The third factor of production consists of natural resources. The term is used to mean land as well as other resources. Today it is fashionable to refer to these resources as nonreproducible capital in order to emphasize the fact that when, for example, a coal deposit is exhausted, it is beyond human power to reconstitute it. And, if it is true that reclamation can increase the quantity of available arable land, it is also true that the amount of land on the earth is finite.
The storage of foodstuffs. The conditions which existed in preindustrial Europe drove families to keep as large a reserve of foodstuffs as possible. The reserves were stored in attics and roofs with special openings for ventilation. This picture shows the roof of a house in Strasbourg, France. Commission Régionale d’Inventaire d’Alsace, Strasbourg.
In preindustrial Europe, the natural resource par excellence was land. In Malthus’s and Ricardo’s time, land was still the factor which, in the last analysis, “set limits to population growth and determined the distribution of the population.”78 As has been rightly observed:
It is natural to ascribe a large importance to the per capita supply of land in a dominantly agricultural society where levels of technology are low and little capital is employed. Agricultural techniques may improve or nonagricultural pursuits develop, but too slowly to offset the depressive effect of a falling supply of land per head when the population rises…. The ratio of cultivable land to population has been the chief determinant of the level of real income of pre-industrial societies…. It is tempting to relate the great secular fluctuations [of real wages] of the first five and a half centuries primarily to changes in the ratio of population to land.79
By “land,” one meant, above all, arable land. The resources of the subsoil, however, were not ignored.
Among the natural resources exploited in Europe prior to the eighteenth century, of particular importance were mineral deposits of silver, mercury, alum, tin, sulfur, copper, and iron. Pitcoal was already in use in the Middle Ages, but medieval people were very suspicious of this type of fuel, vaguely but strongly feeling that its use “poisoned the air.” Albeit with overtones of superstition, medieval people were more conscious of possible pollution damage than people at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Forests must be considered separately. From a theoretical point of view, forests cannot be treated as nonproducible capital because trees can be, and are, planted by man; forests are, therefore, reproducible capital. In fact, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, trees were planted and attention was paid to the problem of forest preservation. In mountain districts, the felling of trees in communal woods was regulated, from an early date, by precise rules. In 1281, the English Cistercians established enclosures of five years to protect the seedlings in their forests. In the same period the Statutes of the Commune of Montaguloto dell’Ardinghesea, in the district of Siena, laid down that every member of the commune inheriting a hide had to plant ten trees a year. In France from the end of the thirteenth century public concern about the fate of the forests gave rise to a series of royal as well as local provisions. In 1346 King Philip IV issued an ordinance regulating the cutting of trees and the consumption of timber. In 1669 the great minister Colbert inspired the formulation of an organic law for the protection of the forests. In the Hapsburg territories, Emperor Ferdinand I issued a general ordinance on the matter of forestry in 1557 and instituted the position of Königlich-Kaiserlich Förstmeister (Royal and Imperial Master of the Forests) for all hereditary territories of the Crown. One perceives the same kind of concern at the level of the local agricultural units. In the seventeenth-century accounts of the Medicean farm of Cafaggioli, it is clearly specified that “the trees are cut in the woods only once every ten years.” Ordinances, statutes, decrees, and individual provisions, however, did not prove very effective. When population pressure grew and/or the demand for wood increased, the knell of the forest was rung.
Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Europeans behaved toward the trees in an eminently parasitic and extremely wasteful way. The maquis of southern France, the barren lands of central Spain, are a sad testimonial to what Europeans increasingly did to their forests after the end of the tenth century. Italy exhausted her forest reserves very early, which explains the extensive use of brick and marble in Italian architecture. In Lombardy the area covered with trees was reduced to less than 9 percent of the whole rural territory by 1555.80 The forested area represented about 33 percent of the French territory around 1500 and only 25 percent around 1650; in the meantime, also, the quality of the forests had noticeably deteriorated.81 For reasons that we shall analyze below, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
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centuries England provided the worst example of massive destruction of forests. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the European forested area was reduced to the levels shown in Table 2.20.
The main bottleneck of preindustrial economies was the strictly limited supply of energy. The main sources of energy other than man’s muscular work were plants and animals, and this fact set a limit to the possible expansion of any given agricultural society. The limiting factor was again the supply of land on which plants are grown and animals bred.
Since earliest antiquity the sailing ship had enabled man to master the energy of the wind on water, and this fact accounts for the fortunes of peoples who, like the Greeks and the Phoenicians, had open access to easily navigable seas. As we shall see below, the people of medieval and Renaissance Europe learned to harness the energy of water and wind to a remarkable extent for land-based activities. The mills of European design could do the work for which other societies needed gangs of slaves, and the medieval and Renaissance men feverishly built mills wherever and whenever they could. Availability of steady winds and the presence of waterfalls and streams must thus be counted among the natural resources of preindustrial Europe. They were to the people of the time what coal, oil, and uranium are to an industrialized society. The difference is that while the energy potentially embodied in coal, oil, and uranium can be transported, the energy of wind and water has to be used on the spot. This fact dictated the location of most manufactures of preindustrial Europe: they were normally located where mills could be built.
Table 2.20 Forested area in Europe in about the middle of the nineteenth century Thousand acres
Russia 429,868
Austro-Hungary 36,546
Germany 34,977
France 21,992
Italy 12,417
Spain 11,737
ORGANIZATION
In order to result in any production, labor, capital, and natural resources must be combined in organizational forms which vary according to technology, the size of markets, and the types of production. Within any given society, at a given level of technology, and for the same kind of production, greatly different forms of organization can coexist. In a modern metropolis, for instance, the giant supermarket coexists with the little grocery shop run as a family business. The following generalizations must therefore be taken with more than a pinch of salt and allowance must be made for an infinite number of variations and exceptions.
When our millennium started, in the agricultural sector the prevalent (although, by no means the exclusive) form of organization of labor, capital, and land was represented by the manorial system. Manors were large concentrations of landed property. Within a manor the land was generally divided into several farms. One farm was very large and was managed directly by the lord himself (the demesne or mansus indominicatus). The other farms, variable in number, were unequal in size but much smaller than the central farm; they were scattered at some distance and were granted out to peasant households. The fundamental role of these satellite farms was to be subsidiary to the demesne: specifically they had to provide the lord
with periodic tributes and above all with contributions in labor (corvées) for the needs of the central farm.
Fundamentally the classical manor around the year 1000 was an economic microcosm, centrally planned, largely self-sufficient, within which both the division of labor and monetary exchange played minimal and irrelevant roles.
By the middle of the twelfth century, the manorial system was beginning to disintegrate: first in Italy, then in France, and finally in Germany and England. Italian developments seem to have been a whole century ahead of those of France and the latter almost a century ahead of those of England.
Large-scale demesne farming operations gradually ceased, the land hitherto managed directly by the lord was let to peasant farmers and the labor services due from customary holdings were commuted to monetary rents or shares of the crops. The story of western European agriculture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is completely dominated by the disintegration of the manorial organization. What emerged in its place was an extraordinary variety of organizational forms suited to local economic and geophysical conditions. In Tuscany mezzadria (sharecropping) prevailed; the Lombard plain in the fifteenth century saw the flourishing of protocapitalistic fermiers who acted as intermediaries between absentee landowners and tenant sharecroppers; in sixteenth-century England enclosing and engrossing were the prevailing trends. The detailed description of these and similar local forms of agricultural organization would be of great interest and significance but would occupy a space too large for the present book.
Let us turn to the manufacturing sector. We are accustomed today to the idea of the factory. In preindustrial Europe, however, from the beginning of our millennium to the Industrial Revolution, the prevailing technical unit of manufacturing production was and remained the workshop. The industrial factory is characterized by a high concentration of wage-labor and machines. In the workshop, the concentration of labor and capital was minimal and wage-labor was almost unknown.
The wage worker of the modern factory operates with capital not his own, is subject to a strict work discipline, and performs a series of highly specialized and routine operations which contribute to a limited part of the final product. The craftsman of the preindustrial workshop often, if not always, owned the capital or at least part of it, worked longer hours than the industrial worker, but was not subject to the hard discipline of the factory, and in some manufacturing sectors had the pleasure and pride of seeing the final product emerge from his own hands. These are the human aspects. But in order to understand the preindustrial workshop, it is necessary to delve into more technical aspects, in particular the relation between craftsmen and merchant-entrepreneurs.
In the more highly developed trades, the artisan did not normally produce for the market. With his limited financial resources, he could not undertake the risks connected with such production. He normally worked on commission. The man who gave him the orders was the “merchant,” who often advanced to the craftsman the necessary working capital (raw materials) and sometimes also lent him the fixed capital (looms, for example). The economic dimension of the craftsman’s business was thus determined by the economic dimension of the business of the merchant, who gave the work order, provided the raw materials, undertook the distribution of the products, developed the markets, determined the type of product, and exercised quality control over the activities of the worker.
The merchant produced for the market and, as one can still see in Florence and Venice, the mansions of the merchants included in their structure large rooms intended solely for the storage of the raw materials and the finished goods.
The organization of production thus revolved around these two poles, the craftsman’s workshop and the warehouse of the merchant. In the first, work was done to order. In the second, production was for the market and the merchants concerned themselves with both the supply of raw materials and the marketing of finished goods.
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These are the broad lines of the picture but there were countless gradations and exceptions, and especially in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some enterprises assumed more modern characteristics in relation to both size and organization. Mining and shipbuilding were the typical sectors in which “bigness” prevailed at an early stage. By the sixteenth century the arsenal of Venice was more the prototype of a modern factory than the appendix of the old artisan yards. In seventeenth-century England,
“in all dockyard centers and especially at Portsmouth and in the Medway towns there was a clear picture of substantial concentration of workers laboring under conditions very different from those surrounding the domestic system.”82 At Chatham in 1665, 800 workers were assembled in the local dockyard. Outside the mining and shipbuilding sectors, the units of manufacturing production usually remained small, although there were exceptions. In the 1550s Gilbert van Schoonbeke built in Antwerp an integrated system of breweries that involved the enormous investment of 271,000 florins.83 In seventeenth-century Amsterdam a manufacturer of crystal and fine glass possibly employed 80 workmen.84 In northern Italy, in the second half of the seventeenth century, some silk thread manufacturers employed as many as 150 and 200 workers.85
These large units of manufacturing production were dwarfed, however, by the giants which, in the course of the seventeenth century, emerged in the tertiary sector, and specifically in overseas trade. The Dutch East India Company employed directly some 12,000 men toward the end of the seventeenth century.
The “big ones,” whether in manufacturing or in trading sectors, formed the vanguard of modern capitalism. But no matter how important, for the volume of business they carried or for the example of organization they set, they remained exceptions. Between them and the traditional workshops there was a wide spectrum of intermediate forms such as that represented by the glass and earthenware business of Giovan Pietro moyollario in the small town of Pavia (Italy). We have an inventory of this business dated 1546. At the head of the enterprise was Giovan Pietro. One part of the business included the workers (magistri), a furnace, and the utensils (fornax et instrumenta). Another part included the sales shop and special salesmen (venditores) who divided their time between attending to customers in the shop and wandering around in the city with special baskets (cavagnolle longhe a venditoribus) to sell the product. The house of the master included the furnace and the shop, but also an office (studieto), a room for the workers (camera magistrorum) with three beds and two tables, and a room for the salesmen (camera venditorum) with one bed. That is, the workers and salesmen lived and slept in the factory, which was, at the same time, the house of the master.86
History is seldom schematic or simple: hybrid, transitional forms prevail, such as the productive unit of Giovan Pietro, which was no longer a workshop but not yet a factory.