Download Expansion of Europe in the 18th Century

The Expansion of Europe in the Eighteenth Century
1. Agriculture and the Land
1. Introduction
1. With the exception of Holland, at least 80 percent of the people of all
western European countries drew their livelihoods from agriculture
(Eastern higher percent)
2. In 1700 European agriculture was much more ancient and medieval with
an average of only five or six bushels of grain for every bushel of wheat
sown
3. In crisis years, when crops were ruined by drought or flood, starvation
forced people to use substitutes—the “famine foods” of a desperate
population
1. People gathered chestnuts and stripped bark in the forests, they cut
dandelions and grass, and they ate these substitutes to escape
starvation
2. Such unbalanced, inadequate food in famine years made people
weak and susceptible to epidemics—dysentery, intestinal
problems, influenza, smallpox
4. In preindustrial Europe, the harvest was the real king, which was often
cruel
2. The Open-Field System
1. The greatest accomplishment of medieval agriculture was the open-field
system of village agriculture developed by European peasants
1. Open-field system was divided the land to be cultivated by the
peasants of a given village into several large fields, which were in
turn cut up into long, narrow strips that were not enclosed into
small plots by fences or hedges
2. The land of those who owned land were nobility, clergy, and
wealthy
2. The ever-present problem was exhaustion of the soil and when the
community planted wheat year after ear, the nitrogen in the soil was soon
depleted—crop failure
1. In the early Middle Ages, the only way for the land to recover its
fertility was for a field to lie fallow for a period of time (alternating
crop and idle)
2. Three-year rotations were introduced that permitted a year of
wheat or rye to be followed by a year of oats or beans and then by
a year of fallow (still plowed)
3. Traditional village rights reinforced the traditional pattern of farming and
in addition to rotating, villages maintained open meadows for hay and
natural pasture set aside for draft horses, oxen, cows, and pigs of the
village community
4. Poor women would go through the fields picking up the few single grains
that had fallen to the ground in course of harvest (The Gleaners by Jean
François Millet)
5. In the age of absolutism and nobility, state and landlord continued to levy
heavy taxes and high rents that stripped the peasants of much of their
meager earnings
6. In eastern Europe, peasants were worst off because of serfdom and social
conditions were better in the west where they could own land and pass it
on to their children
7. Peasants of a region of France had to pay heavy royal taxes, the church’s
tithe, and dues to the lord as well as set aside seed for the next season (half
of their crop left)
3. The Agricultural Revolution
1. European peasants could improve their position by taking land from those
who owned buy did not labor but powerful forces stood ready to crush any
protest
2. If peasants could replace the idle fallow with crops they could increase
their land under cultivation by 50 percent and an agricultural revolution
followed that occurred slowly throughout Europe but progressively
eliminated the use of the fallow
3. Because grain crops exhaust the soil and make fallowing necessary, the
secret to eliminating fallow lies in the alternating grain with certain
nitrogen-storing crops such as land reviving crops such as peas and beans,
root crops such as turnips and potatoes, and clovers and grasses (turnips,
potatoes, and clover were new-comers)
4. New patterns of organization allowed some farmers to develop
increasingly sophisticated patterns of rotation to suit different kinds of
soils
5. Improvements in farming had multiple effects
1. The new crops made ideal feed for animals and peasants had more
fodder, hay and root crops for the winter, they could build up herds
of cattle and sheep
2. More animals meant more meat and better diets for the people and
also meant more manure for fertilizer and therefore more grain for
bread and porridge
6. Advocates of the new rotations included an emerging group of
experimental scientists, some government officials, and landowners,
believed that new methods were scarcely possible within the traditional
system of open fields and common rights
7. A farmer who wanted to experiment had to get all landholders in a village
to agree so they argued that farmers should enclose and consolidate their
scattered holdings into compact, fenced-in fields in order to farm more
effectively
8. But with land distributed unequally all across Europe by 1700, common
rights were precious to there poor peasants and when small land holders
and the village poor could effectively oppose the enclosure of the open
fields and common pasture, they did so—only powerful social and
political pressure could overcome such opposition
9. The promise of the new system was only realized in the Low Countries
and England
4. The Leadership of the Low Countries and England
1. The new methods of the agricultural revolution originated in the Low
Countries and Holland was most advanced in many areas of human
endeavor including shipbuilding navigation, commerce, banking, drainage
and agriculture—provided model
1. Enclosed fields, continuous rotation, heavy manuring, and a wide
variety of crops
2. The reasons for early Dutch leadership were the dense populated
areas in the Low Countries and the pressure of population was
connected with the second cause, the growth of towns and cities in
the Low Countries (allowed specialization)
3. The English were the best students and they received instruction in
drainage and water control, draining the extensive marshes, or
fens, of wet and rainy England
2. The most famous of Dutch engineers, Cornelius Vermuyden, directed
large drainage projects in Yorkshire and Cambridge—converting the land
into one of the most fertile
3. Viscount Charles Townsend, one of the pioneers of English agricultural
improvement, learned about turnips and clover while serving as English
ambassador to Holland and when he returned to Norfolk spoke of turnips
(“Turnip Townsend”)
4. Jethro Tull, was another important English innovator, using horses rather
than slower moving oxen for plowing and advocated sowing seed with
drilling equipment
5. There were also improvements in livestock—selective breeding of
ordinary livestock was a marked pattern over the old pattern (breeding
faster horse for races and hunts)
6. The great surge of agricultural production provided for England’s urban
population
5. The Cost of Enclosure
1. In England, open fields were enclosed fairly but other historians argue that
because large landowners controlled Parliament, which made laws, they
had Parliament pass hundreds of “enclosure acts” each that authorized the
fencing of open fields in a given village and the division of the common in
proportion to one’s property in the fields
2. The heavy legal and surveying costs of enclosure were also divided among
the people, peasants had pay cost and landless cottagers lost access to
common pastures
3. By 1750, as much as half of English farmland was enclosed and many
English lost their ability to produce wool, from sheep, for the growing
textile industry
4. By 1700, a highly distinctive pattern of landownership and production
existed in England, where the were the few large landowners, at the other
extreme were a large mass of landless cottagers who labored mainly for
wages, and in between, small, independent peasant farmers who owned
their own land and substantial tenant farmers who rented land from
landowners, hired laborers, and sold output on market
5. The tenant framers, who had formerly been independent owners, were the
key to mastering the new methods of farming, because the tenant farmers
fenced fields, built drains, and improved the soil with fertilizers—
increasing employment opportunities
6. By eliminating common rights and greatly reducing the access enclosure
movement marked the completion of two major historical developments in
England
1. The rise of the market-oriented estate agriculture
2. The emergence of a landless rural proletariat—wealthy English
land owners help most of the land, leasing their holdings to
middle-sized farmers, who in turn relied on landless laborers for
their workforce (proletarianization—this transformation of large
numbers of small peasant farmers into landless rural wage earners)
2. The Beginning of the Population Explosion
1. Limitations on Population Growth
1. Commonly held ideas about population that are wrong included the idea
that people married young and had large families and societies were so
ignorant that they could do nothing to control the numbers and that
population was always growing too fast
2. Until 1700, the total population of Europe grew slowly much of the time
following an irregular cyclical pattern, which had great influence on social
and economic life
3. The Black Death created a sharp drop in population and prices after 1350
and also created a labor shortage throughout Europe—increased standard
of living
4. The second great surge of population growth outstripped the growth of
agricultural production after 1500 where food prices rose more rapidly
than wages resulting in a decline in the living standards for the majority of
people throughout Europe
5. Population slowed and stopped in seventeenth-century Europe and
birthrate and death rate were about balanced and population grew about
0.5 to 1 percent in a normal year
6. In periods, increases in deaths occurred periodically in the seventeenth
century on a local scale— famine, epidemic disease, and war caused
demographic crisis
1. Famine, the result of poor farming methods and periodic crop
failures accompanied by disease killed (bubonic plague, dysentery,
and smallpox)
2. The indirect effects were more harmful than the organized
killings—war spread disease—armies passed venereal disease
throughout the countryside
2. The New Pattern of the Eighteenth Century
1. Population growth was especially dramatic after about 1750—caused by
fewer deaths
2. Fewer deaths occurred due to the disappearance of the bubonic plague in
part because of stricter measures of quarantine in Mediterranean ports and
along Austrian border
3. Bubonic plague was a disease that was mainly carried around by the black
rat’s flea (carrying around bacillus) and after 1600, a new rat of Asiatic
origin, the brown, or wander, rat began to drive out and eventually
eliminated the black rat
4. The most important advance in preventive medicine in this period was the
inoculation against smallpox and improvements in the water supply and
sewerage promoted better public health, drainage of swamps and marshes
reduced insect population
5. Human beings also became more successful in their efforts to safeguard
the supply of food and protect against famine and advances in
transportation lessened the impact of local crop failure and family—
emergency supplies could be brought in
6. Population grew in the eighteenth century primarily because years of
abnormal death rates were less catastrophic; famines, epidemics, and wars
continued but moderated
7. There was only so much land available and agriculture could not provide
enough work for the rapidly growing labor force, and people had to look
for new ways
3. The Growth of the Cottage Industry
1. Introduction
1. The growth of population contributed to the development of industry in
rural areas; manufacturing with hand tools in peasant cottages and
workshed grew—peasants had always made clothing, processed some
food, and constructed some housing
2. A new system emerged called “cottage industry” or “domestic industry”
that distinguished it from the factory industry and scholars have preferred
to speak of “protoindustrialization,” by which they mean a stage of rural
industrial development with wage workers and hand tools that preceded
the emergence of factory industries
3. Putting-out system is used by contemporaries to describe the key features
of eighteenth-century rural industry (new form of industrial production)
2. The Putting-Out System
1. The two main participants in the putting-out system were the merchant
capitalist and the rural worker—the merchant loaned, raw materials to
several cottage workers, who processed the materials in homes and
returned the finished product to the merchant
2. The system was a kind of capitalism and grew because it had competitive
advantages
1. Since countryside was unregulated, workers and merchants could
change procedures and experiment but they did not need to meet
rigid guild standards
2. Textiles: all manner of knives, forks, and housewares; buttons and
gloves; clocks; and musical instruments could be produced in the
countryside
3. Rural manufacturing did not spread across Europe at an even rate, first
appearing in England and by 1500, half of England’s textiles were being
produced in the countryside and in France, Colbert revived the urban
guilds and used them to control
4. In 1762, the government encouraged the growth of cottage manufacturing
and thus in France, as in Germany and other areas, the later part of the
eighteenth century witnessed the remarkable expansion of rural industry in
certain populated regions
3. The Textile Industry
1. The making of linen, woolen, and cotton cloth was the typical activity of
cottage works engaged in the putting-out system—way of life and
economic system
1. The rural worker lived in a small cottage with tiny windows and
little space and it was often a single room that served as a
workshop, kitchen, and bedroom
2. There were only a few pieces of furniture, the most important
being the loom changed when John Kay’s invention of the flying
shuttle enabled the weaver to throw the shuttle back and forth
between the threads with one hand
2. The cottage industry was first and foremost a family enterprise and all
members of the family helped in the work—every person from seven to
eighty—while women and children prepared the raw material and spun the
thread, the man of the house wove the cloth and children helped wash dirt
out of the raw cotton
3. The work of four or five spinners was needed to keep one weaver steadily
employed and often widows and unmarried women were recruited by the
wife to spin
4. There were constant disputes over the weights of materials and the quality
of the cloth and rural labor was cheap, scattered, and poorly organized—it
was hard to control
5. After getting paid on Saturday afternoon, the family did not work on “holy
Monday”
6. Labor relations were often poor, and the merchant was unable to control
the quality of the cloth or the schedule of the workers
4. Building the Atlantic Economy
1. Introduction
1. The expansion of Europe in the eighteenth century was characterized by
the growth of world trade—Netherlands, France, and, above all, Great
Britain benefited most
2. Great Britain, formed in 1707 by the union of England and Scotland in a
single kingdom, gradually became the leading maritime power (longdistance trade)
2. Mercantilism and Colonial Wars
1. Britain’s commercial leadership in the eighteenth century had its origins in
the mercantilism of the seventeenth century—European mercantilism was
a system of economic regulations aimed at increasing the power of the
state
2. Practiced by Colbert under Louis XIV, mercantilism aimed at creating a
favorable balance of foreign trade in order to increase a country’s stock of
gold
3. What distinguished English mercantilism was then idea that government
economic regulations could and should serve the private interest of
individuals and groups as well as the public needs of the state—others put
needs of state ahead of individuals
4. The result of the English desire to increase both military power and private
wealth was the mercantile system of the Navigation Acts passed under
Oliver Cromwell
1. The acts required that goods imported from Europe into England
and Scotland be carried on British-owned ships or on ships of the
country producing the article
2. Acts gave British merchants and shipowners monopoly on trade
with the colonies
3. The colonists were required to buy almost all of their European
goods from Britain and people believed that they were be a
guaranteed market for products
4. The Navigation Acts were a form of economic warfare in that their
initial target was the Dutch, who were far ahead of the English in
shipping and foreign trade and three Anglo-Dutch wars between
1652 and 1674 damaged Dutch commerce
5. Late in the seventeenth century, the Dutch and English became allies to
stop the expansion of France’s Louis XIV and the Netherlands followed
Spain into decline
6. From 1701 to 1763, Britain and France were locked in a series of wars to
decide, in part, which nation would become the leading maritime power
(share of profits)
7. The War of the Spanish Succession which started when Louis XIV
declared his willingness to accept the Spanish crown willed to his
grandson—union of France and Spain threatened to destroy the British
colonies in America (coalition of states)
1. Louis XIV was forced in the Peace of Utrecht (1713) to cede
Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the Hudson Bay territory to
Britain
2. Spain was compelled to give Britain control of the West African
slave trade (asiento) and let Britain send one ship of products into
Spanish colonies yearly
8. The War of Austrian Succession, which started when Frederick the Great
Prussia seized Silesia from Austria’s Maria Theresa, gradually became a
world war
1. The seizure of French territory in Canada by New England
colonists in 1745 led France to sue for peace in 1748 and to accept
a return to the territorial situation existing in North America at the
beginning of the war
2. France’s Bourbon ally, Spain, defended itself well and remained
intact
9. The inconclusive standoff was followed by the Seven Years’ War (17561763) where in central Europe, Austria’s Maria Theresa sought to win
back Silesia and crush Prussia re-establishing control in German affairs
(she almost succeeded, skillfully winning both France, Habsburg’s longstanding enemy and Russia to her cause)
10. The seven Years’ War was decisive between the Franco-British
competition for colonial empire and led by William Pitt, the British
concentrated on using sea power to destroy the French fleet and choke off
French commerce around the world (British captured Quebec and
strangled France’s sugar trade with its Caribbean Islands)
11. With the Treaty of Paris, France lost all its possessions on the mainland of
North America—French Canada and territory east of Mississippi River
passed to Britain, and France ceded Louisiana to Spain as compensation
for loss of Florida to Britain
12. By 1763, British naval power, built on the rapid growth of British shipping
industry after the passing of the Navigation Acts, triumphed decisively
3. Land and Labor in British America
1. The settlements along the Atlantic coast provided an outlet for surplus
population
2. The possibility of having one’s own farm was attractive to ordinary men
and women from the British Isles; land in the England was concentrated in
the hands of the nobility and gentry; white settles who came to colonies as
free men, indentured servants (work for seven years for passage), and
prisoners could obtain own land
3. Unlike the great majority of European peasants, American farmers could
keep most of what they produced; availability of land made labor
expensive in the colonies
4. Cheap land and scarce labor were critical factors in the growth of slavery
in the southern colonies (Spanish introduced slavery into the Americas in
the 16th century)
5. In the 18th century, framers of New England and middle colonies produced
food exporting the products to West Indies (people depend on the
mainland colonies)
6. The English could not buy cheaper sugar from Brazil, nor allowed to grow
tobacco and the colonists had their place in the mercantile system of the
Navigation Acts
7. The abundance of almost free land resulted in a rapid increase in the
colonial population in the 18th century (the population increased ten fold
from 1700-1775)
8. Agricultural development resulted in fairly high standards of living for
colonists
4. The Growth of Foreign Trade
1. The rapidly growing and wealthy agricultural population of the mainland
colonies provided an expanding market for English manufactured goods
2. Rising demand for manufactured goods in North America as well as in the
West Indies, Africa, and Latin America allowed English cottage industry
to continue
3. Like England earlier, European states adopted protectionist, mercantilist
policies, and by 1773, England was selling only about two-thirds as much
woolen cloth to northern and western Europe as its had in 1700 (wool
cloth was only important product)
4. Decline in many markets meant that the English economy needed new
markets and protected colonial markets came to the rescue and from 17001773, manufactured products to the Atlantic economy—mainland colonies
of North America and West Indian sugar islands—soared from £500,000
to £4.0 million
5. English exports became much more balanced and diversified (to America
and Africa went large quantities of metal items) and the mercantilist
system formed in the seventeenth century to attack the Dutch achieved
success in the 18th century
6. The English concentrated much of the trade flowing through the Atlantic
economy
5. Revival in Colonial Latin America
1. When the last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II, died in 1700, Spain’s vast
empire lay ready for dismemberment but Spain recovered under the
leadership of Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip V, who brought men and ideas
from France
2. Peace was restored after the War of Spanish Succession and a series of
ministers reasserted royal authority, overhauling state finances and
strengthening defense
3. Spain received Louisiana from France in 1763 and missionaries and
ranchers extended Spanish influence all the way to northern California and
economy improved
4. In 1800 Spanish America accounted for half of world silver production
and silver mining encouraged food production for large mining camps and
allowed Creoles—people of Spanish blood born in America—to purchase
more European goods
5. The Creole elite came to rival the top government officials dispatched to
govern the colonies and estate owners believed that work in the fields was
the proper occupation of the peasantry and slavery and periodic forced
labor gave way to debt peonage
6. Debt peonage—a planter or rancher would keep the estate’s Christianized
Indians in perpetual debt bondage by periodically advancing food, shelter,
and a little money
7. The large middle group in Spanish colonies consisted of mestizos, the
offspring of Spanish men and Indian women and at the end of the colonial
era, about 20% were white (Creoles), 30 % were mestizo, and about 50 %
were of African origin
8. In the 18th century Spanish and Portuguese colonies developed a growing
commerce in silver, sugar, and slaves as well as in manufactured goods for
Europeanized elite
6. Adam Smith and Economic Liberalism
1. Wanting bigger positions in overseas commerce, independent merchants
in many countries began campaigning against “monopolies” and called for
“free trade”
1. Although mercantilist policies strengthened both the Spanish and
British colonial empires, Creole merchants were annoyed by
regulations imposed in Madrid
2. Small English merchants complained about the injustice of
handing over exclusive trading rights to great trading combines
such as the East India Company
2. The general idea of freedom of enterprise in foreign trade was developed
by Scottish professor of philosophy Adam Smith, whose Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations founded modern economics
was highly critical of mercantilism
3. To Smith, mercantilism meant a combination of stifling government
regulations and unfair privileges for state-approved monopolies and
government favorites and free competition, which would best protect
consumers from price gouging and give all citizens a fair and equal right
to do what they did best (“system of natural liberty”)
4. Smith argued that the government should limit itself to “only three duties”
1. The government should provide a defense against foreign invasion
2. The government should maintain civil order with courts and police
protection
3. The government should sponsor certain indispensable public works
and institutions that could never earn an adequate profit for private
investors
5. Smith was one of the enlightenment’s most original and characteristic
thinkers rely-ing on the power of reason to unlock the secrets of the
secular world (spoke truth)
6. Unlike many disgruntled merchant capitalists, Smith applauded the
modest rise in real wages of British works in the 18th century saying, “No
society can surely by flourish-ing and happy, of which the far great part of
the members are poor and miserable.”
7. Believing that employers as well as workers and consumers were
motivated by narrow self-interest, Smith did not call for more laws and
more polic power but made the pursuit of self-interest in a competitive
market the source of an underlying and previously unrecognized a
harmony, a harmony that would result in gradual process
8. The “invisible hand” of free competition for one and for all disciplined the
freed of selfish individuals and provided the most effective means of
increasing wealth
9. Smith’s work emerged as the classic argument for economic liberalism
and capitalism