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Tony Brewer raised some reasonable questions.  He begins with the obvious 
fact that a population as dense as England's could not support itself by 
hunting and gathering.  So he questions how the game laws could be a 
significant source of sustenance for large number of people. 
 
The answer is that hunting did not provide a major source of calories for 
most of the people in the countryside, but for many, especially the 
poorest, hunting was a significant source of protein.  We, as economists, 
are familiar with the way that even a marginal change can spell the 
difference between success and failure. 
 
In fact, because of the large amount of land required to maintain the deer, 
the gentry turned large stretches of land into deer parks, preventing the 
hunting of other small game that otherwise would have improved the diet of 
many of the poor. 
 
According to Engels (1894, 213; see also Marx 1977, 892-95), for each acre 
of English common land brought into cultivation by means 
of enclosures, three acres of Scottish land were eventually transformed 
into deer parks.  Marx (1977, 892) remarked, "Everyone 
knows that there are no true forests in England.  The deer in the parks are 
demure domestic cattle, as fat as London aldermen. 
Scotland is therefore the last refuge of the 'noble passion.'" 
 
Tony Brewer wrote: 
 
> First, if the game laws are to be counted a significant part of 
> primitive accumulation in the Marxist sense, that is, of forcing people 
> into the capitalist labour market, it would have to be the case that 
> hunting was a significant potential means of support taken away by the 
> game laws. But surely we know that hunting and gathering can only 
> support very low density populations, far less than the density in 
> England in the industrial revolution. It is hard to see that the 
> availability or otherwise of hunting could affect labour supply 
> significantly. 
 
> More important, if classical economists are to be blamed for not 
> emphasising this alleged function of the game laws we must first think 
> how it would have looked to them. They saw population as endogenous, so 
> even if hunting could support significant numbers they would surely say 
> that in the long run population would increase if hunting were freely 
> allowed, with no reduction in labour supply in the formal (capitalist) 
> labour market. 
 
One of my major discoveries in researching this book was the degree to 
which the classical political economists did not adopt a long-term 
perspective, except when writing in their more theoretical works.  Many of 
the people at the time were concerned with what I called a calculus of 
primitive accumulation in which they wanted enough self provisioning to 
make sure that wages could be low, but not so much as to offer an escape 
from wage labor. 
 
> Michael's defence mainly consists of a description of the damage done 
> to agriculture by game animals and by hunting (this is hunting by 
> oppressive capitalists and landlords within the game laws, not by free 
> peasant-worker-poachers outside the laws). This is even more puzzling. 
> If the game laws allowed or encouraged this damage, how can capitalism 
> possibly gain from a reduction in agricultural productivity? (I assume 
> that capitalist farms were not selectively exempted from damage - most 
> farms were capitalist at the date concerned.) 
 
The rich landlords were not inconvenienced by the Corn Laws, but the poor 
farmers were.  The distinction at the time was not between capitalists and 
noncapitalist farms, but between landlords who paid a certain amount of 
rent and those that didn't. 
 
The vast majority of farmers did not qualify by the standards.  As a 
result, they did suffer significant productivity losses.  Tony, you're 
absolutely correct, that they paid no attention to the productivity losses 
associated with the Game Laws, while the Corn Laws were a matter of hot 
debate. 
 
The logical reason would seem to be that businesspeople felt inconvenienced 
by the Corn Laws, but were undisturbed by the plight of the less well-off 
people in the countryside. 
 
Michael Perelman 
California State University -- Chico 
 
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