Nature's Evil

TWO

Grain’s Way

It is only recently that farming has become sufficiently productive for some people to create surpluses that others can use. The creation of the first agrarian states in Mesopotamia occurred within the most recent 5 per cent of the history of human kind. The era of petrofarming has lasted for less than a quarter of 1 per cent.

The bog civilisation

The first farmers were marsh dwellers, and their greatest skill was not ploughing or irrigation but the ability to drain water. The anthropologist James C. Scott describes how nomads came to the flood plains of Mesopotamia about 6,000 years ago. The sea level was higher than it is now. The changing courses of rivers great and small criss-crossed broad tracts of marshland. Regular floods washed away weeds and brought in silt, in which cereals and beans could be sown. Thanks to annual flooding, the soil was never exhausted. It was at this time that the selective breeding of plants began, as well as the domestication of cattle and the building of houses and boats from reeds. Probably it was at this period that people learnt to dig up, dry and burn peat – a crucial skill for surviving in wetlands (see chapter 11 ). Although these people sowed seed on the available plots of land and harvested crops from them, they had no inclination towards private ownership. It seems likely they had no enemies. The wetlands protected these first peasant farmers from the attention of the desert nomads. 1

As Scott describes it, Mesopotamia was not unlike Holland on the eve of the Golden Age. On various continents, civilisation took its first steps in wetlands; this is how the first settled populations arose along the Jordan, Nile, Niger, Indus and Amazon rivers, and then in the early rice states of Africa and China. The central role of wetlands in the history of civilisation has been forgotten. In the written history of the Judeo-Christian world, deserts have played a disproportionate role. But wetlands are closer to our primordial condition – to the Golden Age, the lost Garden of Eden – than deserts. Humble wetlands left few traces for the historian. And yet written history began when people started keeping a tally of the grain grown on the wetlands, on tablets made of clay which was extracted from the wetlands and baked in a fire, itself fuelled by peat lifted from those wetlands.

For a long time historians believed that peasant agriculture replaced the world of savage hunters and warlike nomads. Anthropologists have revised these narratives of early states, many of them coming from biblical sources, and tell a different story. The first farmers had a poorer diet than the desert nomads; they were shorter in stature and died younger. Walls, gates and towers controlled the population, helping to tax their trade. Indeed, these early towns were more like concentration camps. Nomads robbed them, or exacted tribute, and settled inside as chieftains or kings. But epidemics were a more frequent cause of death. People and animals lived cheek by jowl; sheep, rats, lice, mosquitoes and humans spread infection. Epidemics led to hunger, uprisings, flight – in a word, to collapse.

In time, a local strongman or passing nomad would appear on the scene and impose taxes on the locals. 2 He had two problems. People constantly lived on the brink of disaster. Skimming off a tithe from their meagre harvest would deprive the farmers of seed and starve them to death, an outcome which would be of no benefit to the master. The other problem was that, apart from grain, he could not count the other products these people created. They depended on perishable goods, such as fish, game or berries, or even stuff that was hidden underground, such as roots and tubers. As a stationary bandit became a local lord, he turned his village over to grain cultivation, preventing the peasants from growing other sorts of staple crop. Fencing his village and using metal tools that were unavailable to the commoners, the strongman wielded a new source of power over them: only he could cut the timber that his subjects needed for their ploughs, houses and boats. Paid in kind, he stored the grain against the risk of famine or exchanged it for things he couldn’t get locally. Taxing the captive population, such a strongman needed an independent source of power that would be different and more ‘space-intensive’ than grain. 3 Exploiting and distributing this natural resource at will, he would build up his material legitimacy .

We read this in the earliest written story, preserved on clay tablets. Gilgamesh is the king of Uruk, one of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia. Tired of squabbles with his subjects, Gilgamesh leaves the city and captures the Cedar Forest. By cutting cedars and bringing their precious timber to town, he gains true power: this is the difference between a topical resource such as cedar and diffused ones such as clay and grain. The story ends when Gilgamesh uses his cedar to build a very special door and a fabulous ship. On board his ship, Gilgamesh survives a flood and comes back to his city, telling new fables and bringing new treasures. But a recently found tablet, which belongs to the same epic cycle, sounds remorseful: ‘My friend, we have reduced the forest to a wasteland … My friend, we have cut down a lofty cedar, which top abutted the heavens.’ 4

The grain hypothesis

James Scott poses an interesting question: what was it about cereals that made them central for agriculture? They are dry and storable, but so are lentils. In a mixed field, with cereals, beans and vegetables, different plants ripen at different times, and the peasants harvest them as they become ready. This is fine for subsistence but pretty inconvenient for taxation purposes. Therefore cereals underwent a historical process of selection, which set their biological clock so that myriad ears would ripen simultaneously. Already in ancient Mesopotamia, a field of ripe wheat had to be harvested in the space of a week. Then the tax collector could inspect, count and tax the harvest. Going round the fields, he valued the crop and took his cut (usually a tithe, but sometimes two tithes) to the state stores. Turning human beings into a means, the new state not only forced the peasants to plough the land but also prescribed what crop they were to plant. Overriding the objections or rebellions of the peasants, the authorities forced them to go over to growing cereal crops.

Uruk and other city-states with defensive walls, tax collection and an internal hierarchy emerged in the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates in about 3000 bce . Similar states appeared on the Nile, then on the Indus and in the Andes. The anthropologist Roberto Carneiro points out that these were all fertile but naturally isolated territories where, as chance would have it, farming was more productive than elsewhere. 5 People fought over such favoured places, and they changed hands. Geographical variation defined the formation of states and their survival.

In Mesopotamia the preferred grain was wheat. Centuries of irrigation made the soil increasingly saline, and the heirs of Gilgamesh switched to millet. Ancient Athens depended on grain, supplied by sea from Egypt and Sicily. Chinese cities needed rice. In the sixth century they were already supplied by canals, which transported rice over distances of up to 2,000 kilometres. Wheat bread was always prized in Europe, but rye predominated in its northern regions. The Baltic trade in rye kept Holland and England supplied for hundreds of years. Canals, ports and granaries were built to accommodate this trade. Rivalling churches and palaces, these structures were the most complex that man could build at the time. The state collected taxes and guaranteed the storage of grain, taking on the responsibility of providing for its population in times of war or crop failure. Many revolutions, including the French and the Russian, began in response to the fact that the state granaries were empty.

Even today, four sorts of grain – wheat, rice, barley and maize – provide more than half the calories consumed by humankind. They are all crops that ripen simultaneously and they all have a long shelf life, making them suitable for trading and taxation purposes. But they are all very different. Unlike wheat or rye, rice grains are easily cooked, but rice flour doesn’t keep well. In China and other rice-dependent countries, hand mills were mostly sufficient for preparing the occasional meal that needed rice flour. 6 For Europeans, wind- and watermills for grinding grain embodied technical proficiency and historical change.

Crop rotation

Continuing the migration of the naked ape from the African savannah to the forests and wetlands of Eurasia, civilisation moved northwards. For millennia, the Mediterranean was the centre of trade. In the crisis-ridden seventeenth century, the North Sea assumed this role. Luxuries from the East – silk, sugar, cotton – continued to exert their charms. But northern products, such as tar, hemp and saltpetre, shaped the world to come. The Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War were pan-European conflicts between the North and the South; from this time on, the North was usually the victor. Vienna repelled the Turks, but Prague was seized by the Swedes. The first oceanic empires, Portugal and Spain, looked for colonies in the southern seas. Holland and England focused on trade with the great expanses of the North – from Arkhangelsk to Newfoundland, from Danzig to Bergen. Hanseatic and then Dutch and English trade in raw materials from the North – grain, timber, fur, linen, hemp, iron – was in greater volumes than the colonial trade in sugar, tea, cotton and other southern products. 7

Burning a forest and clearing the land gave immediate results. Land would never again be as fertile as it was after the ashes were first ploughed in. In the eighteenth century, agronomists called this the law of declining fertility, while economists called it the law of diminishing returns. If the fertility of your land is declining, you need more land. The deforestation of Europe was the direct result of the expansion of grain cultivation. But, between the forest and the field, there always existed a third space – pasture, meadow, wetland. In the estates of ancient Rome, a third of the land lay fallow – i.e., uncultivated. For centuries the peasants to the north of the Alps had practised the fire-fallow system of agriculture, sowing and harvesting crops, then putting cattle onto the land, and then, after several years, abandoning that field and advancing deeper into the forest. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a quarter of German lands lay fallow. The history of agriculture was the process of the peasants learning what to do with fallow land, how to use it productively.

In the system that was typical for Northern Europe, land was divided into three parts. In autumn, a field was sown with wheat or rye. In spring the crop was harvested and the field was sown with barley, oats or beans, which were used as cattle fodder. Then the field lay fallow for a year. In this way, a third of the land was non-productive, while the cultivated fields produced at a ratio of 4:1 – i.e., from every grain sown, four new grains grew. This was the average productivity of arable farming throughout Europe, from Italy to Scandinavia. Bumper harvests could be achieved only with the addition of fertilisers – animal manure or night soil from the towns. Intensive agriculture developed only on the outskirts of towns, close to the markets.

Crop rotation was the main reason for an increase in productivity. It also supported the reorientation of farming from grain to fibre – wool, linen, hemp. From each harvest the peasant had to feed his family and also pay his master and the state for the land and for protection. This obliged him to earn cash by reducing the share of raw, perishable products he grew for survival and increasing the share of dry, cash crops he grew for trade. This was the road to riches. Cottage industry left the peasant families with a part of the profit which in other circumstances would have gone to the merchants and landowners (see chapters 5 and 7 ). But this new economy continued to depend on the massive supply of grain from Prussia, Poland and the Baltic lands. 8

The landowners in Eastern Europe battled with the same problems of the grain economy that the Mesopotamian authorities had encountered thousands of years earlier: low productivity, extended transport routes, and a ‘lazy’ population with little motivation to work and still less desire to save. But grain didn’t require much labour. Unlike the slave-owner who met all his slaves’ needs as he understood them – provisions, clothes and tools – the landowner let the peasants survive on subsistence farming. Thanks to their simultaneous ripening, cereal crops could be harvested and processed in one fell swoop. During the rest of the year the peasants didn’t work in the landowner’s fields. They had vegetable plots, pastures and crafts. The landowner didn’t interfere in these activities, which meant that peasants were able to develop them better and faster. Nor was the landowner interested in the complex crop rotation systems needed to increase productivity. They only made the process of collecting rent more complicated, especially if the noble owner ruled in absentia. His opportunities for trading depended on the proximity of his farm to the riverine system. If a farm was 10 or 20 miles from the river, trade was unprofitable. The income of the landowner depended not on the productivity of his land but on its proximity to a river and the sea. Foreign shipowners reaped the lion’s share of the profit, and they invested it back in their countries. For the village, these earnings were lost. 9

Agriculture provided general employment, but it was not full-time or year round. The landowner had to have physical mastery over the peasants to force them to work, just as the peasants forced their horses to work. But the work was seasonal. People worked in accordance with the annual rhythms of preparing the soil, sowing, harvesting and processing the crop. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, men in Russian villages spent no more than half their time working, and women and adolescents no more than a third. But at harvest time, when the crop had to be brought in all at one go, everyone joined in the toil, men, women and children. Technological innovations very slowly changed the key moments in this cycle. The gradual replacement of oxen with horses was an important step. In England this happened as early as the sixteenth century, in Europe much later. The change travelled, like many similar ‘improvements’, from west to east. Peasants opposed this replacement, because they knew that, if war broke out, horses would be requisitioned. Although ploughing with oxen was slower, it was the more reliable option. Stunted horses, shod with wooden shoes, couldn’t pull a plough. Over the centuries the weight and strength of horses increased, but this was the result of selective breeding that happened in cavalry stables, not in peasant farmyards. Iron replaced wood, helping to save effort, increase productivity, and bring peasants to compliance. Iron horseshoes, iron ploughshares, iron hoes allowed farmers to turn over deep furrows and drain fields with ditches. The conversion of military technology for civilian use was a reward for the incessant taxes, requisitioning and billeting which victorious states imposed on their civilian populations.

Over the centuries, crop rotation became more complex. First tested in Holland, the four-field system spread during the eighteenth century to England, Sweden and Prussia. The amount of agricultural land lying fallow at any given time halved. Consumed on the spot by the farmers and their animals, turnips and beans from the rotated fields freed up wheat, which could be sold as a cash crop. The increase in demand was a powerful stimulus for these changes: the growing towns always needed more provisions. Later, the multiple-field system became ever more complex. Some agronomists promoted seven- or even eleven-field rotation, but it did not lead to a great leap in productivity.

The difficulties of long-term planning are obvious to a modern mind. In 1742, the governor of Astrakhan in southern Russia, Vasily Tatishchev, pressured the local landowners to divide their estates into four parts. ‘Let the first be for rye, the second for spring wheat, let the third lie fallow, the fourth be pasture for cattle …, so that in a very short time, all the land will have been enriched with manure and become exceedingly profitable.’ 10 Tatishchev was dismissed from his post in Astrakhan in 1745 – three years after he wrote his exhortation about four-year crop rotation. Another Russian expert in crop rotation, Andrey Bolotov, managed a crown estate near Moscow. Having seen the advanced field system in eastern Prussia, where he had served in the Seven Years’ War, Bolotov marked off seven fields on the crown estate and forced the peasants to separate them by ditches. After two years Bolotov was transferred to a more lucrative post, and the fields returned to their original condition. Landowners and their bailiffs complained that the peasants were lazy, improvements failed to be embedded, land lay fallow, crops rotted in the fields, and there were no roads. There was no point in increasing the production of grain without transportation routes. Excess grain was used mainly for distilling. It turned out that the bailiff’s efforts to raise the productivity of the peasants succeeded only in lowering the price of vodka in the village tavern.

Improvements and indolence

Even if markets were accessible, military conscription, the requisition of horses, the passage or billeting of troops, and the state’s modernising plans all interfered with crop rotation. Young and aggressive European states, the heirs of the crusades and religious wars, juggled multiple risks – riots in the towns, revolutions in the capital cities, and peasant sabotage in the countryside. Agricultural innovations came to England from the Netherlands, and then returned east. Canals and dams for draining fields, and crop-rotation systems, which included animal fodder and the use of manure on a massive scale, were all Dutch imports. Agricultural productivity along the coastal strip was everywhere much higher than in the heartlands. Port towns expanded if they were situated at the intersections where one influx of commodities arrived from the countryside and another came from the colonies. By 1700, Amsterdam and London contained a tenth of the populations of their respective countries. For these trading cities, the secret of survival lay in ‘ghost acres’ – natural resources which were outside their borders but were available to them thanks to trade. * Crop rotation required the peasant to combine many skills, crafts and trades. Comparing the economic life of a European farmer with that of a nineteenth- or twentieth-century worker, for example a miner or a factory hand, we come to a surprising conclusion: the peasant economy was more complex, the peasant’s work was more varied, and his diet was better than the proletarian’s. The changing seasons lent variety to the peasant’s work. The patchwork pattern of crop rotation offered the chance to escape from supervision.

In the towns, highly specialised labour processed valuable, topical resources, which were often brought from afar. There, the printing press was invented, banks carried on their business, ships were built. The peasants rested their land, keeping large tracts fallow. Human muscles were supplemented only by the muscle power of livestock, but animals took up a large amount of arable land. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, an English farm with 20 acres of wheat needed another 8 acres to graze four bullocks, without which the harvest couldn’t be brought in. At the beginning of the twentieth century in North America there were 25 million horses and mules – one horse for three humans. A quarter of all agricultural land was needed to keep them fed.

According to the historian Robert Brenner, agriculture in Europe went through two class wars. In the late Middle Ages, when plague caused a shortage of manpower in the countryside, the peasants of Western Europe won the first class war, establishing their right to change masters and hire themselves out just like the townspeople did. The peasants of Eastern Europe lost this war and remained in dependence as serfs. As a consequence, the landowners in Western Europe strove to save on labour by improving the productivity of the land. When they failed in this they started the second class war. Now the landowning aristocracy wanted the freedom of contracts to be on both sides, so that, just as the peasants had the right to leave of their own accord, now the landlords would also have the right to dismiss them and change the use of land or sell it. In England, this war was won by the elite. The nobility got the right to enclose their land, introduce ‘improvements’ and get rid of their surplus peasants, who then went to the towns. In France it was the peasants who won the second class war. The country continued to depend on millions of small landowners, who had no motive to introduce innovations because even improved land was difficult to sell. 11 In Eastern Europe, landowners obtained a land market, but it had limitations. Land could only be sold along with the serfs, and, later, peasants could only be sold along with the land. It was difficult to rent out or mortgage such land.

Was the peasants’ resistance to modern efficiency a cunning and purposeful sabotage – a ‘weapon of the weak’ (James Scott) – or an inherent feature of the peasantry – the ‘idiocy of rural life’ (Karl Marx)? Landowners and reformers usually blamed laziness, as if it was endemic to the countryside. The English aristocracy suspected their Irish peasants of indolence, but Robert Malthus linked Irish idleness to potatoes – they were more productive than grain but were not easy to trade. The American plantation owners believed that their black slaves were innately lazy. Adam Smith developed a theory that peasant laziness was on account of the lack of specialisation. ‘The habit of sauntering … acquired by every country workman who is obliged to change his work and his tools every half hour, and to apply his hand in twenty different ways almost every day of his life, renders him almost always slothful and lazy.’ 12

In the 1920s, the Russian economist Alexander Chayanov described the peasant household as a ‘moral economy’. The peasant was accustomed to earning the amount he considered necessary; he worried about getting less but was not interested in making more. This attitude was not peculiar to the Russian peasant. On the contrary, Chayanov showed that Swiss and German farmers also lacked a profit incentive and were risk averse. For example, Chayanov saw that the peasant willingly kept a couple of cows, whose upkeep amounted to ‘practically nothing’. But keeping more cows needed more work than the peasants were prepared to do. For most of the year the peasants had no employment: working in the fields of central Russia occupied no more than a quarter of their time. Using their free time, the peasants mastered the production of goods, such as linen, for export. But, even as they got richer, they didn’t abandon their subsistence farming, which functioned like a self-regulating mechanism, along the lines of a thermostat. In order to trade, you need a surplus, but the reverse is also true: there is no surplus without trade. This is nature’s own way, and the main concern of the farmer is not what to do with a surplus but how to avoid a deficit. The peasant toiled not to earn money but to survive; not to maximise profit, but to make enough to live on. 13 Although specialisation was always the most efficient solution, peasant farms remained diverse: even if their main product, for example grain or wool, was successfully traded on the market, they continued to produce many other things – vegetables, meat, hay, which they consumed themselves. The production of these commodities didn’t appear in accounts and they weren’t taxed. The state and landowners attached no importance to subsistence farming, but it was fundamental to the survival of the peasantry. The seasonal nature of many important tasks meant investment in expensive machines was not practical. The cyclical life of nature was alien to the town, preoccupied with stability and expansion. Still, urban life required supplies of grain, firewood and much more, which could only be secured by the peasants.

Supplying the capitals

Trade hubs and sites of power, capital cities grew so rapidly that they far outpaced the limited ability of the surrounding lands to feed them. For most of them, trade in fibres, metals and finished goods was the push factor, and the shortage of grain and timber the pull factor, of development. From Venice to St Petersburg, full granaries symbolised the stability of power, just as they had done thousands of years before in the cities of Mesopotamia.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Paris consumed 3 million bushels of grain per year, Amsterdam, 1.5 million, Rome 1 million. Transporting such quantities of grain by cart was impossible – all growing cities were situated near the sea or navigable rivers. The shortage of grain was a constant problem for Mediterranean cities. As early as the sixteenth century, Dutch ships had transported grain to them from the Baltic lands, sailing around Europe. Amsterdam was supplied from the Polish lands around Danzig, while Stockholm depended on the fields of Livonia and Estonia. The provisioning of London was helped when the East Anglian fens were drained and large farms were established on the reclaimed fenland. Paris was kept supplied via the Seine and the canals built by Colbert. Completed in 1734, this network deprived provincial France of supplies, and local riots accompanied the growth of the capital. 14

The delivery of grain to the new capital, St Petersburg, was to become a perennial problem for the Russian Empire. Having occupied the delta of the Neva in 1703, Peter I appreciated its similarities to the situation of Amsterdam, where he had spent the best time of his youth. The Baltic route to Europe was three times shorter than the White Sea route around Scandinavia. Impatient to join the Northern trade, the newly proclaimed empire turned this freshly captured Swedish colony into its capital city and resettled many thousands of people there. It had to supply them with grain and other essentials of life.

The fertile lands lay far away. The low (200 metres) but wide (500 kilometres) central Russian upland separates the basins of the Baltic and the White Sea from the basins of the Black Sea and the Caspian. Its hills formed the heart of the Muscovy state – they became the curse of the Petersburg Empire. In the south, the empire had black soils which produced excellent crops. The construction of a short linking canal, just 2.8 kilometres long, would create an uninterrupted waterway almost 1,000 kilometres long, connecting the trading capital with its resource base, the Baltic Sea with the Caspian, the markets of Europe with the treasures of Asia. Having rejected tenders from foreign adventurers, Peter gave a concession to build the Vishny Volochok canal to Mikhail Serdyukov (1678–1754). A Mongolian captive from the heart of Siberia who, like many successful Russian entrepreneurs, was suspected of the heresy of Old Belief, Serdyukov had taught himself about canals from studying French books. His Vishny Volochok canal was a success. * It served to bring grain to the capital for almost 200 years, right up until the arrival of the railways. But cargo could not go in the opposite direction, against the current, with the result that the prices of imported textiles in the Russian provinces were several times higher than in St Petersburg.

Once he got his canal, Peter imposed prohibitive duties on the export of hemp and pelts from Arkhangelsk. 15 St Petersburg’s population grew rapidly and in 1790 overtook that of Moscow. The mass influx of soldiers and peasants needed to keep building the city only exacerbated the shortage of bread. But the farms around the capital didn’t turn to growing rye. The Finnish peasants sold meat, milk, hay and firewood in the city and themselves bought bread. All the rye for the commoners, wheat for the rich, oats for horses and hemp for ships’ ropes were brought from the south. Transportation costs dictated consumer prices. During the time of Peter the Great, rye flour cost four times as much in St Petersburg as it did in Moscow. St Petersburg rapidly turned into a city of scandalous inequality, as described in the classics of Russian literature. But right up until the twentieth century St Petersburg never experienced the kind of bread riots that took place in Paris or London.

Grain’s way to the new capital was long: 2,000 kilometres. Barge haulers or horses pulled grain barges up from Kazan and the southern steppes along the Volga River. With luck, the grain reached the capital within six months; if things went wrong, it could take a year. The cargo might rot on the journey or the vessel carrying it might sink. Flour was easier to transport than grain. Milled locally, it was packed in birch bark baskets, each holding from 120 to 160 kilograms of flour. In autumn or winter the baskets of flour were delivered from the mills to the grain quays by cart or on sledges. Barge haulers pulled the barges upstream; it took sixty men to pull a barge carrying 2,000 baskets. In the shallows at Rybinsk the baskets had to be loaded into small boats. Like the baskets, these barques were sold for firewood in St Petersburg. One of the busiest trade routes in the world, the short canal was the bottleneck in the whole system. A barque stuck on a weir could hold up traffic for a week. New, bypassing waterways weren’t built until the nineteenth century. 16 In the meantime, the area of arable land doubled in the newly colonised lands of Ukraine and Southern Russia. The empire’s problem was that in the south there was no one to sell grain to, and in the north there was nowhere to buy it. Unable to reach the grain in Ukraine, the government sent the mountain to Mohammed, billeting a quarter of the Russian army there.

After 1850, St Petersburg had the second biggest population in Europe after Paris. The development of the Black Sea ports took Ukrainian grain to Europe. But only the railways created a national grain market, and a significant share of the Russian grain export went via St Petersburg. State intervention played a decisive role in this success. Although grain was grown mostly by private producers and the price of bread was mostly free-floating, only the state could develop infrastructure. When the price of commodities is defined not by their production cost but by the cost of transportation, the state has a defining role in creating the market.

War and potatoes

The revolution in European agriculture occurred only when America and the most important of her treasures, the potato, were discovered. Following the example of the Incas, the Spanish fed potatoes to the workers in the silver mines of Potosí. Their ships carried potatoes back to Europe. Accustomed to the purity of grain, European farmers were appalled by the dirty, oddly shaped potato. In France, people believed it caused leprosy, but in other places it was thought to be an aphrodisiac. In Ireland, the potato appeared just when the English were colonising the country in the sixteenth century. Walter Raleigh may have introduced it there himself. In 1594 he had been looking for gold in South America; when he failed to find it, he wrote a book about Eldorado. Queen Elizabeth gave him tobacco plantations in Virginia and estates in Ireland, which were also called plantations. In 1602 Raleigh sold his Irish plantations to Richard Boyle, the father of the famous chemist. Potatoes were already being grown there on a massive scale. The Catholics rebelled, the English suppressed the uprisings, and the Irish discovered the strategic superiority of the potato. The enemy trampled down your crops and stole the grain from your barns, but the humble potato continued to lie in the ground waiting for its rightful owner.

Potatoes contain seven times more moisture than wheat and are therefore prone to rot. This made potatoes beneath the notice of the Exchequer and saved millions of peasants. An acre of potatoes could feed ten people, five times as many as an acre of wheat. Having discovered potatoes on his own land, Frederick II forced his farmers to plant potatoes on their fallow fields. As a result, the peasants consumed less grain and paid more taxes. The population increased thanks to the potato, and this was a long-standing aim of the Prussian crown. The potato helped Prussia to survive its multiple wars. 17 Following Frederick’s example, European monarchies introduced the potato throughout Northern Europe. Potatoes and crop rotation were the key reasons for the population explosion in Europe in the nineteenth century. Diseases in cereals are quite different to those in potatoes, which helped to stabilise the harvests. Without the potato there would have been no urbanisation and no industrial revolution. In the 1830s, in the central Russian provinces, peasants rioted against the potatoes that landowners imposed on them in order to get more revenue from their ‘empty lands’. In contrast, in Ireland the landowners complained about ‘the idleness of peasants’, which they explained by the easy productivity of their potatoes. Undoubtedly, potatoes in the ground saved the peasants from starvation in a bad year. Perhaps that is why Soviet collectivisation led to a worse famine in the black soil, grain-growing regions of Ukraine than in northern Russia, where more vegetable crops were grown. Across Europe, potato growing increased the area of land under cultivation by a whole quarter. Then the introduction of tractors and motor vehicles released another quarter of the land which had been used for feeding horses. Agricultural expansion kept pace with industrial expansion.

Space and power

On the eve of modernity, the European economy depended on hundreds of towns with surrounding green belts. The main route for trade was by water. On the canals built in the Low Countries, one horse could pull as big a barge-load of grain as fifty horses could carry on a good road. Thanks to its rivers and sea coast, Poland was the main supplier of grain to the Netherlands. Productivity was low, but Poland contributed to the Netherlands a huge number of ‘ghost acres’ – according to the historian Jan de Vries, almost 2.5 million hectares of arable land, half the area of modern Holland. Still, only 5 per cent of the wheat and 12 per cent of the rye grown in Poland was exported. All the rest was consumed locally or kept back as seed. To increase his revenue, the landowner needed to reduce his peasants’ consumption even further, but they were barely able to subsist. Grain exports fed the thriving Dutch culture but led to serfdom in Poland. 18

While big cities were increasingly dependent on foreign trade, the countryside relied on the nearest town. In 1826, the Mecklenburg landowner Johann Heinrich von Thünen demonstrated that agricultural revenue depends not on the soil or the farmer’s skill but on the farm’s distance from the nearest town. In his book The Isolated State , von Thünen constructed a formal model for the relation between town and country. In this model, each town is surrounded by concentric rings of agricultural activity. The inner ring consists of nearby farms, which produce vegetables, milk and meat for the town’s markets. These fetch high prices in the town, but only the nearest farms make a profit on these perishable goods. They do not practise crop rotation because they fertilise the land with night soil which they get from the town. The next ring out is made up of arable farms, which supply wheat and rye to the town. The closer the farm is to the town, the cheaper the cost of transport; von Thünen’s estate was situated 5 miles from Rostock, so he knew what he was talking about. If a farm is 10 German miles (75 kilometres) away from the town market, the horses and carts will be on the road there and back for four days. The horses have to be fed. According to von Thünen’s calculations, on such a journey they would eat one-eighth of the grain delivered. Delivering grain from farms further than 50 German miles from a town, the horses would eat the entire load on the journey. The forest zone is situated in the third ring, on the periphery. The prices in the town shift the borders of the agricultural belts: the higher the price of grain, the greater the area of arable land, but then firewood will be too distant. 19 Therefore von Thünen re-examined the theory of land rent: it is defined not by the productivity of the land, as Ricardo thought, but by the land’s distance from the market.

Grain is the most widespread of all main resources after air and water. However, it became the subject of protectionist laws, which limited free trade for the sake of security. The interests of the grain producers, who wanted to raise prices, clashed with the interests of the consumers, who faced starvation. When the Napoleonic wars ended and troops were demobilised all over Europe, there was an immediate fall in the demand for grain. In England, a parliament of landowners chose to protect the market and voted for the Corn Laws, which limited the import of cereals. The price of industrial products fell but the price of grain and flour stabilised. The cotton mill workers couldn’t earn enough to buy food, and bread riots broke out in London. In 1815 the volcano Tambor erupted on the remote island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies. The result was ‘the year without a summer’, when harvests failed on a catastrophic scale. Defending the ‘cotton interest’ against the ‘grain interest’, a group of journalists and intellectuals from the cotton-processing town of Manchester demanded a free market. The leader of the movement was Richard Cobden, the owner of a profitable calico factory. Free trade, wrote Cobden, is the secret of permanent peace, because all nations will have as great an interest in the prosperity of other nations as in their own. For the generation that had lived through the Napoleonic wars and the continental blockade, this opinion was convincing. In 1841, Robert Peel, a reader of Adam Smith and supporter of free trade, became prime minister. He was the son of a textile magnate – the first leader of the government whose wealth came from cotton, not grain or sugar. In 1846 the Great Famine began in Ireland after blight devastated the potato crop. The same variety – a monoculture – was planted throughout the island, and the blight spread like wildfire. A proportion of British grain went to Ireland, and this helped Peel to repeal the Corn Laws. The debate about the advantages of free trade over mercantilism resulted in a victory for the free trade lobby.

Karl Marx moved to London in 1849, and the debates about the Corn Laws helped him to formulate his idea of class warfare. The fall in grain prices resulted in the ruin of the tenant farmers. The effect was similar to that of the earlier land enclosures – landless peasants went to the industrial towns or emigrated. In the countryside, economy of scale helped the largest farms to survive. In order to facilitate land sales and mergers, the government had to create a free market in land, abolishing inheritance rights and entailments. The radical followers of Bentham and Cobden had long been calling for this. This was a victory of industrial over agricultural interests, of metals and textiles over grain and sugar.

The abolition of corn tariffs in England led to soaring prices on the continent. Because of railways and steamships, American and Russian exports of grain dramatically increased, and the price of grain fell. At the end of the nineteenth century practically the whole of Europe was practising food protectionism, which largely meant grain import tariffs. Only the most industrialised countries, Great Britain and Belgium, refrained from this. In the 1880s Great Britain imported 65 per cent of its wheat, paying for it with its industrial goods. On the eve of the First World War, Russian peasants harvested three times less wheat per acre than English farmers, but the area of arable land kept pace with the growth in population and the expansion of railways. 20 The Russian prime minister, Sergey Witte, a former railway official, took British mercantilism from the sea onto dry land. His plan worked: thanks to the railways and low tariffs, the growth in the grain trade made up more than half the growth of the whole economy. But after the war, global wheat prices collapsed again. The economic historian David Allen characterises the late period of the Russian Empire as a one-off boom in raw materials.

The agricultural experiments of the Soviet authorities led to mass starvation. Collectivisation of agriculture brought crop failures, ecological devastation and mass famines. Things got so bad that in 1982 the Communist Party voted for the Food Programme, which entailed annual purchases of huge amounts of grain in exchange for oil. The USSR collapsed, and its successor, the Russian Federation, has become a major exporter of grain. However, petrofarming is just another method of converting oil into food (see chapter 13 ). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the double action of farm subsidies and energy-intensive technologies has reproduced the Soviet Food Programme all over the developed world.

Notes

Notes

1 Scott, Against the Grain . 2 Kant, ‘Conjectures on the beginning of human history’; Olson, The Logic of Collective Action . 3 Olson, ‘Space, agriculture, and organization’. 4 Al-Rawi and George, ‘Back to the cedar forest’, p. 83. 5 Carneiro, ‘A theory of the origin of the state’. 6 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence . 7 De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis . 8 De Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age . 9 Von Thünen, The Isolated State ; Małowist, ‘Poland, Russia and Western trade in the 15th and 16th centuries’; Moon, The Russian Peasantry . 10 Zheleznov, Ekonomicheskie vozzreniia pervykh russkikh agronomov , pp. 153, 201. 11 Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate . 12 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , p. 19. 13 Chayanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziajstvo . 14 Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV ; Kaplan, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question . 15 Jones, Bread upon the Waters . 16 Ibid. 17 McNeill, ‘Frederick the Great and the propagation of potatoes’. 18 De Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age ; de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy . 19 Von Thünen, The Isolated State . Chayanov saw von Thünen’s scholarship as exemplary, and Braudel compared him to Marx. See also Parr, ‘Overlooked aspects of the von Thünen system’. 20 Allen, Farm to Factory .