Economics 303Y1: The Economic History of Modern Europe to 1914

Prof. John H. Munro munro5@chass.utoronto.ca

Department of Economics john.munro@utoronto.ca

University of Toronto http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/munro5/

Economics 303Y1: The Economic History of Modern Europe to 1914

Topic No. 4 (8): Labour and the Enclosures of the Industrial Revolution Era (1750 - 1830): The Social Costs of Agricultural Modernization

* 1. Michael Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 1750 - 1830, Studies in Economic History Series (London, 1984), especially pp. 64-83. An exposition of the traditional (moderate) 'conservative' viewpoint

* 2. Robert Allen, 'Tracking the Agricultural Revolution in England,' The Economic History Review, 2^nd ser., 52:2 (May 1999), 209-35.

* 3. Robert Allan, 'Agriculture During the Industrial Revolution,'in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey, eds., The Economic History of Britain Since 1700, 2nd edn., vol. 1: 1700-1860 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 96-122. See also R. C. Allen, 'The Growth of Labor Productivity in Early Modern English Agriculture, Explorations in Economic History, 25 (1988), 117-46. Neo-Marxist

* 4. Mark Overton, 'Re-establishing the English Agricultural Revolution,' Agricultural History Review, 44:1 (1996), 1-20. See also: Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500 - 1800, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The most recent overview of agrarian changes, reasserting the much older that the era of the Industrial Revolution was itelf also the true era of the modern Agricultural Revolution.

* 5 J.D. Chambers, 'Enclosure and the Labour Supply in the Industrial Revolution,' Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 5 (1953), 319-43. A classic study, disputing the Marxist view.

* 6. N. F. R. Crafts, 'Enclosure and the Labor Supply Revisited,' Explorations in Economic History, 15 (Apr. 1978), 172 - 83.

* 7. Bennett D. Black and Robert P. Thomas, 'The Enclosure Movement and the Supply of Labour During the Industrial Revolution,' Journal of European Economic History, 3:2 (Fall 1974), 401-23.

* 8. Pamela Sharpe, 'The Female Labour Market in English Agriculture during the Industrial Revolution: Expansion or Contraction?', Agricultural History Review, 47:2 (1999), 161-81.

* 9. Donald Woodward, 'Early Modern Servants in Husbandry Revisited', Agricultural History Review, 48:ii (2000), 141-50.

10. A.J. Gritt, 'The Census and the Servant: A Reassesment of the Decline and Distribution of Farm Service in Early Nineteenth-Century England', The Economic History Review, 2^nd ser., 53:1 (February 2000),84-106.

11. Stephen Caunce, 'Farm Servants and the Development of Capitalism in English Agriculture,' Agricultural History Review, 45:1 (1997), 49-60.

12. Jane Humphries, 'Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,' Journal of Economic History, 50 (Mar 1990), 1 - 16.

13. Boaz Moselle, 'Allotments, Enclosure, and Proletarianization in Early Nineteenth-Century Southern England,' The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 48:3 (August 1995), 482-500.

14. George Boyer, 'The Old Poor Law and the Agricultural Labor Market in Southern England: An Empirical Analysis,' The Journal of Economic History, 46 (Mar. 1986), 113-36.

15. Jon S. Cohen and Martin L. Weitzman, 'Enclosure and Depopulation: A Marxian Analysis,' in William Parker and E.L. Jones, ed., European Peasants and Their Markets (1975), pp. 161-76. Though focused more on the Tudor-Stuart era, its Marxist analysis remains germane to this period.

* 16 . George Mingay, Enclosure and the Small Farmer in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (1968), pp. 9-32.

17. J.L. and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760-1832 (London, 1911) Chapters 1 - 4, and 10 - 11, especially pp. 73-81.  A Fabian socialist point of view, quite passionately expressed (still worth reading). A classic.

18. Joyce Burnette, 'Testing for Occupational Crowding in Eighteenth-Century British Agriculture,' Explorations in Economic History, 33:3 (July 1996), 319-45.

19. Michael E. Turner, J.V. Becket, and B. Afton, 'Taking Stock: Farms, Farm Records, and Agricultural Output in England, 1700 - 1850,' Agricultural History Review, 44:1 (1996), 21-34.

20. Gregory Clark, 'Renting the Revolution,' Journal of Economic History, 58:1 (March 1998), 206-10. A review article based on M.E. Turner, J.V. Beckett, and Bethanie Afton, Agricultural Rent in England, 1690 - 1914 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For the reply, see Michael Turner, John Beckett, and Bethanie Afton, 'Renting the Revolution: A Reply to Clark,' Journal of Economic History, 58:1 (March 1998), 211-14.

QUESTIONS:

1. Did Enclosures necessarily mean displacement and 'depopulation' in the era ca. 1750-1830? If so, did such enclosures provide a principal source of wage labour for the Industrial Revolution? Did Enclosures initially produce an urban or a rural 'proletariat'? What happened to those displaced by Enclosures in the later 18th and 19th centuries?

2. What social classes gained and which ones lost by Enclosures? To what extent did Parliamentary Enclosures protect farmers' property rights? Who principally gained the rising economic rent from land in this era?

3. Were Enclosures economically necessary for modern industrialization? Where did enclosures principally take place? Discuss the interrelationships between agrarian, industrial, and demographic changes in this period of urban industrialization.

4. What were the principal motives and forms of Enclosures: to capture the economic rent on land (i.e. 'exploit' the peasantry), to promote agricultural 'modernization', to accomodate the ambitions of larger, market-oriented tenant farmers? Or some combination of these factors?

5. How did the new industrial towns and cities of 19th-century England acquire their labour forces?

• What was the fate of agricultural servants-in-husbandry and of agricultural labourers after 1815?