Ok - though I thought I was being a reasonably good fellow, fair
and sensitive to the intricacies of Wood's argument - I will make no
further references to Wood or Brenner in the next few postings.
Perhaps I am, at times, curt and ungracious (uncivil?). But this is
not because I am bullish, far from it. It is more that I suffer, as the
author of the famous *Confessions of an English Opium Eater* said
of himself, Thomas De Quincey, from a "chronic passion of
anxiety". (Just 'cause this is all you know about me, don't turn it
into my defining trait - we all have multiple selves nowadays). In
any case, I intend to stay low after I finish what I started.
Those who know a bit about O'Brien's earlier work would be
surprised to know that, in his 1996 article, "Path dependency, or
why Britain became an industrialized and urbanized economy long
before France", he draws a definite contrast between the
economies of Britain and France, to argue that English agricultural
productivity, from 1500 onwards, "grew consistently at a higher rate
than it did in France", specifically that "between 1500 and 1910
labour productivity probably multiplied 4.7 times in Britain
compared to 2.4 in France." I mean this is the same O'Brien who
made his mark by showing, on the contrary, that France's 18th
century/19th century economy was as healthy, if not more, than
the English. But in this 1996 paper he seems convinced that
modern Britain was indeed far ahead industrially than France, and
sets out to answer why this was so. Like his other papers, this one
is over-researched, if I can put it that way. So much so that he
wavers back and forth from one empirical/research finding to
another, seemingly unable to come to any decisive conclusion why
England forged ahead. We are reminded that England had far
higher levels of land concentration than France, "when farms of 100
acres and above covered 75% of the cultivable area of Britain but
only 29% of that in France", and that "about two-thirds of French
agricultural land was farmed by owner occupiers, while tenants
(mainly tenants at will) managed 85% of Britain's farmland". He
thinks there was an obvious difference between the peasantries of
these two countries, with respect to land ownership, farm size,
security of tenure, common rights, but is unsure at what point this
difference started. "Perhaps 1066 is not inappropriate because the
consolidation of Norman rule apparently led to major shifts in the
distribution of landownership and in the status of the indigenous
Anglo-Saxon and Celtic populations"
