The Transformation of the World (48 page)

What did this mean for social history, in Europe, for example? Although the relative proportions of the three sectors—(a) agriculture and fisheries, (b) industry and mechanized mining, and (c) services—gradually changed in Europe, employment in the primary sector remained for a long time the highest in absolute terms. In 1910 the numbers working in agriculture were below the level of 1870 only in Britain, Belgium, Denmark, and Switzerland (plus Ireland, for altogether special reasons). At some point the share of those employed in agriculture fell below 50 percent in Europe: it happened before 1750 in England, between 1850 and 1880 almost everywhere in western and northern Europe, and only after 1900 in Italy, Portugal, and Spain.
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The typical cause was more the emigration of rural laborers to urban industrial centers than a reduction in the number of family farms. All societies of Europe with the exception of England (much less Wales and Scotland) retained a strongly agrarian character throughout the nineteenth century. And even in England, with its towering (and tiny) landowning aristocracy, cultural ideals of a preindustrial country life continued to be dominant. The great contraction of agriculture, together with the social and cultural marginalization of the world of the peasantry, began in continental Europe after 1945 and is only today reaching a climax in countries such as China.

Statistically, then, the global food situation improved spectacularly between 1800 or 1850 and 1913. Engel's Law (so named after the Prussian statistician Ernst Engel), which is one of the few empirically rock-solid laws in social science, states that since the share spent on food decreases as total income increases, the rich are not the only ones able to profit from a growth in per capita production. Attempts have been made to demonstrate this by reference to an “agricultural revolution.”
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It is a concept about which there has long been intense debate, especially in relation to the economic history of England—that is, to the prehistory of the Industrial Revolution. The classic question is whether an “agricultural revolution” really did precede the Industrial Revolution and was perhaps even its necessary prerequisite. Suffice to recall a simple rule: “For industrialization to occur, it had to be possible to produce more food with fewer people.”
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There is no need to pronounce on the matter here. The relative proportions are the main interest for global history, and about those it is possible to say the following.

First
, historians of England or Europe define agricultural revolution in general as the beginning of a long and steady increase in agricultural efficiency, measured both by rising yields per hectare (resulting in Europe mainly from new systems of crop rotation and preindustrial technological innovations)
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and by a growth of labor productivity caused by mechanization and so-called economies of scale. Similar phenomena have already been recorded in the fourteenth-century Netherlands. The true agricultural revolution, however, took place in England in the late eighteenth century and continued in the first half of the nineteenth.
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By 1800 an English rural laborer was producing twice as much as a Russian, and wheat output per hectare in England and the Netherlands was more than twice as high as almost anywhere else in the world. England was able to become a leading grain exporter to the Continent over the course of the eighteenth century, before its fast-growing population turned it into an even larger net importer and, beginning with the first Corn Law of 1815, made grain tariffs a central bone of contention in British politics.
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Second
, England's special developmental path does not allow the conclusion that European or “Western” agriculture was unambiguously leading the world at the end of the eighteenth century. In large parts of Europe, agriculture was no more able to sustain the local population than in Indian, Chinese, Japanese, or Javanese regions of intensive farming. It was a long time before even the more dynamic European regions clearly benefited from advances in mechanization. The age-old sickle still cut 90 percent of the wheat harvest in southern England in 1790, being only slowly replaced by the scythe; and around 1900, when the sheaf-binding harvester was the leading technology in England, the scythe was still reaping most of the cereals on the Continent.
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Steam-powered machines threshed most of the harvest from the 1880s in England, but only much later elsewhere. In 1892 the first tractor went into batch production in the United States, though no more than one thousand were in use in 1914 (one million by 1930). In 1950 horses still accounted for 85 percent of traction in European
agriculture.
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Artificial fertilizer, first used on a large scale in Germany and the Netherlands, came to be taken for granted all over Europe only in the 1930s, a full century after Justus von Liebig's trailblazing discoveries. Full mechanization and rationalization of agriculture was a
twentieth
-century development also in Europe and the United States, and relics of premodern ways of using the soil still lingered there. From Scandinavia to southern Italy, many farmers practiced technologically simple forms of subsistence agriculture, sometimes even slashand-burn techniques as in Africa. Wherever, as around the Mediterranean, the use of horses came up against a lack of pasture and winter fodder, the energetic input into agricultural production faced narrow constraints. And also in Europe there were cases of agricultural “decay.” Spanish agriculture had never recovered from the fact that the agrarian expertise of the Jews and Muslims (the last of whom were expelled in 1609) had been treated with contempt and their irrigation systems allowed to fall into disrepair.
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Third
, labor-intensive rice cultivation on irrigated fields in tropical and subtropical latitudes had for millennia been among the most productive forms of agriculture. It too acquired its finished shape in a long process, which came to an end only in twelfth-century southern China: in the words of Fernand Braudel, “the most important event in the history of mankind in the Far East.”
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Since a transcendence of the given limits of agriculture is possible only at the highest “traditional” level, some regions of Asia were candidates for such a leap forward. Agricultural revolution presupposes a high population density, a functioning market system, reasonably free labor, and a high level and wide dissemination of know-how. These conditions were present also in parts of southern and central China in the mid-eighteenth century. Other factors, however, were working against an independent Chinese or Asiatic agricultural revolution: paddy cultivation was able to absorb ever increasing labor inputs on a given area; there were scarcely any reserves of land that could be opened up, given proper incentives; the ecological costs of intensive agriculture were more plainly visible in China (or Japan and India) than in Europe; alternative job opportunities were lacking outside the villages; absentee landowners living in the cities had few motives to improve production on their leased-out lands; and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was only limited access to industrially produced fertilizer. In northern China, where the ecological conditions were less favorable than in the south, and where producers tended to prefer millet and wheat over rice, the extreme parcelization of landownership and minimal “economies of scale” presented major additional difficulties.
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Large estates or farms serve no purpose in the cultivation of rice: centralized management brings little benefit; and power-driven machinery—apart from small diesel and electric pumps, which first began to raise productivity in Japan in the 1910s—has very limited application in rice fields or tea gardens.
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There is also little scope for soil-preserving crop rotation, since terraced pools can scarcely be used for anything other than rice and carp.

All this means that it would be unrealistic and inappropriate to use the Dutch-English “agricultural revolution” as a yardstick for an ecologically and socially quite different form of agriculture. In various parts of Asia at various times, that model reached a point at which it became difficult to feed an often-growing population. When that critical point was reached, however, also depended on
external
circumstances. Paddy cultivation in southern China, for instance, was part of a wider production complex, which included fish farming, tea growing, and silkworm breeding. From the early eighteenth century on, tea and silk were highly dependent upon the export trade, and the collapse of China's foreign markets (first for tea, then for silk) when Indian and Japanese competition emerged in the late nineteenth century was a decisive factor in the acute crisis of Chinese agriculture that many Western observers described in the 1920s and 1930s.

Fourth
, the model of the English agricultural revolution did not spread through the West in the same way as the industrial mode of production, which could find a niche in the most diverse contexts. Agriculture is more bound up than industry with particular ecological conditions and much more tied to traditional social structures that are not easy to overcome. Certainly agricultural performance displayed wide variations. Only a few countries in continental Europe made spectacular gains in crop yield and productivity—by Germany first of all (where grain yields per hectare rose by 27 percent in the first half of the nineteenth century
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), then by Denmark, the Netherlands, and Austria-Hungary, but scarcely at all by France, the largest agrarian economy of Western Europe. The absolute figures for output show a similar pattern: the grain harvest grew between 1845 and 1914 by a factor of 3.7 in Germany but only 1.2 in France.
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One peculiarity of Europe and North America in comparison with Asia and large parts of Africa is the mixed economy of agriculture and livestock farming. In nineteenth-century Asia the distance between agriculture and (often nomadic) livestock breeding was still greater than in Europe—an important point, given that Europe's better integration of the two helped it to attain especially high productivity increases.
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A country like Denmark managed to achieve its own quite distinctive agricultural revolution by specializing in animal farming. Butter, cheese, and bacon can also be a road to riches.

Fifth
, the “pure” model of agricultural revolution, with the intensification of production at its core, assumes that improved performance is due primarily to increases in labor productivity and only secondarily to the expansion of arable land. In England and Wales, the acreage of farmland and pasture increased by nearly 50 percent between 1700 and 1800, but only by an insignificant amount in the following hundred years.
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The great gains of the nineteenth century came rather from the
extensive
growth of production in frontier areas of the Tsarist Empire, the United States, Argentina, and Canada, as well as in India.
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This expanding production of food staples had consequences that intruded far into political history. Two are particularly worth mentioning here. On the one hand, the adversaries of the Central Powers gained a decisive advantage in the First
World War from their ability to mobilize the far superior agricultural potential of North America and Australasia.
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A lack of global political judgment led German leaders of the time to overlook this key factor.

On the other hand, agriculture had already become a central field of political conflict in a number of countries. This had only partly to do—as it has long been claimed for Germany—with the preponderance of authoritarian aristocratic elites, since the problem was similar in countries like the United States or the Netherlands where such elites were not a significant feature. By the turn of the century at the latest (gradually after the Emancipation of 1861 in the case of Russia), the intensive
and
extensive advances of agriculture had led on both sides of the Atlantic to the rise of an agrarian capitalism that employed wage labor and was highly export oriented. The crisis of world agriculture that began in 1873 and lasted for two decades was exemplified by the falling prices for agricultural goods and the less sharply falling, or even slightly rising, wages for farm laborers in line with pay increases in the cities. In this situation, large estates were often less capable of survival than smaller production units consisting essentially of members of one family. As the landowners' income fell, they asserted their interests ever more vociferously within the political system by calling, above all, for protective tariffs on agricultural imports—a campaign that was especially successful in Germany but less so in Britain or the United States. The prominence of agrarian issues in public debate, and of agrarianromantic themes in cultural life, concealed the slow decline in the weight of the rural sector in several growing national economies of the West.
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Elsewhere, in countries that had not seen the development of agrarian capitalism and where rural interests were represented in the political system by urban rentiers remote from village life, agrarian issues remained more or less out of sight. This was the case in the Ottoman Empire and Japan. But the most surprising silence was in the world's largest peasant country: China. It is a striking fact that in the whole discussion on reform, which began after the end of the Taiping Revolution in 1864 and grew more intense after the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, there was almost never any talk of the peasantry. China's public discussion was blind to one of its most pressing problems.

8 Poverty and Wealth

Poverty and Modernity

With the exception of the kind of utopian visions that exist in many civilizations, people before the nineteenth century never doubted that poverty was part of the natural, divinely ordained scheme of things. Classical political economy from Thomas Robert Malthus to John Stuart Mill, pessimistic in its basic mood, was not confident that modern capitalism was bringing a qualitative rise in productivity, or that the “uplifting” of the poor was possible except as the result of
individual effort. But there was also a more optimistic school of thought that did not take poverty for granted and insisted that it could be overcome. The pioneers were two late Enlightenment thinkers: Tom Paine and the Marquis de Condorcet. Writing independently of each other in the 1790s, both formulated the idea that poverty was unacceptable in the modern world; that it should not be alleviated with alms but conquered through redistribution and development of the productive forces; and that society should help those who were unable to help themselves. Ever since Paine and Condorcet, two revolutionaries eventually killed or forgotten by their revolutions, the Western world has in principle regarded poverty as a scandal.
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