The New Penguin History of the World (106 page)

Early industrial areas grew by accretion, not only around the centres of established European manufactures (such as textiles or brewing) closely related to agriculture but in the countryside. This long continued to be true. Old trades created concentrations of supporting industry. Antwerp had been the great port of entry to Europe for English cloth; as a result, finishing and dyeing establishments appeared there to work up further the commodities flowing through the port. Meanwhile, in the English countryside, wool merchants shaped the early pattern of industrial growth by ‘putting out’ to peasant spinners and weavers the raw materials they needed. The presence of minerals was another locating factor; mining and metallurgy were the most important industrial activities independent of agriculture and were widely dispersed. But industries could stagnate or even, sometimes, collapse. This seems to have happened to Italy. Its medieval industrial pre-eminence disappeared in the sixteenth century while that of the Flemish Low Countries and western and southern Germany – the old Carolingian heartland – lasted another century or so until it began to be clear that England, the Dutch Netherlands and Sweden were the new manufacturing leaders. In the eighteenth century Russia’s extractive industries would add her to the list of industrial countries. By then, too, other factors were beginning to enter the equation; organized science was being brought to bear on industrial techniques and state policy was shaping industry both consciously and unconsciously.

The long-term picture of overall expansion and growth obviously requires much qualification. Dramatic fluctuations could easily occur even in the nineteenth century, when a bad harvest could lead to runs on banks and a contraction of demand for manufactured goods big enough to be called a slump. This reflected the growing development and integration of the economy. It could cause new forms of distress. Not long after 1500, for example, it began to be noticed that prices were rising with unprecedented speed. Locally this trend was sometimes very sharp indeed, doubling costs in a year. Though nothing like this rate was maintained anywhere
for long the general effect seems to have been a roughly fourfold rise in European prices in a century. Given twentieth-century inflation, this does not seem very shocking, but it was quite novel and had great and grave repercussions. Some property-owners benefited and some suffered. Some landowners reacted by putting up rents and increasing as much as possible the yields from their feudal dues. Some had to sell out. In this sense, inflation made for social mobility, as it often does. Among the poor, the effects were usually harsh, for the price of agricultural produce shot up and money wages did not keep pace. Real wages therefore fell. This was sometimes made worse by local factors, too. In England, for example, high wool prices tempted landlords to enclose common land and thus remove it from common use in order to put sheep on it. The wretched peasant grazier starved and, thus, as one famous contemporary comment put it, ‘sheep ate men’. Everywhere in the central third of the century there were popular revolts and a running disorder which reveal both the incomprehensibility and the severity of what was going on. Everywhere it was the extremes of society which felt the pinch of inflation most sharply; to the poor it brought starvation while kings were pinched because they had to spend more than anyone else.

Much ink has been spent by historians on explaining this century-long price rise. They no longer feel satisfied with the explanation first put forward by contemporary observers, that the essential cause was a new supply of bullion which followed the opening of the New World mines by the Spanish; inflation was well under way before American bullion began to arrive in any significant quantity, even if gold later aggravated things. Probably the fundamental pressure always came from a population whose numbers were increasing when big advances in productivity still lay in the future. The rise in prices continued until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Then it began occasionally even to show signs of falling until a slower increase was resumed around 1700.

In our own day we need no reminders that social change can quickly follow economic change. We have little belief in the immutability of social forms and institutions. Three hundred years ago, many men and women believed them to be virtually God-given and the result was that although social changes took place in the aftermath of inflation (and, it must be said, for many other reasons) they were muffled and masked by the persistence of old forms. Superficially and nominally much of European society remained unchanged between 1500 and 1800 or thereabouts. Yet the economic realities underlying it changed a great deal. Appearances were deceptive.

Rural life had already begun to show this in some countries before 1500. As agriculture became more and more a matter of business (though by no
means only because of that), traditional rural society had to change. Forms were usually preserved, and the results were more and more incongruous. Although feudal lordship still existed in France in the 1780s it was by then less a social reality than an economic device. The ‘seigneur’ might never see his tenants, might not be of noble blood, and might draw nothing from his lordship except sums of money which represented his claims on his tenants’ labour, time and produce. Further east, the feudal relationship remained more of a reality. This in part reflected an alliance of rulers and nobles to take advantage of the new market for grain and timber in the growing population of western and southern Europe. They tied peasants to the land and exacted heavier and heavier labour services. In Russia serfdom became the very basis of society.

In England, on the other hand, even the commercialized ‘feudalism’ which existed in France had gone long before 1800, and noble status conferred no legal privilege beyond the rights of peers to be summoned to a parliament (their other legal distinction was that like most of the other subjects of King George III, they could not vote in the election of a Member of Parliament). The English nobility was tiny; even after its reinforcement by Scottish peers, the House of Lords at the end of the eighteenth century had fewer than two hundred hereditary members, whose legal status could only be transmitted to a single successor. In Great Britain there was no large class of noble men and women, all enjoying extensive legal privileges separating them from the rest of the population, such as there was almost universally elsewhere in Europe. In France there were perhaps a quarter of a million nobles on the eve of the Revolution. All had important legal and formal rights; the corresponding legal order in England could comfortably have been assembled in the hall of an Oxford college and would have had rights correspondingly less impressive.

On the other hand, the wealth and social influence of English landowners was immense. Below the peerage stretched the ill-defined class of English gentlemen, linked at the top to the peers’ families and disappearing at the other end into the ranks of prosperous farmers and merchants who were eminently respectable but not ‘gentlefolk’. Its permeability was of enormous value in promoting cohesion and mobility. Gentlemanly status could be approached by enrichment, by professional distinction, or by personal merit. It was essentially a matter of a shared code of behaviour, still reflecting the aristocratic concept of honour, but one civilized by the purging away of its exclusiveness, its gothicisms and its legal supports. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the idea of the gentleman became one of the formative cultural influences of English history.

In fact, ruling hierarchies differed from country to country. Contrasts
could be drawn right across Europe. There would be nothing tidy about the result. None the less, a broad tendency towards social change which strained old forms is observable in many countries by 1700. In the most advanced countries it brought new ideas about what constituted status and how it should be recognized. Though not complete, there was a shift from personal ties to market relationships as a way of defining people’s rights and expectations, and a shift from a corporate vision of society to an individualist one. This was most notable in the United Provinces, the republic which emerged in the Dutch Netherlands during this era. It was in effect ruled by merchants, particularly those of Amsterdam, the centre of Holland, its richest province. Here the landed nobility had never counted for as much as the mercantile and urban oligarchs.

Nowhere else in Europe had social change gone as far by 1789 as in Great Britain and the United Provinces. Elsewhere questioning of traditional status had barely begun. Figaro, the valet-hero of a notably successful eighteenth-century French comedy, jibed that his aristocratic master had done nothing to deserve his privileges beyond giving himself the trouble to be born. This was recognized at the time as a dangerous and subversive idea, but hardly caused much alarm. Europe was still soaked in the assumptions of aristocracy (and was to be for a long time even after 1800). Degrees of exclusiveness varied, but the distinction between noble and non-noble remained crucial. Though alarmed aristocrats accused them of doing so, kings would nowhere ally with commoners against them, even in the last resort. Kings were aristocrats, too; it was their trade, one of them said. Only the coming of a great revolution in France changed things much and then hardly at all outside that country before the end of the century. As the nineteenth century began, it looked as if most Europeans still respected noble blood. All that had changed was that not so many people still automatically thought it was a distinction which ought to be reflected in laws.

Just as some men began to feel that to describe society in terms of orders, with legally distinct rights and obligations, no longer expressed its reality, so also a few of them were beginning to feel less sure that religion upheld a particular social hierarchy. It was still for a long time possible to believe that

The rich man in his castle,
the poor man at his gate,
God made them, high and lowly,
and ordered their estate

as an Ulsterwoman put in the nineteenth century, but this was not quite the same thing as saying that a fixed unchanging order was the expression
of God’s will. Even by 1800 a few people were beginning to think God rather liked the rich man to show the wisdom of God’s way by having made his own way in the world rather than by inheriting his father’s place. ‘Government is a contrivance of human wisdom for the satisfaction of human wants,’ said an eighteenth-century Irishman, and he was a conservative, too. A broad utilitarianism was coming to be the way more and more people assessed institutions in advanced countries, social institutions among them.

The old formal hierarchies were under most pressure where strain was imposed upon them by economic change – increasing mobility, the growth of towns, the rise of a market economy, the appearance of new commercial opportunities – but also by the spread of literacy and social awareness. Broadly speaking, three situations can be distinguished. In the East, in Russia, and almost to the same extent in Poland or east Prussia and Hungary, agrarian society was still so little disturbed by new developments that the traditional social pattern was not only intact but all but unchallenged at the end of the eighteenth century. In these landlocked countries, safe from the threats to the existing order implicit in the commercial development of maritime Europe, the traditional ruling classes not only retained their position but had often showed that they could actually enlarge their privileges. In a second group of countries, there was enough of a clash between the economic and social worlds which were coming into being and the existing order to provoke demands for change. When political circumstances permitted its resolution, these would demand satisfaction, though they could be contained for a time. France was a noisy example, but in some of the German states, Belgium and parts of Italy there were signs of the same sort of strain. The third group of countries were those relatively more open societies, such as England, the Netherlands and, across the sea, British North America, where the formal distinctions of society already meant less by comparison with wealth (or even talent), where legal rights were widely diffused, economic opportunity was felt to be widespread, and wage-dependency was very marked. Even in the sixteenth century, English society seems much more fluid than that of continental countries and, indeed, when the North Americans came to give themselves a new constitution in the eighteenth century they forbade the conferring of hereditary titles. In these countries individualism had a scope almost untrammelled by law, whatever the real restraints of custom and opportunity.

It is only too easy in a general account such as this to be overprecise, over-definite. Even the suggested rough tripartite division blurs too much. There were startling contrasts within societies which we might misinterpret if we think of them as homogeneous. In the advanced countries there was
still much that we should find strange, even antediluvian. The towns of England, France and Germany were for the most part little Barchesters, wrapped in a comfortable provincialism, lorded over by narrow merchant oligarchies, successful guildsmen or cathedral chapters. Yet Chartres, contentedly rooted in its medieval countryside and medieval ways, its eighteenth-century population still the same size as five hundred years earlier, was part of the same country as Nantes or Bordeaux, thriving, bustling ports which were only two of several making up the dynamic sector of the French economy. Even the nineteenth century would find its immediate forebears unprogressive; far be it from us, therefore, to predicate the existence of a mature and clearly defined individualist and capitalist society, wholly conscious of itself as such in any European country. What marked the countries we might call ‘advanced’ was a tendency to move further and faster in that direction than the great majority of the rest of the world.