Karl Marx moved to London in 1849, and the debates about the Corn Laws helped him to formulate his idea of class warfare. The fall in grain prices resulted in the ruin of the tenant farmers. The effect was similar to that of the earlier land enclosures – landless peasants went to the industrial towns or emigrated. In the countryside, economy of scale helped the largest farms to survive. In order to facilitate land sales and mergers, the government had to create a free market in land, abolishing inheritance rights and entailments. The radical followers of Bentham and Cobden had long been calling for this. This was a victory of industrial over agricultural interests, of metals and textiles over grain and sugar.
The abolition of corn tariffs in England led to soaring prices on the continent. Because of railways and steamships, American and Russian exports of grain dramatically increased, and the price of grain fell. At the end of the nineteenth century practically the whole of Europe was practising food protectionism, which largely meant grain import tariffs. Only the most industrialised countries, Great Britain and Belgium, refrained from this. In the 1880s Great Britain imported 65 per cent of its wheat, paying for it with its industrial goods. On the eve of the First World War, Russian peasants harvested three times less wheat per acre than English farmers, but the area of arable land kept pace with the growth in population and the expansion of railways. 20 The Russian prime minister, Sergey Witte, a former railway official, took British mercantilism from the sea onto dry land. His plan worked: thanks to the railways and low tariffs, the growth in the grain trade made up more than half the growth of the whole economy. But after the war, global wheat prices collapsed again. The economic historian David Allen characterises the late period of the Russian Empire as a one-off boom in raw materials.
The agricultural experiments of the Soviet authorities led to mass starvation. Collectivisation of agriculture brought crop failures, ecological devastation and mass famines. Things got so bad that in 1982 the Communist Party voted for the Food Programme, which entailed annual purchases of huge amounts of grain in exchange for oil. The USSR collapsed, and its successor, the Russian Federation, has become a major exporter of grain. However, petrofarming is just another method of converting oil into food (see chapter 13 ). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the double action of farm subsidies and energy-intensive technologies has reproduced the Soviet Food Programme all over the developed world.
Notes
Notes
1 Scott, Against the Grain . 2 Kant, ‘Conjectures on the beginning of human history’; Olson, The Logic of Collective Action . 3 Olson, ‘Space, agriculture, and organization’. 4 Al-Rawi and George, ‘Back to the cedar forest’, p. 83. 5 Carneiro, ‘A theory of the origin of the state’. 6 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence . 7 De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis . 8 De Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age . 9 Von Thünen, The Isolated State ; Małowist, ‘Poland, Russia and Western trade in the 15th and 16th centuries’; Moon, The Russian Peasantry . 10 Zheleznov, Ekonomicheskie vozzreniia pervykh russkikh agronomov , pp. 153, 201. 11 Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate . 12 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , p. 19. 13 Chayanov, Krest’ianskoe khoziajstvo . 14 Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV ; Kaplan, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question . 15 Jones, Bread upon the Waters . 16 Ibid. 17 McNeill, ‘Frederick the Great and the propagation of potatoes’. 18 De Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age ; de Vries and van der Woude, The First Modern Economy . 19 Von Thünen, The Isolated State . Chayanov saw von Thünen’s scholarship as exemplary, and Braudel compared him to Marx. See also Parr, ‘Overlooked aspects of the von Thünen system’. 20 Allen, Farm to Factory .
THREE
The Remains of Foreign Bodies
Anthropologists can’t agree about whether our ancient ancestors were omnivores or corpse eaters, or whether they preferred shellfish. It was later that people developed a taste for meat and for milk. Feeding an animal takes a lot of land, more than it takes to support a human being. But stock-rearing is less labour-intensive than arable farming. On the Mongolian steppe, two shepherds on horseback could look after a flock of 2,000 sheep. A Turkmen herdsman with an assistant could graze a herd of 800 bulls and cows. Hunting requires even less labour and, correspondingly, more land. In Europe, hunting remained a privilege of the aristocracy. The Austrian Hapsburgs were deeply attached to this strange pastime right up to the end; even during the First World War they numbered their hunting trophies in the thousands. If it is true that political power is defined by excess, a surfeit of the necessary, then collections of hunting trophies illustrate this thesis just as well as the harems of oriental sultans.
Meat
Animals are at the top of the food chain, and a calorie of meat was always more expensive than a calorie of plant food. In many cultures, the consumption of meat was a privilege of the elite. Meat was available for mass consumption only on rare occasions – that was the gift economy in action. Alcohol was consumed with the meat and the whole event was a feast – a communal release of physical and sexual energy.
All world religions, except for Zoroastrianism, surrounded meat eating with various prohibitions. In India, eating cows is forbidden; in the Middle East, pigs are banned; in the British Isles, dogs and horses are off the menu. Anthropologists theorise that these taboos follow the rule ‘edibility is inversely related to humanity’. 1 Some cultures consider horses to be close to humans and they aren’t eaten, while in other cultures cows have this status. Prolonged fasting – regular abstinence from meat and dairy products – was embraced by Catholicism and the Orthodox Church. Over a couple of thousand years, this practice has demonstrated that the plant-based diet is good for physical health.
Meat perishes quickly, which makes it unsuitable for long-distance trade. Drying, smoking or, alternatively, freezing meat commodified it. For centuries, the British Navy lived on salt beef and rum. This diet resulted in scurvy, which seamen thought was a severe form of seasickness. Farmers focused on hides and wool – they could be preserved and traded, and meat was eaten within the household. Once again, distance from the town was a crucial factor. Meat could be sold if a farm was close to the town, but every extra kilometre lowered the profit, especially if it had to be transported overland. Selling sausage and cheese made economic sense in places where they could be transported by water, preferably along a canal. An alternative was to drive live cattle to market, but that also entailed losses in proportion to the distance.