England, France and Prussia
(T J Byres)
Many political debates in India take the agrarian transition in England as the sole/exemplary model of European transition from feudalism to capitalism. This then is sought to be applied to countries across the world to assess the extent, degree and nature of agrarian transition, both in academic literature and political activism. Studies by T.J.Byres argue that in Europe, leave alone in the Americas and Asian countries of Japan, South Korea, the agrarian transition has been extremely varied. The essay presents three examples of England, France and Germany to highlight the complexity of processes that determined and shaped the development of capitalism in agriculture: the institution of full private property rights; the nature of control exercised by the feudal lords over the state; the kind of taxation policy of the state; the demand for agricultural goods; availability of legal recourse for the tenants and peasants to challenge feudal control over their land and labour and other social institutions. While giving snapshots of processes that lasted centuries, Byres gently reminds us that the fortunes of small peasants in these three countries varies over time and the condition of small peasants in 19th century can no way be compared to that of the small peasants of today. Therefore, even though small peasants have always existed, their condition in early 20th century is different from that during the Green Revolution which again is different from that of the post-globalization period. As Byres incisively notes, how useful is it be to label the economic structure of the peasant agriculture in contemporary India ‘semi-feudal’ given that world-wide there is near monopoly of industrial capitalism?
Byres chooses three historical instances to illustrate strikingly different experiences and paths of agrarian transformation and transition to capitalism. England, the first historical example of such transformation – ‘capitalism triumphant’ – as landlord-mediated capitalism from below; Prussia, as the example of Lenin’s celebrated ‘capitalism from above’ and France as, ‘capitalism delayed’. In general, Byres notes, conflict, rather than harmony, was the principal underlying feature of the relationship between the main classes of feudal society in Europe. Agrarian revolt was as natural to the seigneurial regime as strikes are to large-scale capitalism. In making this point, Byres runs against the fairly widespread current of academic thinking that sees feudal relations as peaceful, non-antagonistic and based on settled systems of obligation and patronage.
England: Capitalism from Below
In the 13th century, the lower stratum of rich peasants held more than 30 acres, while a select few worked more than 60. The rich peasants controlled the commons, declared local custom, and maintained order through running the manorial court with its jurisdictional, punitive and land-registration functions. The existence of a sizeable market for agricultural products motivated them to accumulate more land, which they did through ‘the abandoned demesnes (land usually around the manor) of the aristocracy’, although, within the village community, there were limits upon the accumulation of land.
These new landlords expanded and reorganised their demesnes and employed professional agents who supervised them and ensured that the labour requirements of the lords were met through ‘legally sanctioned coercive powers’ to keep the flow of profits steady. Such increased demands, in turn, created discontent among the peasantry who also had other sources of discontent and social tension.
The earliest signs of resistance manifested in villeins – feudal tenants – raising disputes in royal courts about increased services demanded of them. Groups of such tenants argued that the lords could not make increased demands on them as under the law they also had rights. Therefore they argued that they were no ordinary villeins and so could not be subjected to the lord’s arbitrary will. There was also resistance over the collection of tallage2, the right to buy and sell land, payment of merchet,3 the attempt to extract labour rents fully; while there was collective refusal to perform services. Peasants kept breaking into manor houses and carry away charters, threatened to burn houses and harm the occupants physically. There were many instances of assault, and of ‘violent defiance of both private and public authority’. Then, at the end of the 1340s, these social conflicts were intensified dramatically, by the savage impact of the Black Death, which cut the population by as much as 50%. It induced additional seigneurial reaction to control tenants and labour thereby generating further class struggle between lords and peasants, partly giving rise to the English Rising of 1381. But, the 1381 rebels were defeated, and did not secure their goals.
These class struggles had their effect on rents, wages and the viability of feudal estates. Rents fell more or less universally between the early 14th and the early 16th century, making renting out of manorial land decreasingly profitable. Wages, too, rose over the long term. Even though agricultural prices had fallen by ten per cent, real wages had multiplied by nearly two-and-half times and cash wages had nearly doubled. For landlords whose demesne cultivation was increasingly done by wage labour such ‘rising wage cost’ was of great significance. Landlords increasingly let out their demesne land for money rent, often on short leases, at competitive rents4. Hilton refers to this as ‘collapsed seigneurial economy’ of the 15th century. Many of the nobility went bankrupt. By the middle of the 15th century, there was a crisis, at least partly the result of a successful class struggle waged by the peasantry. Feudalism was no longer workable but the landlord class still owned preponderance of land. But what would take its place?
In a successful bid to make a turnaround in their falling rental income, the English landlord class transformed themselves from a feudal into a capitalist landlord class. By creating a competitive tenancy market, landlords dispossessed small and customary tenants of their rented land; instead letting it out in large units at higher rents on ‘economic’ leases. Such land, in order to be made suitable for capitalist farming, whether arable or pasture, got to be enclosed, either by the landlord himself, or by the new capitalist tenant, usually the latter. Denied easement, the entrapped small peasants bitterly resisted this enclosure. However, over time such struggles, be they against high rents, to facilitate seizing of land for pasture, or against enclosure, weakened. By the end of the Tudor era the transition had been completed, the new class structure was in place, and the way was set for the stark opposition, in the countryside, of agricultural proletariat with the capitalist employer who was in alliance with a powerful capitalist landlord class. This is how the English agriculture transitioned to capitalism via a reconstituted landlord and capitalist tenant farmers classes.
In England, a feudal landlord class, rendered obsolete by class struggle waged by a united peasantry, was transformed into a progressive, capitalist landlord class. This class let its land, which was enclosed, in leases at ‘competitive’ rents. A rich peasantry (or, at least, its upper stratum), emerging from prior feudal differentiation, was metamorphosed into a class of capitalist tenant farmers able to pay ‘competitive’ rents and earn the average rate of profit. Integral to that outcome was the victory of the reconstituted landlord class over the peasantry during the 16th century, the era of transition.
France: Capitalism Delayed
The French countryside remained feudal until late 19th century with small peasants (called manouvrier, who were owners of small holdings and hired themselves out as a labourers) and middle peasants who owned horses and ploughs. Above them were differing categories of rich peasants with a tiny group of very rich peasants at ‘the very peak of the peasant social pyramid’. These was a small class of large and enterprising tenants (operating 80-150 acres) in areas of large-scale farming: either the laboureurs-fermiers or the substantial tenant-farmers; the receveurs de seigneurie (the receivers for the lords of the manors), or fermiers-receveurs (farmer receivers). In the 18th century, the indebtedness of small peasants to larger ones increased. Increasingly small peasants hired themselves out as wage-labourers and there emerged a growing category of landless day-labourers, who worked for wages. In France, however, by 1789, transition to capitalism did not occur.
Unlike in England, priests, nobles, and bourgeois in France almost never managed their properties directly; their domains were extremely fragmented and rented-out as middle-sized farms, even as individual fields. Due to the absence of enclosures a very large number of small peasant proprietors survived. Between the French landlord class and the small peasantry was a class of middlemen called fermiers-généraux5, comprising businessmen, notaries, shopkeepers. They stood between proprietor and sharecropper: leasing in sharecropping units from one or perhaps more than one proprietor and sub-letting them; perhaps assigned by the proprietor (if the proprietor were a lord) to collect seigneurial revenues; and entrusted with feudal rights of usage. The fermier-général, instead of encouraging commercial production, had a vested interest in the maintenance of the old system which guaranteed his own position.
The potential revolutionary role of tenant farmers in France was limited. Though were squeezed by high rents, they remained attached older feudal practices. It is the laboureurs, who owned horses and ploughs and made surplus who struggled for a change. They protested against the rack renting. There was a powerful movement for village enfranchisement with demands like fixation of judicial fines, abolition or regularization of the seigneurial tax, eradication of death duty, a fixed rather than arbitrary marriage tax, fixed payments to the lord on alienation of property. The demands also included ‘freedom of personal status’.
The French Revolution cleared the ground for a possible unleashing of capitalism. It removed the massive barrier inherent in the feudal relationships which had persisted despite an apparently ‘free’ peasantry (‘free’ inasmuch as they were not serfs). It ‘destroyed the seigneurial regime and abolished feudal rights, established total right to property. It modified the distribution of land and proprietary rights in land, as church land and the land of émigré nobles were sold. The major beneficiaries were the urban middle class and the rich peasantry. Indeed, ‘the French rural community’ was destroyed. On the one hand, ‘the laboureurs … finally constituted themselves [as] a class’, and clearly became the ‘dominant class in the countryside’. On the other, “the ‘mass of peasants’ – a poor and middle peasantry – ‘clung desperately to the traditional forms of production and stubbornly called for the maintenance of the limitations which collective constraint imposed on private property’”.
In France, a clearly unprogressive landlord class displayed no evidence of either transformation into a capitalist landlord class or a class of capitalist farmers; while the rich peasantry, a potential class of capitalists, was constrained, in part, by its surplus being effectively appropriated by the state and by landlords. This continued until 1789, while capitalist transformation was further postponed, until the end of the 19th century, by a relentless struggle waged by poor and middle peasants.
Prussia: Capitalism from Above
During 11-12th centuries, lay and church magnates obtained land grants in east of Elbe, encouraged peasants in Rhineland and Low Countries to settle down there as free peasants. Known as Junkers, these ‘colonizing German and Polish landowners created villages where the inhabitants were offered freer terms and conditions of life than in the western ones. Peasants were offered land holdings on free and heritable terms, on low money rents and their labour services and payments to church were waived. Superior jurisdictions and fiscal pressures were avoided. Instead of the landlord, his agent (who was given a holding three or four time the size of the peasants), became in effect the immediate lord, presiding over the village court and taking a proportion of the fines (1973, 92).
The situation changed drastically in the 14th century in wake of the Black Death and other such visitations. There was widespread flight from land, leading to depopulated, deserted villages and a serious shortage of labour through the 15th century. The Junkers, leading the seigneurial offensive, began to acquire and farm deserted peasant land as an emergency measure until new peasants are found. However, when the corn prices began to rise in the 16th century it became more permanent. Confronted with a serious labour shortage, both of free wage labourers and of those employed via labour services, the Junkers curtailed peasants’ freedom to move, imposed a wage limit, shifted from fixed money rents to competitive rents and, finally extended mandatory labour services of the peasants. By the 16th century, the wage labour multiplied and became the norm. The free peasantry disappeared completely.
However, the Prussian peasantry did not accept the deterioration of their rights and conditions without resistance. Appeals to princely/judicial authority had little effect and political uprisings were brutally put down. In this class struggle, the Junkers won a crushing victory. By the end of the 16th century, the Prussian Junkers had succeeded, with the aid of state power, in enserfing the free peasantry. The Junker economy developed as a form of seigneurial (feudal) market production in which, by means of extra-economic coercion, the landlords forced the peasantry to shoulder the cost of the labour, horsepower and tools necessary to demesne farming. When serfdom had broken down irretrievably in England and France, in Prussia it was re-established with a vengeance.
But, soon, a thin differentiation began to take place. A tiny minority of free peasants grew who frequently served the Junkers’ interests as chief administrative and police officers and directing the village’s labour. The unfree peasantry, divided into ‘true Bauern’, (the middle and large peasants owning 50-170 acres) and those who were not (holding 5-25 acres), i.e., the large class of marginal peasantry beneath the Bauern. All Bauerns had the obligation to maintain draught animals for the Junkers, a specified number according the farm size.
Full and half Bauerns led the class struggle of peasants for the abolition of feudal obligations that began to threaten the feudal order by the second half of the 18th century. By the end of the 18th century the Prussian leadership realised that abolition of feudal dues was imperative. In 1807, in the wake of crushing defeat by Napoleon’s armies in 1806, feudalism was finally abolished – nearly 350 years after its demise in England, followed by a period of transition.
If the 16th century was the era of the transition to capitalist agriculture in England, the 19th century was so for Prussia. But in Prussia it was the erstwhile feudal landlords who became capitalist farmers. It was ‘capitalism from above’. Let us see how this occurred in detail.
Junkers, just as the English landlord class, retained ownership of their land, enclosed the land of both poor and rich peasants, in the teeth of opposition, – the land they owned and common land. But by the late 18th century, the Prussian nobility had accumulated much debt and in the severe depression of the 1820s the market for grains virtually collapsed, paving the way for decisive changes. A large number of noble estates had to be sold off to the commoners. The new estate owners equipped with fresh capital led the way in the transformation of Prussian agriculture. By the 1850s, the proportion of Junker estates owned by commoners had tripled or quadrupled. By 1856 it stood at 56%. But it was not only the new owners who took to capitalist farming. The old were similarly receptive to new ways.
The Prussian landlord class retained ownership of most of the land, engrossing large quantities of peasant land. But, unlike English landlords, they ceased to be landlords. They were takers of labour rent i.e., they took decisions with respect to the form that production would take such as which crops would be grown etc. Therefore, before 1807 they were not totally divorced from the process of production. Such a landlord class is more likely to transition to hiring wage labour than is the one which appropriates surplus via kind or money rent, which was prevalent in England. Such increase in rent seeking in cash led to the severing of links with production. They also could transition into a class of capitalist farmers but such a transformation is more likely where the landlord class has a direct relationship with labour (through labour rent) and has links with the process of production.
With the disappearance of obligatory labour services, Prussian landlords had lost their captive labour supply. Former serfs, indeed, were unwilling to work on Junker holdings. The relationship with the new forms of labour, however, was not immediately fully capitalist. It involved, initially and for some time, transitional forms. The Junkers, then, did not spring fully-caparisoned as capitalist farmers from the belly of feudalism. They would take time to slough off their feudal skins. At first, ‘peasant labour services and the compulsory farm service of peasant youth on Junker farms were replaced by contractually hired farm servants and the cottager system…the latter [involving] the exchange of labour for an allocation of the land’ (Perkins 1984, 5). While farm servants were technically free, there were restrictions on their movement.
This was followed by the system of confined labourers, hired on written short-term contracts. In each case, there was an absence of the money wage. Living standards were pitifully low. Ultimately, the Junkers were forced to employ day labourers, or ‘free labourers’ (freiArbeiter), paid a money wage. It was wage labour, free in Marx’s double sense, but not without the vestigial traces of feudalism. By 1871 the transition was complete. By then the Junkers were, in every useful sense, fully capitalist. It was a capitalism marked deeply by Prussia’s immediate feudal past and the powerful subjugation of the peasantry which it entailed.
There were regions like in east of Elbe in Prussia, where free peasantry were initially brought by early colonizers, only to be enserfed later in 16th century. Peasantry resisted the feudal exactions in 18-19th century, weakening Junkers. In response to eventual non-availability of serf labour, by mid 19th century, Junker class transformed itself into a class of capitalist farmers, farming with hired labour. The possibility of capitalism from below, via a rich peasantry, was wholly pre-empted by the absence of a rich peasantry of sufficient strength. The Junkers first victory over the ‘free’ peasantry in the 16th century was marked by imposing feudalism, the 19th century victory over the enserfed peasantry was marked by entry of capitalism – ‘capitalism from above’.
Relevance of transition debate today
It would be very risky to transfer any generalizations about peasant societies of medieval Europe to any other time. For example, the capitalist farmers who were to be an important element in the history of early European capitalism emerged in a general environment of small-scale enterprise. What could the fate of peasant societies in the present world of almost world-wide commercial and industrial monopoly capitalism have in common with that of peasant societies of the late medieval world? Clearly, the tasks of leadership in contemporary peasant society have nothing in common with the tasks of the past, except in the recognition that conflict is part of existence and that nothing is gained without struggle. To that I might add that when dealing with peasantries, in the past or the present, and however different the one is from the other, it is always important to consider the nature, the extent and the progress of the social differentiation that characterises such peasantries, and the nature of the landlord class.
Notes
1. Summarized from Terence Byres paper presented at the 2006 Workshop on ‘The Peasantry and the Development of Capitalism in Comparative Perspective’, as part of the International Conference on Land, Poverty, Social Justice and Development
2. A tax levied by the Norman and early Angevin kings of England on their Crown lands and royal towns.
3. A fine paid by a tenant in feudal England, esp a villein, to his lord for allowing the marriage of his daughter.
4.This form of tenancy (kaulu) is very different from the kind prevalent today in Andhra and Telangana because there is no such thing as seigneurial economy here.
5. An outsourced tax collector in feudal France.