Читать книгу Nature's Evil - Alexander Etkind - Страница 22

Continuing the migration of the naked ape from the African savannah to the forests and wetlands of Eurasia, civilisation moved northwards. For millennia, the Mediterranean was the centre of trade. In the crisis-ridden seventeenth century, the North Sea assumed this role. Luxuries from the East – silk, sugar, cotton – continued to exert their charms. But northern products, such as tar, hemp and saltpetre, shaped the world to come. The Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War were pan-European conflicts between the North and the South; from this time on, the North was usually the victor. Vienna repelled the Turks, but Prague was seized by the Swedes. The first oceanic empires, Portugal and Spain, looked for colonies in the southern seas. Holland and England focused on trade with the great expanses of the North – from Arkhangelsk to Newfoundland, from Danzig to Bergen. Hanseatic and then Dutch and English trade in raw materials from the North – grain, timber, fur, linen, hemp, iron – was in greater volumes than the colonial trade in sugar, tea, cotton and other southern products.⁷

Burning a forest and clearing the land gave immediate results. Land would never again be as fertile as it was after the ashes were first ploughed in. In the eighteenth century, agronomists called this the law of declining fertility, while economists called it the law of diminishing returns. If the fertility of your land is declining, you need more land. The deforestation of Europe was the direct result of the expansion of grain cultivation. But, between the forest and the field, there always existed a third space – pasture, meadow, wetland. In the estates of ancient Rome, a third of the land lay fallow – i.e., uncultivated. For centuries the peasants to the north of the Alps had practised the fire-fallow system of agriculture, sowing and harvesting crops, then putting cattle onto the land, and then, after several years, abandoning that field and advancing deeper into the forest. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a quarter of German lands lay fallow. The history of agriculture was the process of the peasants learning what to do with fallow land, how to use it productively.

In the system that was typical for Northern Europe, land was divided into three parts. In autumn, a field was sown with wheat or rye. In spring the crop was harvested and the field was sown with barley, oats or beans, which were used as cattle fodder. Then the field lay fallow for a year. In this way, a third of the land was non-productive, while the cultivated fields produced at a ratio of 4:1 – i.e., from every grain sown, four new grains grew. This was the average productivity of arable farming throughout Europe, from Italy to Scandinavia. Bumper harvests could be achieved only with the addition of fertilisers – animal manure or night soil from the towns. Intensive agriculture developed only on the outskirts of towns, close to the markets.

Crop rotation was the main reason for an increase in productivity. It also supported the reorientation of farming from grain to fibre – wool, linen, hemp. From each harvest the peasant had to feed his family and also pay his master and the state for the land and for protection. This obliged him to earn cash by reducing the share of raw, perishable products he grew for survival and increasing the share of dry, cash crops he grew for trade. This was the road to riches. Cottage industry left the peasant families with a part of the profit which in other circumstances would have gone to the merchants and landowners (see chapters 5 and 7). But this new economy continued to depend on the massive supply of grain from Prussia, Poland and the Baltic lands.⁸

The landowners in Eastern Europe battled with the same problems of the grain economy that the Mesopotamian authorities had encountered thousands of years earlier: low productivity, extended transport routes, and a ‘lazy’ population with little motivation to work and still less desire to save. But grain didn’t require much labour. Unlike the slave-owner who met all his slaves’ needs as he understood them – provisions, clothes and tools – the landowner let the peasants survive on subsistence farming. Thanks to their simultaneous ripening, cereal crops could be harvested and processed in one fell swoop. During the rest of the year the peasants didn’t work in the landowner’s fields. They had vegetable plots, pastures and crafts. The landowner didn’t interfere in these activities, which meant that peasants were able to develop them better and faster. Nor was the landowner interested in the complex crop rotation systems needed to increase productivity. They only made the process of collecting rent more complicated, especially if the noble owner ruled in absentia. His opportunities for trading depended on the proximity of his farm to the riverine system. If a farm was 10 or 20 miles from the river, trade was unprofitable. The income of the landowner depended not on the productivity of his land but on its proximity to a river and the sea. Foreign shipowners reaped the lion’s share of the profit, and they invested it back in their countries. For the village, these earnings were lost.⁹

Agriculture provided general employment, but it was not full-time or year round. The landowner had to have physical mastery over the peasants to force them to work, just as the peasants forced their horses to work. But the work was seasonal. People worked in accordance with the annual rhythms of preparing the soil, sowing, harvesting and processing the crop. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, men in Russian villages spent no more than half their time working, and women and adolescents no more than a third. But at harvest time, when the crop had to be brought in all at one go, everyone joined in the toil, men, women and children. Technological innovations very slowly changed the key moments in this cycle. The gradual replacement of oxen with horses was an important step. In England this happened as early as the sixteenth century, in Europe much later. The change travelled, like many similar ‘improvements’, from west to east. Peasants opposed this replacement, because they knew that, if war broke out, horses would be requisitioned. Although ploughing with oxen was slower, it was the more reliable option. Stunted horses, shod with wooden shoes, couldn’t pull a plough. Over the centuries the weight and strength of horses increased, but this was the result of selective breeding that happened in cavalry stables, not in peasant farmyards. Iron replaced wood, helping to save effort, increase productivity, and bring peasants to compliance. Iron horseshoes, iron ploughshares, iron hoes allowed farmers to turn over deep furrows and drain fields with ditches. The conversion of military technology for civilian use was a reward for the incessant taxes, requisitioning and billeting which victorious states imposed on their civilian populations.

Over the centuries, crop rotation became more complex. First tested in Holland, the four-field system spread during the eighteenth century to England, Sweden and Prussia. The amount of agricultural land lying fallow at any given time halved. Consumed on the spot by the farmers and their animals, turnips and beans from the rotated fields freed up wheat, which could be sold as a cash crop. The increase in demand was a powerful stimulus for these changes: the growing towns always needed more provisions. Later, the multiple-field system became ever more complex. Some agronomists promoted seven- or even eleven-field rotation, but it did not lead to a great leap in productivity.

The difficulties of long-term planning are obvious to a modern mind. In 1742, the governor of Astrakhan in southern Russia, Vasily Tatishchev, pressured the local landowners to divide their estates into four parts. ‘Let the first be for rye, the second for spring wheat, let the third lie fallow, the fourth be pasture for cattle …, so that in a very short time, all the land will have been enriched with manure and become exceedingly profitable.’¹⁰ Tatishchev was dismissed from his post in Astrakhan in 1745 – three years after he wrote his exhortation about four-year crop rotation. Another Russian expert in crop rotation, Andrey Bolotov, managed a crown estate near Moscow. Having seen the advanced field system in eastern Prussia, where he had served in the Seven Years’ War, Bolotov marked off seven fields on the crown estate and forced the peasants to separate them by ditches. After two years Bolotov was transferred to a more lucrative post, and the fields returned to their original condition. Landowners and their bailiffs complained that the peasants were lazy, improvements failed to be embedded, land lay fallow, crops rotted in the fields, and there were no roads. There was no point in increasing the production of grain without transportation routes. Excess grain was used mainly for distilling. It turned out that the bailiff’s efforts to raise the productivity of the peasants succeeded only in lowering the price of vodka in the village tavern.