This proposition, that agriculture was the source of the surplus enabling growth and development, and that feudalism was important everywhere, even in America, needs justification. What needs to be shown is that the surplus did in fact emerge in agriculture in both Europe and America; that it emerged more rapidly in circumstances in which feudalism was more evolved towards capitalism; and that the depth of feudalism in the agricultural institutions of different parts of what was to become Canada varied, so that different growth paths were generated in different regions of the country. If this is shown then it is evident that very long run factors of disintegration have been built into into the growth and development of the nation. What is to be shown first, then, is that the surplus emerged in agriculture in Europe, and that economic advance was more rapid in circumstances in which feudalism was more attenuated.
The rise of commerce in the age of mercantilism was an important factor in the transfer of Europe to America. It was yet another source of surplus for investment. No doubt the commercial exploitation of primary product exports in New France and New England were stimulants to growth and development. Still, settlement and the establishment of agriculture were at the root of successful colonization. They were the substance of growth. Their legacy, determined by different degrees of feudalism in different regions of the nation, has been one of disintegration in Canada.
In France as in England, it was agriculture rather than industry that first provided a platform on which capitalism (for want of a better word) could deploy the disingenuous illusion and cruelty of its admirable genius.That is to say, whereas Smith said that the surplus for investment in the growth process should have come first in agriculture, but did not; Bloch said nothing about where it should have come from, but, he said that, in fact, it had come from agriculture.
This difference of opinion is most important with respect to the nature of economic development and policy in America. It was the age of exploration and colonial trade that brought America into the range of European economic activity. Commerce was necessarily important at the beginning of American development, and historians in the United States and Canada, have examined the great commercial exports, fish, tobacco, fur, indigo and rice, timber and cotton, and cereals, as sources of capital, that is as the engines of development and growth; but settlement in America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries required agricultural development too. Given initial equipment and supplies, with few and temporary exceptions, agriculture in America was self sufficient, producing a surplus that was, at least in part, unrelated to the staple trades.
New England was developed under the attenuated feudal arrangements that characterized English agriculture at the time of colonization. New France was developed under the feudal arrangements that were emerging in France. So, if Marc Bloch was correct in stating that agriculture was the foundation of capitalistic economic advance in England and France, would this not also be true in America?
For some who think that capitalism emerged from feudalism with agriculture the leading sector, any parallel emergence of a surplus in commerce is of secondary importance. Their point is that the individual property rights and contractual market relations that distinguish commercialism from the common property and reciprocal duties of feudalism were not in themselves the agent of capital accumulation. Rather, it was the extension of feudal property relations into the market that generated a surplus. Feudalism was characterized by monopoly rights. Only the members of the town guilds could practice certain trades. All grains had to be ground at the lord's mill. Only those licenced by the king could carry out certain trades. In this view capitalism emerged from feudalism with monopolistic, that is, vestigially feudal agriculture as the leading sector; and commerce, also structured by the vestiges of feudalism, eventually played an important supporting role. In short, monopolistic redistribution of the product of society has been the essence of capitalism from the beginning.
History is never as tidy as the theories of those who study it. There was more to the emergence of a surplus for investment in mediaeval Europe than a set of property rights that placed economic and political power in the hands of a few who were willing to invest. There were innovations in agricultural technique by which the surplus was generated before it was transferred into the hands of capitalists. Further, Marc Block agreed that there were inventions and innovations in non-agricultural activities that generated other surpluses before it was transferred into the hands of merchant capitalists. Agriculture and primitive manufacturing became more productive along side of increasing commerce under aboriginal feudal property arrangements, and development of capitalistic property rights was a result of the increase in productivity. Technological change and general advance in knowledge was the occasion of organizational change, in this other (Veblenian) view. Commercial expansion in the mercantilist period, 1480--1860, and national policies associated with it, were effects of technological change. In America, too, in this view, growth and development, ultimately, were not consequences of commerce leading agriculture, or agriculture leading commerce, or of any set of property rights, but of the chaotic development of technique and institutions in all sectors.
What follows is not proof of a theory that technological change precedes of economic change which precedes institutional change. It is an assertion that that sequence, generally speaking, is a matter of history, in Europe and America; and some evidence is offered to bolster the assertion.
In the beginning the lord did not own the land. Some of his men were free, owned their own land, and rendered service in kind in return for participating in the life and protection of the manor. Some were bondmen, holding land from the lord and working the lord's own land according to some agreed upon or customary pattern of service. Others were slaves, or descendents of slaves who lived in the lord's household and worked for him. The details of the arrangement were different from place to place over Europe; and they evolved substantially over the centuries between the Norse incursions and the transfer of systems of land tenure to America.
The feudal manor was first organized for survival: survival from marauding barbarians, survival over the winter. Positive economic growth was out of the question in a world of political chaos. The manor was organized for survival, not growth.
When the invasions stopped, in the ninth century, freed from attack, and without the support of any dramatic, independent burst of commercial activity, European agriculture generated a surplus for investment in new and expanded economic activities. The way in which this change took place is debatable, but that it took place is not. Change and growth were continuous from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries, when America was settled by Europeans.
During the early mediaeval period, slaves and freemen (sokemen) tended to become serfs; and the bonds of serfs tended to become attached to their lands, rather than to themselves. Lines of feudal obligation tended to center on the monarchy, suggesting the coming importance of the nation state. From the eleventh century to the thirteenth, during the High Middle Ages, population and land under cultivation increased, with new tenure arrangements showing up in new areas. The number of freemen increased and obligations of service were transformed into money payments. The lord's monopoly rights over milling, brewing and making cloth were monetized. Following the wars and plagues of the fourteenth century, depopulation led to contraction of cultivated land, and to further adjustments in the relations between lord and peasant. In one view, excess of land over labour placed the peasant in a better position The number of freemen who had purchased or otherwise earned their status continued to increase.
Once into the Age of Sail, after 1450, the increasing importance of commerce, and eventual importation of precious metals from America did not initiate, but certainly accelerated monetization of economic relationships. Remaining feudal obligations tended to become annual, occasional, or final lump sum monetary settlements. In short, growth and development began in Europe in the tenth century, six hundred years before the settlement of New England and New France, five hundred years before the Portuguese and Spanish encompassed the globe, before the Age of Sail, and long before the commercial developments noted by Adam Smith.
By the eleventh century, the charrue, the wheeled plough that patterned so much of French cultivation into long narrow fields, was already being used in much of the north and west of Europe. Dryer soils and hilly country, mostly in the south, was cultivated with the wheel-less araire. Everywhere there were new clearings, trade and the towns revived, and central authority recovered in the form of monarchy. The Hanseatic League was formed to protect and control the trade of western Europe. Venice flourished with the trade to and from the Orient. England emerged, attached to Flanders and Normandy by a feudal arrangement that would lead to the Hundred Years War between England and France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. England had only a quarter of the population of France, about the same ratio in population as the French merchant marine bore to the English during their seventeenth century mercantilist rivalries. Novgorod the Great was the important `Russian' center. Moscow was a town on the frontier of the eastward migrations of the Slavic peoples. As western Europe transformed its feudal structure, eastern Europe was just beginning to feudalize. Most Slavic peasants still lived in communes without lords, though there were some lord and serf arrangements.
The advance of a capitalistic, market economy was slow but relentless. In the thirteenth century, seigneurs in France had commuted services in the making of cloth, scythes, spears, and the like, into money payments. Manufacturing had moved to the towns where manufacture of woolen cloth and clothing became the leading industry. Land was parcelled out for crop shares and specialized into the cultivation of indigo for dying cloth, and into the cultivation of grapes.
There were other pervasive institutional changes, but they varied from place to place. Seigneurial justice was decentralized in France, and centralized under the monarch in England and Germany; but relations between lords, great lords, and the king were complex and changing everywhere.
Technological advance was an important factor in these institutional changes. Mechanical power, animal, wind, and water power, had been applied to mills for doing laundry, to tanning hides, sawing wood, casting iron, mashing pulp for paper making, and to operating fullers' vats, bellows for blast furnaces, and hydraulic hammers in foundries. Indeed, the new clearings and cuttings for fuel for forges depleted forests and significantly reduced the surplus of arable land. By the fourteenth century, the lathe, the brace and bit, and the spinning wheel were in general use.
With these changes the High Middle Ages passed, except in Russia. Russia had no High Middle Ages. During Europe's High Middle Ages, Russia was devastated by the invasion of Mongol Hordes.
The fourteenth century in Europe was marked by calamities, typified by the Black Death, 1347--1349, the Hundred Years War between France and England, and the War of the Roses in England. Fields and villages, manors and towns were abandoned due to the ravages of disease and war, not to be reclaimed, in some cases, until the sixteenth century.
Feudalism continued to evolve, in part because of the calamities, in part as a result of further technical advance. The vestiges of fourteenth century depopulation worked in favour of the peasant, making it easier for him to purchase the status of a sokeman, and to simplify, monetize, and ease his feudal obligations. Cannon, introduced alongside the long bow, revolutionized warfare. Cannon were first manufactured in Europe in 1326. The first mobile cannon appeared in the Hussite Wars of 1419--1434. After some technical improvement, artillery became decisive in the wars of the sixteenth century. With cannon the means of attack was superior to the means of defence (the feudal castle), and decentralized political power became militarily obsolete. technical advance in navigation was sufficient for, if not the cause of, the commercial explosion of the sixteenth century.
In different ways in different countries, feudal obligations homogenized under a monarchy. Royal justice remained strong in fifteenth century England, except for certain matters that had fallen to local courts appointed or presided over by local lords. This was enough to make the difference. Judging in their own favour over a century and a half, these courts eliminated perpetual inheritance of tenures. In France, where the monarchy intervened on behalf of the peasants, and appointed provincial Intendants to enforce its regulations, court decisions reversed the English result. By 1500 perpetual inheritance was entrenched in France. This difference was critical in determining the ease with which agricultural could be adjusted to market forces.
Russia was another case altogether. Muscovy freed itself from the `Tartar Yoke' only in 1480, and the `Golden Horde' continued to control Asian and much of east European Russia until 1502. So, Russian feudalism took shape in the subsequent process of Russian military expansion. The nobility's lands were extended, and serf lands were reduced to hereditary plots or to commons on large estates which the serfs worked under feudal obligations.
Russian expansion east, unlike European expansion west, took place on land. It reached the Pacific coast by 1700, a century and a half after the Dutch monopolized the trade of Java, about the time that Lasalle and Laverendre opened exploitation of the central plains of North America. It was not that the Russian expansion was unaffected by commercial operations of the type that characterized colonial expansion in the West. It was a different, deepening feudalism that organized the advance.
In western Europe, the right of all individuals to own and alienate property in land, a right that had been emerging for centuries, was substantially secured in England by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and in France by the Revolution of 1791.
Toward the end of the High Middle Ages, perhaps as a final product of the rise of the universities and the advance of learning and the arts in that period, a new attitude emerged in literature and the arts. There was a rebirth of classical Greek and Roman approaches to science and philosophy. This rebirth or Renaissance, as it has been called, was evident in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly in the commercial city states of Florence and Venice. It moved north into continental Europe before the discovery of the New World. It was associated with the invention of the printing press and the appearance of the Gutenberg, vernacular bible in 1450, and was not separable from the Protestant Reformation that spread through Europe and affected England in the sixteenth century. The Renaissance and the Reformation reflected and generated a new information environment in which new attitudes to science and the conduct of business could find acceptance. Custom surrendered to rational enquiry and to rational organization. The change ushered in the Modern Period of European history.
Whatever the sequence of cause and effect, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the capitalization of agriculture, colonization of America, and the advance of international commerce occurred at the same time. Henry VIII's dates correspond to Martin Luther's, 1491--1547 and 1483--1546. Henry VIII was followed by the Elizabethan era and the contribution of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was still writing when Catholic Charles I began his quarrels with his Protestant Parliaments, leading to the civil wars of 1642--1645. Charles was beheaded in 1649. The Cromwellian Protectorate followed, between 1653 and 1658, before another restoration of the monarchy, leading to another revolution on the part of the landed nobles, the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Given this cultural, religious, and political turmoil, it is hardly surprising that England's mercantilist regulations were not assiduously enforced in her American colonies, so that when they were enforced, there were violent objections from the colonists.
In France the decline of feudalism took a different turn. The seventeenth century brought French colonial expansion in America, and some expansion of agriculture in France. Bourgeois landowners drained marshlands and exploited the possibilities of new crops introduced from America, particularly maize and potatoes. Both of these vegetables facilitated a more intensive exploitation of land through crop rotation, particularly in areas supplying markets in growing cities. But feudal arrangements were more robust in France. Serfdom had passed from being a quality of a class of peasants, to a quality of a class of land, as elsewhere, but {\itl mainmorte\/} and {\itl formariage\/}, the lords rights in peasant inheritance, remained. Given the increasing presence of market oriented land owners, peasants more frequently disposed of these obligations through purchase from indebted or improving owners. The non-noble seigneur, who worked the land for profit and remained on the site for that purpose, was more in evidence. Traditional dues, having been commuted to fixed money amounts, lost their real value as imported precious metals and debasements inflated prices beyond historic precedent. Traditional seigneurs fell into disarray in the late sixteenth century, and arriviste bourgeois penetrated their ranks en masse. Capitalist organization was evident in the founding of companies to speculate in land reclamation, and peasants, as well as seigneurs, tumbled through the cycle of land accumulation, debt and liquidation.
The difference lay in the success of the monarchy in France, and the relative success of feudalism itself. Orderly expansion of industry in mercantilist France was, in part, a consequence of the strength of the monarchy and of the rationality with which mercantilist ministers organized the economy. The strength of the monarchy carried over into the courts where peasant's feudal rights were protected against encroaching seigneurs. Ironically, the good order and success of mercantilism in France preserved feudal relations, defending peasants from market exploitation, and inhibiting the advance of capitalistic agriculture. Colonization of New France, coming in the most successful period of French mercantilism, was characterized by a robust feudal system of land tenure.
In the eighteenth century, in England, a marked increase in the pace of advance constituted what has come to be seen as an agricultural revolution. It was founded on a more intensive use of land through the substitution of crop rotation for fallowing. It was successful because it involved the use of `artificial' legume fodders with two useful qualities: they replaced the fertility of the soil drained by traditional cereals, and they provided additional fodder for cattle. This effectively broke the dung-fodder cycle, providing more fertilizer to improve soil fertility, which, in turn, produced even more fodder, cattle, and fertilizer. There were other improvements, but this was the foundation of the surplus in agriculture that fed the industrial revolution in late eighteenth century England. The way had been prepared by the evolution of feudalistic into capitalistic agriculture, by an infusion of the commercial spirit, and by prior elaboration of market arrangements. Over centuries, property rights in land had evolved towards individual and absolute tenure. Enclosure had been enforced against common use, and land had been parcelled in sufficiently large units to accommodate the demand for food stuffs in industrial towns. In England, where defeudalization had gone furthest, the agricultural revolution first occurred. Thereafter, while England turned to manufacturing, it occurred in France.
Where feudalism was more deeply entrenched, production of a surplus in agriculture was inhibited. Economic growth and development had a different and slower path. This was true in the comparative experience of England and France. It was universally true, accounting for the relative backwardness of Russia. Why this was the case is evident in eighteenth century complaints against the details of the feudal system in France.
In 1775, the Abbot of Luxeuil, in an attempt to improve the condition of serfs on monastery lands, made the following appeal,
In the thirty years during which the petitioner has ruled over this abbey, he has seen nothing but heavy, indolent, discouraged and dejected men, land left uncultivated, culture absolutely neglected, no commerce, no emulation, and general apathy mainmorte, then, is at once destructive of agriculture, of manufactures, and of commerce; it is revolting to humanity; it annihilates human existence. By reducing a part of His Majesty's subjects to a kind of insupportable slavery in a free kingdom, it humiliates and crushes them, and renders them, to some extent, incapable of action; it is an obstacle to marriage and tends to depopulation, either because those who languish under its yoke refuse to reproduce their slavish race, or by reason of the emigration of inhabitants, fatigued by the servitude under which they groan; in short, mainmorte may be regarded as a scourge to the State. The seigneurs themselves, in the districts where this servitude still exists, lose much more by the lack of culture of the lands of their estates than they gain by the escheats, reversions and other casual dues attached to the right of mainmorte; the inheritances are despoiled; the mainmortables, who have nothing but a miserable life to regret and nothing to lose, give themselves up to all kinds of excesses; mainmorte is a source, as abundant as it is continual, of lawsuits and contests, as burdensome, expensive and ruinous for the seigneurs as for their subjects. (Sydney, 1921, pp.~8--9.).
Feudal arrangements in France as elsewhere, were subject to local variations. Decentralization was the nature of the feudal system. In general, however, mainmorte was the same everywhere. It was the seigneur's claim against the right of inheritance on the part of the serf. The serf and those of his descendants who were of age, in the usual case, could not be put off the land; but neither could they sell the land for any price, and often the serf had to submit to the regulation of marriage of his children to ensure that the seigneur's right of inheritance would not be prejudiced.
By the eighteenth century many feudal dues had been transmuted into money payments, but often transmutation was partial, taking place only on some lands or in some seasons. In consequence, there were not only direct costs associated with feudalism, there were costs consequent upon the confusion of arrangements. In the beginning a principal duty of the serf was to work the seigneur's land at certain times and in specified ways. In time, these corvees were transmuted into money rents or payments in kind called cens or censives. When payment was in kind it was called terrage or champart. In the usual case, a serf possessor of land subject to terrage could not change the method of cultivation or the crop without the seigneur's permission, could not sell or use the land as a basis for a loan, and could not leave it uncultivated for a specified period of time, on penalty of it reverting to full possession by the seigneur. Little room was left to the improving serf. Further, the harder the peasant worked and the more he produced, the larger was the share of his harvest claimed by the seigneur.
In petitioning against the right of terrage, the inhabitants of Saint-Maurice-sur-fessard, in the Orleans, stated,
The levying of this charge is burdensome, since it compels the vassal to deliver the product to the seigneur; he must even carry it to him before removing what remains in his fields, and he cannot do so till the lord or his agent has come to count it on the spot. But the person charged with the collection of this due has often to oversee five or six parishes, or even more, and he cannot be everywhere at once; the waiting peasant dare not remove his own grain, because he runs the risk of having as many suits brought against him as there are parcels of land subject to this right. A heavy rain falls, the grain germinates, the straw rots; this misfortune happens only too frequently and totally discourages the cultivator, so that he takes but little account of land which owes champart. He neglects to enrich it, obtains scarcely anything from it, and spends all his labour on soil which is exempt (Sydney, 1921, pp.~13--14.).
The success of agriculture, its ability to produce a surplus for investment, depended on the elimination of feudal institutions. This was achieved almost two centuries after settlement began in French and British American colonies. The French Revolution followed hard upon the American Revolution, and both entailed formal abolition of feudal tenure. The difference was that significantly greater informal erosion had occurred in England and New England, than had occurred in New France.
If European economic systems advanced on the basis of a surplus in agriculture, and European economic systems were transferred to America, then European economic systems in America advanced with substantial reliance on a surplus in agriculture. However important the sailing ship in the discovery of the New World, and however important the commerce carried on in sailing ships after the discovery, without success in agriculture the economic activity that followed discovery would not have had the the level, intensity, and character that it had.
Further, if the rate of advance of European economic systems and their different growth paths were an immediate and evident consequence of the extent to which feudal arrangements in agriculture had eroded, then variations in the extent to which feudal arrangements had eroded in the economic systems transferred to America made a difference in the rate of advance of the different North American colonies.
The history of the demise of feudalism in Europe is also the history of the demise of feudalism in America. It is not a preliminaryto the economic history of Canada. From 1600 to 1850, it is the economic history of Canada. It is the history of the implanting of different institutions and different growth paths in different parts of what came to be Canada. It is, then, an important part of the the history of very long run economic factors in the disintegration Canada.
All of this is independent of any theory of why capitalism emerged, why it emerged where it emerged, or what sequence of events was entailed. Institutional arrangements associated with capitalism or designated as capitalist, accompanied more rapid growth and development, as a matter of record. The deeper the feudal structure, the slower the rate of growth, however that may be explained. History itself establishes the presence of substantial, very long run disintegrating factors in the growth and development of the Canadian economy.
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