Coercion and capital

The Dutch Republic had many of the features occurring in Weber’s account of the social importance of Calvinism. It would immediately seem that this confession was less useful from an organizational point of view.

As normal in pre-industrial societies — and largely also in industrial ones — wealth was unequally distributed, most of the profit going to those who were already wealthy. Ordinary people nevertheless seem to have been better off here than in most other countries. Wages were high, due to great expansion and the need for workers.

The Dutch public credit is the obvious model for its English counterpart, introduced shortly after Temple’s comment. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 and was able to borrow money on the international marked, with the English state as guarantee.¹⁹ Whereas Charles II in 1671 had repudiated his debt of £1.3 million, loans were now guaranteed by the whole landed and commercial wealth of the country. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were 60,000 public creditors which had increased to around half a million by the end of the century. The annual interest payment on the loans, 8 per cent, was guaranteed by Parlia­ment.

Thus, England and the Dutch Republic clearly had a financial advantage over France from the second half of the seventeenth century, which also seems to imply the superiority of capital over coercion and the connection of the former with constitutionalism. The merchant aristocracies of England and the Dutch Republic needed military forces to protect and extend their trade and, in the case of the latter, to defend their very exposed borders against foreign conquerors, and were willing to pay for this. Both countries had the advantage that the wealthy part of the population, including the nobility, paid taxes, which not only brought sub­stantial revenues but also enabled the country to get loans on favourable condi­tions. England was probably wealthier per capita than France in the eighteenth century, but its greatest advantage was the ability to tax the whole population. This was in turn the result of its constitutional government: the taxpayers were repre­sented in Parliament. Thus, the key to success was not the use or threat of force, but involving the population, or at least the wealthier parts of it, in the government. This lesson was transmitted to France and several other countries from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars onwards, where large armies were mobilized through participation in government and patriotic appeals.

Privileges and monopolies were characteristic of most absolutist states and led to great inefficiency in the economy. The economic success of England in the eight­eenth century was to a considerable extent a result of the absence of such inter­ventions.²¹ Admittedly, England and the Dutch Republic also had their trading companies with monopolies, but they were not able to control trade in the same way. In particular, the Glorious Revolution in 1688 led to the abolition of a number of monopolies, which had been an essential part of royal policy under the Stuarts. Granting monopolies was profitable for the king and increased his power by making people dependent on him. For the same reason, Parliament was against them and tried to restrict or abolish them. A statute on monopolies was passed in 1623 and the Long Parliament (1640—53) abolished all domestic monopolies, but the king still retained the opportunity to grant overseas ones during the period of restauration. Thus, the Royal African Company had a monopoly, granted by Charles II in 1660, on the very lucrative slave trade across the Atlantic, but this was frequently infringed by other traders. In 1689, the company seized the cargo of one such merchant, named Nightingale, who brought the matter to court. The judge ruled that the seizure was illegal because the company was exercising a monopoly right created by royal prerogative, i.e. not by Parliament — this was just after the Glorious Revolution. The question of overseas monopolies became hotly debated, with numerous petitions to Parliament, which finally, in 1698, abolished the monopoly of the African Company.

Thus, monopolies had now become a matter for Parliament which received a number of petitions from various people and organizations either to abolish or introduce them. Producers and businessmen often wanted monopolies or bans against competition and in some cases succeeded. Thus, the wearing of lighter cloth, cotton or silk imported from India, was banned in the early eighteenth century to protect English wool production, but the ban was abolished in 1774.

The English Parliament did not make the world a better place by liberating the slave trade but it did contribute to economic growth by abolishing privileges and allowing free competition. In a similar way, the commercialization of agricultural production led to economic growth and was probably also a factor in the later Industrial Revolution but had negative social consequences. As a consequence of the reduction of the population because of the Black Death in the later Middle Ages, many landowners turned to sheep farming instead of agriculture, thus reducing the areas cultivated by individual peasants, even after the population had begun to increase again. Later, landowners got hold of common land, earlier at the disposal of the village communities, through enclosure, i.e. that they became reserved for the owner himself or the one to whom he rented the land.²² Gradually, many village communities consisting of small farms were replaced by large estates, cultivated by the landowner himself or more usually by one tenant with sufficient capital to rent the whole. The evicted farmers had to resort to a precarious existence as landless workers or as artisans or later industrial labourers in the towns. In a similar way, landowners in the Scottish Highlands evicted their tenants in order to use the land for sheep farming.

From an economic point of view, however, the effect was positive; agricultural production increased greatly; the production per agricultural worker is considered to have increased by 75 per cent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The introduction of new crops, such as turnips and clover, which enriched the soil rather than exhausting it, made it possible to avoid the long periods of fallow — of around one-third of the area — that had been necessary previously. The increasing size of cities and improved transport also formed an incentive to produce for the market.

During the eighteenth century, England — from 1707, Britain — surpassed the Dutch Republic as the leading commercial nation of Europe. However, the country did not become dominated by the bourgeoisie to the same extent. Eng­land still had a strong nobility with a great influence on culture as well as politics. On the other hand, the court had a less central position than in France; there is no Versailles in England. Instead, the residences of the nobility and gentry dominate, particularly in the countryside, to some extent also in the cities, in the latter, together with those of the wealthy burghers. Since the breakthrough of Palladian architecture in the early seventeenth century, these residences are mostly built in the classicist style, from Blenheim Palace to a number of smaller houses all over the country and in cities like Edinburgh and Bath and large parts of London. Numer­ous portraits of elegantly dressed men and women give a more aristocratic impression than their counterparts in the Dutch Republic. However, it was rela­tively easy for wealthy burghers to get a title, at least to be knighted, but this did not mean that they gave up their trade. On the contrary, ideas of profit and investment largely penetrated the nobility and gentry, as expressed in the reforms in agriculture. Moreover, in most cases, the way to public office did not go through royal favour but through election or connections with the political estab­lishment. In this way, social barriers were determined by wealth rather than birth. As Members of Parliament received no pay, only wealthy people or people with wealthy patrons could be elected. Commissions as officers in the army and navy also had to be bought, in addition to the fact that patronage was important for most posi­tions in society. In contrast to France, however, there was no rule about noble birth.

Turning to France, we first have to observe that this was by no means a purely agrarian country. Particularly during Louis XIV’s reign, France made great efforts to stimulate trade and commerce, including the abolition of some of the internal tolls, improvement of communications, notably the great Canal du Midi, 150 miles long, built at Colbert’s initiative, and privileges for merchants. Like England, France also expanded overseas, with colonies in America, the Caribbean and India, some of which were lost to England in the wars of the eighteenth century. Even so, France remained an important colonial power, profiting greatly from sugar production in its colonies in the Caribbean and from the slave trade across the Atlantic. Bordeaux, the leading port of colonial trade, made a deep impression on two English visitors, respectively in 1775 and 1787.²³ Its quay extended on a straight line for more than 2 miles and had a range of regular buildings, and the city had the opulence which only wealth could confer. The latter of the two, Arthur Young, added that although Paris could not be com­pared to London, Bordeaux by far surpassed Liverpool. After the recent restoration of its eighteenth-century beauty — the product of its mercantile wealth at the time — it has become an attractive focus for tourists.

There was also an increase in agricultural production and some improvement of the conditions of the peasants in the eighteenth century, aided by longer periods of peace and good harvests in the mid-eighteenth century. As in England, but not to the same extent, there was a tendency in many parts of the country towards larger farms, rented by a few wealthy farmers who owned ploughs and other equipment and employed those with smaller plots as labourers. Nevertheless, strong control and intervention from the state made France lag behind England and the Dutch Republic. It is also difficult to imagine a different economic policy in a country like France, not only because of its absolutist doctrine but also because of the importance of patronage in the king’s rule of the country. In contrast to Britain and the Dutch Republic, France did not institute a national bank. The explanation for this is probably the financial experiments introduced by the Scot John Law, which ended in bankruptcy in 1720. In principle, this was a useful reform, but Law was a ruthless speculator who exploited the unreserved trust he received from the regent, the Duke of Orleans, in a way that was bound to lead to disaster. There was a similar financial scandal in England at the same time, but less disastrous, because the parliamentary system made it more difficult for one person to get the same position there as in absolutist France.²⁴ The lack of a national bank con­tributed to the problems later in the century that led to the Revolution, although it is an open question whether such an innovation would have been sufficient to solve the country’s financial problems.

Culturally and socially, the court dominated in France to a greater extent than in England and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The centre of the country was Versailles, which was also the model for noble residences all over the country, as well as for art and literature in general. The nobles also had greater privileges in France than in the two other countries. They still retained some governmental rights in local society and in the eighteenth century, they had an exclusive right to commissions as officers, to the extent that noble descent in four generations was demanded for admission to cadet schools. The fact that this rule was not applied to artillery officers made it possible for many of the great generals of the Revolution, including Napoleon, to get their education. On the other hand, it was not difficult for wealthy people to obtain noble status. They were then included in the noblesse de robe (‘robe’ nobility, after the long robe which distinguished the holders of certain offices), whereas the more exclusive noblesse d’epee (sword nobility) was reserved for the ancient families. The difference from England, however, was that ennoblement was not compa­tible with a bourgeois profession. It has been pointed out that successful busi­nesses only remained for one generation in the same family; success was an incentive to buy an office or seek ennoblement. In addition, institutions like tax farming were a strong incentive for wealthy people to invest in office and royal patronage rather than pure business. The French bourgeoisie actually consisted more of rentiers and administrators than of businessmen.

The wars of 1688—1714 partly confirm Tilly’s observation about coercion and capital. Although Tilly classifies both England and France as combinations of the two, coercion was clearly more prominent in France while capital dominated in England. France was ruled by an absolute king, whereas the Dutch Republic and England were constitutional countries, in which the executive power was limited by that of elected assemblies. The difference between France, on the one hand, and England and the Dutch Republic, on the other, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is obvious and the comparison seems in most respects to be in favour of the latter. England and the Dutch Republic were enormously suc­cessful and clearly demonstrate that capital had now become the main path to political success. Another question is the causal relationship between capital and constitutionalism and to what extent the difference can be traced further back in history. In the case of the Dutch Republic, both phenomena are already to be found in the Middle Ages, which makes the causal relationship between them more difficult to decide. England, however, underwent great commercial changes in the seventeenth century, whereas it seems possible to trace its constitution back to the thirteenth century.