Nature's Evil. Alexander Etkind
was transferred to a more lucrative post, and the fields returned to their original condition. Landowners and their bailiffs complained that the peasants were lazy, improvements failed to be embedded, land lay fallow, crops rotted in the fields, and there were no roads. There was no point in increasing the production of grain without transportation routes. Excess grain was used mainly for distilling. It turned out that the bailiff’s efforts to raise the productivity of the peasants succeeded only in lowering the price of vodka in the village tavern.
Improvements and indolence
Even if markets were accessible, military conscription, the requisition of horses, the passage or billeting of troops, and the state’s modernising plans all interfered with crop rotation. Young and aggressive European states, the heirs of the crusades and religious wars, juggled multiple risks – riots in the towns, revolutions in the capital cities, and peasant sabotage in the countryside. Agricultural innovations came to England from the Netherlands, and then returned east. Canals and dams for draining fields, and crop-rotation systems, which included animal fodder and the use of manure on a massive scale, were all Dutch imports. Agricultural productivity along the coastal strip was everywhere much higher than in the heartlands. Port towns expanded if they were situated at the intersections where one influx of commodities arrived from the countryside and another came from the colonies. By 1700, Amsterdam and London contained a tenth of the populations of their respective countries. For these trading cities, the secret of survival lay in ‘ghost acres’ – natural resources which were outside their borders but were available to them thanks to trade.* Crop rotation required the peasant to combine many skills, crafts and trades. Comparing the economic life of a European farmer with that of a nineteenth- or twentieth-century worker, for example a miner or a factory hand, we come to a surprising conclusion: the peasant economy was more complex, the peasant’s work was more varied, and his diet was better than the proletarian’s. The changing seasons lent variety to the peasant’s work. The patchwork pattern of crop rotation offered the chance to escape from supervision.
In the towns, highly specialised labour processed valuable, topical resources, which were often brought from afar. There, the printing press was invented, banks carried on their business, ships were built. The peasants rested their land, keeping large tracts fallow. Human muscles were supplemented only by the muscle power of livestock, but animals took up a large amount of arable land. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, an English farm with 20 acres of wheat needed another 8 acres to graze four bullocks, without which the harvest couldn’t be brought in. At the beginning of the twentieth century in North America there were 25 million horses and mules – one horse for three humans. A quarter of all agricultural land was needed to keep them fed.
According to the historian Robert Brenner, agriculture in Europe went through two class wars. In the late Middle Ages, when plague caused a shortage of manpower in the countryside, the peasants of Western Europe won the first class war, establishing their right to change masters and hire themselves out just like the townspeople did. The peasants of Eastern Europe lost this war and remained in dependence as serfs. As a consequence, the landowners in Western Europe strove to save on labour by improving the productivity of the land. When they failed in this they started the second class war. Now the landowning aristocracy wanted the freedom of contracts to be on both sides, so that, just as the peasants had the right to leave of their own accord, now the landlords would also have the right to dismiss them and change the use of land or sell it. In England, this war was won by the elite. The nobility got the right to enclose their land, introduce ‘improvements’ and get rid of their surplus peasants, who then went to the towns. In France it was the peasants who won the second class war. The country continued to depend on millions of small landowners, who had no motive to introduce innovations because even improved land was difficult to sell.11 In Eastern Europe, landowners obtained a land market, but it had limitations. Land could only be sold along with the serfs, and, later, peasants could only be sold along with the land. It was difficult to rent out or mortgage such land.
Was the peasants’ resistance to modern efficiency a cunning and purposeful sabotage – a ‘weapon of the weak’ (James Scott) – or an inherent feature of the peasantry – the ‘idiocy of rural life’ (Karl Marx)? Landowners and reformers usually blamed laziness, as if it was endemic to the countryside. The English aristocracy suspected their Irish peasants of indolence, but Robert Malthus linked Irish idleness to potatoes – they were more productive than grain but were not easy to trade. The American plantation owners believed that their black slaves were innately lazy. Adam Smith developed a theory that peasant laziness was on account of the lack of specialisation. ‘The habit of sauntering … acquired by every country workman who is obliged to change his work and his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty different ways almost every day of his life, renders him almost always slothful and lazy.’12
In the 1920s, the Russian economist Alexander Chayanov described the peasant household as a ‘moral economy’. The peasant was accustomed to earning the amount he considered necessary; he worried about getting less but was not interested in making more. This attitude was not peculiar to the Russian peasant. On the contrary, Chayanov showed that Swiss and German farmers also lacked a profit incentive and were risk averse. For example, Chayanov saw that the peasant willingly kept a couple of cows, whose upkeep amounted to ‘practically nothing’. But keeping more cows needed more work than the peasants were prepared to do. For most of the year the peasants had no employment: working in the fields of central Russia occupied no more than a quarter of their time. Using their free time, the peasants mastered the production of goods, such as linen, for export. But, even as they got richer, they didn’t abandon their subsistence farming, which functioned like a self-regulating mechanism, along the lines of a thermostat. In order to trade, you need a surplus, but the reverse is also true: there is no surplus without trade. This is nature’s own way, and the main concern of the farmer is not what to do with a surplus but how to avoid a deficit. The peasant toiled not to earn money but to survive; not to maximise profit, but to make enough to live on.13 Although specialisation was always the most efficient solution, peasant farms remained diverse: even if their main product, for example grain or wool, was successfully traded on the market, they continued to produce many other things – vegetables, meat, hay, which they consumed themselves. The production of these commodities didn’t appear in accounts and they weren’t taxed. The state and landowners attached no importance to subsistence farming, but it was fundamental to the survival of the peasantry. The seasonal nature of many important tasks meant investment in expensive machines was not practical. The cyclical life of nature was alien to the town, preoccupied with stability and expansion. Still, urban life required supplies of grain, firewood and much more, which could only be secured by the peasants.
Supplying the capitals
Trade hubs and sites of power, capital cities grew so rapidly that they far outpaced the limited ability of the surrounding lands to feed them. For most of them, trade in fibres, metals and finished goods was the push factor, and the shortage of grain and timber the pull factor, of development. From Venice to St Petersburg, full granaries symbolised the stability of power, just as they had done thousands of years before in the cities of Mesopotamia.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Paris consumed 3 million bushels of grain per year, Amsterdam, 1.5 million, Rome 1 million. Transporting such quantities of grain by cart was impossible – all growing cities were situated near the sea or navigable rivers. The shortage of grain was a constant problem for Mediterranean cities. As early as the sixteenth century, Dutch ships had transported grain to them from the Baltic lands, sailing around Europe. Amsterdam was supplied from the Polish lands around Danzig, while Stockholm depended on the fields of Livonia and Estonia. The provisioning of London was helped when the East Anglian fens were drained and large farms were established on the reclaimed fenland. Paris was kept supplied via the Seine and the canals built by Colbert. Completed in 1734, this network deprived provincial France of supplies, and local riots accompanied the growth of the capital.14
The delivery of grain to the new capital, St Petersburg, was to become a perennial