant farmer relations of the land. In historical terms, this means a comparative analysis of intensification of serfdom in Eastern Europe versus its decline in the west, and of the rise of agrarian capitalism and agricultural productivity in England in relation to their failure in France.
The inability of the serf-based agrarian economy to innovate in agriculture even under extreme market incentives is understandable considering the heavy surplus extraction by the lord and the barriers to mobility of men and land. The lord’s rent ended to confiscate not merely the peasant’s income above subsistence but also threaten the funds needed to refurbish the peasant’s holding and prevent long term decline of productivity. At the same time, the lord’s most obvious mode of increasing income from his lands was not through capital investment or introduction of new techniques, but through squeezing the peasants by either increasing money rents or labour services.
Given these property relationships, productivity crisis leading to demographic crisis was more or less to be expected. The logic used to explain intensification of serfdom in Eastern Europe is that the crisis in seigneurial revenues which followed the decline of population and the disappearance of tenants led the lords to assert their control over the peasants and bind them to their land to protect their own incomes. In England, by contrast, by 1400 the landlords’ offensive had failed; revolt and flight led to the end of serfdom.
The crisis of peasant productivity was accompanied by an intensification of the class conflict inherent in the existing structure, but with different outcomes in different places, depending on the balance of forces between the contending classes. Brenner states that an explanation cannot be found in the direct impact of forces of supply and demand, whether commercial or demographic in origin. Neither will the pressure of trade provide an answer; ironically, the rise of large-scale export commerce has sometimes been invoked to explain the rise of serfdom in the east as it has, analogously, the rise of capitalism in the west.
The most widely accepted explanation of divergence between east and west European development has been found in the weak development of towns in this region which made the entire area more vulnerable to seigneurial reaction. But Brenner argues that the relatively tiny urban centres could not have exerted sufficient attractive power on the rural masses to account for the collapse of serfdom by 1500. Also, few runaway serfs could have had the capital or skill to enter the ranks of urban craftsmen or shopkeepers. Finally, it cannot be assumed that towns housed allies of the peasantry. Often, the urban patriciate would align themselves with the nobility against the peasantry, often being landowners themselves.
In western Europe, what was more successful than peasant revolt was the process of stubborn resistance, village by village, through which the peasantry developed their solidarity and village institutions. It was by this means that the peasantry were able to limit considerably the claims of the aristocracy and ultimately to dissolve serfdom.
In the east, the availability of forced labourers whose service could be incessantly intensified discouraged introduction of agricultural improvements. Second, the lord’s increasing surplus extraction limited emergence of a home market for industrial goods. Third, the direct control over peasant mobility meant constriction of industrial labour force. Finally, the landlords pursued, as the ruling class, a policy of “anti-mercantilism”. Thus the possibility of balanced economic growth was destroyed and Eastern Europe was consigned to backwardness.
AGRARIAN CAPITALISM: ENGLAND VS FRANCE
Even the collapse of serfdom did not lead in any automatic way to capitalism or successful economic development. In England, the pesantry were able by the mid-15th century through flight and resistance, to break feudal control over hteir mobility and to win full freedom. In the long run however, the landlords had two strategies to cprevent loss of land to peasant freehold. One was the vacancy of many customary peasant holdings due to the demographic collapse of thelate 14th and 15th centuries. In this way a great deal of land was simply removed from the customary sector and added to the leasehold sector. Secondly, they could insist on the right to charge fines at will whenever pesant land was conveyed in sales or inheritance.
The peasant revolts in England did not succeed and by the end of the 17th century, English landlords controlled an overwhelming proportion of the cultivable land—70-75%–and capitalist class relations were developing. In Brenner’s view it was the emergence of the “classic” landlord/capitalist tenant/wage-labourer structure which made possible the transformation of agricultural production in England. With the peasants’ failure to establish freehold control, the landlords were able to consolidate and enclose large farms and lease them to capitalist tenants.
The contrasting failure in France of agrarian transformation seems to have followed directly from the continuing strength of peasnt landholding in to the early modern period. In France, unlike England, the centralized state appears to have developed as a class-like phenomenon—that is, as an independent extractor of the surplus in particular on the basis of its arbitrary power to tax the land. In the 13th century the lords aimed to consolidate their right to tax their customary peasants at will. However, peasants of the Paris region resisted with force and in great numbers. What turned the tide in their favour was monarchical intervention against the landlords. The crown recognized by implication the peasants’ free legal status, paving the way for fixed rents and effective proprietorship.
By the early modern period the consolidation of peasant property in relationship to the development of French state had created a very different sort of class structure in the French countryside from that in England. In England, peasant revolt was directed against the landlords. In France the target of peasant revolt was the crushing taxation of the absolutist state, which ironically had been instrumental in securing and protecting peasant proprietorship (and thus impeding capitalist development).
In England, monarchical centralization developed from the later 15th century in relationship to and with ultimate dependence upon the landlord classes, as is evident in the growth of the parliamentary institutions. Their relative failure to establish freehold rights deprived the monarchy of a potential financial base in the pesantry for developing its independence of the landlords.
It cannot be said that the French landlords did not wish to consolidate holdings. But in order to do so they could not, as in England, merely raise rents or fines to impossible levels. Throughout most of France, state-supported law assured hereditability and fixed fines for customary tenures. Thus the landlord might have to buy up countless small peasant holdings in order to amass a consolidated unit, which was rarely easy to do.
Given the French property structure, it is then not surprising that the rising population, markets and grain process of the 16th and 17th centuries did not lead to agricultural improvement but merely to a renewal of the old Malthusian cycle of underdevelopment. In sum, it is not difficult according to Brenner to comprehend the dismal pattern of economic development imposed by the class structure in France. Not only was there a long-term failure of agricultural productivity but a corresponding inability to develop the home market. Thus the most complete freedom and property rights for the rural population ironically meant poverty and a self-perpetuating cycle of backwardness. In England, it was precisely the absence of such rights that facilitated the onset of real economic development.