===================== HES POSTING ==================== [Eh.Res has kept the Polanyi discussion going. Here are the three most recent comments that HES subscribers have not seen. -- RBE] ------------------------------------------- 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]