Nature's Evil

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

Improvements and indolence

Even if markets were accessible, military conscription, the requisition of horses, the passage or billeting of troops, and the state’s modernising plans all interfered with crop rotation. Young and aggressive European states, the heirs of the crusades and religious wars, juggled multiple risks – riots in the towns, revolutions in the capital cities, and peasant sabotage in the countryside. Agricultural innovations came to England from the Netherlands, and then returned east. Canals and dams for draining fields, and crop-rotation systems, which included animal fodder and the use of manure on a massive scale, were all Dutch imports. Agricultural productivity along the coastal strip was everywhere much higher than in the heartlands. Port towns expanded if they were situated at the intersections where one influx of commodities arrived from the countryside and another came from the colonies. By 1700, Amsterdam and London contained a tenth of the populations of their respective countries. For these trading cities, the secret of survival lay in ‘ghost acres’ – natural resources which were outside their borders but were available to them thanks to trade. * Crop rotation required the peasant to combine many skills, crafts and trades. Comparing the economic life of a European farmer with that of a nineteenth- or twentieth-century worker, for example a miner or a factory hand, we come to a surprising conclusion: the peasant economy was more complex, the peasant’s work was more varied, and his diet was better than the proletarian’s. The changing seasons lent variety to the peasant’s work. The patchwork pattern of crop rotation offered the chance to escape from supervision.

In the towns, highly specialised labour processed valuable, topical resources, which were often brought from afar. There, the printing press was invented, banks carried on their business, ships were built. The peasants rested their land, keeping large tracts fallow. Human muscles were supplemented only by the muscle power of livestock, but animals took up a large amount of arable land. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, an English farm with 20 acres of wheat needed another 8 acres to graze four bullocks, without which the harvest couldn’t be brought in. At the beginning of the twentieth century in North America there were 25 million horses and mules – one horse for three humans. A quarter of all agricultural land was needed to keep them fed.