Growth Recurring
Historically, mass poverty is the normal human condition. This has naturally led to attempt to explain those historically rare instances of sustained economic growth leading to mass prosperity as being somehow special. Not merely in being, before 1900, rare but also involving some very particular human motivations, institutions or discoveries. A
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Does he give more detail about how those particular principalities hit upon the right combination of public goods (I'm guessing low customs duties + a sewage system) to produce growth per capita?
I take your point about growth in technology only being Malthusian (the population expands to match) in nature. I was always under the impression that the Black Plague was a major driver in Europe - reducing population pressure on the land (hence leading to the abolishment of serfdom) at the same time as certain technical innovations (padded collars and heavy ploughs) led to increased production and the low populations led to competition between cities to gain tradesmen.
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I am a bit surprised at the absence of mention of the enclosure movement created by the "private property" revolution. I always understood that as a key driver - enclosure leads to creation of landless proletariat in the cities, which produces all the economies of scale, specialisation, etc, necessary to start industrial production and increase productivity so fast that (in the long run) growth outruns population (and in the short run produces mass misery and suffering). Eg Britain's cities built the ships that enabled them to fish the north sea, turn ireland into a depopulated potato farm, grow sugar in the jamaicas and import wheat (corn), thus producing the staples of the british industrial proletariat diet: fish, chips, bread and treacle/jam, which gives you malnutrition but not malnourishment.
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The processes start way before, for example, 1848, even though the real "industrial revolution" take off is actually second half of the C19th, as Jones makes clear. As Macfarlane points out, folk were commenting how notably richer the English were certainly by the C16th or even earlier. The classic English medieval pattern was to leave home in your teens, work as a labourer, save money, become tenant farmer. Landlessness to tenancy was life cycle pattern, not social layer-cake ( ... )
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The expanding middle class may have been enough to counteract any drop in living standards, but I doubt that urban poverty really is generally worse than rural poverty. It certainly does not seem to be the judgement of those who move to the cities in such huge numbers.
I am aware of the witchcraft as awkward-person removal-technique in the English context (in, e.g., Keith Thomas). (It was also the differences between witchcraft acccusations and trials between England and the continent which drove Macfarlane's study in the first place.) But the withcraft accusations were largely over by the end of the C17th ( ... )
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What it also gives you is slums, industrial accidents, lung disease,cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, murder, robbery and rape. But from the village, people don't see that. They see the bright lights.
Less poetically, the higher real wages are visible but the poorer living conditions are not, since they only happen to you if you are unlucky and everyone thinks they will be lucky.
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Still, I tend to be very leary of explanations which postulate continuous individual misjudgement on a massive scale. The disease and other crowding costs I grant (see comments about the effects of American migration). But there are lots of unpleasantnesses about rural poverty also.
A factor worth mentioning is the result of the ecological bounty from the New World - potatoes and such. They would have had a counterveiling effect.
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The big difference is that urban poverty is much more visible than rural poverty. Writers either lived in the city (in which case they rub shoulders with the urban poor) or lived in good circumstances in the country (in which case they see merely the picturesque aspects of rustic life).
Dickens, who actually knew better than he is given credit for, frequently depicted the hellishness of both kinds of poverty in his books. Consider the sort of rural culture that could produce a Squeers, or long tolerate his establishment.
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More property rights, legal systems, physical infrastructure.
reducing population pressure on the land (hence leading to the abolishment of serfdom)
That has the economics of servitude the wrong way around. For servitude to be economically rational, subsistence + enforcement costs have to be higher than free wages. As population mounts, wages fall, encouraging the abolition of serfdom. Slavery and serfdom are features of low population to land ratios.
It was the barriers to landlord collusion which allowed wages to rise after the Black Death, encouraging marketisation of tenancies and capital investment. In Eastern Europe, conversely, one gets re-enserfment as rulers accept their service nobilities' pleas to tie peasants to the land, since said nobility was militarily crucial to ruler forces.
how those particular principalities hit upon ...
That is covered more in his The European Miracle. Though Growth Recurring does cover Japan in more detail. The Tokugawa bakufu created ( ... )
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