A peasantry eager to purchase might have gradually extended their holdings at the expense of the demesne land, and to the distribution of property, which was already fairly complete, there might have been added another excellent element, namely, the more equal possession of that property. But any such process of gradual buying by the small man from the great, such as would seem natural to the temper of us European people, and such as has since taken place nearly everywhere in countries which were left free to act upon their popular instincts, was interrupted in this country by an artificial revolution of the most violent kind. This artificial revolution consisted in the seizing of the monastic lands by the Crown.
It is important to grasp clearly the nature of this operation, for the whole economic future of England was to flow from it.
Of the demesne lands, and the power of local administration which they carried with them (a very important feature, as we shall see later), rather more than a quarter were in the hands of the Church ; the Church was therefore the “Lord” of something over 25 per cent., say 28 per cent., or perhaps nearly 30 per cent., of English agricultural communities, and the overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce. The Church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30 per cent, of the demesne land in the villages, and the receiver of something like 30 per cent, of the customary dues, etc., paid by the maller owners to the greater. All this economic power lay until 1535 in the hands of Cathedral Chapters, communities of monks and nuns, educational establishments conducted by the clergy, and so forth.
When the Monastic lands were confiscated by Henry VIII., not the whole of this vast economic influence was suddenly extinguished. The secular clergy remained endowed, and most of the educational establishments, though looted, retained some revenue; but though the whole 30 per cent, did not suffer confiscation, something well over 20 per cent, did, and the revolution effected by this vast operation was by far the most complete, the most sudden, and the most momentous of any that has taken place in the economic history of any European people.
It was at first intended to retain this great mass of the means of production in the hands of the Crown: that must be clearly remembered by any student of the fortunes of England, and by all who marvel at the contrast between the old England and the new.
Had that intention been firmly maintained, the English State and its government would have been the most powerful in Europe.
The Executive (which in those days meant the King) would have had a greater opportunity for crushing the resistance of the wealthy, for backing its political power with economic power, and for ordering the social life of its subjects than any other executive in Christendom.
Had Henry VIII. and his successors kept the land thus confiscated, the power of the French Monarchy, at which we are astonished, would have been nothing to the power of the English.
The King of England would have had in his own hands an instrument of control of the most absolute sort. He would presumably have used it, as a strong central government always does, for the weakening of the wealthier classes, and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people. At any rate, it would have been a very different England indeed from the England we know, if the King had held fast to his own after the dissolution of the monasteries.
Now it is precisely here that the capital point in this great revolution appears. The King failed to keep the lands he had seized. That class of large landowners which already existed and controlled, as I have said, anything from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England, were too strong for the monarchy. They insisted upon land being granted to themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridiculously small sums, and they were strong enough in Parliament, and through the local administrative power they had, to see that their demands were satisfied. Nothing that the Crown let go ever went back to the Crown, and year after year more and more of what had once been the monastic land became the absolute possession of the large land-owners...Hilaire Belloc (1912 [2nd edition] The Servile State, Chapter IV ("How the Distributive State Failed")
Hayek mentions The Servile State in The Road to Serfdom., and so I was curious about the connection. (I had never heard Beloc before.) The book is very brief and written in an engaging style, and it's full of stimulating observations. It's a bit peculiar I had never chanced upon it before because it is quite clearly one of the founding texts of what shortly thereafter came to be known as property owning democracy. (I was pleased to find Ben Jackson claim this a decade ago, too here.) In addition, Belloc does really anticipate a road to serfdom thesis (although surely does not originate it--it's in Tocqueville and probably earlier), but it's clearly not Hayek's (or Mises') version (Edward McPhail has a lovely paper explaining that it here). I intend to blog a bit about in the future -- not the least because of his description of biopolitics and his analysis of corporate welfare state.
But today, I want to do a more lighthearted piece. As is well known Marxists and Liberals have a fierce debate over the origin of capitalism (which on the liberal side is treated as the origin of mercantilism to which liberalism is a response.) On the Marxist side -- recall (here) my digression on Meiksins Wood and Adam Smith (and this follow up) --, capitalism emerges when term-limit leases are introduced in agriculture and the price of these leases are determined by an estimation by surveyors of the value of that land after improvement in light of prevailing, or at the least the abstract perception of prevailing, market conditions. And this, in turn, sets a landgrab in motion in which enclosures are forced on a politically weak rural population who live out a kind of natural communism. And this violence generates the 'productivity of property,' which gets capitalism going (which liberals will call Mercantilism).
As an aside, some Liberals have a tendency to treat the 'productivity of property' in consequentialist fashion as unequivocally a good thing. The other day, for example, I noticed that in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Hayek mentions, in passing (while discussing mid twentieth century agriculture), that "there can be little question that the consolidation of dispersed holdings inherited in Europe from the Middle Ages or the enclosures of the commons in England were necessary legislative measures to make improvements by individual efforts possible." (p. 488-489 [Hamowy edition]; emphasis added). It's the kind of passage that gives critics and even friends of Hayek pause--he clearly thinks that some transitionary violence can be justified for the end it serves (but will not dwell on it).
Okay, if we turn to Belloc, he posits a kind of golden age (he calls it an "excellent state of affairs"): the distributed state: in which property was very widely distributed and guilds and country customs conspired to keep income and property inequality to a relative minimum. And the first quoted paragraph above gives his very schematic model for the natural course of events of the evolution of the distributed state. It's not a pure counterfactual (as in Smith's natural course in Book 3 of Wealth of Nations) because Belloc also suggests this natural evolution happened in France. (That's an odd claim, but let's ignore it.) But in England this natural evolution was interrupted by an artificial revolution: Henry VIII's landgrab of the monasteries.
Now, because of the weakness of the sixteenth century English royal family, the landgrab ends up reinforcing and creating a more durable oligarchy with a weak monarchy and a more powerless rural population.* Belloc tells what happens next:
All over England men who already held in virtually absolute property from one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs and the barns of a village, became possessed in a very few years of a further great section of the means of production, which turned the scale wholly in their favour. They added to that third a new and extra-fifth. They became at a blow the owners of half the land! In many centres of capital importance they had come to own more than half the land. They were in many districts not only the unquestioned superiors, but the economic masters of the rest of the community. They could buy to the greatest advantage.
The world-historical significance of this is as follows meant that before the industrial revolution, England was already an oligarchic state.
Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the date 1700. By that time more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not one man in two, even if you reckon the very small owners, inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned off.
Such a proportion may seem to us to-day a wonderfully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one-half of our population were possessed of the means of production, we should be in a very different situation from that in which we find ourselves. But the point to seize is that, though the bad business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700, yet by that date England had already become Capitalist. She had already permitted a vast section of her population to become proletarian, and it is this and not the so-called “Industrial Revolution,” a later thing, which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves to-day.
Now, I want to offer four observations about Belloc's story. First, it is an unintended consequence explanation: in which structural forces (pre-existing social arrangements and webs of local corruption) and historical contingency (Henry VIII's rupture with Rome) conspire to upend English economic development.
Second, in so far enclosures figure into his story, they are a late nineteenth century development in which oligarchic capitalism is performing a mopping up operation and they figure in tales of futile resistance by the old and their fathers.
Third, in Belloc's account there never really was an early revolution in the productivity of property as an engine of history. Rather, it's the application of technology by entrenched wealthy landowners (who also become industrialists).
Fourth, and finally, Belloc is no liberal. But his origin story is a natural one to embrace by liberals who, while distancing themselves from capitalists as a class, want to explain why due to initial conditions capitalism turned mercantile (in which violence was part of its DNA), as (say) Röpke argues. And such liberals might wish to suggest that in so far as there were original sins of capitalism, they were performed by a capricious monarch. Of course, such liberals are scarce on the ground.
*I actually think this is also David Hume's view. But will have to check that.
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