Production and Consumption in English Households 1600-1750

Darron Dean, Andrew Hann, Mark Overton, Jane Whittle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415208031
• eBook ISBN: 9781134620234
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

This economic, social and cultural analysis of the nature and variety of production and consumption activities in households in Kent and Cornwall yields important new insights on the transition to capitalism in England.

1 Household economies and
economic development in early
modern England

In an urbanised, industrial economy few goods are produced in the home: households are dependent on the market. Members of the household earn money outside the home, and use this to purchase items the household needs and wants. Most of these items, whether they are basic foodstuffs or elaborately manufactured items, have been produced at some distance from the home, often wholly or partly in a foreign country. In a peasant economy without significant market development, the main aim of household production is to provide consumption needs directly: the household is largely self-sufficient, and exchange activities are minimal. Production is typically located in or near the home, which is a significant site of consumption. Because the household is self-provisioned, consumption goods are simple and lack variety.

By the sixteenth century very few English households were self-sufficient.¹ Yet many households had access to land and still produced much of their own food. Goods that were purchased had often been produced locally and were rarely from outside England. So how, and when, did the household economy move from self-sufficiency to complete market dependence? This study of production and consumption in the household is directed towards that question. It is a study of how the English economy changed during the early modern period, and how these changes affected people's everyday lives; and, inversely, a study of how normal people changed their everyday lives and how these changes affected the economy. In a nutshell, therefore, we are approaching an old problem, the development of capitalism, through the economic activities of the household.

‘Household’ and ‘family’ are sometimes used interchangeably by historians and there is an extensive literature on the family in early modern England, which includes the concept of the ‘family economy’.² Our concern here is with the household, which is not the same as the family since it consisted of all those living together under the authority of a householder, linked not only by ties of blood and marriage, but also by contractual relationships of work and material benefits. Thus the household ‘might include a spouse, children, other relations, servants and apprentices, boarders, sojourners, or only some of these’.³ It is for this reason that some historians prefer to talk of the ‘household economy’ as opposed to the ‘family economy’.⁴

The transition to capitalism in early modern England is usually theorised from the point of view of production. The classics which define the field all emphasise changes in the production process: Adam Smith stressed the division of labour, Marx the unequal ownership of the means of production, and Weber the work ethic. Yet each of these models also implies changed patterns of consumption. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith described how increased division of labour in production activities necessarily led to an increase in the quantity and range of goods entering the market, to urbanisation and increased international trade. These trends resulted in an increased opportunity to purchase a wider range of goods and a decreased reliance on home-produced items, but in turn specialisation was dependent on the extent of market demand.⁵ Marx in Capital said a great deal about commodities, demand and markets under capitalism, but consumption was not given a role in capitalism's development. Nevertheless, changing patterns of consumption can be read into his historical scheme. The development of capitalism involved the expropriation of the mass of the population from the land, and, having lost their access to land, workers were dependent on capitalist owners of property to provide them with employment. A nation of small-scale agriculturalists became a nation of wage labourers. These proletarianised labourers were reliant on the market for their consumption needs, exchanging wages for goods and services. The loss of access to land meant losing the opportunity for self-sufficiency, or partial self-sufficiency.⁶ In The Protestant Ethic Weber argued that modern capitalism was characterised by a distinctive work ethic, which caused people to work for the sake of work itself. In traditional societies work was orientated towards fulfilling the needs and wants of subsistence and leisure; thus work was driven by the desire for consumption. Methodical hard work for its own sake led to the generation of profits. The transformation of the work ethic has contradictory implications for consumption, which were not explored by Weber. On the one hand consumption ceases to be the main aim of work; on the other, extra work leads to increased wealth and thus the possibility of increased consumption.⁷ The more profound implication of Weber's thesis is that cultural change can stimulate economic change, thus causes of and motivations for change should not be sought in the economy alone.

Yet the overarching models of Smith, Marx and Weber are far from perfect as a framework with which to investigate economic change in England between 1600 and 1750. They provide little detail, and are often inaccurate in describing the exact contours of change. They are not only biased towards production, but assume a workforce made up of adult men and neglect the dynamics within the household. Further, they are too dichotomous, contrasting a self-sufficient peasant or traditional society with a fully commercialised or capitalist economy. When applied to the reality of England's economic change these models leave a long intermediate, transitional period stretching from at least the fourteenth century to the late eighteenth century. England's economy during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century was commercialised, with well-developed market structures: it was not a self-sufficient peasant economy, yet it displayed fundamental differences to the industrialised, urbanised economy of the nineteenth century. A number of alternative models suggest that there was an intermediate stage of economic development, one in which production was orientated towards sale in the market, but was small scale, located in the home, and more often rural than urban. We will discuss four of these models or approaches: ‘peasant studies’, proto-industrialisation, the history of women's work and the ‘industrious revolution’.

Although ‘peasant studies’ cannot be summarised as a single school of thought, it is united by its focus on the household economy of small-scale agriculturalists or peasants.⁸ Chayanov, the father of this approach, insisted economic decisions made in peasant households could not be modelled in the same way as those taken in capitalist enterprises. The primary interest of a peasant household was not profit but the survival of all its members, present and future.⁹ As Scott has pointed out, when survival is precarious, peasant households are risk-averse.¹⁰ Rather than selecting the enterprise that would generate the highest cash income, the peasant farmer aims to produce a range of crops and animals so that the household can still be fed if one crop fails or an animal succumbs to disease. Where land is poor quality or in short supply, households diversify into craft production with the aim of selling in the market, as another strand in their production activities. While some historians, notably Alan Macfarlane, have insisted on a strict definition of the peasantry as being barely affected by market exchanges, the weight of peasant studies has found that peasantries only marginally affected by the market are very rare: most peasants produced a large proportion of their goods for the market, and purchased many of their household needs.¹¹ Yet their relationship with the market is not the same as that of a capitalist farmer. Peasants diversify and retain an element of self-sufficiency not because markets are absent but because markets are unreliable. In addition, the production strategies of such households are influenced by the fact that they generally have more labour than wealth to invest. Risk-aversion leads to diversification of production, the opposite trend to Adam Smith's increased division of labour. If these two theories are correct, then there must be a point in economic development when markets become reliable enough for households to switch from diversifying to specialising, and it is possible that such a point was reached in southern England in the period 1600–1750.

Farming remained the dominant occupation in England from 1600 to 1750, yet in the same period England experienced both urbanisation and industrialisation. Wrigley has estimated that the proportion of the English population living in towns rose from 8 per cent to 21 per cent between 1600 and 1750, while the proportion engaged in ‘rural non-agricultural’ occupations rose from 22 per cent to 33 per cent.¹² The concept of protoindustrialisation attempts to explain this growth of rural ‘pre-industrial industry’, or the ‘expansion of domestic industries producing goods for non-local markets’.¹³ Proto-industrialisation describes the development of industrial production within the household, and focuses on how changes in occupation alter family structure, work patterns and demographic behaviour. It seeks to explain the regional specialisation of production, while retaining an awareness that many households were by-employed in industry and agriculture.¹⁴ As such, it has much in common with the aims of this book, yet in other ways the concept is too narrow. Protoindustrialisation stresses the special role of export-orientated industries. These industries, especially textiles, were very important, but the emphasis on them leads to a neglect of the broad range of non-agricultural occupations that proliferated in England during this period. Many served only local markets, but marked an important step away from home production. For similar reasons, despite its stress on by-employment, proto-industry fails to capture the multiple production activities in which single households might be engaged.

Chayanov argued that the family household should be regarded as a single, indivisible unit of production and consumption. However, more recent researchers in many fields stress the division of tasks within the household, and unequal entitlements to aspects of consumption such as food and leisure between men, women and children.¹⁵ With some notable exceptions, women have also often been absent as subjects of economic history, with the implicit assumption either that women had no role in the wider economy or that women were affected by economic and social change in the same way as men. This view was challenged nearly a century ago by Clark, whose study of women's work in the seventeenth century divided production into three co-existing types: ‘domestic industry’ solely for the use of the family, ‘family industry’ carried out at home but with the aim of selling or exchanging goods, and ‘capitalist industry’ undertaken for a wage payment. The work roles of men and women, and of unmarried and married women, differed according to the type of production, but were particularly strongly affected by the switch to capitalist industry, which removed work from the home.¹⁶ Although Clark's labels for the different types of production are rather confusing, the distinctions themselves are crucial and have much in common with the peasant studies and proto-industrial approaches. While they represent a progression from subsistence economy to capitalism, Clark's recognition that they could and did co-exist in seventeenth-century England turns our attention to the balance between them. We might add that they could also co-exist in a single household, and thus the balance needs to be observed on that level as well as between households. Thus the notion of the ‘family economy’ as developed by Tilly and Scott is open to criticism because of its emphasis on subsistence and the absence of wage labour.¹⁷

Clark's survey of the range of occupations and productive activities undertaken by women warns against any simplistic assumption that women restricted themselves largely to household maintenance and child-care tasks.¹⁸ In any case, to characterise women's work as ‘domestic’ in an era when most work by men and women was carried out within or near the home is largely meaningless. Instead men's work can be characterised as predominantly orientated towards producing goods (some for the market and some for home consumption, usually after processing), and only occasionally involving maintenance tasks such as house repair or collection of fuel. Women's work, on the other hand, typically combined tasks such as child-care, cooking and cleaning with tasks that produced and processed goods for sale or home consumption, such as gardening, spinning and dairying. Both men and women engaged in wage-earning activities, as servants living within their household of employment or as day labourers.¹⁹

The special position of women's work ‘at the intersection of the household's functions: reproduction, production and consumption’ prompted de Vries to stress its significance in his theorisation of an ‘industrious revolution’ in the early modern period.²⁰ He defines this as ‘a household-based intensification of market-directed labour and/or production, related to an increased demand for market-supplied goods and services’.²¹ It thus brings together an awareness of the market-orientated peasant economy, proto-industrialisation, and the changing nature of women's work, in an attempt to explain the increase in specialist market-orientated production and in the consumption of non-home-produced goods that preceded the Industrial Revolution. The industrious revolution occurred ‘in those peasant households that could follow the course of specialisation by concentrating household labour in marketed food production’. Such a household reduces ‘the amount of labour devoted to a wide variety of home handicrafts and services and replaces these activities with market supplied substitutes’.²² Thus the switch of women's labour from producing everyday goods such as bread and beer in the home, to purchasing them, is an important indicator. This switch allowed women's labour to be turned to cash-earning activities instead. Due to women's position on the intersection of production and consumption, the different forms of women's work imply different modes of consumption as well as production, different patterns of earning and expenditure; in short, different household economies.

De Vries cites as evidence Thirsk's study of the proliferation of new industries and crops in seventeenth-century England. These new forms of production not only prompted changes in consumption patterns, but also had a particular demand for women's and children's labour, offering new money-earning opportunities.²³ Rather than seeing peasants as conservative consumers, de Vries argues that changes in peasant household production strategies towards specialising in saleable goods were motivated by the desire to consume more marke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge explorations in economic history
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Household economies and economic development in early modern England
• 2 Probate inventories
• 3 Household production
• 4 By-employment, women's work and ‘unproductive’ households
• 5 The material culture of consumption
• 6 Rooms and room use
• 7 Wealth, occupation, status and location
• 8 Conclusions
• Appendix 1 The distribution of the inventory samples by parish
• Appendix 2 Production categories
• Appendix 3 Some characteristics of occupation and status groups
• Appendix 4 The ownership of material goods by status and occupation
• Appendix 5 Logistic regression statistics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index