We argue that the First Industrial Revolution occurred in England in the middle of the 18th century precisely because it was uniquely urbanized before 1750.
This is something of an oversimplification of the paper’s case: Britons, or more precisely English farmers, produced more because they had to pay out more than foreign growers in rent, tithe and taxes. This forced them to produce more food, thereby supporting larger urban populations whose increased volume and range of economic and social interactions favoured intellectual exchange and innovation. The proposition is attractive in that it draws together the phenomena of agricultural growth, urbanisation and demand-driven and/or technology-led industrialisation. But could agrarian rents really be a driver of urban industry? It’s a lovely thought amid today’s welter of tosh about voting and property rights, but is it a speculation too far?
Brunt & García-Peñalosa seem on solid ground so far as the productivity-urbanisation relationship is concerned. Adam Smith said something similar in 1776:
As subsistence is, in the nature of things, prior to conveniency and luxury, so the industry which procures the former must necessarily be prior to that which ministers to the latter. The cultivation and improvement of the country, therefore, which affords subsistence, must, necessarily, be prior to the increase of the town, which furnishes only the means of conveniency and luxury. It is the surplus produce of the country only, or what is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators, that constitutes the subsistence of the town, which can therefore increase only with the increase of this surplus produce.
As we might expect, higher food output per worker indeed tends to be associated with a larger proportion of townspeople, though an admittedly rough estimate for principal products – albeit one based largely on later data – yields a rather more urban Holland, Belgium & Italy and a more rural Wales, Hungary & Romania than might be suggested by agricultural productivity alone (presumably indicating sizeable food imports among the former group and exports of grain and livestock from the latter).
The authors’ analysis starts by overstating a point that isn’t entirely irrelevant to their analysis, and might usefully have been improved upon:
China, which is regarded by many historians as the most technologically advanced country in the Middle Ages, had much higher urbanization rates than Europe around the year 1000, with about 3 per cent of the population living in cities in the former and virtually zero in the latter. However, over the next 700 years Western Europe experienced a massive increase in urbanization rates, reaching almost 10 per cent by the year 1700, whilst no substantial change took place in China.
This is over-egging the pudding somewhat. The authors’ dismissal of extravagant claims for China’s urbanisation is welcome, and they are right to note that while Europe forged ahead in the following centuries, China struggled to add a single percentage point. But while Europe’s urban population around 1000 was still struggling to recover from its post-Roman low, it certainly wasn’t zero, even in the then relatively peripheral north-west. There are grounds to think that western Europe wasn’t so far behind China, especially if one adopts a lower urban population threshold than the authors’ preferred 10,000 (the cut-off point for de Vries’s city-by-city study): the proportion was lower in north-western Europe, but still not far short of the Continental average. China had more big cities with its sophisticated imperial administration and advanced internal communications, but Europe contained many smaller regional centres, trade emporia and former Roman capitals in varying states of decay or repair. At a more appropriate urban threshold of 2,000 the Europe-China differential would all but disappear.
So perhaps western Europe on the eve of its 11th-century revival wasn’t quite such a backwater in the urbanisation stakes, despite the continent’s relative economic frailty. Just as importantly, by 1300 or even 1200 Europe – however defined - may well have been already ahead, a crucial point lost in comparing only the beginning and end of the 700-year period. This doesn’t invalidate the authors’ case, and may even support it: exactions at the expense of Europe’s cultivators had doubtless increased in the 11th-12th centuries as emerging monarchies and feudal elites jockeyed for advantage. But while overall urbanisation remained low, more precise dating of Europe’s lead underlines the need to look at the medium as well as the long term, and to seek possible explanations of the “Great Divergence” also at times well before the 18th century.
Urbanisation is only one step in the analysis, though a key one in that it is seen as a proximate motor of Europe’s technological revolution. The cornerstone of the authors' argument is the link between agrarian extraction (effectively rent, since this is the main difference between the English and Chinese rates) and the agricultural productivity growth which made large urban populations sustainable. In trying to identify something approaching a “take-off”, however, Brunt & García-Peñalosa seem to have allowed their enthusiasm for English agricultural growth to get the better of them:
Clark finds an increase in output per worker of 44 per cent between 1700-09 and 1770-79. Moreover, Clark documents that output per worker already rose sharply in the 16th and 17th century, increasing fivefold between 1500 and 1650.
A fivefold increase in output per worker in 1500-1650 is of course out of the question, not least given an intervening increase of only around five percentage points in the urbanisation level. Fivefold pre-industrial productivity growth would in any case surely be anathema to Clark’s neo-malthusian heart, necessitating a compensating population increase to soak up the surplus output. In fact Clark finds a productivity drop of about a quarter, not entirely implausible against a background of rapid population growth and the resulting reversal of the land windfall occasioned by the excess mortality of the 14th and 15th centuries. My own estimates suggest a modest rise in labour productivity in the two centuries before 1650, and an increase of a third or so in 1700-70, the latter closer to Brunt (2000) than Clark. For the following century, though, Brunt & García-Peñalosa seem needlessly cautious in their estimates – a rise of a mere fifth when population and trade data suggest an improvement of three-fifths or more. That debate will doubtless run and run, sustained by the high 18th-century output estimates which Clark derives from his series for land rent, wages and capital inputs.
Again, none of this disproves the paper’s basic premise, but it raises once more the issue of timing. There seems to have been nothing exceptional about the level of rural exactions in the latter half of the 18th century when England outstripped its continental rivals in urbanisation (or rather most of them, a significant qualification) and industrialisation: the burdens faced by growers had been in place for at least a couple of centuries, for much of which time provincial urbanisation had been sluggish. Agricultural advance was, like urban growth, a gradual process. But the greatest increases in both agricultural productivity (though not aggregate output) and urbanisation would come in the following century.
The next element – leaving aside the matter of state capacity, not entirely convincingly dealt with (I remain unpersuaded that this correlates with high agrarian rents) – is the scale and impact of compulsory extraction from agriculture:
In table 4 we report the tax burden on agricultural workers in England and China in c.1775, which was almost 100 times greater in England. Since output per worker was around ten times higher in England than in the typical Chinese province, the tax rate was around ten times higher in England than China.
Here again, some of the data seem questionable (“tax” here includes rent and tithe, but that’s clearly indicated). Given that output per English agricultural worker was only perhaps £35 in the 1770s – equivalent to four or five tons of grain – it’s difficult to imagine a Chinese peasant producing a mere tenth as much, still less sharing it among family, landlord, tax-collector and buyers. Chinese productivity was certainly a good deal behind, but a more accurate ratio would seem to be around a third, even lowering Perkins’s generous per capita grain allowance (based as it is on the best years of the 1950s rather than the perhaps more representative 1930s). Nor is the authors’ estimate of 47 pence for China’s land tax per man in agriculture entirely convincing: this might have been the amount going to the Imperial coffers, but other estimates suggest a burden perhaps three times as great after allowing for provincial surcharges, payment in lieu of corvée, outright misappropriation and differences in prices. Again, that doesn’t invalidate the paper’s argument, but it moderates the implied differential, even without considering whether tenancy had already begun to replace peasant ownership on a significant scale, a process whose timing remains unclear.
A more serious shortcoming is the paper’s omission of comparisons between the burdens of English growers and their Continental counterparts. Limiting the exercise to England and China addresses one part of the Great Divergence, but what of the “Little Divergence” within Europe, or perhaps we should say the many little divergences between those countries that surged forward and those that lagged behind? What would estimates for France (where peasant burdens were notorious but urbanisation remained well behind England’s until the latter half of the 20th century) and the highly-urbanised Netherlands or less prosperous lands further east tell us? And what light might, for instance, be shed on the issue by a similar exercise involving British and French territories in North America or the Iberian colonies to the south?
A full comparison of peasant burdens among Europe’s economies alone would be a mammoth undertaking, fraught with still greater difficulty than the relatively clear-cut England-China case. But the example of France suggests that the results may not be so supportive of the Brunt-García hypothesis. Against the authors’ finding of a 23% burden on English farms (possibly on the low side, it must be admitted), that of French peasants has been put at up to a third of output – one of the many grievances that fuelled the Revolution. Yet French agricultural labour productivity remained far below England’s – perhaps £16 of output per person engaged, well over China’s £11 but just half of the English level – and the gap was widening. France was also considerably less urbanised than England, and again falling behind: as late as 1801 under a fifth of the French population lived in towns of 2,000 or more, no greater a proportion than in the England of 1700, and in the meantime England’s urban share (using the same threshold) had topped 35%.
Against the case of France we may contrast that of the Netherlands, where urban population in Holland proper had shot up as early as the 14th century at a time when rural exactions were modest, widespread peasant ownership reflecting easy terms designed to draw cultivators to newly-reclaimed land. By 1514 more than 35% of Holland’s population lived in towns of 2,000-plus, a level not to be matched by England for another three centuries (though of course on a far greater scale), and the province was already a world leader in terms of income. Yet agrarian tenancy only became widespread during the 16th century, with townspeople prominent among the new rural landlord class. City growth continued apace, it’s true, with Amsterdam alone booming from a respectable provincial town of 12,000 in the 1510s to a commercial metropolis of 105,000 in 1622 and 150-200,000 on the eve of the disastrous French invasion half a century later.
But crucially, Holland’s initial urban explosion wasn’t matched by neighbouring provinces with a less unburdened peasantry. Nor was the rapid income growth of 1400-1650 sustained from the third quarter of the 17th century, despite the putative rent stimulus to the industry of an innovative and highly productive farm population. Having quintupled in 1514-1672 to half a million, Holland’s urban population stagnated for the next century and a half. Agrarian productivity remained high, at around £30 per worker, the highest on the Continent owing to a highly developed dairy sector, though by 1770 somewhat behind England. But a comparison of France and Holland – or indeed between 15th- and 18th-century Holland – would yield the very opposite finding to the one suggested by the starker but less like-for-like England-China contrast.
At the end of the day we are left with the familiar chicken-and-egg dilemma. To put it crudely, did London’s population quintuple in 1600-1800 because the bloated land rents of Middlesex’s dwindling rural portion forced the county’s remaining farmers to produce more to feed their urban neighbours? It’s an absurd question, but illustrative of the wider problem of causality. London drew in its supplies from a far wider area, both domestic and international, and while its growth clearly profited from adjacent resources, it in turn impacted on nearby land values: Clark’s early 19th-century rent benchmarks show clear crests around London, Manchester and Birmingham, as might be expected from their leading role in Britain’s commercial and industrial advance.
Brunt and García-Peñalosa’s approach has definite appeal: along with literacy, the rise in European urbanisation well before the classic industrial revolution period remains something of a mystery, if not a cause of the later economic upsurge then at least an expression of forces that would later underlie industrial expansion – whether agricultural growth, diversity and exchange, Allen’s trade-driven high-wage economy or Clark’s “survival of the richest”.
the authors have offered a stimulating avenue for future research, though their approach shares the limitations of all such attempts at monocausal explanation. In fact they could have gone one better by investigating the implications of their tax-and-grow scenario for Allen’s alluring (though itself not fully explained) hypothesis of an exceptionally commercialised economy driven to labour-saving innovation by the cost of its own workers, indeed by its very success. Then we might really be on to something, even if only as a partial answer to the hugely complex question (as Brunt titled his 2000 comparison with France), “Why England?”.
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