Nature's Evil

Continuing the migration of the naked ape from the African savannah to the forests and wetlands of Eurasia, civilisation moved northwards. For millennia, the Mediterranean was the centre of trade. In the crisis-ridden seventeenth century, the North Sea assumed this role. Luxuries from the East – silk, sugar, cotton – continued to exert their charms. But northern products, such as tar, hemp and saltpetre, shaped the world to come. The Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War were pan-European conflicts between the North and the South; from this time on, the North was usually the victor. Vienna repelled the Turks, but Prague was seized by the Swedes. The first oceanic empires, Portugal and Spain, looked for colonies in the southern seas. Holland and England focused on trade with the great expanses of the North – from Arkhangelsk to Newfoundland, from Danzig to Bergen. Hanseatic and then Dutch and English trade in raw materials from the North – grain, timber, fur, linen, hemp, iron – was in greater volumes than the colonial trade in sugar, tea, cotton and other southern products. 7

Burning a forest and clearing the land gave immediate results. Land would never again be as fertile as it was after the ashes were first ploughed in. In the eighteenth century, agronomists called this the law of declining fertility, while economists called it the law of diminishing returns. If the fertility of your land is declining, you need more land. The deforestation of Europe was the direct result of the expansion of grain cultivation. But, between the forest and the field, there always existed a third space – pasture, meadow, wetland. In the estates of ancient Rome, a third of the land lay fallow – i.e., uncultivated. For centuries the peasants to the north of the Alps had practised the fire-fallow system of agriculture, sowing and harvesting crops, then putting cattle onto the land, and then, after several years, abandoning that field and advancing deeper into the forest. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a quarter of German lands lay fallow. The history of agriculture was the process of the peasants learning what to do with fallow land, how to use it productively.

In the system that was typical for Northern Europe, land was divided into three parts. In autumn, a field was sown with wheat or rye. In spring the crop was harvested and the field was sown with barley, oats or beans, which were used as cattle fodder. Then the field lay fallow for a year. In this way, a third of the land was non-productive, while the cultivated fields produced at a ratio of 4:1 – i.e., from every grain sown, four new grains grew. This was the average productivity of arable farming throughout Europe, from Italy to Scandinavia. Bumper harvests could be achieved only with the addition of fertilisers – animal manure or night soil from the towns. Intensive agriculture developed only on the outskirts of towns, close to the markets.

Crop rotation was the main reason for an increase in productivity. It also supported the reorientation of farming from grain to fibre – wool, linen, hemp. From each harvest the peasant had to feed his family and also pay his master and the state for the land and for protection. This obliged him to earn cash by reducing the share of raw, perishable products he grew for survival and increasing the share of dry, cash crops he grew for trade. This was the road to riches. Cottage industry left the peasant families with a part of the profit which in other circumstances would have gone to the merchants and landowners (see chapters 5 and 7 ). But this new economy continued to depend on the massive supply of grain from Prussia, Poland and the Baltic lands. 8