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[Eh.Res has kept the Polanyi discussion going. Here are the three most
recent comments that HES subscribers have not seen. -- RBE]
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Sender: Mary Schweitzer <[log in to unmask]>
Michael Perelman wrote:
[much snipped]
> I also sense a general agreement that market and non-market rules cohabit
> with difficulty.
I couldn't disagree with this more. In fact, I wrote a book to
disagree with it, called "Custom and Contract: Household, Government,
and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylvania," (NY: Colubmia U Press 1987 --
good luck finding it, but feel free to xerox it; I own the copyright
now) -- CUSTOM (tradition) and CONTRACT (the market) worked TOGETHER
quite well in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. The market was simply one
of many institutions to USE to achieve OTHER goals. Because of
the stability and presence of Pa paper currency, transactions often
took place in CASH (as noted in account books) -- or books were
cleared using cash roughly every 4-6 weeks. And if my calculations
are correct, they experienced economic growth due to gains in trade
-- both international and internal -- roughly on the levels we
associate with the early 19th century.
The paper money of Pennsylvania was a financial INNOVATION, and a
financial innovation works just the same as a transportration
innovation or a communications innovation -- it reduces the
costs of trading. If you reduce the costs of trading, both
sidees of the trade benefit.
The Society of Friends (Quakers) could be trusted in long-distance
trade because it was considered a violation of Friendly Ways to
welch on a contract or bargain. As early as 1705 the Philadelphia
Friends Meeting had a mechanism for bankruptcy proceedings in place
-- when someone was about to go under from debt, up to three members
of the Meeting considered good at these matters would be instructed
to take over the running of the farm (usually a farm) until the
debts could be repaid over time. Foreclosure was not only unFriendly,
but it was part of the code of the Friends that they stay out of the
courts. nevertheless, it was also a written part of the Friends'
instructions to the local meetings that debts be repaid and that
a reasonable price be paid "for the use of the moneys." the same
thing happened with orphans' accounts. The original inheritance
PLUS INTEREST was required to be repaid to the orphans, less the
amount it cost to raise them (of course, with locals doing the paperwork,
it often happened that mom and stepdad's costs of raising the kids
just precisely coincided with the principal plus interest due them,
if Dad died when they were young.)
The Friends were so good at this that some of their stipulations
were written into the legal code -- and non-Quakers would ask the
services of Quakers to negotiate a solution to business conflicts.
What was "success" to a Quaker family? Keeping with the Faith --
having the children marry within the Faith -- and being able to
send the chidlren off into a decent life for their own children.
They also preferred to keep everybody nearby, which was not only
amenable but also handy when you had to look somewhere for a guardian
for orphans or bail out a family emergency.
Using wills and inventories, I was able to show that a pattern of
indebtedness in young families with young children, who often took
in a couple of Dutch (German) indentured servants to help out if
there weren't neices or nephews of a convenient age; then families
with older children (marriage being delayed unto the mid-20s) were
immensely productive, raking in income. Sons were sent off to
earn wages per day in the area when not needed on the farm; a large
portion of the country populace bought apprenticeships for their
sons (and even their daughters) as a hedge on agricultural ups and
downs, so there was cash that came in from that source; girls spun,
knitted, sewed (profesionals usually did the weaving); then the
family purchased more land, and older sons would be sent to develop
it -- sometimes they purchased or settled land in the Great Valley
and the whole family moved when the kids grew up -- then there was
the period of dispersal, when the kids settled on their farms and
the parents or widowed mother lived with one child who got extra
stuff for that -- unlike the New England fathers of Henretta's work,
the Pennsylvania Quakers let go of the farms but held on to cash,
lending it out at interest or to their sons, until their death.
At the father's death, the widow got one-third, the remainder divided
up into shares so that the eldest son got two shares and the rest,
boys and girls, got one share each. The boys' share was usually
given in land, agricultural tools; the girls' share in livestock and
domestic goods; both got cash.
The system worked quite well, but required an ever-expanding outlet
of land. fortunately for Pennsylvanians, they bordered on the Great
Valley and could move quite far out west, and then south, and then
both west and northwest, without encontering the border between
the Iroquois and the Europeans, or other of the established nations
of the time.
But they worked both systems together -- by the end of the century,
as Joan Jensen noted in her work -- women in the counties nearest
Philadelphia had created a lucrative trade in buttermaking --
I had women back in the 1730s who were marketing their own brand of
butter in my sources -- it didn't seem to upset anyone if the woman
was bringing in the cash and the man producing the goods consumed at
home.
That's why the Henretta-Lemon debate doesn't work. BOTH assumed
that if you found markets, you found individualistic self-centered
profit-centered behavior. No. You just found markets.
(May I suggest the work of Jackson and Gloria Main for similar
examples from Connecticut?)
This is the area I was working in when I collapsed with chronic fatigue
and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS) (aka chronic fatigue syndrome)
in October 1994. I have recently uploaded some of the unpublished
(and unfinished) manuscripts (have many more to add) to my new web
site; if you are interested, you'll find them at:
http://www2.netcom.com/~schweit2/history.html
Mary Schweitzer
Villanova University
-------------------------------------
From: "A. Gunder Frank" <[log in to unmask]>
Marilyn Gerriets' thoughtful and interesting "Polanyi" contribution and
'defense' probably unintentionally poses a chicken-&-egg puzzle and
contradiction between the main body of her argument and its conclusion. At
the very end, she streses 'the market transformed society,' while
throughout she confines herself to the Polanyist discussion of how society
limits the [operation of the ] market. Well, which comes first, the
society egg or the chicken market? If it is really the society as she
argues, then how come the market ends up transforming it? And if it is
much more the market as i would argue, how come she - and most observers/
analysts - do not deal with THAT? Actually she does, without saying so:
women in the labor force and their economic 'independence.' She implies,
or perhaps even says, that changing social norms permit women to enter the
labor force and open new avenues to them. She does not say that the MARKET
impels women to enter the labor force when the husband's income is
insufficient - or when there is no husband! But both of these later - yes
even whether there is a husband or not - are market determined. Moreover,
as I argue, they are WORLD maket determined - and have been for a
long,long time, which of course is also denied by Polanyi [eg Trade &
Markets in the Early Empires], but about which he was also 99.44 % pure
wrong. Indeed, the extent to which people in Canada rationally 'entered'
the market or 'not,' was and IS also world market determined. Moreover,
it is an error to suppose that there are 'traditional' societies in the
'third' world which are only now or recently being subjected to market
forces and being negatively transformed thereby. These 'societies' have
always been subject to the market - and the WORLD market - and their very
'cloture from' the market was historically relatively recent, mostly since
the nineteenth century, and also world market determined. India and China,
but also many others 'societies' in the world were far more commercialized
until and through the eighteenth century than in the ninteenth. Witness
that they were alos much more urbanized earlier than later and much more
urban than Europe at the time. Only yesterday i was reading in and quoting
from Paul Bairoch's new 3 volume Economic History of the World
[Paris:Gallimard, may 1997, 1500 pp] in which he mentiones that when
Paris [and London which he does not mention] had 125,000 inhabitants,
Istanbul and Peking had 700,000, Calicut and Cairo about 500,000, and Fez
in Marocco or Pegu in Burma had already DECLINED from their 250,000 and
180,000. Actuallly, though he does not mention it, Edu=Tokyo in allegedly
'feudal' and 'closed in' Japan was even bigger than Peking and Istanbul.
Not only were these and many intermediate size cities market dependent,
they were all themselves linked by the WORLD market -- which is also what
made them go up and down in size. So which is the market chicken and which
the societal egg? And how come Marilyn sooooo neglects the question of how
the market impinges on society -- before/while it 'transforms' it? I
apologize for singling out Marilyn, since her 'neglect' is much less than
that of most - including 'economic' historians.
Gunder Frank
University of Toronto
-------------------------------------
From: Mary Schweitzer <[log in to unmask]>
But wait -- there's more.
In eighteenth century Philadelphia, who kept the books in an
artisan family? The wife (or in the case of Ben Franklin, the
mistress ...) Not real consistent with the mythology of the
coming of Cash and The Market for it to be the woman of the
house who's the front for the operation, is it?
And let's not forget Coventry Forge (where they built the
Franklin Stove), which was owned by Big Merchant Money in
Philadelphia, managed by Anna Nutt (and later her granddaughter),
and operated by labor on monthly, weekly, hourly, and piecework
contracts (depending on the job). Coventry Forge was sending
iron west to Lancaster in exchange for German weavers' linen
as early as the 1720s.
It was supplied by a large network of farmers and housewives who
sold livestock, butter, cheese, and various artisanal skills --
all generally for cash, to the general store, which then sold it
to the Coventry community, often on account. If there was a
creditor-debtor relationship, Coventry was most often in debt
to its neighbors.
This is just one part of the early modern British American world.
And Rhode Island was different from eastern Massachusetts, which
was different from western Massachusetts and the Connecticut
River Valley, which was diferent from upstate NY, which was
different from downstate NY, which was diffferent from the
greater Quaker Philadelphia region, which was different from
the backcountry and different from the Eastern Shore of hte Chesapeake,
and different from the Va/Md tobacco regions, which were
different from the Shenandoah, which was different from the far
backcountry (what we inappropriate call the frontier), which was
different from east Carlina, the lowland around Charleston,
which was differnet from the Cherokee, different from the
Seminoles, different from the Iroquois.
German women hired themselves out by the day (for cash wages)
to thresh wheat and mow hay; English women NEVER did.
The Moravians were immensely successful in the market -- while
maintaining a communitarian economy internally.
And what market could have been more inhumanely alienating than
that of slavery, where even the progeny of human beings was
bought and sold? it is a fiction of southern self-promoting
mythology that we would even consider Southern slavery anything
but a perverse (but very real) form of market behavior --
resting on a particular type of power relationship -- but all
economic activity is contingent upon power relationships; markets
are no different.
You cannot squish this immensely complex picture into anything so
simplistic or narrow as market/nonmarket or exchange/reciprocity
or cash/tradition.
Mary Schweitzer
-----------------------------
From: John Nye <[log in to unmask]>
marilyn gerriets wrote:
>
> The debate on the issues might become clearer if people distinguished
> among the institution of the market, the place of the market in society,
> and rational maximising behaviour.
<material cut>
>
> If Polanyi is interpreted as arguing that the market was a new
> innovation in 19th Britain, certainly he is wrong. Nonetheless, Polanyi
> has given us an enhanced understanding that the role of the market
> within society has changed greatly through time, with results that have
> transformed society.
It is not clear that Polanyi could distinguish between the three
interpretations offered above. And he is certainly not the first to note
that transactions costs and changing institutions have caused the market's
role to evolve over time. Smith, Marx, Weber, all noted such things.
However, the lack of clarity on Polanyi's part and the tendency of many
scholars to interpret his findings as indicating a lack of market = no
modern profit-maximizing behavior is not uncommon a failing he may have
shared with Weber.
Precisely because of Polanyi's vagueness about economic theory, his work
has always been "favorably" interpreted by scholars who wish to ignore
supply and demand altogether --- as one anthropologist pointed out to
me.
Thus, either one makes the broad claims (all three) in which case it is
hard to argue that Polanyi was right, or one makes the narrow (TC +
changing institutions) claim, in which case Polanyi's work was neither
as new or as insightful as his admirers wish him to be.
my two centavos worth,
John Nye
Hoover Institution and Washington University in St. Louis
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