Nature's Evil

Potatoes contain seven times more moisture than wheat and are therefore prone to rot. This made potatoes beneath the notice of the Exchequer and saved millions of peasants. An acre of potatoes could feed ten people, five times as many as an acre of wheat. Having discovered potatoes on his own land, Frederick II forced his farmers to plant potatoes on their fallow fields. As a result, the peasants consumed less grain and paid more taxes. The population increased thanks to the potato, and this was a long-standing aim of the Prussian crown. The potato helped Prussia to survive its multiple wars. 17 Following Frederick’s example, European monarchies introduced the potato throughout Northern Europe. Potatoes and crop rotation were the key reasons for the population explosion in Europe in the nineteenth century. Diseases in cereals are quite different to those in potatoes, which helped to stabilise the harvests. Without the potato there would have been no urbanisation and no industrial revolution. In the 1830s, in the central Russian provinces, peasants rioted against the potatoes that landowners imposed on them in order to get more revenue from their ‘empty lands’. In contrast, in Ireland the landowners complained about ‘the idleness of peasants’, which they explained by the easy productivity of their potatoes. Undoubtedly, potatoes in the ground saved the peasants from starvation in a bad year. Perhaps that is why Soviet collectivisation led to a worse famine in the black soil, grain-growing regions of Ukraine than in northern Russia, where more vegetable crops were grown. Across Europe, potato growing increased the area of land under cultivation by a whole quarter. Then the introduction of tractors and motor vehicles released another quarter of the land which had been used for feeding horses. Agricultural expansion kept pace with industrial expansion.

Space and power

On the eve of modernity, the European economy depended on hundreds of towns with surrounding green belts. The main route for trade was by water. On the canals built in the Low Countries, one horse could pull as big a barge-load of grain as fifty horses could carry on a good road. Thanks to its rivers and sea coast, Poland was the main supplier of grain to the Netherlands. Productivity was low, but Poland contributed to the Netherlands a huge number of ‘ghost acres’ – according to the historian Jan de Vries, almost 2.5 million hectares of arable land, half the area of modern Holland. Still, only 5 per cent of the wheat and 12 per cent of the rye grown in Poland was exported. All the rest was consumed locally or kept back as seed. To increase his revenue, the landowner needed to reduce his peasants’ consumption even further, but they were barely able to subsist. Grain exports fed the thriving Dutch culture but led to serfdom in Poland. 18

While big cities were increasingly dependent on foreign trade, the countryside relied on the nearest town. In 1826, the Mecklenburg landowner Johann Heinrich von Thünen demonstrated that agricultural revenue depends not on the soil or the farmer’s skill but on the farm’s distance from the nearest town. In his book The Isolated State , von Thünen constructed a formal model for the relation between town and country. In this model, each town is surrounded by concentric rings of agricultural activity. The inner ring consists of nearby farms, which produce vegetables, milk and meat for the town’s markets. These fetch high prices in the town, but only the nearest farms make a profit on these perishable goods. They do not practise crop rotation because they fertilise the land with night soil which they get from the town. The next ring out is made up of arable farms, which supply wheat and rye to the town. The closer the farm is to the town, the cheaper the cost of transport; von Thünen’s estate was situated 5 miles from Rostock, so he knew what he was talking about. If a farm is 10 German miles (75 kilometres) away from the town market, the horses and carts will be on the road there and back for four days. The horses have to be fed. According to von Thünen’s calculations, on such a journey they would eat one-eighth of the grain delivered. Delivering grain from farms further than 50 German miles from a town, the horses would eat the entire load on the journey. The forest zone is situated in the third ring, on the periphery. The prices in the town shift the borders of the agricultural belts: the higher the price of grain, the greater the area of arable land, but then firewood will be too distant. 19 Therefore von Thünen re-examined the theory of land rent: it is defined not by the productivity of the land, as Ricardo thought, but by the land’s distance from the market.