Nature's Evil

The landowners in Eastern Europe battled with the same problems of the grain economy that the Mesopotamian authorities had encountered thousands of years earlier: low productivity, extended transport routes, and a ‘lazy’ population with little motivation to work and still less desire to save. But grain didn’t require much labour. Unlike the slave-owner who met all his slaves’ needs as he understood them – provisions, clothes and tools – the landowner let the peasants survive on subsistence farming. Thanks to their simultaneous ripening, cereal crops could be harvested and processed in one fell swoop. During the rest of the year the peasants didn’t work in the landowner’s fields. They had vegetable plots, pastures and crafts. The landowner didn’t interfere in these activities, which meant that peasants were able to develop them better and faster. Nor was the landowner interested in the complex crop rotation systems needed to increase productivity. They only made the process of collecting rent more complicated, especially if the noble owner ruled in absentia. His opportunities for trading depended on the proximity of his farm to the riverine system. If a farm was 10 or 20 miles from the river, trade was unprofitable. The income of the landowner depended not on the productivity of his land but on its proximity to a river and the sea. Foreign shipowners reaped the lion’s share of the profit, and they invested it back in their countries. For the village, these earnings were lost. 9

Agriculture provided general employment, but it was not full-time or year round. The landowner had to have physical mastery over the peasants to force them to work, just as the peasants forced their horses to work. But the work was seasonal. People worked in accordance with the annual rhythms of preparing the soil, sowing, harvesting and processing the crop. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, men in Russian villages spent no more than half their time working, and women and adolescents no more than a third. But at harvest time, when the crop had to be brought in all at one go, everyone joined in the toil, men, women and children. Technological innovations very slowly changed the key moments in this cycle. The gradual replacement of oxen with horses was an important step. In England this happened as early as the sixteenth century, in Europe much later. The change travelled, like many similar ‘improvements’, from west to east. Peasants opposed this replacement, because they knew that, if war broke out, horses would be requisitioned. Although ploughing with oxen was slower, it was the more reliable option. Stunted horses, shod with wooden shoes, couldn’t pull a plough. Over the centuries the weight and strength of horses increased, but this was the result of selective breeding that happened in cavalry stables, not in peasant farmyards. Iron replaced wood, helping to save effort, increase productivity, and bring peasants to compliance. Iron horseshoes, iron ploughshares, iron hoes allowed farmers to turn over deep furrows and drain fields with ditches. The conversion of military technology for civilian use was a reward for the incessant taxes, requisitioning and billeting which victorious states imposed on their civilian populations.

Over the centuries, crop rotation became more complex. First tested in Holland, the four-field system spread during the eighteenth century to England, Sweden and Prussia. The amount of agricultural land lying fallow at any given time halved. Consumed on the spot by the farmers and their animals, turnips and beans from the rotated fields freed up wheat, which could be sold as a cash crop. The increase in demand was a powerful stimulus for these changes: the growing towns always needed more provisions. Later, the multiple-field system became ever more complex. Some agronomists promoted seven- or even eleven-field rotation, but it did not lead to a great leap in productivity.