Poverty in World History

Steven M. Beaudoin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134523283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

A genuinely global survey of world poverty from 1500 to the present day, Poverty in World History focuses upon the period from around 1500 onwards when poverty became a global issue, and uses the process of globalization as the chief lens through which to study and understand poverty in world history.

The result is both a tying together of significant strands of world history, and an examination of changing attitudes towards poverty and poor relief throughout the world. This wide ranging study underscores a major consequence of increased cultural and economic interaction among the world's societies, highlighting the similarities and differences in impacts and responses to the resulting'smaller'globe. Topics include:

• innovations in early modern poor relief
• the causes of trends towards a globalization of poverty after 1500
• poor relief since 1945 to the present
• poverty, morality and the state.

Chapter 1

Poverty and charity in the pre-modern world

Causes, perceptions, and strategies

Embarking on any study of poverty in the pre-modern world is challenging. First, historians have relatively few sources upon which to base their investigations. In many of the world’s societies, statistics, like the concept of material poverty itself, is a relatively new idea. This, unfortunately, limits the detail and depth of our understanding; the farther back in time we search, the more tentative our conclusions must be. With few exceptions, most scholars must content themselves with studying broad, sweeping causes without achieving clear indications of the scope and extent of poverty within given societies. Conditions improve only slightly when the focus shifts to the various explanations and strategies that each community devised in the face of need and want. Elites, and the states they served, were far more interested in detailing their own actions and thoughts, particularly if these reflected well on their sense of generosity and piety. But even given their limitations, the written records are spotty and reflect the attitudes of only a small minority of the world’s pre-modern population; rarely do they indicate how the majority lived and experienced hardship. Second, beyond the source deficiencies, the study of poverty in the pre-modern world is complicated by significant diversity. Before the sixteenth century, both the causes of poverty and the reactions it inspired were primarily rooted in the internal dynamics of individual civilizations and their immediate surroundings. The fledgling, far-flung networks of trade that joined the Afro-Eurasian landmass together into one “world” system were weak and had little impact upon how most of the world’s societies functioned, let alone how their people lived their lives. As a result, the history of poverty during these centuries must be sought in the different socioeconomic, cultural, and political contexts that emerged in each civilization, especially their systems of resource allocation and their religious precepts and institutions.

Luckily, the number of historians willing to grapple with such difficulties has grown remarkably over the last decades. Based on their efforts, this chapter sets our study’s foundation by examining the nature and causes of poverty in the pre-modern world, the various means by which different cultures perceived such need, and the various strategies both individuals and societies devised to cope with it. For the vast majority of the pre-modern world’s population, poverty meant hunger, and almost no one was free from its specter. Yet the specific causes for both structural and conjunctural poverty could shift from region to region, depending in particular on the resources that shaped economic life. Similarly, given limitations on resources, a great deal of attention in many societies went into determining who should receive aid, but the qualities that made these men and women “deserving” depended upon diverse cultural values. Finally, while those who suffered deprivation might seek assistance from the same types of sources – institutions designed to help the needy; private and unofficial charity; family; and informal strategies devised by the poor themselves – the availability of each type differed across time and space. In short, the perceptions of need and want – and the possibilities for relief – were based on fundamental assumptions about resources and community specific to each culture. Establishing these differences, and their place within a broad set of commonalities, provides a framework for analyzing the impacts of the world economy as it developed after 1450 and for understanding the contexts in which new strategies were considered and implemented.

The nature and scope of poverty

In relation to poverty, the most basic similarity among all the world’s premodern civilizations is that misery and insecurity remained inexorably linked to hunger. Regardless of the degree of commercial development, all of the world’s sedentary societies were agricultural at their core. Moreover, despite impressive technological breakthroughs over the centuries, like the yoke, heavier metal plows, and faster growing strains of grain, the state of the world’s technology before 1450 limited the supply of available food. Indeed, in the initial stages of civilization, changes in growing conditions could destroy entire societies, as was the case for ancient India’s Harappan civilization in the Indus River Valley, which mysteriously disappeared around 1500 BCE. While earlier interpretations imagined waves of invaders, archeological evidence now suggests that alterations in the intensity of the southwest monsoon and its impact on Indus River flooding patterns may have had a greater impact in the Harappan decline. Without seasonal flooding along the Indus to replenish the soil and supply irrigation systems, much as the Nile did in Egypt, agricultural productivity fell off and a vibrant urban culture faded into obscurity. Although the classical civilizations in China’s rich Yellow and Yangtze River valleys, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and along the banks of India’s Ganges River escaped such fates, even their successors in the post-classical period could not produce vast surpluses of agricultural goods over long stretches of time. While historians continue to debate the exact relationship between technology, agricultural production, and population growth, one thing is clear: hunger remained a palpable fear throughout the pre-modern world. In this context, then, poverty can be defined best in absolute terms – it was the inability to sustain life, not the absence of material possessions.

At the same time, it is important to recognize and maintain the distinction between famine and food scarcity. Famine, the widespread decline in food availability for the community as a whole, is marked most by its duration and its sweeping impacts. Not one bad harvest, but a series of disastrous crop yields creates a famine. And, since it frequently results in elevated mortality rates and far-reaching societal responses like mass migration from one region to another, it also typically prompts largescale measures to assist those afflicted. Food scarcity, on the other hand, is reflected in short-term inflation in food prices, which can be severe, but only for a portion of the population. It produces pockets of need, no less dire for those afflicted, but not widespread starvation. This, according to scholars, was commonplace in the pre-modern world. In ancient Athens, for example, one in every six years between 403 and 323 BCE were marked by food shortages, while that rate was one in every five years for Rome between 123 and 50 BCE. Similarly, in China, officials recorded agricultural disasters in 119 years between 25 and 220 CE, leaving only seventy-six years without shortages. Famine, in contrast, became a rarity as civilizations developed. Or, more precisely, it became a localized catastrophe, linked as much to the ineffective distribution of stores from neighboring areas as to the calamities that normally created such widespread dearth in the first place.

This means that chronic hunger and undernourishment, not starvation, was the most common form of poverty in the pre-modern world, and it could affect almost anyone. Given the limitations on agricultural surpluses, the vast majority of the world’s population could easily slide into conjunctural poverty. They had the physical means to support themselves in optimal conditions (i.e. health, good weather, access to land and other resources, etc.), but rarely produced enough to withstand variations in their precarious living conditions. In good years, the meager surplus they produced helped provide for the destitute and structural poor, and the elite, those who might join the conjunctural poor if the crisis was severe and long in duration. The history of poverty is to be found, then, not just among the destitute and infirm, but also among the multitudes whose lives weaved back and forth across the line separating hunger and subsistence. Consequently, the search for poverty’s causes must focus on three central concerns: (1) the conditions that could cause an individual or family to slide below subsistence; (2) the circumstances that could cause the number of people below that threshold to swell at particular moments in time; and (3) the economic structures that determined how many people remained susceptible to such a slide as a normal part of life.

Poverty’s causes

Determining poverty’s causes during the pre-modern period is least complicated at the two extremes: individual destitution and mass conjunctural poverty. For the destitute, the causes of impoverishment were the same throughout the various classical and post-classical civilizations – any misfortune that made it impossible for an individual to provide for him or herself. In some instances, this misfortune accompanied certain stages in the life cycle. Children and the elderly, for example, suffered from need unless someone provided assistance. That’s why orphans were particularly at risk. Among adults in the most productive years of their lives, hunger struck those who lost their ability to care for themselves due to illness or handicap. It could also afflict a family whose chief breadwinner died, suffered from a disability, or sustained a serious injury that depleted the household’s resources and precluded a return to usual earning power. It is impossible to estimate the rates of such poverty during this period, but since adequate medical care was scarce, one can assume that it was fairly high.

On a societal level, conjunctural or crisis poverty often resulted from natural or manmade calamities like floods, droughts, and warfare. Such disasters could destroy crops, prevent farmers from taking to the fields (especially in the case of warfare), or disrupt the distribution of food after harvest. Indeed, humankind learned early on that separating an enemy from supplies like fresh water was an effective tool in forcing others to submit. While we often associate such misery with sudden catastrophes, it is important to note that other more slowly evolving causes could contribute to such crises by diminishing available resources, as occurred in the Harappan civilization noted above. Salinization and siltation could threaten essential irrigation networks, while long-term alterations in climate might shorten the growing season. Scientists estimate, for instance, that ancient China experienced one such period of deterioration between the first and eighth centuries CE that reduced the growing season by 30–40 days. The result was chronic food shortage that swelled the ranks of the conjunctural poor. As with destitution, records that indicate the prevalence of such calamities was imprecise, but estimates lead historians to believe that food scarcity was a constant concern. In China alone, for instance, scholars have counted almost ninety agricultural disasters, from floods to hailstorms, from locusts to droughts, during the Eastern and Western Zhou dynasties, from 1027 to 221 BCE.

Recognizing the constant insecurity that might lead to destitution and widespread conjunctural poverty is only part of the search to understand the causes of poverty, however. It does not address the causes of two of the more common types of poverty: structural poverty – the misery that struck those who had the ability to meet their needs, but not the means, even in the best conditions for food production – and more limited forms of conjunctural poverty – impoverishment most often associated with less severe downturns in economic conditions. For that, the focus must shift away from the characteristics that all civilizations shared, like the insecurity produced by individual misfortune and climatic catastrophe, to the various systems of resource allocation adopted in each. According to Amartya Sen, a leading scholar of poverty and development, susceptibility to hunger is tied to the system of “entitlements” that structures a society. In other words, not everyone faces the possibility of starvation equally, and many factors can determine a person’s risk, from geographic location and social standing, to sex and age. That susceptibility also changes over time. In early medieval Europe, for example, when market agriculture was in its infancy, famine and food shortages could be less severe for serfs because they were not dependent on systems of transportation for a steady supply of food and because their lords retained a certain responsibility for keeping them alive. City dwellers, on the other hand, were at the mercy of poorly maintained transportation networks. Moreover, within urban areas, to the extent that monetization had influenced the economy, those with a higher income could more readily afford food as famine drove up prices. As time passed and market economies evolved, however, the urban/rural split in entitlement shifted. Farmers who planted cash crops came to rely upon the same transportation networks as urban dwellers for sustenance. But, as those roads and canals developed, the routes connecting cities with one another became more secure, ensuring that well supplied cities in other regions could replenish the stocks of sister cities first. Only after urban officials could secure their own sources of food would they then permit newly restocked municipal granaries to be opened to residents outside their city walls. In other words, urban residents acquired a more secure entitlement to agricultural goods than peasants. Their needs were met first. A similar dynamic operated within households, where, in patriarchal cultures, adult men maintained a stronger entitlement than women and children.

Assessing susceptibility based on entitlement to resources – and subsequently the causes of structural and less severe conjunctural poverty – thus requires understanding the economic, political, and cultural structures that shaped particular societies. This is a difficult task for anyone seeking to understand the causes of poverty in the pre-modern world as a whole. It forces attention on the essential characteristics that most of the world’s societies shared. Patriarchy, for example, made women more vulnerable to poverty than men throughout the world, even in societies where resources were plentiful; women in patriarchal societies had a difficult time maintaining any sort of individual claim to such resources. Widows and adult women who sought to live independently typically confronted male relatives who asserted their own claims to family property; those who resisted risked being squeezed by poverty until they conceded. Surrender meant subsistence, but subservience in an extended household.

Another significant shared characteristic was the prevalence of what one historian terms an “organic” economy, an economy based entirely on the productive capacity of land without benefit of any sources of energy beyond human and animal power.¹ In such economies, productivity is always constrained by the availability of land; as it becomes scarce, instances of structural and conjunctural poverty increase. This has inclined some scholars to argue that poverty truly originates with farming, even in areas with plentiful land. In hunting and gathering societies, resources were usually devoted to the entire group’s survival. There was little strict social differentiation within the group to justify differences in entitlement. In agricultural societies, however, social distinctions became more common, with critical ramifications. As access to the fresh water necessary to agriculture grew in importance, the goal of production shifted from group to elite maintenance. The kings and temple keepers of ancient Sumeria in the Near East, for example, lived in societies organized around the production and extraction of agricultural surpluses earmarked for elite consumption. Although the health of the entire civilization depended upon supplying enough crops to those who grew them, elites commanded far greater shares of available resources than commoners. In short, agriculture led to hierarchies based in part on access to and control over land and fresh water, and this in turn led to poverty.

There is much of value in this interpretation, for excess appropriation was a frequent cause of food shortage among classical and post-classical civilizations, especially in militarized and urban societies like ancient Rome and China. In the Roman empire, for example, urban residents – typically citizens of the empire – maintained a stronger entitlement to resources than peasants. Even in years that witnessed a plentiful harvest, many peasants could face hunger. As the famous physician Galen, a resident of the urban outpost of Pergamum in the Asian stretches of the empire, noted in 148 CE:

For those who live in the cities, in accordance with their habit of procuring sufficient grain at the beginning of the summer to last for the entire coming year, took from the fields all the wheat, barley, beans and lentils, leaving the other legumes to the rustici, although they even carted off no small portion of these to the city as well. Consequently the peasantry of these districts, having consumed during the winter whatever was left, were literally compelled for the rest of the year to feed on noxious plants, eating the shoots and tendrils of trees and shrubs, the bulbs and roots of unwholesome plants.

The state compounded such dearth by collecting taxes and manpower, which further decreased productivity. In China, during the Zhou and Qin dynasties, when population pressures were not yet great and migration to unsettled regions was still possible, some peasants chose to abandon their fields rather than submit to high taxes and conscription in armies or labor gangs, decreasing productivity and increasing the burdens on those left behind. In such instances, conjunctural poverty was the result for the remaining peasants; they had the ability and the means to provide for themselves, but outside forces stepped in to reduce their stores of available food.

Some argue, however, that hierarchy by itself does not lead to poverty; it only contributes to it when resources become scarce. That is why some scholars have emphasized the availability of resources, not just systems of allocation in determining poverty’s causes. These historians make an important distinction between land-rich and land-scarce societies. In societies where land was plentiful and easily attained, structural poverty was virtually unknown. Subsistence agriculture dominated the economy, and able-bodied people could see to their own sustenance. The same holds true in non-agricultural economies, like the pastoral societies of sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, where physical hardship, a chief cause of destitution, was the primary cause of impoverishment. Conjunctural poverty, on the other hand, could be quite common in land-rich societies and was typically tied either to excess appropriation as described above or to the life-cycle of particular households. Young families with many mouths to feed but few grown children to contribute their labor to the household’s survival, often experienced periods of impoverishment that would be alleviated once their older children could either work around the house or be hired out to other households.

In land-scarce societies, on the other hand, structural poverty was far more common and conjunctural poverty more pervasive. The increase in such impoverishment usually accompanied two other developments: overpopulation and the rise of commercial agriculture. The first factor follows from the argument that Thomas Malthus first articulated in the eighteenth century: population increases exponentially, while resources grow arithmetically; eventually, population will outstrip resources and lead to widespread dearth. Some modern scholars disagree with Malthus on the last stage of this process, however. While Malthus argued that the result would be famine, increased mortality, and a renewed cycle, historians now argue that many societies struggled along for centuries in such circumstances without renewing the cycle (an issue we will return to in future chapters). Regardless of who is right, poverty clearly increases according to both scenarios. As for the rise of commercial agriculture, this often arose in tandem with population growth and subsequent urbanization. Larger numbers of urban dwellers relied upon an ever-growing hinterland to supply their needs; this led to a greater focus on the part of landowners to grow for urban markets. Few landowners abandoned subsistence agriculture completely, but they allotted more and more arable land for planting crops that could be sold. Not surprisingly, as the profits from agriculture increased, so did the value of land, with patterns of land ownership shifting to emphasize consolidation. Sometimes, this gave rise to vast commercial estates like the Roman latifundia. The result was a spiraling increase in structural poverty among both rural landless laborers and urban workers whose salaries could not keep pace with the increasing price of food. Similarly, as commercial economies came to depend upon the size of agricultural yields and the profits to be made from them, the levels of conjunctural poverty flowed and ebbed with every harvest.

While many of the world’s most advanced classical and post-classical civilizations witnessed these transformations, from ancient Rome and China to the Islamic Middle East, the most frequently cited example of such developments in the pre-modern world is medieval Europe. Up to the thirteenth century, Europe was a land-rich society growing prosperous in the wake of population growth, urbanization, and the rise of long-distance trade. Economic expansion and development were particularly evident in Italy and northwestern Europe, altering both the system of resource allocation and the nature of economic insecurity. In the countryside, the most significant changes included the spread of arable land, as an increasing population brought more land under cultivation, and the monetization of the economy. Seeking to acquire more goods from distant lands, many manorial lords converted dues in service and kind into money rents. This forced peasants to participate in market agriculture as a means of raising the necessary cash. In some areas, greater social differentiation resulted; some peasant families failed to prosper in this transition and survived by maintaining a small plot of land for their own needs and hiring themselves out to others who had acquired more land than they alone could work. In urban areas, change was even more dramatic. Although never more than 10 percent of the overall population of Europe, greater numbers of city-dwellers survived on the margins of the agricultural economy. Some participated in long-distance trade, manufacturing, transporting, and selling goods like woolen cloth and Eastern spices along an axis that stretched from southern England to the Middle East; others made and sold products to service the needs of urban residents. As in the countryside, economic development produced greater social differentiation. The urban social structure could range from escaped serfs, who often worked as day laborers, to a handful of nobles who preferred the more vibrant life of the cities to their country estates.

All of this had significant ramifications for Europeans’ economic insecurity and susceptibility to poverty. But trade was brisk and the availability of land could meet the demands of population expansion through the end of the thirteenth century. During this period of economic growth, lords grew rich by collecting more rent from peasants who converted marginal lands into farms, while peasants sold high-priced grain to an expanding urban populace. In those urban areas, the woolen cloth industry in particular gave rise to the first signs of a mass market, employing thousands as fullers, spinners, and weavers in cities throughout Flanders and northern Italy. New urban wealth also sparked a building boom, marking this as the age of the great gothic cathedrals. In these conditions, poverty dogged mainly the elderly, orphans, and those who suffered an illness or handicap that ended their ability to take care of themselves or their families. Financial setbacks certainly afflicted many, but these often proved temporary during this period of economic opportunity.

This began to change around 1300, when population growth started to outstrip land. Heirs subdivided property into smaller and smaller plots, while depleted soil...