George Grantham

Agricultural Supply During the Industrial Revolution: French Evidence and European Implications

Analysis of the spatial pattern of prices and output in the manuscript returns of the French agricultural census of 1852 indicates that the availability of market outlets was probably the dominant factor determining the rise in agricultural productivity prior to the mid-nineteenth century and that agricultural supply was probably price elastic. The belief that the period of the industrial revolution was one of inelastic agricultural supply is shown to rest on a misinterpretation of the extant data on agricultural prices.

Contra Ricardo: On the macroeconomics of pre-industrial economies

The Ricardian model that inspires the conventional account of pre-industrial economic history assumes that productive opportunities are fully exploited, and that economic growth and fluctuations reflect the interaction of technological improvement, diminishing returns to labour and capital, and homeostatic demographic responses to changes in per capita income. This article argues that the long swings in output and productivity were the consequence of endogenous variation in trading costs affecting the profitability of undertaking specialised investment in market production. Because its markets were often ‘thin’, the pre-industrial economy possessed latent reserves of productivity that were not fully exploited. A search-equilibrium model is developed to demonstrate how such an economy could experience swings in output and productivity in the absence of technological or other ‘fundamental’ changes. The argument is supported by evidence indicating that the level of output in the second century may have approached that of the early eighteenth century.‘For those who care for the overmastering pattern, the elements are evidently there for a heroically simplified version of English history before the nineteenth century in which long-term movements in prices, in income distribution, in investment, in real wages, and in migration are dominated by changes in the growth of population’. – H. J. Habakkuk (1958).‘We may say broadly that while the part which nature plays in production shows a tendency to diminishing return, the part which man plays shows a tendency to increasing return’. – Alfred Marshall.

The French cliometric revolution: A survey of cliometric contributions to French economic history

This article surveys cliometric research on the development of the French economy, with special emphasis on the fiscal and monetary history of the Revolution, the alleged retardation of the French economy in the nineteenth century, and the question of agricultural productivity in the early modern and industrial age.

The Diffusion of the New Husbandry in Northern France, 1815–1840

This article deals with agricultural innovation in early nineteenth-century France. The core of the argument advanced is that the diffusion of the new intensive mixed husbandry in northern France was delayed by the slow growth in demand for meat and dairy products before 1840, which reduced the advantages to be gained from adopting forage-intensive crop rotations. Because the climate of southern France precluded large-scale adoption of the northern varieties of mixed husbandry, this study confines itself to the part of France lying north of the Loire, and east of the Breton peninsula. This region contained 39 percent of Frances people in 1840, raised 48 percent of its wheat and 64 percent of its fodder, and produced more than 75 percent of the value of its animal production. It was already the most industrialized and wealthy section of the country.

Explaining the industrial transition: a non-Malthusian perspective

The large-scale structure of world economic history exhibits three steady states punctuated by two phase transitions. The first transition arrived with the domestication of plants and animals; the second with the invention of engines capable of converting thermal to mechanical energy for applications in mining, manufacturing, and transportation. Yet, although both transitions led to increases in the absolute size of the economy, they affected the standard of living differently. Whereas the Industrial Revolution resulted in sustained growth in real per capita income for more than two centuries, over nine millennia the Agricultural Revolution spent itself in population growth that left per capita income insignificantly higher, and possibly lower than the level prevailing under hunting and gathering. This pattern raises three fundamental questions in economic history: why did the first great technological transition produce secular stasis in living standards? Why has the second yielded both steady growth in population and rising living standards? What triggered the transition from the stationary agricultural state to the progressive industrial state?

Occupational, Marital, and Life-Cycle Determinants of Women's Labor Force Participation in Mid Nineteenth-Century Rural France

Abstract The French population census of 1851 is unique among Frances nineteenth- and early twentieth-century censuses, as it is the only census to provide information on the market-oriented work of women and children within and outside the home. This study utilizes that information to analyze the demographic, structural, and economic determinants of womens labor force participation in a sample of rural communes in northern France. The data reveal an industrious population in which two-thirds to three-quarters of women in farm families engaged in market-oriented work. The data suggest that women were pushed rather than pulled into the rural labor force, and that poverty was the primary factor driving rural womens participation. The census data throw statistical light on the labor market participation rates of women and children in a preindustrial setting and are likely to produce major revisions in understandings of productivity growth in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France.

At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000. By David Levine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. vii, 431.

This books central message is summed up in the following sentence, which appears about midway through it: “The transformation of reproductive patterns was part of a massive shift in the nature of social relations because social change was experienced by thinking people who reflected on it and changed their behavior with regard to it†(p. 243). The statement epitomizes both the books flaccid prose and its lack of intellectual rigor. According to its author, the birth of modernization in the west was marked by the establishment of a “western†demographic pattern based on the economic viability of the nuclear family and the unusual length of time between puberty and marriage. But since everything social is connected to everything else, explaining this demographic change—if indeed it happened, a question we cannot yet answer on the basis of current knowledge—seems to require explaining everything else as well. Some intimation of this sort seems to have tempted David Levine to take the reader on a ramble through the vast literature on the medieval economy and society that has accumulated since the rebirth of medieval studies in the 1930s. It is a temptation devoutly to be resisted.