Agriculture, innovation and the origins of 'capitalism' (England).

摘要

This essay offers an alternative, non-Marxist explanation for the rise of capitalism in England. Arguing that the essential feature of the modern economy is not its employment of free wage-labour but its propensity to innovate, its approach to the problem of capitalism is to explain the origins of this latter characteristic, to explain, in other words, why the relative technological stagnation of the Middle Ages gave way to the rapid advances of more recent centuries. Holding that medieval economic stagnation was due primarily not to a lack of competition but to the self-sufficiency of agricultural producers (which made them immune to the effects of falling prices), the origins of innovation are sought in the rise of the non-self-sufficient urban sector, inherently predisposed as it is towards technological change. England's first wave of urbanization being the result of the seventeenth-century agricultural revolution, the problem of the origins of innovation, and therefore of capitalism, reduces itself to the origins of this latter event. It is with this question that the bulk of the essay is concerned. Based on the pamphlet literature published by the so-called 'improvers'---the ones who first sought out and developed the new agricultural techniques---the essay attempts to explain their technological experimentation in terms of the social and intellectual conditions in which they lived, concluding that the poverty and desperation of the times was their chief inspiration.