Great write-up Dinger. A couple of corrections.
Animal "husbandry" was purely incidental. It could have been any other activity resultinmg in industrial production.
The shift in value did not happen from land to labor - but from land to labor and industrial capital.
Capital replaces expensive labor with machinery and multiplies existing labor. The value "migrated" mostly from land to factories, mills, etc.
Agreed. I left capital out as a simplification. Then again, factories didn't arrive in the late-fourteenth century. And, as you know, Capital isn't just machinery; it can be animal power.
I am not sure that labor got expensive or that it mattered positively rather than negatively.
The drop in population surely affected the social order and advanced liberties when lords competer for tenantsm but the population could grow fast in those times and good land did decrease in area due to climate change. So the demographically the sitiation was probably not much different after it stabilised than before plagues.
Perhaps, but the "stabilization" took something on the order of 150 years on some accounts.
What changed is that increase power of cities and merchants over lords and disarray in guilds provided for more options in accumulating productive capital.
Division of labor, trade and economic monetary calculation was known since antiquity. Capitalism differs from other systems mostly in marketing and investing - it produces for the masses, not for elite and it allows even the poorest people venue for savings/investmentvia banking.
The capitalists - artisans with savings or merchants - opened shops with their savings and hired exess workers from countryside.
Sorry, that sounds too much like Alan Macfarlane to be true. but let's keep going.
In those times, the second brothers and exess sisters could not marry and have children because the father's plots coudl not be subdivided any more. So they were forced to back-breaking work on their brother's farm for food, treated as extra mouths to feed. Such were eager to trade desperate existance without future for a job on factory - indoors, guaranteed income, chance to have family.
This argument has problems. First, it assumes a land-scarce economy, which is not the economy that got the peasants their concessions. I suppose you could go: Black Death-freeing of serfs-enclosure-land problems again.
Second, the notion of second brothers and excess sisters being unable to marry just isn't borne out by the manorial court rolls. Yes, partible inheretance was a divisive factor, but there were strategies to build it up as well.
Third, social factors don't move people around nearly as much as economic ones. Until the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of Europeans were engaged in agricultural production; they were peasants, in short. That's for good reason: everyone needs to eat, and the surplus a peasant family produced was relatively small. It's that surplus that enables someone else not to farm. So today, we've got industrialized farming practices that provide for plenty of surplus, so most of us in the industrialized world don't have to farm. You only see people leaving villages and going to cities, or doing something other than farming if there's food for that activity.
Labor had to be cheap because new capitalists had to sell to peasants - which were poor.
I'm doubtful of this. Capitalists didn't start selling to peasants until pretty late in the game. Most of the materials for peasant life were supplied locally through village industry, as many of our last names attest.
Of course factory workers become more politically active than disposessed country peasants - they develop expertise, they cogregate in great numbers, they live in cities where they are exposed to protaganda, etc. They are certainly seen more by historians than peasants.
So they ***** more and are heard more. That's why it may seem that workers that came to work on the factory voluntarily live on worse conditions than they did before they came to town.
Which defies common sense - why would they choose to trade lavish country life for factory "expoloitation".
I don't know about the twentienth century, but I know that until that point, cities had birth/death ratios below one, and life expectancy was much lower. Cities needed to be replenished constantly from the o****ryside.
Capitalists -- merchants, factory owners, bankers -- keep all kinds of records. In GB, all we have for the peasants are manorial court rolls and after 1540, parish records. Literacy matters more in cities than elsewhere, and in cities you also get people who don't have to work for a living, unlike in peasant villages. As for ******ing more, I don't know. Peasant uprisings are at least as common as factory worker revolts, both in the past and in the present. But when factory workers rise up, you're more likely to hear their side of the story.
Oh yeah, another thing, city-dwellers were not subject to the same onerous obligations as peasants. They were technically free, which made cities an attractive place to end up.
And they were not disposessed by sheep - the factories appeared first and created demand for wool, only then did the sheep replaced farming. That is also common sense.
The wool industry is one of the oldest in England and Scotland. As early as the eleventh century, wool was being made for export. It was this trade that contributed to the urbanization of Northern Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries on. The simplified model is: England and Scotland had the flocks and would produce the wool, which would usually be exported overseas to Flanders, where it would be converted to cloth. Traders would take the cloth down to Champagne, where in the towns of Troyes, Provins, Meaux and Lagny trade fairs would be held. Merchants from Italy, among other places, would come with spices and good stuff from the Eastern mediterranean. By the thirteenth century, half the population of Flanders was living in cities, a rate of urbanization unmatched north of the alps, and the dominant industry was cloth production. As political stability improved and the italians developed some sophisticated banking systems, the "trade caravan" system changed to one where trade no longer required face-to-face barter, and goods would be shipped from point to point. All this happened before the plague, and before the peasants got their concessions. So centuries before factories were created, the wool trade was in effect. The demand was there, the supply was there, and the means of production. The mills just streamlined it.
