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How did the telegraph improve market integration in late imperial China? We exploit differences in the exogenous timing of telegraph construction in different prefectures from 1870 to 1911. The empirical results show that the arrival of the telegraph within a prefecture pair reduced the ratio of the two prefectures’ monthly high-grade rice prices by 6.6 percentage points in 9 southern Chinese provinces, or 17.2% of the mean of the dependent variable. The main results are robust to controlling for institutional or transportation changes occurring during the same period, to using an alternative measure of market integration, to using prices of mid-grade and low-grade rice, and to excluding outliers with low data quality. In addition, the effect of the telegraph was stronger for prefecture pairs in which information transmission was more costly, and traditional long-distance traders played an important role in the telegraph’s promotion of market integration. In conclusion, our findings help us understand how a new information technology enhanced market integration in a premodern agrarian society with an established commercial network.

Spanish land reform, involving the break-up of the large southern estates, was a central issue during the first decades of the twentieth century, and justified for economic and political reasons. We employ new provincial data on landless workers, land prices and agrarian wages to consider if government intervention was needed because of the failure of the free action of markets to redistribute land. Our evidence shows that the relative number of landless workers decreased significantly from 1860 to 1930 before the approval of the 1932 Land Reform during the Second Republic (1931-36). This was due to two interrelated market forces: the falling ratio between land prices and rural wages, which made land cheaper for landless workers to rent and buy land plots, and structural change that drained rural population from the countryside. Given that shifts in factor prices were helping workers gain access to land, the economic arguments for reform by the 1930s remain unclear

This article studies the impact of insecure property rights on the behaviour of owners of land before the Spanish Civil War. The theoretical literature on land reform argues that legal threats to the status quo determine agrarian organization, with owners selling land and moving to other asset classes or engaging in large‐scale substitution of sharecroppers and tenants with wage labourers. This study, which uses municipal data on tenant evictions in Catalonia in 1934–5, does not find that uncertainty over property rights in the 1930s meant that owners tried to substitute tenants with wage labourers, especially in the case of the controversial rabassa morta contracts on vineyards. Here it is argued that after 40 years of organizational adjustment to shocks related to phylloxera infestations, legal changes, urbanization, and changes in relative prices, by the 1930s the margin for adjustment was small.

Poor relief provisions in early modern Europe are often considered to have been characterized by a divide between a uniform, compulsory, tax‐based, and relatively secure and generous poor law ‘system’ in England, and the more haphazard, voluntary, relatively parsimonious, insecure, and predominantly urban relief practices on the Continent. In this article we challenge these assumptions by arguing that the spread of agrarian capitalism in coastal Flanders fostered a reorganization of poor relief that displayed many features considered unique to the English old poor law, including the levying of poor taxes. By exploring the introduction, diffusion, and effects of poor taxes in the rural district of Furnes in the second half of the eighteenth century, we demonstrate that poor taxes were not unique to England, and sharpen our comparative understanding of the causes, implications, and conflicts associated with this particular way of raising revenue for the poor. This supports our more general contention that the influence of the normative framework should not be overstated: more than differences in legislation, similarities in socio‐economic development can explain variations in relief practices in preindustrial Europe.

The social consequences of agrarian change have been widely debated. The traditional view of the lower classes becoming increasingly vulnerable due to the loss of access to resources has been met with the revisionist view that this change was counteracted by an increase in the volume and regularity of employment due to investments and new farming practices. This article address this issue by studying the agricultural revolution in southern Sweden using aggregate data at the parish level. New micro-level data on actual harvest outcomes, supplemented by price data, make it possible to differentiate between the development of the local economy and exogenous price shocks. Our results indicate a clear mortality response to harvest fluctuations in general and to harvest failures in particular. The response differed greatly between farming regions, being strongest in the areas most dependent on grain production. The response also diminished during the agricultural revolution, indicating the increasing efficiency of the local economy. This indicates employment effects in line with the revisionist view. At the same time, vulnerability to fluctuations in prices of basic foodstuffs remained high until the second half of the nineteenth century and was also quite similar across farming regions.

Fixed-rent contracts do not free landlords from the need to supervise the land if it is of high value and fragile fertility, nor do they free them from the costs of monitoring farmers if they are poor peasants prone to fall into arrears. In such cases, however, compensation for improvements will encourage tenants to farm with care and act as a bond against non-payment of rent. This article studies the repercussions of these kinds of situations by analysing what happened in nineteenth-century Valencia, where being the owners of the improvements led to tenants eventually becoming the owners of the land.

Historians have documented rising farm sizes throughout the period 1450–1850. Existing studies have revealed much about the mechanisms underlying the development of agrarian capitalism. However, we currently lack any consensus as to when the critical developments occurred. This is largely due to the absence of sufficiently large and geographically wide-ranging datasets but is also attributable to conceptual weaknesses in much of the literature. This article develops a new approach to the problem and argues that agrarian capitalism was dominant in southern and eastern England by 1700 but that in northern England the critical developments came later.

This article argues that historians have paid insufficient attention to the agrarian roots of early modern English famines. While not dismissing the insights arising from entitlements theory, the article takes issue with recent writings that have explained the famine of 1622–3 in north-west England as an entitlements crisis. It offers new empirical evidence from an estate in east Lancashire to demonstrate the scale of the crisis in the early 1620s, using estate accounts to produce new price data and estimates of productivity. On the basis of oat tithe data, the scale of the shortfall in foodstuffs in the harvest of 1621 is demonstrated as being probably in the region of a third; that of the following year has to be inferred from price data. The evidence shows that the crisis was not limited to the arable economy, but was followed by an extensive restocking of the pastoral economy. The article therefore makes a contribution to the growing interest in weather as an exogenous factor.

Between 1200 and 1349, villeinage was not prominent in Suffolk, and, even in those places where it was locally significant, many of its exactions were lightly enforced. The gap between the theory and practice of villeinage was maintained by custom, although this article emphasizes both the importance of regional custom and its mutability. The relative insignificance of villeinage here has two main implications: first, villeinage cannot have caused any crisis of agrarian productivity before the Black Death; and second, its subsequent dissolution cannot have been the prime mover behind the transformation of the landholding structure and the emergence of agrarian capitalism.

During Tawney's century, Kent was London's principal coastwise supplier of grain. This trade was concentrated in the ports of Milton, Faversham, and Sandwich, and largely controlled by merchant-oligarchs living in them, who played a pivotal role in fostering the development of market integration and regional agrarian specialization. In periods of shortage, urban merchants prioritized their own commercial interest, and the subsistence needs of their own resident poor, at the expense of the county's rural poor, and in opposition to policies advocated by their guardians on the county bench. The regional politics of dearth need to be analysed at least as much in terms of vertical as of horizontal fissures in the social structure, and against the background of the politics of plenty, for over-dependence on the London market provoked protest from producers following good harvests and hardened their attitudes to the poor when the situation was reversed. Some forms of popular protest usually assumed to embody plebeian critiques of the failures of local justices should in fact be read primarily as expressions of the unity that often bound governors and their client-poor in opposition to the rival subsistence claims of other little commonwealths.

Research on English late medieval economic history has neglected the evidence of tithes as indicators of agrarian output. In this article, methods used by historians of continental Europe have been developed and applied to the Durham Priory accounting material in order to create the first series of tithe-based production indicators for medieval England. The data are manipulated, and presented, to provide insight into long- and short-term trends in aggregate levels of arable production. The series of indicators are then used to examine the evidence for falling output in the late middle ages in the light of our understanding of demographic, economic, and climatic factors.

This article explores how far estate management and institutional constraints help to explain the transformations of rural society in England from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The monks of Durham Cathedral Priory and the bishops of Durham faced many of the same exogenous pressures in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but they responded differently to these challenges. By the seventeenth century all of the dean and chapter's lands were consolidated holdings on 21-year leases, whereas a confused mixture of copyhold and leasehold land had developed on the bishops' estate. This had a significant impact upon the challenges and opportunities facing their tenants. Institutional constraints were often crucial factors in the transformation of the English countryside: these two neighbouring ecclesiastical estates faced broadly the same problems and yet the composition of their estates diverged significantly across this period, having a profound effect not only on levels of rent, but also on the tenure of holdings and ultimately their relative size; three of the most important factors in the formation of agrarian capitalism. This article also argues that how rural society adapted to the fifteenth-century recession greatly affected the ability of their sixteenth-century counterparts to respond to inflation.

Although the historical national accounts of Sweden are among the most detailed in the world, there is scope for improvement. This study revises previous historical estimates of Swedish GDP. Agricultural output is upgraded for the nineteenth century following recent research by Swedish agrarian historians on the underestimation of official statistics. Estimates of annual fluctuations before 1861 are significantly improved by using new sources on yield ratios of harvests. For manufacturing, home industries are added, in accordance with modern international guidelines (2008 SNA). The study concludes that early nineteenth-century Sweden was not as poor relative to other West European countries as previously thought.

TJ'hough the societies of Europe in the early fourteenth century were 1 predominantly agrarian, the growth of long-distance and short-distance trade had encouraged the growth of employment outside agriculture and spread the use of money in rural communities. In charting the commercialization of everyday life, and in explaining it, historians justifiably emphasize the importance of towns, using this term to include both centres of international trade and the many small market-centred communities whose impact was only local. The expansion and multiplication of towns was one of the ways in which population growth had been accommodated since the eleventh century, and by I300 urban demand for food and industrial raw materials offered a diverse range of marketing opportunities for countrymen. But across Europe there was great variation in the number and size of towns. These contrasts colour the way historians perceive regional economic differences more than any other indicator, and not surprisingly. The size of urban populations had implications for political organization, social structure, education, and culture as well as for the volume and pattern of trade. Two countries whose history can help to explain the economic significance of such differences are England and northern Italy-that is, Italy north of the kingdom of Naples. Why was town life so much less developed in the former than in the latter? How does the contrast relate to other characteristics of their economies? Let us start by examining the towns of the two countries more closely, distinguishing between those that were very large, large, middle-sized, and small.2

T he degree to which plague was responsible for the collapse of the manorial economy has long been a vexed question, but recent commentators have tended to place it at centre stage, acknowledging that the Black Death was more than just a catalyst for processes under way since the end of the thirteenth century.2 Studies of estates and individual manors have reflected the more general debates but, whatever their stance, most have been obliged to record considerable changes in the manorial regime subsequent to the outbreak of plague and its recurrence.3 In particular, more than one study has stressed the gradual adoption of novel tenurial forms seemingly in the wake of recurrent national or local outbreaks of plague. Estate studies by Dyer and Harvey have shown how, in the second half of the fourteenth century, landlords, in order to ensure that holdings remained occupied, abandoned customary hereditable tenures with their traditional labour service component and substituted leasehold for terms of years or for lives.4 Studies of individual manors and groups of manors have often produced similar findings, although the way land was held was not uniform throughout England and responses varied according to region and type of lord.' I I am grateful to Miss Barbara Harvey and Prof. Zvi Razi for their advice on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank members of seminars at the Universities of Leicester and Cambridge and anonymous referees for their valuable comments. Thanks are also due to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster and to the staff of the Essex Record Office for permission to use their records. 2 Hatcher has recently reviewed the historiography and offered his own revisionist interpretation of developments in the first two decades after the arrival of plague: Hatcher, 'Aftermath of the Black Death', pp. 3-9. For a recent general overview, see also Horrox, Black Death, pp. 229-4I. Among the strongest proponents of the 'Black Death as catalyst' thesis were Levett, 'Black Death'; and, most obviously, Postan, 'Medieval agrarian society', pp. 569-70, and idem, Medieval economy and society

A consensus exists among economic historians that US tariffs, which increased dramatically during the Civil War, remained high during the remainder of the nineteenth century.' The overall level of formal (legislated) import duties at the end of the nineteenth century was probably higher than the level of formal duties immediately following the Civil War. In fact, the only reduction in formal import duties, an across-the-board i0 per cent decrease in I872, was reversed in I875; and the four major tariff acts during the last two decades of the century, which changed tariffs on certain individual commodities, left the overall level of formal protection for domestic industries probably somewhat higher.2 Despite the acknowledged importance of the tariff to the sectional strife between the industrial north and the agrarian south after the Civil War and the fact that it accorded widely different levels of real protection to domestic industries, Hawke has suggested that the literature about the US tariff has 'a distinctly antiquated appearance'.3 As a remedy, Hawke reassessed the level of post-Civil War tariff protection by estimating effective rates of protection for a number of industries for I879, i889, i899, and I904, using the US Census of Manufactures.4 He concluded that there was a smaller increase in protection than was commonly believed and that formal tariffs (in nominal terms) were only an approximate guide to effective levels of protection.5 Baack and Ray, more recently, have provided a 'long overdue re-examination of the determinants of post-Civil War tariff policy'.6 Baack and Ray's econometric results support their theoretical model in suggesting that the profit motive of special interest groups explains the structure of tariffs and subsequent levels of protection during the post-Civil War period.7 Neither of these two studies provides an estimate of the effects on tariff levels of an important characteristic of the post-Civil War economy, since neither estimates the separate effect of changes in prices on the real level of protection implicit in the level of formal duties. While Hawke's calculations

B renner's purpose in his original article in Past and Present was to explain the various routes and speeds by which different European regions developed capitalist forms of agricultural organization.2 In doing so, he argued for the centrality of the 'agrarian class structure', that is the balance of class relationships within the countryside, in dictating developments. This article will not attempt to discuss the whole model but will offer a critique of Brenner's account of the English experience in the early modern period (and suggest that agrarian class structure alone is not an adequate explanatory device) before proposing an alternative route to the future which, in one sense, turns Brenner's views upside down. I shall probe the limits of our knowledge and, where knowledge fails, offer speculation as a stimulus to future research. The speculation may prove to be ill founded. As Shaw remarked when championing Elgar and Cockaigne, to offer it may be to damn myself 'to all critical prosperity with a gaffe that will make your grandson blush for you'.3 But the risk is one I am happy to take. Brenner regarded the existence of large commercial farms, held on lease from absentee rentier landlords and worked by hired wage labour, as the distinctive feature of the eighteenth-century English countryside. He accepted the estimate of Mingay and Thompson that by c. I700 English landlords controlled 70-75 per cent of the cultivable area of England and he equated this with the area farmed by large, market-orientated enterprises.4 These farms produced for a national if not an international market. They represented a marked contrast with French agriculture in which peasants, that is small scale, subsistence farmers, continued to predominate until a much later date. The large English farms were, in Brenner's analysis, created by a deliberate landlord policy which was aided if not abetted by the Crown, which was permitted by the destruction of the property rights of the English peasantry, and which entailed the expropriation of their land. 'With the peasants' failure to establish essentially freehold control over the land, the landlords were I An earlier version of this paper was read to the seminar on late medieval and early modern economic history, All Souls College, Oxford in i987: in making revisions I am grateful for the comments I received then and for the criticisms of Drs Joan Thirsk and Bridget Taylor and Professor D. M. Palliser. Many of the issues raised in this paper form the subject of the writer's continuing research. 2 Brenner, 'Agrarian class structure'. 3 Shaw's Music III (i893-1950), ed. Laurence, p. 722. 4 While the figure is perhaps of the right order (though it conceals large regional variations), the equation of landlord control with a specific type of farm is unsound.

R R. H. Britnell2 has recently used the records of an Essex estate, Bourchier Hall, to illustrate some of the features of agricultural technology in the fourteenth century. Amongst other things they show up the exceedingly low corn yields that were usually obtained, and Britnell examines the causes in considerable detail. He draws attention to the rotation of fallow-wheat-oats which was followed on the better soils in Essex at the time, and he discusses the difficulties of maintaining the fertility of the land unless the proportion of dungproducing animals to crop acreage was greater than was then usual. Records of corn sown and harvested in certain years between I 338 and I35I show that in most of them the yield of wheat was less than twice the amount of seed sown to grow it; nor were oats sufficiently better to make the crop worth growing. Britnell refers to "a failure ofdemesne agriculture which lasted through the 'fifties" caused mainly by debility of the grain and exhaustion of the soil. It is not clear what is meant by debility in this context, though in its Latin form the word is frequently encountered in documents of the time, and it occurs in one of the Bourchier Hall accounts now in the Essex Record Office. It is probably a reference either to the poor quality of the seed (bladum debile), or to the poor yield of the crop (propter debilitated). Because of debility of the grain, 22 acres of oats were left unharvested at Bourchier Hall in I 350, and the wheat was apparently affected in the same way. The reference to the other alleged cause, the exhaustion of the soil, draws attention to a subject which has interested agrarian historians for many years.

Indian economic history has tended to develop as a series of selfcontained specialisms. One area of expertise grew up around the analysis of the agrarian taxation of the Mughal empire of the seventeenth century. Heavily reliant on Persian documents, it has flourished in India, particularly at the Aligarh Muslim University. Another area intensively studied has been India's pattern of external trade during the era of the Portuguese, Dutch and English expansions. This work has been based on the papers of the European trading companies importing Indian textiles. A third well-trodden area has been the theory and practice of the revenue systems introduced by British colonial administrators in the nineteenth century as they transformed Mughal taxation of the agrarian product into a true tax on land owned. Yet neither the polemics between nationalists and apologists for empire at the end of the last century nor more recent forays into development economics have welded these disparate specialisms into a unified and comparative area of study.1 Against this background the achievement of the Cambridge Economic History of India is outstanding. Here for the first time it is possible to attain an overview of Indian economic history by reading a series of short but authoritative chapters. To anyone who has to try to teach or to learn this subject the value of these volumes is very great whatever one's disagreements in detail or preferred ideological bias. At the same time the main weakness of the CEHI is a reflection of this strength. The process of integration has begun, but it has not been pushed very far. It is difficult here to gain a broad impression of how the Indian economy might have changed over time or how features such as demography, foreign trade, agricultural production and state policy might have acted on each other. This article does not seek to offer a critique of these volumes as a whole; that would certainly be presumptuous and probably impossible. Instead it uses the CEHI in conjunction with work which has appeared since the early

DvETAILED examples of later medieval agricultural technology are not so numerous that the heart sinks at the prospect of a new one. The whole topic of later medieval practice is only now beginning to be systematically explored by contributors to the Cambridge Agrarian History of England and Wales, the relevant volume of which is currently being prepared under the editorship of Dr Miller. The main objection to a single case study, such as the present one, is nevertheless easy to anticipate. It is the inevitable objection to all minute research in agrarian history-that the multiplication of differently observed examples of different ways of cultivating different crops on different soils at different times by different types of farmer makes for painful reading without making generalizations any easier to form, and indeed usually rendering them more difficult. My defence for drawing attention to the present example would be that it implies a set of general technical considerations. It illustrates a pattern of events which -may have repeated itself in many places and on many different types of soil, if I have explained it correctly. The interpretation is grounded partly in principles of agriculture (the principles of crop rotation), partly in principles of economic theory (especially the principle of diminishing returns) and partly in a well-established proposition concerning later medieval economic history (that the production of cereals was declining as a consequence of declining population). This is quite sufficient to suggest its general relevance, and my hope is that it will prove useful in accounting for similar changes in other places. I The problem concerns the relationship between the annual output of cereals, the productivity of labour in agriculture and the technique of production adopted. According to a well-known supposition about the progress of agriculture, with a given range of soils and a given range of techniques labour is likely to be concentrated first on more fertile soils and to be applied to increasingly less fertile soils as the demand for grain increases. Prof. Postan has argued that the margin of cultivation was being extended in this way during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and that the marginal product of labour was declining through this period. He has argued, too, that the technology of arable farming was linked to that of pasture farming by the use of animal dung as a manure. The expansion of the arable area at the expense of the pasture area would reduce the number of animals which could be kept, and so cause an absolute reduction in the amount of manure available.'

MTM HE simulta neous publication oftwo fresh assessments ofthe early fourteenthcentury economy marks a significant departure from recent discussions of the problems raised by conditions in the countryside before the Black Death.1 Everyone has his own ideas as to what happened to the economy after the Black Death. But any attempt to account for what happened then by attributing it to simple causes is bound to be suspect. Consequently, historians have looked for predisposing factors to which they can assign some share of responsibility for the momentous subversion of the accepted order of things that took place once the Black Death had run its course, and have perceived symptoms of excessive strain or debility in the changes they find on the land or in farming policy during the half-century or so before its coming. Prof. Postan has always contended that the economy was failing well before the days of the Black Death; and his views have always commanded widespread support.2 Dr Baker has concluded, for example, from his examination of the JNfonarum Inquisitiones that "the high tide of medieval land colonisation ... [was] ... on the turn" in the early decades of the fourteenth century;' and Dr Kershaw, who has contributed a pastoral crisis in this period to the saga of crop failures with which H. S. Lucas has made us all so familiar, firmly corroborates his findings.4 Widespread support, however, is not unanimity. There are dissentients. Miss Harvey, using very similar records to those cited by Prof. Postan and by those who share his views, comes to very different conclusions;5 and Dr Watts has added his proffer to the range of her arguments and examples.6 1 E. Miller, 'War, Taxation and the English Economy in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries', in J. M. Winter, ed. War and Economic Development (Cambridge, I975); J. R. Maddicott, 'The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294-I34I', Past and Present, supp. I (I 975). 2 M. M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge, 1973), pp. I4,20I if. 3 A. R. H. Baker, 'Evidence in the Nonarum Inquisitiones of Contracting Arable Lands', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. xix (1 966), 5 I 8. 4 I. Kershaw, 'The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 13 I 5-22', Past and Present, LIX (I 973) . 5 B. Harvey, 'The Population Trend in England between 1300 and 1348', Transactions Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. xvi (i966). 6 D. G. Watts, 'A Model for the Early Fourteenth Century', Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. xx (i967).

A MAJOR concern of economic historians since World War II has been to interpret the process of industrialization in now developed countries. One prominent line of approach has been to compare the experience of the European economies in the eighteenth century, and much of the inquiry has been conceptualized along the following lines. "The Industrial Revolution poses two problems: (i) Why did this first breakthrough to a modern industrial system take place in Western Europe? and (2) Why, within this European experience, did change occur when and where it did ?" 2 This comparative approach has been seen as a particularly valuable way of yielding insights into the process of economic growth in general and the causes of the English Industrial Revolution in particular. Thus Crouzet argues that "The economic historian interested in the key problem of growth is bound to find the comparative approach particularly fruitful. A systematic comparison of the eighteenth-century English economy with that of another country-and France as the leading continental power at that time seems the obvious choice-should bring out more clearly what factors were peculiar to England and might have determined what is a unique phenomenon, the English Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century."3 Since Crouzet wrote, much of the literature has accepted the usefulness of the question, "Why was England first ?" and the specific question, "Why did England experience the onset of the Industrial Revolution before France ?" has been promoted to a position of great prominence.4 There is by now an extensive literature offering a wide variety of responses to these questions. The answers seem to fall into three types. First, there are studies which single out a single crucial reason. To cite just a couple of examples we find views as diverse as those of Kemp ("if one overriding reason can be given for the slower transformation of the continent ... it must be the continued prevalence of the traditional agrarian structures")5 and Hagen ("the differences in personality rather than differential circumstances are the central explanation of Britain's

T tHE socio-economic organization of late seventeenth-century English society no longer lends itself to convenient generalization. Prof. Holmes's recent critique of Gregory King has splintered that worthy's famous table, or conventional notions of its reliability, beyond apparent hope of repair, even though the critique itself leaves King's more specific local and demographic exercises unblemished.' This can only mean that, in future years, an even heavier responsibility will fall upon those hardy but sometimes ill-supported frontiersmen, the regional and local historians of economic development and social change. Nevertheless, the challenge thrown to a growing group of historians may well turn out to be beneficial. There is little doubt, for example, that the examination and analysis of probate inventories, covering large geographical areas, and for long curiously neglected, will eventually produce working estimates of changing wealth levels which will in turn permit inter-regional as well as inter-local comparisons. Moreover, inventories, used with care, yield considerable information relative to social aspiration and status as well as to purely economic considerations, and so will provide a more than rudimentary guidance in the formation of models of social structure. This is especially likely to be the case where rural societies are being considered; towns have social complexities which are best treated separately. Clearly, too, scholars in this field must not demand too much of their raw material and of its supporting documentation. Attempts to form sophisticated methodologies now being developed by researchers on U.S. probate inventories2 may, if applied unwisely, have the effect of depositing their

A HISTORIAN dipping into some of the major works in the bibliography that follows this survey-for example, Guichard on Muslim Spain (84), 1 Ladero on the royal finances of the fifteenth century (ioi), Perez or Gutierrez Nieto on the Comunidades (I42, 86), Anes on the eighteenth-century agrarian scene (i i), and Fontana or Tortella on the complexities of nineteenthcentury capitalism and government policies (6o-I, I 9o) -would surely conclude that the study of the economic and social history of Spain is in a healthy state. He would not be entirely wrong, and it is the purpose of this article to give some account of studies, in languages other than English, which have appeared in recent years. The survey, of course, is selective: for example, it does not attempt to cover the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it excludes the history of economic thought, and in the case of some particular areas of study, such as that of the desamortizaciones, the reader is referred to recent review articles for further information. The fundamental introduction to the demographic history of Spain is the short study by Nadal (I30). Although it covers only the modern period, the book is a masterpiece of succinct analysis, the main themes of which are provided by contrasts: the Spanish experience is compared to a European model, and an ancien regime cycle is contrasted with the "new" demographic cycle of growth which, while lagging behind the European model, began in the eighteenth century. Within this framework Nadal also manages to include much data on related themes, such as diseases, epidemics, the regional distribution of population, migrations, and expulsions. It is against the background of Nadal's book that comments on recent studies must be set. Is there an area of medieval Europe which presents so many problems for the history of demography as Spain? Firstly, there are the variables of documentation. The fogatges and libros defuegos of late medieval Catalonia and Navarre, for example, have to be set against an almost complete absence of similar evidence for the kingdoms of Castile and Granada. Secondly, there is the intractable problem posed by the moving frontier. What were the different patterns of repopulation during the various stages of the Muslim conquest and Christian reconquest? How many settlers were attracted to reconquered lands and how many of the "enemy" were expelled or assimilated? The difficulties can perhaps be best illustrated by looking at thirteenth-century Castile in terms of the Malthusian "scissors". Even if we knew the rate of population growth, we would still be left with the problem that the kingdom of Castile doubled in size during the thirteenth-century reconquest and that many of the Muslims who were at first assimilated were later expelled. In terms of Castile and the Malthusian "scissors"

It is now many years since historians first turned to the land tax assessments to elucidate the position of the small landowner in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A. H. Johnson pointed out as long ago as i909 that the evidence of the land tax suggested the crucial period for the survival of small owners to be not the age of heavy parliamentary enclosure, but rather the then little-explored decades of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.1 Shortly afterwards H. L. Gray made use of the assessments in his discussion of Oxfordshire farming,2 and then, in the very first issue of the Economic History Review, appeared Davies's well-known statistical tour de force,3 the starting point for a number of subsequent inquiries.4 Davies's figures showed that, in the counties he investigated, small owners increased both in number and in acreage owned over the period I780-i832 (although there was, he said, a downward trend evident after I802). And of course, as a result of Davies's and subsequent work, the evidence of the land tax assessments has become one of the pillars on which the modern view of the effects of the enclosure movement and the agricultural revolution has rested. The purpose of this short article is not to challenge the broad conclusions arrived at from the land tax evidence that small owners generally prospered between about I780 and i 8I5, and were by no means washed away by the high tide of parliamentary enclosure but rather to point out that interpretation of the assessments is fraught with difficulties more serious than is generally realized, and that in consequence anything but the most broad and general conclusion may be quite invalid. It is indisputable that the land tax assessments remain a valuable source for agrarian history, but as a source they cannot, in this writer's view, bear the weight of detailed interpretation which has been placed on them.5

C ENTRAL and eastern Yorkshire offers a uniquely suitable field for the study of certain problems of twelfthand thirteenth-century agrarian history. The basin of the Ouse, as opposed to the moors of the west and north-east, forms part of the central and eastern English plain; and of the whole region treated in the classical accounts of medieval agrarian history it is, perhaps, the only part which has not been subjected to detailed study. There is a special affinity between the plain of Yorkshire and the region between Welland and Trent ;2 that the rural organisation of Yorkshire after the Conquest has not been studied in conjunction with that of the central Danelaw is due to an event which modified, temporarily or perhaps permanently, the development of the northern district.a The devastation of io69, more extensive in some districts than in others, left about half the Yorkshire plain entirely waste in io86, and had evidently affected many districts in which the Domesday commissioners found some surviving population. There can be no doubt of the intensity and lasting effects of the devastation. In many vills, seventeen years later, no population was recorded, and no income even from woods or rough pasture ; over large parts of Yorkshire the cultivation of the soil was entirely suspended, perhaps for a generation or longer.4 It is, therefore, reasonable to look for the mature post-Conquest development of Yorkshire at a somewhat later date than for that of the region illustrated by Danelam Charters, and to place it in the thirteenth and -perhaps the late twelfth century. The evidence for this period consists chiefly of some thousands of charters surviving in various forms; and with the methods of using charter material elaborated by Professor Stenton the reader must here be assumed to be familiar. I wish to use this material at present only in so far as it relates to the distribution

T VHE object of this article is to summarize the results of recent study of the expropriation of the English peasantry; a problem organically bound up with the investigation of the parliamentary enclosures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which formed the subject of my previously published work.' The main problem here, as Soviet historians understand it, is the succession of different forms of landownership: common ownership, feudal ownership, and small, independent peasant economies. The last-named derive, as we believe, from the disintegration of feudal ownership. They subsequently decline and are squeezed out by the modern private (bourgeois) ownership of the big landlords. The peasant economy is then replaced by a form of capitalist production in which the tenant farmer or leaseholder exploits the labour of hired agricultural workers: this serves as a source of capitalist rent which the farmers pay to the landlords. Soviet historians of the agrarian question link up the succession of different forms of landownership with the succession of different forms of feudal rent, the transition to the monetary form of feudal rent and its further development and transformation into capitalist rent. In particular, the level and extent of peasant landownership are, in our opinion, the result of the evolution of 'rental' relations and of the development of capitalist rent in England in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The 'specific weight' of peasant landownership is inversely proportional to that of the 'improved' and capitalist rent in the total of manorial incomes. Of course, the successful penetration of 'improved' and capitalist rent into relations of landownership should be studied in conjunction with the geographical peculiarities of the individual districts, the concrete historical conditions of time and place, general economic factors, the prices of agricultural and other products, etc. What, then, primarily interests Soviet historians studying the history of the English peasantry in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries? The main problem lies in determining the social laws which made themselves felt in the English village in the period of so-called primitive accumulation (in Marx's understanding of this important term2) in connexion with the birth of the new social formation

in some way from the once supposedly ubiquitous "classical manor", with its demesne, villein and freehold lands, and copious supplies of compulsory labour. Theories based upon a limited range of evidence, in this case drawn mainly from large ecclesiastical estates in the midlands and the south, were bound to present a distorted picture when applied to English rural life as a whole. We may now be in danger of creating new myths by accepting hypotheses on economic fluctuations in the agrarian sector as uniformly applicable to all regions of medieval England. The "boom" of the thirteenth century, with its soaring rents and emphasis on Colonization, and its rising prices for foodstuffs and low wages for labour, has justifiably been seen as largely a manifestation of the spectacular growth of population; and the "depression" of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the reversal of previous economic trends, as a result of the substantial decrease in numbers. It cannot be disputed that in a peasant agricultural system changes in population must have a direct effect upon demand for land;2 attempts to explain vicissitudes in the agrarian economy of medieval England in terms of monetary fluctuations3 or economic developments of national significance outside the agrarian sector4 have been unconvincing. Nevertheless, the existence of considerable diversity in the effects wrought upon regional economies by demographic change needs to be emphasized. Although in very general terms the fall in population which occurred in the course of the fourteenth century did tend to express itself in a contraction in the area under cultivation, in falling land values, high wages, and relatively low prices for foodstuffs, the impact of demographic decline upon the particular

PROF. Ringrose's article is a welcome addition to the growing interest in developing a systematic approach to European economic history constructed from new developments in the social sciences. We find ourselves in agreement with some of his analysis. Moreover we have substantially elaborated the theory1 since we presented it in preliminary form in this journal, and we believe we can explain a number of the difficulties inherent in our first tentative presentation. We do, however, take exception to the following points in Ringrose's comment. (i) Much as we respect Prof. Slicher van Bath's pioneering study of European agrarian history, our model was neither drawn from his study nor is it essentially similar to one he employs. His model is in fact difficult to specify. The exact interaction between population, relative prices, and the absolute price level is never clearly spelled out. We, on the other hand, employ a general equilibrium model that specifies that relative prices are a function of population and invariant to the quantity of money or the absolute level of prices. Prof. van Bath considers the latter important and is interested in the absolute level of agricultural prices. We feel that it is the change in relative prices-the price of agricultural produce compared to the price of non-agricultural goods-that is important in inducing institutional change. (2) We make no apology for our assumption of "economic" man for two reasons. First, some assumptions are necessary for any explanation. Second, the assumption appears to be a good starting-ground since irrational and uneconomic behaviour throughout most of history doomed man to starvation and death. He could not afford the luxury of undertaking activities that made him worse off. This is increasingly true the further back in history we go since the tolerances within which man either survived or starved were much narrower than today. Furthermore, we in no way imply that our model explains all historical institutions. Clearly there were many institutions founded for non-economic reasons, and equally human behaviour was frequently motivated by other human drives. Yet it is difficult to counter the argument that those institutions, whatever their goals, that were economically most efficient survived. Few persons and no institutions ever escape the "scarcity" problem-all are continually faced with financial constraints. The ultimate test is whether the model we have developed

T THIS article examines the connexions between conditions in the rural economy of Ireland and marriage during the post-famine period from I 85 I to I9 I1. A number of previous studies have posited such connexions in several Western agrarian societies.1 Kennedy has noted, however, that because changes in marriage variables during the post-famine period were so dramatic there, Ireland can serve as a test case for hypotheses with more general, though less extreme, relevance.2 Such an orientation is adopted in the following examination of factors affecting marriage in Ireland, which attempts to use more systematic analytical techniques than most previous work on the problem.