Philip T. Hoffman. Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside,
1450-1820. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xvi + 361 pp.
Appendices, notes, sources, bibliography, index. $39.50 (cloth), ISBN
0-691-02983-0.
Reviewed by Jonathan J. Liebowitz, Department of History, University of
Massachusetts Lowell.
Published by H-France (May, 1997)
In a recent on-line review of an economic history text edited by T. G.
Rawski, historian Michael Dintenfass of the University of Wisconsin remarks
that the book "invites historians to discuss matters that no longer
interest them deeply." [1] In his volume on pre-Revolutionary French
agriculture, Philip Hoffman also seeks to write an economic history which
will make concepts and findings influenced by the cliometric revolution
accessible to historians.[2] I fear that despite his meticulous and
imaginative research, Hoffman will meet the same fate as the authors of
Rawski's volume and find that he is talking past his audience. Yet
historians of early modern and revolutionary France, even those of a
postmodern bent, will have to take into consideration his conclusions about
the agricultural economy if they want to understand the behavior of most
French men and women of the pre-industrial era.
Hoffman's goal is to teach historians of early modern France that
cliometrics has something to offer them and that they can understand its
lessons even if not conversant with economic theory and econometric
methods. Specifically he wants to revise the "consensus" view that the
French agricultural economy was stagnant for more than 350 years before the
Revolution because small farms were inefficient and the village community
was hostile to innovation. After outlining this position in the first
chapter, the rest of the book argues that the consensus is wrong on all
particulars: early modern agriculture was not stagnant, at least not in all
times and places; small farms were no less efficient than large ones;
members of the village community were not bound by unyielding tradition but
sought their individual interests, which sometimes might be served by
traditional arrangements, sometimes by innovation.
Chapter Two ("Common Rights and the Village Community") begins with a
dispute, revealed in legal documents, from a village near Nantes on the
Loire in which the local farmers seem to be defending their traditional
rights to pasture on the common against a local lord who wants to enclose
it. But Hoffman springs a surprise on us: the poor farmers insisting on
their common rights were pasturing, not their family cows, but sheep, which
they leased from merchants in return for a share of the profits. In this
way the poor used traditional rights to break into "nascent rural
capitalism" (p. 23). The story is complicated, but by no means is it one in
which the poor cooperated to uphold tradition in face of a modernizing
capitalist elite. Instead, strife was more common among the villagers than
cooperation, and they were equally likely as the rich to be involved in the
market.
In Chapter Three ("Labor Markets, Rental Markets, and Credit in the Local
Economy"), Hoffman disputes the claim that markets were risky, maintaining
that they reduced rather than increased the variation of peasants' income.
Most peasants were involved in one market or another, whether labor,
rental, or credit. Here he finds another assumption to disprove: that
higher rent on smaller parcels of land resulted from either the power of
large tenants or the land hunger of the poor. Rather he finds that the
difference resulted from the landlords' collection of a risk premium from
the poorer tenants of smaller parcels because they would be more likely to
default on their payments.
With Chapters Four ("Agricultural Productivity in France, 1450-1789") and
Five ("Explaining Productivity in a Traditional Economy") Hoffman comes to
the center of his concerns. What was the output of farms and how did it
change? What were the reasons for the changes which occurred? At first
glance, it would seem that answering these questions would have to begin
with measurements of the total output of French agriculture at several
points in time. But that is probably impossible since no one was collecting
national data until the eighteenth century, and, even if contemporaries had
collected such data, the researcher would face problems such as changes in
national borders. So Hoffman adopts another strategy: comparison of Total
Factor Productivity (TFP) at different times and places. TFP measures how
efficiently producers turn their inputs--in agriculture typically land,
labor, and capital--into output--wheat, wool, and so on. When TFP rises it
means that the same inputs yield a greater output. The advantage of using
this measure is that TFPs can be compared even if areas are very different
because what is being measured is the output per unit of input.
Nevertheless, direct measurement of the factors runs into almost as many
problems as does measurement of total output, so Hoffman adopts a technique
used by Robert Allen ("The Efficiency and Distributional Consequences,"
Economic Journal, vol. 92, 1982) to circumvent these problems. Instead of
trying to measure how much wheat was produced or how many hours of labor
were needed in its production, he measures prices, wages, and especially
rents. Given certain assumptions about the agricultural economy, mostly
that it participated in a competitive market, Hoffman can derive its TFP. I
would accept Hoffman's assumptions, which recent studies of Italian,
English, French and United States farming tend to reinforce.
The conclusions are that despite considerable regional and temporal
variation, agricultural efficiency grew considerably in the Parisian Basin
from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. There was also growth
after 1750 in the Albigeois and Beaujolais and in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in Normandy. Elsewhere, at least in the twenty
communities which form Hoffman's sample, the consensus view of a stagnant
agriculture is borne out.
What caused stagnation in some times and places and growth in others?
"Peasant mentalities" and communities were not responsible for stagnation.
Nor were obstacles to combining small farms into larger ones (e.g., by
enclosure), since small size was not in itself a cause of inefficiency and
small plots could be combined to produce larger ones if farmers wanted.
Recurrent wars and taxes, which caused uncertainty, were more to blame. So
conversely, peace encouraged growth, as did demand from large cities and
reduction of transport costs. Only Paris was really large enough to have a
stimulating effect, and productivity in the Parisian Basin rose steadily at
levels comparable with those of England. If the rest of France remained
behind, one might conclude, as does Vernon Ruttan for a later period, that
the fault was not in the farm sector, but in the slow growth of the urban
economy ("Structural Retardation," Journal of Economic History, vol. 38,
1978).
Hoffman is a member of an increasingly rare breed, the historian doing
economic history. As a historian, he has read manuscript sources in
archives scattered throughout France, with special attention to leases for
farms owned by the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Account books and
court cases provide not just statistics, but enable the construction of
narratives, which can be equally valuable as sources of human behavior.
Hoffman is attentive to specific conditions and thus is careful to reveal
the different patterns of growth over time and place, even if it means that
at the end we receive a set of nuances, not a dramatic bang.
At the same time, Hoffman is also an economist. His undergraduate degree in
mathematics and advanced training in economics allow him to manipulate
econometrics and economic theory with assurance. This is important because
the computation of TFP and determination of the causes of its rise or fall
are not straightforward. Hoffman can do the necessary calculations because
he knows that seemingly irrelevant information may be vital and is able to
turn that information into data for his analysis.
Growth in a Traditional Society is thus a truly interdisciplinary book and
should be read by economists who want to understand how growth can occur in
a pre-industrial economy and by historians who wish to put behind them the
stereotypes of pre- Revolutionary French society.
Notes
[1]. Michael Dintenfass on [EMAIL PROTECTED], 30 September 1996,
reviewing Thomas G. Rawski, ed., Economics and the Historian (1996).
[2]. Other French and American historians working in the same vein include
Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Marc Moriceau, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and George
Grantham.
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Louis Proyect
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