Raj Whitehall speaks to a man with shares in trade but also in manufacturing, mines and city properties. He describes himself by an unfamiliar term that sounds as if it means "person-of-doing" and that he defines as "One who risks moneysavings in affairs of profit." (p. 111) Investor. Entrepreneur.
"Extraordinary, Raj thought. Getting rich without inheriting or stealing it. Odd, and rather unsettling; and if he had so much wealth in cash and goods, why didn't he buy land, the only wealth that was really real?" (ibid.)
Raj does not know that the moneyed class defeated and displaced the landed class as the ruling class in England and Europe back on Earth.
In Howard Fast's Spartacus, a Roman character is disturbed, as well he might be, by a close encounter with some strange, silent men who work, tirelessly and efficiently, in a perfume factory in exchange for a wage. Neither slave owners nor slaves, the industrial working class is stepping onto the stage of history.
14 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
What Raj was seeing were the BEGINNINGS of a free enterprise oriented economy. But for such a system to arise required certain preconditions. One of them being the Civil Government imposing some kind of peace and security of person and property over a large enough territory. I recall how, even before the Cleretts usurped the Chair, the immediately previous Poplanich governors had been strong and able rulers, meaning that simply keeping the peace enabled men like these new "entrepreneurs" to arise.
And we should not forget how Barholm Clerett, at his best, encouraged these advances in the economy. I remember how Raj had only admiration for Barholm at those times, when he thought and acted in ways that were beneficial. Rather than letting his fears and Tzetzas' baleful influence getting the better of him.
Sean
In point of fact, in Britain the various wealthy groups had always been connected by interest and often by blood and intermarriage, because primogeniture (inheritance by one heir of landed property) and lack of an actual aristocratic legal caste group -- all a peer's children are legally commoners until one inherits the title) forced most landowners' offspring in each generation to seek alternative livings.
And British landowners had never been shy about anything that maximized their incomes, from coal mines to advantageous marriages with the daughters of rich outsiders.
Eg., the first major canal in Britain, the Bridgewater, was financed in 1760 by the Duke of Bridgewater to get coal from his estates to Manchester, where he also owned urban real estate.
Furthermore, in Britain the dominant 'capitalist' group was always London-centered and based on banking, finance in general (including things like the East India Company) and large-scale wholesale trade, particularly foreign trade.
This group was always closely linked with Parliament, which was very tender of its interests, and with landholding groups, with which they'd been intermarrying since the 17th century at least.
Provincial businessmen, like Lancashire industrialists, were never in the same class as far as total fortunes went, even at the peak of Britain's industrial dominance, and the really successful elements in that group always ended up moving south and being assimilated.
The first thing a Brit who struck it really rich always did was buy a country place, and the second was send his son to Eaton or somewhere similar. This still happens, too.
So capitalists never overthrew landowners in Britain: they merged with them, very gradually becoming the predominant element in the partnership as Britain became more urbanized and agriculture shrank as a share of the total economy. The British aristocracy were experts at ensuring they skimmed off a lot of any new source of wealth.
Manchester and Sheffield came... and went. The City goes on forever.
Incidentally, the above is the reason that until as later as the 1870's the British upper aristocracy were the richest people in the world, bar none.
I looked on the Glorious Revolution as a decisive turning point in terms of class relationships but obviously history is far more complicated than that. In particular, the British system seems to incorporate and retain a bit of everything indefinitely.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul
Mr. Stirling: Your comments clarified the objections I had to some of Paul's comments, esp. the bit about the new moneyed "class" overthrowing the landed aristocracy, which did not happen. Rather, as you said, both groups gradually merged together, finding a commonalty of interests and values.
I also knew only PEERS were legally aristocrats in British law, meaning younger sons would have to seek their own fortunes elsewhere than in the land. So, we see many of them entering the Church, army, navy, law, commerce and finance, etc. And that was good for the UK!
Paul: and I think it was GOOD of the seemingly muddled British political system making room for a bit of everything. It placed a stress on compromise, consensus, a distaste for radicalism, etc.
Sean
Paul: the Glorious Revolution of 1688 turfed out the Stuarts and ensconced the Whigs... who were dominated by a coterie of great landowners, mostly titled.
The Tories, their opposition, tended to be backed by squires in the provinces.
IOW, it was a disagreement within different factions of the landed classes.
The Whig oligarchy was oriented to London (though they owned estates all over Britain) and, as I mentioned, had close links with financiers, bankers, and overseas trade. Tory squires with modest acreage out in West Bumshire tended to be much more suspicious of urban types. They also tended to be strict Anglicans, while the Whig landed grandees, while Anglicans themselves, were much less devout and also for political reasons more sympathetic to Dissenters.
Note that James lost his throne, and the Whigs were able to return from their exile in Holland, because James insisted on trying to Catholicize the country.
This alienated his natural supporters, the High Churchmen and their followers, who included a lot of the aforementioned Tory backwoods squires.
At the same time, the Dissenters to whom he offered (for purely tactical reasons) toleration weren't, apart from some Quakers, having it.
They knew that the minute political Catholicism dominated England they'd be persecuted out of existence, as the Huguenots were being driven out of France at the time -- James had close links to Louis XIV, much closer than Charles II, who took Louis' money and blandly betrayed him multiple times, like Lucy pulling the football away from Linus over and over again. James really -admired- Louis and wanted to be a reduced-scale copy of him.
So he managed to alienate everyone except the Catholics, who weren't numerous enough in England to be significant and who were universally disliked and suspected. And the Irish Catholics, of course, but everybody else hated them like poison.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with most of your comments here, esp. the bit about how James II lost the support of the Tory squires. I do quibble a bit at you saying King James would try to forcibly Catholicize England, that his "Declaration of Indulgence," offering legal status and toleration to all non-Anglicans, was not sincerely meant. The historians still argue about that, so we can't know what might have happened if James II had not been overthrown.
That might be the germ of two different alternate history bools: one where James II was not overthrown and was sincere about the "Declaration," making no effort to forcibly Catholicize England. And the other story would show the same thing, except England was forcibly Catholicized.
Btw, I think one factor leading to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France was the irritation many of the French had for the continued persecution of their Catholic co-religionists in Britain and Ireland.
Sean
Mr Stirling,
Got it. "Money" didn't simply defeat "land" but it was the victors' close links with finance, banks and trade that mattered long term.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And if agriculture, and hence land ownership, had not shrank as part of the total value of the British economy, land owners, large and small, might have continued to MATTER more than they now do. And I can't help but think that would have been a good thing, checking somewhat the dominance of London and the other cities.
Sean
Kaor, Sean!
I would like to point out that agricultural land is not the only kind of land, and that some Britons, from the Duke of Westminster down to commoners of no extraordinary wealth, obtained considerable incomes from the ownership of urban land, as they still do (have you read about housing costs in London these days?). Whether it would have been a good thing for the rural squirarchy to have had more influence is open to debate, and we cannot fully know the answer; I’m inclined to think that they had quite enough influence as things were. But then, I’m a classical liberal rather than a conservative.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
Of course I agree there are different kinds of land or real estate and more means of making a profit from them than the strictly agricultural use of land. In cities that often takes the form of renting out land for residential, commercial, industrial uses.
And I think a big reason for high housing costs in both UK and US cities comes from POLITICAL interference with natural market forces which would have made for more efficient use of urban land.
And I'm still inclined to think it would have been better for both the US and UK if the owners of agricultural land had more influence than they now do. And I don't mean huge "agricorporations."
Sean
Sean: Britain had an -extremely- concentrated pattern of landownership. In Europe, only Hungary ended up with anything like it.
It's complicated, but to oversimplify this happened because:
a) in England, "copyhold tenure", a form of feudal tenancy usually leased out for very long periods, ended up as being the landlord's absolute private property, and its holders tenants-at-will, whereas in most of Europe (Denmark, for instance) copyhold and similar tenures eventually became the individual property of the -tenants-, the peasants. The feudal lord's rights sank to vestigial traces which were eventually liquidated, usually in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Why exactly things turned out this way is, as I said, extremely complex, having to do with the economic and political history of both countries. You have to remember that under high feudalism, in theory and largely in practice, nobody "owned" land in our sense. People at different levels of society had -rights- to land, or to products from it (like grazing or firewood), in an extremely complex network. Landownership in our sense was known, because Roman law had worked on about the same concept, and it remained a part of the picture, but was really common only in towns and cities and some out-of-the-way parts of the countryside.
In the late medieval and early modern period, private ownership of land in our sense began to grow, but the process was slow and uneven.
And,
b) in Europe in general, the lord's "demesne" land, the land he kept 'in hand' and worked directly, originally with a mix of slave and serf labor and eventually with a mix of labor-services from tenants and hired labor, was generally leased out in the aftermath of the Black Death. (Because, basically, the price of labor rose relative to the price of land as the population dropped and kept dropping for 150 years.)
In most of Europe, this land became assimilated to traditional copyhold tenures and a lot of it ended up as the property of the tenants, when private property in our sense developed.
In England, demesne land was usually leased out in -large- parcels, to commercial farmers -- English agriculture was more market-oriented than most from a very early stage, well back into the Middle Ages.
This type of lease was much more formalized and much more closely regulated; there was less tendency for tenant rights to become hereditary and to be assimilated to property rights.
So when the last vestiges of feudal tenures -- particularly communal "common rights" to wasteland, woodland and so forth -- were eliminated in England, they all tended to go to people who already owned a lot of land, and who were used to using their land commercially, and renting it out to men of capital who were also market-oriented and employers of labor. Most English countrydwellers already depended on wage-labor for their subsistence by the early 17th century, though bits and pieces of subsistence farming persisted for a long time, gradually dying away to things like poaching rabbits, keeping a small truck garden, gleaning after the harvest, etc.
The net result was that by about 1700 rural England was all owned by about 8000 closely intermarried families, who also owned large interests in things like urban land rented out for houses and businesses, coal mines, etc.
This changed afterwards only to get more so, reaching a peak in the 1870's.
England was a land of huge estates, and the huge estates were organized into huge -farms-, 5x or more larger than ecologically equivalent areas in, say, France.
In France or most of Germany, a farm of 100 acres operated as a single unit was enormous. In England, it was on the small side of average -- most land was operated in units of of more than 100 acres, and -owned- in units of -thousands- of acres.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for taking the time for writing what amounted to a short essay. Some of what you said reminded me of what writers like Sir Thomas More wrote in UTOPIA, criticizing things like the "enclosure" of common lands and what I now realize was the increasing stress placed on the commercial use of land worked by hired labor.
I wonder how much of what you described here is still true, however. My impression was that the post WW I era was marked more and more by crippling taxes and "death duties," which drained away much of the wealth held by these 8000 families. And that in many cases they had to sell much of their land for paying death duties and taxes.
Sean
Sean: it started with the agricultural depression of the 1870's in England; Britain had free trade, which when steamships and railways had penetrated enough places made imported food really cheap. British aristocrats started moving their assets out of land then, restrained mainly by the fact that it was hard to find buyers.
WW1 killed a lot of the heirs to old estates, and also made farmers (temporarily) willing to go into debt to buy land. Land prices (and agriculture generally) remained depressed until after 1940, so more and more of it passed into the hands of actual farmers. This trend slowed and stopped after 1950 or so, as land became a more profitable investment again.
Even before the 1870's, owning agricultural land and renting it out had a fairly low return -- around 3% on capital, which was equivalent to what you'd get for the most conservative investments, like Government bonds. Most domestic private-sector investments yielded twice that, and foreign ones still more.
The reason people put money into farmland was that it was extremely -safe-. It couldn't burn down or sink or go bust on you, and it only required a fairly minimal level of management, since the tenant farmers put up the working capital and actually managed production.
The attraction of social status and political power also kept land values higher than they would be on strictly economic grounds.
Cheap imported food, the lure of reasonably safe stock market investments (foreign railway shares, for instance) and the reduced social and political power of landowners all cut back on the attractiveness of land.
Death duties didn't help, but you can dodge them with a little imagination and legal skill -- transferring the land before your death, for instance.
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