Studies in Economic History

The Collected Papers of George Unwin

R. H. Tawney

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367112578
• eBook ISBN: 9780429655364
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

First published in 1927, this important collection contains a selection from the unpublished papers left by the late Professor George Unwin, together with certain of the chapters and articles contributed by him to books and periodicals. Part I is concerned with 'The Study and Teaching of Economic History'. Par II, 'Essays and Lectures on Historical Subjects', ranges over such topics as The Mediaeval City, Commerce and Coinage in Shakespeare's England, Indian Factories in the Eighteenth Century, and ends with a selection of his more important reviews of books. Part III contains six Miscellaneous Papers on varied topics and the Appendix gives an indispensable list of the published works of George Unwin.

PART I

THE STUDY AND TEACHING OF ECONOMIC HISTORY

I

SOME ECONOMIC FACTORS IN GENERAL HISTORY¹

I FIND I cannot approach the, subject announced for this lecture, “Some Economic Factors in General History,” without touching on a larger, more difficult and more dangerous topic—the problem of the relation which the economic factors of history bear to the other factors. This is now almost as bold an undertaking as it would have been in the sixteenth century to offer gratuitous public explanations of the Royal Supremacy or the Real Presence. For I cannot avoid the crucial test—Do I or do I not believe in the Economic Interpretation of History?

I trust that it will not be thought that fears of inquisitorial zeal are making me hedge, when I reply that I do believe, but also that in a more emphatic sense I do not. Let denial, as perhaps the safer attitude, come first. I do not believe that the interpretation which I should wish to see applied to history can be furnished primarily or fundamentally by reference to economic facts and economic motives. But this rests on a mere act of faith: the belief that the inward possessions and experiences of mankind—religion, art, literature, science, music, philosophy, but, above all, the ever widening and deepening communion of human minds and souls with each other—that these are the central and ultimate subjects of history. The ultimate interpretation of these spiritual realities must be found in a spiritual background (eause and effect being perhaps the wrong terms to use in this sphere), although it may be freely admitted that economic facts and economic motives furnish the environment, the conditions, in which these possessions and experiences of man’s spirit are realized.

But, before the Marxian inquisitors hand me over as an irreclaimable obscurantist to the secular arm and the purifying faggot, let me read a partial recantation. As an economic historian, I must believe in some sense in the economic interpretation of history, and my faith, though not that of a Dominic, may still be a saving faith. The history that I have been speaking of as beyond economic interpretation is, after all, an ideal history. Not a history of mere ideals. The facts it should relate are real, and indeed—such is my faith—they are the ultimate realities. But the Word, though made flesh and dwelling amongst us, has not been accepted for publication in the manuals of history.

Little of it has been written. Much of it can never be written for want of records, even when the desert has yielded its last papyrus and the vaunt of the earliest Hittite despot, carved on the remotest rocks of Cappadocia, has been rendered as clear and instructive as the latest fulminations of Fleet Street. The “real” history, as recorded and written, is mainly concerned with the “actual” events and the spiritual unrealities of the newspaper.

It is true that recent historical scholarship, as represented in the best volumes of The Political History of England or in the best chapters of The Cambridge Modern History and Cambridge Mediœval History, shows an immense advance over the school manuals of a generation ago. It is far more critical of the political traditions and assumptions of the past. But the one assumption almost universally, though silently, made is that embodied in Seeley’s phrase: “History is past politics; politics is present history.” And in the minds, not only of general readers and of school teachers of history, but of those who, through the medium of Matriculation Boards and of scholarship examinations, or through the allpervasive propaganda of Wembleyism, mould the plastic thoughts of youth and marshal them the way they should go, the political interpretation of history still holds unquestioned predominance.

To this political interpretation as the dominant faith the economic interpretation of Karl Marx and his followers throws down an effective challenge. Against a dogmatism that is the more dangerous because it is largely unconscious, Karl Marx sets a dogmatism that is deliberate and explicit. Immanuel Kant said that David Hume had roused him from his dogmatic slumber. Karl Marx will not have lived in vain if he has performed a similar service for the historians of the next generation.

The academic representatives of economic history cannot, I think, be charged as a body with unduly magnifying their office. They have opposed the economic interpretation of history, not only as expounded by Karl Marx, but as expounded by Adam Smith. They have insisted on regarding economic development as subordinate to social development; and in this I think they were quite right. But they have gone on to explain social development as the creation of policy; and this I regard as a fundamental error. The ultimate aspect of history is, I believe, the social aspect, that widening and deepening of community which is the correlative of the moral and spiritual growth of men as individuals. Political history, like economic history, is concerned with means adopted to that end, with the persistent and suicidal abuse of those means—i.e. of power and wealth—with the overgrowth and the collapse of the organs through which they work. The facts of political, no less than those of economic, history must, therefore, be regarded as to a large extent pathological, as representing so much loss and waste, as a continual series of divergences and backslidings from the sound and healthy line of human progress.

I trust I shall not seem by this adoption of scientific terms to be raising the futile issue between History as an Art and History as a Science. We do not want less art, but more science. May the day be far distant when we cease to derive joy and inspiration from the art of Herodotus and Tacitus, of Clarendon and Macaulay, as it will certainly be farther distant when history will be written entirely on the model of Newton’s Principia or of Darwin’s Origin of Species. History can never be a science in the same sense as physics or as biology; but, unless the study of the organized life and action of mankind becomes more detached, more objective, more disinterested than it is at present, the great advances made in the physical sciences will undoubtedly conduce, not to the progress of civilization, but to its destruction.

To the possession of such a scientific spirit, however, economic historians can make no prior or exclusive claim. Even if we look back to Adam Smith as the founder of economic history, we must recognize that Vico and Montesquieu preceded him; and the constitutional and institutional studies to which they gave a creative impulse may perhaps claim to be regarded as the central contribution of the nineteenth century to historical scholarship.

It is in the work done by the scholars of all nations in this world-wide field, where historical scholarship, without ceasing to be scholarship, finds its affinities with science and philosophy, that most economic historians have found their starting-point and inspiration. To those who, like myself, are deeply sensible of this obligation, there can be no question of claiming a prior importance for the purely economic aspects of history, or of stressing unduly the degree of our specialization. The economic interpretation in which I profess my belief lies, not in furnishing an ultimate goal, nor an exclusively scientific method, but only in providing an additional, and perhaps a more objective, approach to the study of the political and social aspects of history and of the relations between them.

There is sometimes, no doubt, an apparent objectivity about the alleged economic facts which may turn out to be a snare and a delusion. The story of the wool trade as given in most of the text-books is a case in point. From early times, we are told, there had been wool exported from England for the use of foreign cloth manufacturers; but in the fourteenth century the demand was greatly increased by Edward III’s establishment of the cloth industry in England; and the rise in the price of wool, together with the shortage of labour due to the Black Death, produced a widespread and continuous conversion of arable to sheep-fanning, which lasted till the middle of the sixteenth century, and was thus the dominant feature in English agricultural history for two centuries. This chain of reasoning forms such excellent material for a history lesson or an examination paper that it seems almost wicked to call it in question, but the facts when investigated do not support it.

It is even possible that the exportation of wool reached its maximum in the thirteenth century.¹ In 1273, during a period of war and restriction, a list of licences shows an export of 32,743 sacks. The Customs of 1354, which are often cited in later times as representing the high-water mark of the wool trade, show an exportation of 34,760 sacks, after which date there was a steady decline, which became very rapid in the fifteenth century. Nor did the increased production of cloth make up for this till the middle of the sixteenth century. Edward III did not establish the cloth manufacture. He found it expanding and taxed it. It grew from 16,000 to 50,000 pieces in the truce of Richard II, and had not advanced beyond this amount in the reign of Edward IV. As five or six pieces of cloth could be made out of a sack of wool, the amount represented in the cloth production recorded under Edward IV is only about 10,000 sacks, which, when added to the 10,000 sacks of exported wool shown in the Customs, does not amount to two-thirds of the output of 1273. Nor is there any evidence of a relative rise in the price of wool at this time, whilst there is clear proof of the increasing production of com for export. All that remains, then, of the traditional connection between the wool trade and enclosures is the undoubted fact that in certain districts, at certain limited periods, and generally under catastrophic political conditions, portions of the open-field arable were being displaced by sheep pastures without regard to the interests and the rights of peasant holders.

I have attempted this rapid summary of the results of the labours of many scholars during the past twenty years, in order to show how the economic historian is impelled by the very nature of the facts at his disposal to displace an illusory objectivity by a real one.

“Here shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

But drinking largely sobers us again.”

In what follows I propose to confine myself mainly to two illustrations of this. War is one of the leading aspects of political history. The growth of community and of class relations within narrower or wider communities is perhaps the leading aspect of social history. I shall consider briefly the approach to each of these aspects of history through the consideration of their economic consequences.

The belief in war, not merely as one of the leading factors in history—which it undoubtedly has been—but as one of its chief constructive and creative factors, is an article of popular religion held so naturally and strenuously by schoolboys, that it is almost impossible to teach them history without imparting or strengthening it. It has been one of the main results of the higher criticism involved in the best historical scholarship of our time to undermine that belief, silently indeed and unconsciously, and therefore without open repudiation of it, but none the less effectually. Can anyone read the account given, for instance, by Sir Charles Oman of the Hundred Years’ War or of its sequel, the Wars of the Roses, or those of the Thirty Years’ War given by Sir Augustus Ward and by Sir Stanley Leathes, or the full and definite history of the English Civil War and the other wars of Cromwell as written by Mr. Gardiner and Professor Firth, or the story of the wars of the eighteenth century as told by Mr. Lecky, without coming to the conclusion that, whatever reactions for good may have been stirred in the souls of men by these wars, their general effect was destructive and evil?

The best case that can be made for war is to use the analogy of a surgical operation, and to regard it as a desperate remedy for a case otherwise hopeless. But in war the operation is performed upon the patient by himself whilst in a state of delirium. He believes himself to be two distinct persons, each of which is operating upon the other. He thinks the operation will be successful in proportion to the amount of blood that is shed, and that it will not merely remove the deep-seated evil from which he suffers, but will restore his constitution to the vigour of youth. The selfdoctored patient is not Germany or France, but civilization.

Economic history leaves to the moral philosopher, to the political historian, the deeper question as to the ultimate justification for war, and deals only with the economic consequences. It considers the cost of war and the means used to meet it, and the effects produced by the use of those means upon prices, wages, property, taxation, contracts, credits, class relations—i.e. upon all those conditions that determine the vitality, the stability and the progress of communities. And the economic historian finds that, whilst there have been great changes in the technique and the etiquette of war, very considerable variations in the style of the diplomatic casuistry by which war has been initiated and brought to a conclusion, and an immense increase in its destructive effects upon civilization, there are yet to be noted in all wars between civilized States, in however widely distant periods of history, certain broad economic consequences that recur with such automatic and fatal regularity as to suggest that they are beyond the remedial action of human foresight.

There can be little doubt that the story will be carried back to the days of Hammurabi and Tutankhamen, but at present it begins with fully recorded detail in the history of the Italian republics of the Middle Ages. It has long been known that Genoa furnished a precedent for the Bank of England and the National Debt, but the researches of Dr. Robert Davidsohn,¹ who has devoted a lifetime to the history of mediæval Florence, and those of Professor H. Sieveking ² into the financial and commercial history of Genoa, have revealed in the social and economic development of the great Italian republics a far closer anticipation of the conditions of modern capitalistic civilization than had previously been conceived, leading to an economic collapse and a social arrest and retrogression very similar to that with which some of the larger commercial and industrial societies of Europe seem to be threatened to-day. War finance was the centre of the situation, and provides the main clue to the problems of Italian social history. The cost of the wars of civic imperialism waged by Pisa against Genoa, by Genoa against Venice, by Florence against Lucca and Pisa and Siena, was met by loans which laid the burden through indirect taxes upon the poor, called into existence a rentier class of State creditors, and by concessions to them created an atmosphere of speculation and monopoly in commercial and industrial enterprise. The social conflicts provoked by these conditions led through revolution to foreign intervention and the rule of tyrants, and furnish the only apology that can be offered by the friends of Italy for the present rudimentary state of its political life.

Disastrous as these methods were in the long run, they implied a degree of public credit only attainable in a commercial republic, and were on a higher level than the financial methods adopted by the absolutist monarchies of Spain and France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, where the ever-recurring oppression of war loans was lightened from time to time by partial or complete repudiation. Nevertheless, the loans of the rentier class, upon which the finance of the Bourbons was erected, have been broadened by peasant frugality to serve as the basis of an imperial republic.

In English history there has been a closer connection between war finance and social revolution than is generally realized. The admirable scholarship of Mr. Tawney has taught us to discriminate between the normal development of inequality between holdings, based on gradual enclosure and piecemeal aggregation, and the rapid expropriation of peasant holders which characterized the Reformation period and culminated in Ket’s rebellion. The comparative violence of enclosures between 1535 and 1550 is sufficiently accounted for by the facts that Henry had not only confiscated and thrown upon the market immense quantities of land, but had also, by an unexampled pressure of taxation and debasement, produced a rise in prices that would compel the new purchasers to rid themselves of all encumbrances to the free exploitation of their property.

After the accession of Elizabeth, English agrarian history resumed a more normal course. Side by side with the increase in large farming on capitalist lines by improving gentry and prosperous yeomen and enterprising leaseholders, there was a simultaneous increase of small copyholds, especially on the Crown estates and in the north of England, where it supplied a basis for the new industrial population.

That this development of small-holders and small mast...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR
• PART I THE STUDY AND TEACHING OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• PART II ESSAYS AND LECTURES ON HISTORICAL SUBJECTS
• PART III MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS
• APPENDIX—LIST OF PUBLISHED WORKS OF GEORGE UNWIN
• INDEX