The level and structure of effective demand result from a twofold set of choices – a choice between how much to spend and how much not to spend and a choice between an infinite number of possible types of expenditure. These choices are like votes: by purchasing product A and not purchasing product B, one pushes up the price of product A while depressing that of product B.
On the supply side, in a market economy, economic operators decide when, what, and how much to produce on the basis of price indications. Once they have decided what to produce, these operators must then choose the best possible combination of factors of production.
The whole economic process is therefore a matter of choices – on the part of the consumers and on the part of the producers. In the last analysis, choices are necessary because resources are much more limited than wants. Production is the outcome of all these individual and social choices acting on both the demand and the supply side.
THE DETERMINANTS OF PRODUCTION
Put simply, production is a function of capital, labor, and natural resources. Some twenty-five years ago, economists were content to stop at this point in macroeconomic analysis, but since the 1950s they have taken to splitting hairs.
The factors of production – labor, capital, and natural resources – are the inputs of a productive system. From their combination emerges output – that is, production. Any single mixture of inputs can produce different outputs – different in quality and/or quantity. Physical productivity is the factor which determines the quantity and quality of the product, given the quantity and quality of the inputs.
Economists have lately discovered that, during the last century, output (as measured by Gross National Product) has consistently grown faster than can be accounted for by the increase of the inputs of labor, capital, and natural resources. This discovery led economists on a hunt for another factor which might explain the difference between “how much has been produced” and “how much would have been produced if the factors at play had been only labor, capital, and natural resources.”
However, “how much would have been produced ...” represents an arbitrary estimate which depends on a series of hypothetical assumptions made by those who undertake research of this kind. Even if some agreement could be reached about the size of the residual (the difference between “how much was produced” and “how much would have been produced if ...”), the source of the residual remains in question. The following factors are generally quoted:
a. increase in division of labor between different economies, through the development of trade
b. economies of scale
c. more efficient allocation of factors of production
d. technological development
e. better education
Classifications of this type are useful for logical-anatomic analysis, but they are artificial. In reality, there are no separate streams; everything flows together. For example, “technological development” is in no way separate or “exogenous” to the economic system. Economists often classify it as “exogenous” because it suits their analysis to do so. But it is a trick. As R.O.C. Matthews and C.H. Feinstein have written, “exogeneity is a label applied for conceptual reasons and in no sense an intrinsic attribute of the factors in question.” On the contrary, technological development springs from the brains of the people – that is, labor – and is incorporated in the machines and tools that they use – that is, in capital. It seems unlikely, in any case, that any list can ever be regarded as complete. In 1947, long before Aukrust, Dennison, Solow, and the other “residualists” appeared, J. Schumpeter wrote that “only in very rare cases” can economic development be explained in terms of “causal factors such as an increase in population or the supply of capital.” An economy or a firm often succeeds in doing “something more,” and according to Schumpeter this “something more” “from the standpoint of the observer who is in full possession of all relevant facts ... can be understood ex post but it can never be understood ex ante; that is to say, it cannot be predicted by applying the ordinary rules of inference from the preexisting facts.”1 Schumpeter identified this “something more” as the “creative response of history.” Schumpeter had a profound intuition but, wishing to reduce the intangible to the tangible, the very complex to the very simple, made the mistake of reducing the whole to a part – in this specific case, to entrepreneurial activity.
Entrepreneurial activity is a necessary ingredient, but not a sufficient one. It is the human vitality of a whole society which, given the opportunity, comes into play and sets loose the “creative response of history.”
When a society shows vitality it does so at all levels, not only the economic, and it succeeds better than other societies which seemingly have the same amounts of resources at their disposal. It is not by chance that, when Italian merchants greatly contributed to European economic development, Dante was writing the Divine Comedy, Giotto was introducing innovations in painting, and St Francis was starting his religious movement. In the seventeenth century, when the Low Countries became the prime movers in international trade while producing great entrepreneurs and merchants such as De Geer or the Tripps, they also produced jurists like Grotius, experimentalists such as Huyghens and Leeuwenhoek, and painters such as Rembrandt. Economists who try to split the product of this human vitality, arbitrarily attributing parts of it to this factor and parts to that, bring to mind a fellow who, confronted with one of Giotto’s paintings, would try to measure how much of the beauty of the painting was due to the type of brush used, how much to the chemistry of the colors, and how much to the time taken by the artist. In order to understand what happened in certain societies, it is necessary to understand an atmosphere of collective enthusiasm, of exaltation and of cooperation. When the Cathedral of Chartres was being built “people pulled carts loaded with stones and with wood, and with everything necessary for the construction of the church....”2 “Silence and humility” dominated, wrote Ugo3 and another chronicler commented, “He who has not seen these facts will never see the same again.” When in 1066 the Abbot Desiderio started the construction of a basilica at the top of Monte Cassino, the first great marble column was borne to the summit on the shoulders of people filled with mystical fervor.4
In other cases, political ideology operated; in yet others, enthusiasm for new lands, the spirit of the frontier, the feeling of liberation from restrictions imposed by scarcity of resources or by ossified social and political institutions. When one admires certain exquisite works of art by humble craftsmen of the past, knowing how inadequate the economic incentives were, one cannot but conclude that intangible and nonmeasurable factors, such as the creative urge, love of one’s work, pride in one’s own ability and self-respect, where they exist, make miracles possible; and that the absence of these factors depresses production both quantitatively and qualitatively. Sociologists, analyzing these facts, have coined numerous and varied terms, such as “motivation,” “collective enthusiasm,” “cooperation,” or, in the opposite sense, “alienation.” There is no lack of words; what is lacking is the ability to analyze these things in a functional way, to understand them ex ante as causal elements rather than ex post as a residual which – whether positive or negative – remains largely mysterious.
MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE PRODUCTIVITY LEVELS
As we shall see later, in the centuries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there was marked technological progress. Undoubtedly, the levels of productivity prevailing in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century were considerably higher than they had been six hundred years earlier. But by our standards they were still abysmally low. After all, Europe started her ascent from an extremely primitive stage at the turn of our millennium; and until the seventeenth century, the lack of a systematic criterion of experimentation and research made every innovation dependent upon wearisome and rough empiricism. The productivity of labor was adversely affected by the poverty and scarcity of the equipment and by the low educational levels of the labor force itself. The productivity of capital remained depressed because of the low technological levels and by the limited availability of sources of energy, which were essentially still of animal and vegetable nature.5 Land was by far the most important available natural resource, and its yield was limited.
All this is interesting but extremely vague. Adjectives such as low, reduced, limited, are like mist: they leave too much to the imagination. Let us try to emerge from the fog with a few figures, beginning with agriculture.
A pioneer in the quantitative study of agricultural history is Slicher van Bath. Having gathered data on yield-seed ratios from various European countries, van Bath calculated synthetic averages for wheat, rye, barley, and oats. The results are summarized in Table 3.1.6
Figures of this kind must be taken with more than a simple grain of salt.7 J.Z. Titlow, who patiently collected a vast amount of data on agricultural returns in medieval England, has shown that, by extending the sample, one obtains results which differ noticeably from those of van Bath (Table 3.2). At any rate, in both Tables 3.1 and 3.2, averages for the various countries are not based on comprehensive data but on scattered information derived from a relatively small number of cases.
Table 3.4 contains analogous data for selected areas of Italy, from the fertile plain of the Po Valley (Imola), to the Tuscan farms, to the poor soils of the Ligurian Appenines (Montaldeo). Table 3.5 is based on an exceptionally comprehensive statistic regarding the whole territory of Siena, which was by far the most important grain-producing area of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
A cursory glance at the figures in the following tables is enough to show that agricultural yields varied greatly from one year to the next and from one area to another, owing to the very poor control of man over the forces of nature. Consequently, in the presence of these massive fluctuations, statistical averages have little meaning. Moreover even when one takes the most fertile areas and the most propitious periods, one still finds miserably low yields. The yield ratio for wheat reached the level of 6 only in the best years, while today in the American wheat belt it normally reaches the level of above 30.
Table 3.1 Average gross yields per seed for wheat, rye, barley, and oats in selected European countries, 1200–1699
| Grains yielded per seed planted | |||
| Period | England | France | Germany |
| 1200–1249 | 3.7 | ||
| 1250–1499 | 4.7 | 4.3 | |
| 1500–1699 | 7.0 | 6.3 | 4.2 |
Source: Slicher van Bath, “Yield Ratios,” p. 15.
Table 3.2 Average yields per unit of wheat seed in England, 1200–1349
| According to Slicher van Bath | According to Titow | |
| 1200–49 | 2.9 | 3.8 |
| 1250–99 | 4.2 | 3.8 |
| 1300–49 | 3.9 | 3.9 |
Source: Titow, Winchester Yields, p. 4.
Table 3.3 Mean yield ratios on the estate of the bishopric of Winchester, 1209–1453
| Date | Wheat | Barley | Oats |
| 1209–70 | 3.85 | 4.32 | 2.63 |
| 1271–99 | 3.79 | 3.36 | 2.21 |
| 1300–24 | 3.90 | 3.57 | 2.21 |
| 1325–49 | 3.96 | 3.74 | 2.25 |
| 1349–80 | 3.66 | 3.53 | 2.43 |
| 1381–1410 | 3.88 | 4.13 | 2.93 |
| 1411–53 | 3.66 | 3.64 | 3.03 |
Source: D.L. Farmer, “Grain yields on the Winchester manors in the later middle ages,” Ec.H.R., 2nd ser., 30 (1977), p. 560.
In the territory of Bologna (Italy) in the second half of the fifteenth century 2.5 acres of vineyard produced on average fifty gallons of wine per year. Today in the same region production is seven times greater and of much better quality.8 The land produced little because seeds were not selected, crop rotation and implements were primitive, pesticides were unknown, and last, but not least, manure, the only known fertilizer, was always in very short supply; on the landed property of the abbey of Staffelsee in the Dark Ages the manure available was barely sufficient for 0.5 percent of the land, and in the thirteenth century in the regions around Paris, certainly one of the more advanced areas of the time, fields were fertilized with manure only once in every nine years.9
Table 3.4 Average yields per unit of wheat seed in selected areas of Italy, 1300–1600
| Area | Year | Yield |
| Arezzo1 | 1386 | 5.3 |
| 1387 | 11 | |
| 1390 | 6.5 | |
| Parma2 | 1510–19 | 2.4–5.6 |
| 1520–29 | 2.6–6.0 | |
| 1530–39 | 2.5–5.7 | |
| 1540–49 | 2.6–6.3 | |
| 1550–59 | 0.2–5.3 | |
| 1560–69 | 1.7–5.8 | |
| Florence3 | 1611–20 | 9.4 |
| 1621–30 | 7.6 | |
| 1631–40 | 7.4 | |
| 1641–44 | 7.5 | |
| 1656–60 | 6.7 | |
| 1661–70 | 6.1 | |
| 1671–80 | 5.9 | |
| 1681–90 | 6.7 | |
| 1691–1700 | 6.0 | |
| Imola4 | 1515–24 | 7.3 |
| 1525–34 | 6.3 | |
| 1535–44 | 6.7 | |
| 1545–54 | 6.3 | |
| 1555–64 | 5.2 | |
| 1565–74 | 6.0 | |
| 1585–94 | 5.6 | |
| 1595–1604 | 5.1 | |
| 1605–14 | 6.4 | |
| 1615–24 | 5.4 | |
| 1625–34 | 5.6 | |
| 1635–44 | 5.7 | |
| 1645–54 | 4.9 | |
| 1655–64 | 5.5 | |
| 1665–74 | 6.6 | |
| 1675–84 | 6.0 | |
| 1685–94 | 6.6 | |
| 1695–1704 | 5.8 | |
| Montaldeo5 | 1560 | < 1 |
| 1649 | < 1 | |
| 1650 | < 1 | |
| 1664 | 3 | |
| 1672 | 2.3 | |
| 1673 | 1.3 | |
| 1674 | 2.9 | |
| 1677 | 1.3 | |
| 1678 | 3.5 | |
| 1681 | 1.8 | |
| 1683 | 4 | |
| 1686 | 2.5 | |
| 1687 | 3 | |
| 1688 | 3.3 | |
| 1692 | 1.9 | |
| 1693 | 2.5 | |
| 1694 | 2.6 | |
| 1695 | 1 | |
| 1697 | 1 | |
| 1699 | 2 | |
| 1700 | 1.5 |
Sources: 1. Cherubini, “Proprietà fondiaria,” p. 40. 2. Romani, Nella spirale di una crisi, p. 137. 3. Conti, Formazione della Struttura Agraria, vol. 1, p. 359. 4. Rotelli, “Rendimenti.” 5. Doria, Uomini e Terre, p. 29.
The animals, like the land, performed rather poorly, because they were not adequately fed and there was no adequate selective breeding. Cows’ milk production was meager. It is estimated that milk production per cow in fourteenth-century England was about 500 liters per year, with a low butterfat content.10 In the late 1960s in the United States, though state averages varied noticeably, the overall national average was almost 3,000 liters per year, with a high (about 4 percent) butterfat content.
Table 3.5 Quantity of grain sown and harvested and yield ratios in the territory of Siena, 1593–1609
| Quantity of grain (in moggia) | |||
| Year | Sown | Harvested | Yield |
| 1593–94 | 18,063 | 78,914 | 4.4 |
| 1594–95 | 16,230 | 98,893 | 6.1 |
| 1595–96 | 17,231 | 67,933 | 3.9 |
| 1596–97 | 18,727 | 102,717 | 5.5 |
| 1598–99 | 21,540 | 89,294 | 4.1 |
| 1599–1600 | 20,048 | 92,010 | 4.6 |
| 1600–01 | 18,048 | 76,545 | 4.2 |
| 1602–03 | 17,500 | 90,327 | 5.2 |
| 1603–04 | 17,630 | 70,089 | 4.0 |
| 1606–07 | 16,281 | 74,741 | 4.6 |
| 1607–08 | 15,888 | 94,983 | 6.0 |
| 1608–09 | 16,297 | 74,151 | 4.5 |
Source: Diaz, II Granducato di Toscana, p. 339. A moggio was equivalent to 583 litres.
Since the animals were small, they produced little meat. Table 3.6 shows data comparing seventeenth-century cattle weights in the Montaldeo area (Italy) with weights of cattle of similar age today. The disparity is striking. Data available on northern Europe in the seventeenth century fail to paint a rosier picture: even on pastures which were richer than in Montaldeo, oxen weighed only between 400 and 500 pounds and cows about 220 pounds.11
Table 3.6 Deadweight of male cattle in the district of Montaldeo (Italy), seventeenth century
| Weight in pounds | |||
| Year | Age of animal | 17th century | 20th century |
| 1684 | 5 months | 72 | 245 |
| 1690 | 1 year | 130 | 540 |
| 1686 | 2 years | 240 | 880 |
| 1675 | 3 years | 320 | 1,100 |
| 1675 | 4 years | 480 | 1,310 |
| 1675 | 5 years | 560 | 1,550 |
Source: Doria, Uomini e Terre, p. 57.
For the nonagricultural sectors information is much poorer. However, much of the available data suggests that productivity in these areas was hardly more encouraging than in the agricultural sectors. We know, for instance, that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the situation of the woollen manufacturers in Florence was as follows:12
| 1604 | 1627 | |
| Number of firms | 120 | 52 |
| Number of looms | 1,420 | 782 |
| Number of weavers: males | 878 | 268 |
| females | 1,457 | 1,315 |
| Total | 2,33513 | 1,583 |
| Number of pieces14 produced annually | 14,000 | 7,998 |
| Value of annual production (in scudi) | > 900,000 | 430,000 |
| Percent of wages on value of production | 55 |
From the above data one derives the following ratios:15
| 1604 | 1627 | |
| Number of weavers per firm16 | 19 | 30 |
| Number of looms per firm | 12 | 15 |
| Number of weavers per loom | 1.6 | 2 |
| Number of pieces produced annually per firm | 117 | 154 |
| Number of pieces produced annually per loom | 10 | 10 |
| Number of pieces produced annually per weaver | 6 | 5 |
In Florence, during the 1458–62 period, a weaver would take 4 to 5 weeks to produce roughly 30 metres of taffeta, 6 to 10 weeks to produce the same length of satin, about 8 weeks for damask and 10–14 weeks for velvet.17 In Genoa, at the end of the sixteenth century, a weaver produced on average slightly more than 16 inches (28 inches wide) of velvet per day.18 In Milan at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a weaver produced, on average, little more than half a yard of velvet per work day.19 In Venice, also at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the average daily production of a silk-loom varied between a minimum of 0.4 yards for the gold velvets to a maximum of 1.5 yards for satin and damask, and with a general average for all the various types of silk materials of about 1.2 yards.20 In Yorkshire in the 1580s it took about fifteen persons one week to make a short broadcloth measuring 12 yards by 1.75 yards.21 In the fifteenth century in England a miner could extract a maximum of 30–40 pounds of lead mineral.22 In the Dean (England) four furnaces built by 1613 produced a minimum of about 250 tons and a maximum of 700 of cast iron per furnace per year.23 In 1621, John Browne claimed that in the foundry at Brenchley (England), he could cast two hundred iron cannon in 200 days; in all likelihood, 200 was the number of working days in a year at the furnace. At about the same time in Sweden, a foundry produced between 100 and 150 tons a year of cast-iron cannons.24 In Italy, again in the seventeenth century, most of the paper mills possessed only one or two vats and the average daily production of one vat did not exceed a maximum of 4,500 sheets – in this instance, approximately 110 pounds of paper.25
Low labor productivity obviously meant that production processes were labor-intensive. When the population of London numbered only about 35,000 people, the building of Beaumaris Castle provided employment for 400 masons, 30 smiths and carpenters, 1,000 unskilled workers and 200 carters.
The building industry is most definitely one in which little if any improvement was accomplished as far as labor productivity is concerned until very recent times. In a number of other sectors, however, noticeable improvements were achieved in the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In iron production in England, for instance, between 1350 and 1550, productivity allegedly increased seven or eightfold.26 Although, in regard to book production, it would be absurd from an esthetic point of view to compare a handwritten book with a printed one, it is not absurd from the point of view of the diffusion of ideas, to compare the number of manuscripts a copyist could prepare in one year with the number of volumes a printer could print within the same period. After Gutenberg’s invention, a continuous series of technical improvements progressively increased printers’ productivity. The first printers succeeded in printing (in the language of the trade, “pulling”) about 300 pages a day. By the end of the fifteenth century, the average had risen to over 400. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, two printers could pull about 200 pages an hour, that is, given the high number of working hours per day in those times, about 2,500 pages a day. In the shipping sector, the ratio of crew to cargo improved even if defense requirements slowed down this progress. About the year 1400 the crew-to-cargo ratio averaged one sailor for every 5 or 6 tons. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the ratio was one man per 7 or 8 tons. When peace and a decrease in piracy reduced the needs for defense, the ratio dropped to one man per 10 tons. Of course these gains in the crew-to-cargo ratio must also be considered in the light of the notable gains in the speed and safety of ships and in the rate of their utilization.
The main reason for productivity gains was technological progress, and we shall discuss this in Chapter 6. The gains which were achieved in western Europe in the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were conspicuous when compared to the productivity levels typical of the traditional agricultural societies. But the highest productivity levels reached by preindustrial Europe still look abysmally low when compared with the productivity levels of an industrial society.
Once the foregoing facts about preindustrial European productivity have been established, one important qualification remains to be made. The data which allow us to measure productivity in the past refer exclusively to quantity and leave aside quality. Now, it is simply not true that all the products of the preindustrial era were of better quality than those of the industrial era. Our maps, even if less artistic, are qualitatively better than those of the preindustrial era, and so are our telescopes, our microscopes, and perhaps also our fruit and vegetables. But if one simply states that the average production of a weaver consisted of so many yards of cloth a day, that the average production of a cabinetmaker consisted of so many pieces of furniture a year, or that of the locksmith so many locks a month, one ignores the fact that some of those pieces of cloth, many of those pieces of furniture and many of those locks were exquisite works of art, infinitely more beautiful and better than analogous, contemporary products. If one could adequately take into consideration the qualitative element, then the productivity of the craftsmen of the preindustrial age would appear under a different light.
The combination of the available factors of production results in production. Production as a whole is made up of the most extraordinary variety of goods and services. It includes the apple and the ship, the needle and the plough, the services of a chambermaid and those of a surgeon. To analyze such a complex of different things one must have recourse to broad categories. Oversimplifying an otherwise very complex matter, one may say that in response to the structure of demand as defined above in Chapter 1, the greatest part of production in preindustrial Europe took the form of foodstuffs, textiles, buildings, and domestic services. By the end of the seventeenth century England was no longer a typical preindustrial country. The extraordinary development of her foreign trade had given her economy characteristics of an altogether peculiar nature. Yet about 1688 in England and Wales agriculture still accounted for some 50 percent or more of the national product, the textile manufactures for some 8 percent, building for more than 5 percent, and domestic services for some 10 percent.
If most of the production was centered on a few basic sectors, from a geographical point of view production was extremely scattered. A few products were manufactured in some specialized places – until the fourteenth century the production of silk textiles in the west was concentrated in Lucca (Tuscany), the production of paper in Fabriano (Marche, Italy), and until the end of the fifteenth century Venice maintained a virtual monopoly in the production of high-quality soap and glass. But for most necessities of life there was little geographical division of labor. We saw above, when discussing labor as a factor of production, that the rural population was far from being totally occupied with agricultural pursuits. Not only every town but almost every village had its weavers, spinners, drapers, shoemakers, carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, armorers, and the like. Interregional and international trade grew immeasurably after the tenth century, but in most communities a large number of manufactures continued to be produced locally. In agriculture, monocultures were scarcely known and farmers strove to produce on their individual farms as wide a variety of grains, vegetables, and fruit as possible – of course, at the expense of productivity.
When textbooks refer to production they generally mean positive production, but human societies, by combining labor, capital, and natural resources, also give rise to negative production. There are essentially two types of negative production:
a. the deliberate destruction of men and wealth
b. pollution and the destruction of the environment.
Let us analyze these two types of negative production separately. In all human societies there are perverse people who destroy human lives and wealth, for one reason or another. Some of these persons place their acts in the framework of political ideology or religious doctrine, but in essence they are nevertheless agents of destruction. The assassin is “labor” which by the use of “capital” (say, a gun) brings about a negative production by destroying human capital. The arsonist is “labor” which, in combination with “capital” (often, a match and a gasoline can) destroys physical capital. The bomb-thrower is “labor” which, making use of “capital” (dynamite), destroys human and physical capital at the same time. The mass of those who, with one excuse or another, or without any excuse whatever, destroy instead of build varies from society to society and from period to period. Their potential number is, however, always higher than their actual number because society defends itself, devoting resources – labor and capital – in an effort to control the phenomenon.
At a macroscopic level, the negative production of major significance is war. The first victim of every war is truth. There is no war that has not been cloaked in lies and specious arguments designed to convince people of its timeliness or necessity, in the same way as there is no bomb-thrower who does not try to convince himself and others of the need or worth of his criminal action. In the course of human history, men have been massacred and riches have been destroyed continually, and the most absurd and cruel crimes have been committed, always in the name of some remote ideal, at times religious, at times political, at times social and economic. Whatever the ultimate motivation, war remains essentially the organization of “labor” (the military) and “capital” (weaponry) with the avowed intention of destroying the maximum quantity and quality of the labor and capital of the so-called enemy. In the animal world, only man and the ant have developed mass organization for the destruction of their own kind.
We have seen that man’s productive capacity is a function of the quality and quantity of labor and capital, of the state of the arts, and of a certain collective psychological climate. The same can be said of man’s destructive capacity. Capital, technology, and the organizational skills which assist him in his productive activities also help him in his destructive activities. Consequently, a criminal in an industrial society has a destructive potential infinitely superior to that of his counterpart in a preindustrial society. In the same way, an industrial-era army has a destructive power infinitely greater than that of an army in preindustrial times. A battalion of any contemporary Central American republic would destroy the armies of imperial Rome in the course of a few hours.
These considerations must be borne in mind when one speaks of wars of the past. It has been written that “some thousand fighters, some hundred dead” was the balance sheet of most conflicts of the preindustrial era. Nevertheless, if the wars of bygone days were hardly murderous in a direct sense, they could cause serious destruction of physical capital and could cause high mortality via famine and disease. Armies on the move killed or confiscated livestock, burned or confiscated food reserves, and destroyed houses, mills, barns, and other agricultural buildings. Since the armies of the past inflicted the worst damage on rural areas, the predominantly agricultural societies in question were struck at the very foundation of their economic structure. From a purely economic point of view, war was a much greater evil than the plague, and all the more evil as the societies in question suffered from a relative scarcity of capital in relation to existing population. Plague destroyed men, but not capital, and those who survived the onslaught of the disease usually found themselves in more favorable economic conditions. War, on the other hand, hit capital above all, and those who survived found themselves in conditions of the most abject misery. In the chronicles and documents of the time, descriptions abound of countrysides and towns reduced to flaming wastes and of children who, crying and begging for bread, died of hunger in the streets. Phrases such as “the whole area was turned into a desert” or “where men lived there are now only savage animals” recur frequently in the documents of those times.27 They were not rhetorical exaggerations. The historian often can replace the prose with figures and confirm the dismal, anguished accounts of the time with factual data. In Cheshire (England) out of a total of 264 villages, 52 were wholly or partly devastated in the Norman invasion in 1066. By 1070, as a result of William’s campaign of 1069–70, this figure had increased to 162.28 About the middle of the fourteenth century, the armies engaged in the Hundred Years’ War ravaged, among innumerable others, the possessions of the Abbey du Lys (near Melun, France). In 1384, fifteen years after the most recent pillage, the estate was in the following condition.
forest: 460 arpents of which 300 were burned
vineyards: 32 arpents of which 22 were destroyed
arable land: 190 arpents of which 90 were laid waste.29
In the early fifteenth century, at la Bastide des Jourdans in Haute-Provence (France), 336 of the 346 acres of good arable land belonging to the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem were laid waste, and a vineyard of 178 acres was completely destroyed. Near Grambois, a vineyard of 74 acres was destroyed, and most of the 618 acres of arable land were abandoned. At Montegut, “where there used to be a beautiful farm there is now neither a man, nor a woman, nor a chicken.”30 The effects of the various campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) on the volume of trade in northern France are reflected in the dramatic fluctuations of the revenues from the toll at the Port de Neuilly, in the valley of Paris:31
1301: 250 livres
1340: 200
1376: 248
1409: 320
1425: 36
1428: 80
1444: 26
In the territory of Saarburg (Germany) during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the livestock was drastically depleted as shown in Table 3.7. Such destructions were particularly disastrous because the available resources and productivity normally ruled out rapid recovery.
Human perversity is the source of certain forms of negative production. Ignorance and individual selfishness are sources of other ills. In this respect one must distinguish between (a) destruction of natural resources, (b) pollution of the environment with the waste products of consumption, (c) pollution of the environment with undesirable by-products of productive activities, (d) damage to the health of those engaged in production.
Table 3.7 Livestock losses in Saarburg territory (Germany) during the Thirty Years’ War
| Number of head | ||
| Livestock | Before the war | After the war |
| Horses | 2,651 | 116 |
| Oxen | 5,077 | 36 |
| Hogs | 5,927 | 10 |
| Sheep | 18,267 | |
| Goats | 2,749 | |
Source: Franz, Dreissigjährige Krieg, p. 45.
From all these points of view, the capacity for negative production of European preindustrial societies was infinitely lower than that of industrial societies. First of all, the population was small and per-capita production limited. Moreover, pervasive poverty compelled people to reduce waste to a minimum, and durable goods were continually re-used. Lastly, there was no widespread use of many products such as petroleum and coal, which are largely responsible for pollution of the environment in the contemporary world.
Considerations of this kind recently led an economic historian to assert:
Pollution, loss of natural environment, traffic congestion and accidents have clearly resulted from industrialization and modem technology and have no obviously important analogues in preindustrial societies. Moreover, the more work that is done on traditional peasant societies the clearer does it become that these societies have often achieved an almost miraculous accommodation with nature, balancing present use and preservation for the future with a degree of success which the modern economic machine has rarely approached.32
Unfortunately, however, things were not so rosy in preindustrial Europe. Undoubtedly the capacity of preindustrial societies for disturbing ecological equilibria was infinitely smaller than that of industrial societies. But, this limitation aside, even preindustrial societies managed to mismanage. The following story, reported by Dr Ramazzini in his celebrated book, published in 1713, is good evidence that certain evils which afflict industrial societies were well known, though on a smaller scale, in preindustrial Europe:
A few years ago a violent dispute arose between a citizen of Finale, a town in the dominion of Modena, northern Italy, and a certain business man who owned a huge laboratory at Finale where he manufactured sublimate. The citizen of Finale brought a lawsuit against the manufacturer and demanded that he should move his workshop outside the town or to some other place, on the ground that he poisoned the whole neighborhood whenever his workmen roasted vitriol in the furnace to make sublimate. To prove the truth of his accusation the citizen produced the sworn testimony of the doctor of Finale and also the parish register of deaths, from which it appeared that many more persons died annually in that quarter and in the immediate neighborhood of the laboratory than in other localities. Moreover, the doctor gave evidence that the residents of that neighborhood usually died of wasting disease and diseases of the chest; this he ascribed to the fumes given off by the vitriol, which so tainted the air near by that it was rendered unhealthy and dangerous for the lungs.33
Another common example of shortsighted behavior was the destruction of forests. It meant not only the direct destruction of rich capital, but also the deterioration of the environment in the plains below, facilitating floods and the accumulation of stagnant waters, which became the breeding grounds of malaria.
Within the city walls, one ought not to be dazzled by the presence of magnificent structures, such as the cathedrals, the large palazzi of the rich, or the palace of the Commune. As Robert Dallington wrote about Tuscany at the beginning of the seventeenth century:
All is not gold in Italy, though many travellers gazing onelly at the beautie of their cities and the painted surface of their houses, thinke it the only Paradise of Europe.34
In order to remain within the shelter of the walls, people crowded into relatively small areas, creating dangerously high population densities. Water wells were unsafe. The almost complete lack of hygienic facilities created serious problems in relation to the disposal of human wastes. People used streets and squares as public latrines and threw everything out of the window without care for passersby.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the mother of the Regent of France wrote:
Paris is a horrible place and ill smelling. The streets are so mephitic that one cannot linger there because of the stench of rotting meat and fish and because of a crowd of people who urinate in the streets.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the English diplomat John Barrow remarked that Peking “enjoys one important advantage, which is rarely found in capitals out of England: no kind of filth or nastiness, creating offensive smells, is thrown out into the streets.”35
To human was added animal refuse. Automobile exhaust fumes are toxic. The dung of numerous horses in the narrow and airless streets of preindustrial towns was, perhaps, not as harmful to health, but it was no more pleasant.
From the thirteenth century onward, town administrations made numerous provisions to deal with such inconveniences. How effective these measures were is hard to say, but the fact that prohibitions and threats were continually repeated makes one suspect that people took little notice of the ordinances and that penalties were not enforced strictly enough. On occasion the municipal authorities took positive measures. In Siena, toward the end of the thirteenth century, the town administration was concerned with the garbage and filth accumulating daily in the Piazza del Campo. So it entrusted the cleaning of the square to Giovannino di Ventura, who kept a sow and four piglets in the Piazza to eat the abundant supply of refuse.36
Even traffic congestion is not an altogether new problem. Early in the fourteenth century, traffic had become so congested in Florence that the statutes of the Capitano del Popolo of 1322–25 (lib. V, rub. XXII, c. 86) prohibited the circulation of carts carrying timber in the center of the city on Saturdays.
With the sixteenth century, the increased use of coal in England, first for domestic and then for industrial purposes, opened the doors to the Industrial Revolution but also to our pollution problems. By the seventeenth century, that eminent physician, Thomas Sydenham (1624–89), advised living in the country because “the town air is full of vapors.” In 1661 John Evelyn wrote his famous pamphlet Fumifugium in which, among other things, one reads:
in London we see people walk and converse pursued and haunted by that infernal smoake. The inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the lungs and disordering the entire habit of their bodies, so that catharrs, phtisicks, coughs and consumption rage more in that one City than in the whole Earth besides.
Many activities damaged not only the environment, but also the health of the men who took part in them. The founder of industrial medicine was Bernardino Ramazzini of Bologna, professor of practical medicine at the University of Modena from 1682 to 1700 and at the University of Padua from 1700 to 1714. It is sufficient to open at random his masterpiece De Morbis Artificum Diatriba to find innumerable examples of the fatal consequences of many activities:37
miners: they come up into the untainted open air looking as ghastly as the retinue of the god of the underworld because of their stay in those foul dark places. Whatever metal they mine, they invite dreadful diseases which too often mock at every remedy.... But it is from mercury mines that there issues the most cruel bane of all that deal death and destruction to miners.... In the mines of Meissen where black pompholyx is found, the hands and legs of the miners are eaten away to the bone.
gilders: we all know what terrible maladies are contracted from mercury by goldsmiths, especially by those employed in gilding silver and copper objects. This work cannot be done without the use of amalgam, and when they later drive off the mercury by fire they cannot avoid receiving the poisonous fumes into their mouth, even though they turn away their faces. Hence craftsmen of this sort very soon become subject to vertigo, asthma, and paralysis. Very few of them reach old age, and even when they do not die young their health is so terribly undermined that they pray for death.
potters: they need roasted or calcined lead for glazing their pots ... their mouths, nostrils, and the whole body take in the lead poison, hence they are soon attacked by grievous maladies. First their hands become palsied, then they become paralytic, splenetic, lethargic, cachectic, and toothless, so that one rarely sees a potter whose face is not cadaverous and the color of lead.
sulfur workers: among the minerals that are in daily use, sulfur is employed for many purposes and does serious harm to those who roast and liquefy it or use it in their manufactures. Those who deal with burning or liquefied sulfur contract coughs, dyspnoea, hoarseness, and sore eyes.
tanners: they steep the hides of animals in pits with lime and gall-nuts, tread them with their feet, wash and clean them, and smear them with tallow for various purposes; I mean that they are distressed in the same way by the incessant stink and foul exhalations; one can see them with cadaverous complexions, swollen bodies, ghastly looks, and oppressed breathing; they are nearly all splenic. I have observed many cases of dropsy in workers who follow this trade.
glass-workers: during the process of making glass vessels the men stand continually half-naked in freezing winter weather near very hot furnaces ... they are liable to diseases of the chest.... Pleurisy, asthma, and a chronic cough are the natural result. But a far worse fate awaits those who make colored glass for bracelets and other ornaments for women. In order to color the crystal, they use calcinated borax, antimony, and a certain amount of gold; these they pound together to an impalpable powder and mix it with glass to make the paste needed for this process, and however much they cover and avert their faces while they do this they cannot help breathing in the noxious fumes. Hence it often happens that some of them fall senseless, and sometimes they are suffocated; or in the course of time they suffer from ulcers in the mouth, oesophagus, and trachea. In the end they join the ranks of consumptives, since their lungs become ulcerated, as has been clearly shown by the dissection of their corpses.
More than two centuries were to pass before Dr Ramazzini’s concern for the working condition of labor became public concern and found expression in preventive legislation.