SECULAR CYCLES
By Peter Turchin Sergey A. NefedovPRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13696-7
Contents
Table of Units and Currencies.................................................................ixChapter 1 Introduction: The Theoretical Background...........................................1Chapter 2 Medieval England: The Plantagenet Cycle (1150–1485)..........................35Chapter 3 Early Modern England: The Tudor-Stuart Cycle (1485–1730).....................81Chapter 4 Medieval France: The Capetian Cycle (1150–1450)..............................111Chapter 5 Early Modern France: The Valois Cycle (1450–1660)............................143Chapter 6 Rome: The Republican Cycle (350–30 BCE)......................................176Chapter 7 Rome: The Principate Cycle (30 BCE–285 CE)...................................211Chapter 8 Russia: The Muscovy Cycle (1460–1620)........................................240Chapter 9 Russia: The Romanov Cycle (1620–1922)........................................261Chapter 10 General Conclusions...............................................................303Acknowledgments...............................................................................315References Cited..............................................................................317Index.........................................................................................341
Chapter One
Introduction: The Theoretical Background 1.1 Development of Ideas about Demographic Cycles
The modern science of population dynamics begins with the publication in 1798 of An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus pointed out that when population increases beyond the means of subsistence, food prices increase, real wages decline, and per capita consumption, especially among the poorer strata, drops. Economic distress, often accompanied by famine, plague, and war, leads to lower reproduction and higher mortality rates, resulting in a slower population growth (or even decline) that, in turn, allows the subsistence means to "catch up." The restraints on reproduction are loosened and population growth resumes, leading eventually to another subsistence crisis. Thus, the conflict between the population's natural tendency to increase and the limitations imposed by the availability of food results in the tendency of population numbers to oscillate. Malthus's theory was extended and further developed by David Ricardo in his theories of diminishing returns and rent (Ricardo 1817).
According to the Malthusian argument, the oscillation in population numbers should be accompanied by systematic changes in certain economic variables, most notably food prices. Fortunately, data on prices are reasonably abundant in historical sources, and it is possible to construct time series documenting price fluctuations over very long periods of time. Compilations of price trends appeared as early as the sixteenth century. For example, Ruggiero Romano (1967) reports that a time series of grain prices between 1500 and 1593 appeared in an appendix of La Patria del Friuli Restaurata by Jacopo Stainero, published in 1595 in Venice. The data on prices in medieval and early modern England were made available to historians by Thorold Rogers (1862). By the 1930s the empirical material had accumulated to the point where it became very clear that European prices had gone through a number of very slow swings between 1200 and 1900 (Simiand 1932, Griziotti-Kretschmann 1935, Abel 1980).
A most important and lasting contribution wasWilhelm Abel's Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, the first German edition of which was published in 1935. Abel compiled a rich data set containing time-series information about prices, wages, rents, and population movements in Western and Central Europe from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, ensuring that the empirical importance of his work would remain high to this day. The most striking pattern to emerge was the wavelike movement of grain prices (expressed in terms of grams of silver). There were three waves or "secular trends" (Abel 1980:1):
1. An upward movement during the thirteenth century and early fourteenth century, followed by a decline in the late Middle Ages
2. Another upsurge in the sixteenth century, followed by a decline or apparent equilibrium (depending on the country) during the seventeenth century
3. A third increase during the eighteenth century, followed by irregular fluctuations during the nineteenth century, eventually converging to an early twentieth-century minimum
The twentieth century saw another (fourth during the last millennium) period of price inflation (Fischer 1996).
On the basis of the observed patterns, Abel argued that the fluctuations in the circulation of money could not adequately explain the long-term trends in the price of grain. By contrast, population moved more or less in the same direction as the food prices and in an inverse ratio to wages (Abel 1980:292–93). Abel concluded that the Malthusian-Ricardian theory provided a better explanation of the data than the monetarist theory. Furthermore, the Malthusian-Ricardian theory predicted that an increasing population would result in a specific progression of effects. Rents would rise first, with grain prices lagging behind rents, the price of industrial goods lagging behind grain prices, and workers' wages bringing up the rear. The evidence showed that this was precisely what happened (until the whole system was dramatically changed in the nineteenth century).
Abel's conclusions were soon supported and extended by other historians, with the most influential contributions made by Michael Postan, working in England, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in France. In a talk given in 1950, Postan rejected a monetarist explanation of long-term price movements during the Middle Ages and firmly asserted the primacy of the demographic factor (Hilton 1985). Le Roy Ladurie was an even more consistent follower of Malthus. In The Peasants of Languedoc, first published in French in 1966, he argued that southern France went through a great agrarian cycle lasting from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth (Le Roy Ladurie 1974:289). Although Le Roy Ladurie did not completely ignore the social and political aspects of the cycle, his explanation of the causes underlying the cycle was firmly Malthusian. Speaking in 1973, he said, "it is in the economy, in social relations and, even more fundamentally, in biological facts, rather than in the class struggle, that we must seek the motive force of history" (quoted in Hilton 1985:4).
Such a radical Malthusian position could not but provoke a reaction from scholars working within the Marxist tradition. Although some Marxist historians doubted the very fact of a drastic and prolonged population decline from 1350 to 1450 (Kosminsky 1956), others accepted it but preferred to explain it as the "crisis of feudalism." In an influential book first published in 1946, Maurice Dobb argued that the cause of the crisis was the inefficiency of feudalism as a system of production, coupled with the growing needs of the ruling class for revenue (Dobb 1963:42–47). The "feudal lust for expanded revenue" was a result of two processes: growth in the size of the parasitic class and the increasing extravagance of noble consumption. These two tendencies, working synergistically, resulted in an intensification of feudal pressure on the peasantry to the point where it destroyed the goose that laid the golden eggs. Dobb's theory occasioned an extensive discussion. One interesting contribution to the theory was Paul Sweezy's proposition that the growing extravagance of the feudal ruling class was a result of the rapid expansion of trade from the eleventh century onward, which brought an ever-increasing variety of goods within its reach (Sweezy et al. 1976:38–39). Thus, Sweezy sees the root cause of the fourteenth-century crisis in the impact of this exogenous force on the structure of feudalism (Sweezy et al. 1976:106).
Robert Brenner's 1974 critique of Postan's and Le Roy Ladurie's theories might be regarded as a continuation of the Dobb-Sweezy debate of the 1950s (the "Brenner debate" papers are collected in Aston and Philpin 1985, Hilton 1985). Brenner did not deny that the Malthusian model had a certain compelling logic (Brenner 1985a:14). However, its attempt to explain long-term trends in economic growth and income distribution was doomed from the start because it ignored ("abstracted away") the social structure, the most important part of which was the surplus-extraction relationship between the direct producers and the ruling class (Brenner 1985a:10–11).
One deficiency of the Malthusian theory, according to Brenner, was the empirical observation that different societies within Europe, starting from similar demographic and economic conditions obtaining after the Black Death, subsequently followed divergent trajectories. For example, serfdom completely disappeared from certain Western European countries (England, France) while making a strong comeback in Central Europe (Poland, Prussia). Thus, different property structures (the landholding system) and different balances of power (the cohesiveness and organization of the ruling class) could result in different paths followed by societies after the demographic catastrophe.
The second and even more damaging argument against the Malthusian model is the observation of continuous stagnation of most of the traditional European economies in the late medieval period (Brenner 1985a:18). For example, the Black Death removed about one-third of the English population in the mid-fourteenth century, and by the end of the century the population had been further reduced to one-half of its 1300 peak. According to Malthusian logic, such a drastic population decrease should have led to higher agrarian productivity, low food prices and high real wages, and the resumption of vigorous population growth. Indeed, the dynamics of prices and wages were largely in line with the Malthusian predictions. Yet population stagnated for more than a century, with growth resuming only in the late fifteenth century. Brenner argued that such episodes of long-term stagnation could only be understood as the product of established structures of class relations (Brenner 1985a:18). A decline in the number of direct producers reduced the income of the lords. To maintain their income, the lords attempted to extract a greater amount from each peasant, as well as trying to dispossess one another (via brigandage and internal warfare). The result was the disruption of production, leading to a further demographic decline, rather than a return to equilibrium as the Malthusian model would predict (Brenner 1985b:224).
In their responses to Brenner's critique, Postan and Le Roy Ladurie were unable to effectively account for the prolonged post–Black Death depression phase within the Malthusian theory. Postan and Hatcher acknowledged the problem: "Indeed the reason why the recovery was so belated and so sluggish is still one of the incompletely resolved difficulties inherent in the medieval hypotheses Brenner disagrees with" (1985:69). On the other hand, the extreme version of the Marxist thesis (perhaps found in the purest form in Sweezy), which assigns class relations the all-determining role in the economic development of medieval and early modern Europe, would also fail to account for empirical facts. For example, such a purely class-struggle-based theory is unable to explain the secular cycles in population, prices, and wages, as well as why exploitation of peasants also fluctuated cyclically.
In the end, the critique of Brenner and certain others, most notably Guy Bois (1984), played a constructive role by pointing out that the Malthusian model neglects an important explanatory variable. What we need is a synthetic theory that encompasses both demographic mechanisms (with the associated economic consequences) and power relations (surplus-extraction mechanisms). In the dynamical systems framework, it does not make sense to speak of one or the other as "the primary factor." The two factors interact dynamically, each affecting and being affected by the other. We pursue this idea in the next section.
It is curious that both sides in the Brenner debate almost entirely ignored the role of the state. This omission is understandable. The Marxists tend to treat the state as merely a vehicle for conveying interests of the ruling class, while the Malthusians' focus has been on the economic variables. There is, however, a significant movement among historical sociologists "to bring the state back in" (Skocpol 1979). States are not simply created and manipulated by dominant classes; they are agents in their own right, and they compete with the elites in appropriating resources from the economy.
Historians have long recognized that there were recurrent waves of state breakdown and political crises in European history: the "calamitous" fourteenth century (Tuchman 1978), the "iron century" of 1550–1660 (Kamen 1971), and the "age of revolutions" of 1789–1849 (Hobsbawm 1962). Each of these periods was preceded by a period of sustained and substantial population growth. In a pathbreaking book, Jack Goldstone (1991) argued that there is a causal connection between population growth and state breakdown. The seeds of this theory were already contained in the work of Malthus. Goldstone, however, does not argue that population growth is a direct cause of state collapse (in fact, he carefully distances himself from the strict Malthusian doctrine). Instead, population growth causes social crisis indirectly, by affecting social institutions, which in turn affect sociopolitical stability. For this reason, Goldstone refers to his theory as demographic-structural: demographic because the underlying driving force is population growth, structural because it is not the demographic trend itself that directly causes the state crisis but its impact on economic, political, and social structures (Goldstone 1991:xxvi). We discuss this theory in more detail in the next section, but here we should mention that the verdict on Goldstone's work among historical sociologists has been highly positive (see, e.g., Collins 1993, Wickham-Crowley 1997, Li 2002).
To summarize, it is becoming increasingly clear to specialists from very diverse fields—demographers and historical economists, social historians, and political scientists—that European societies were subjected to recurrent long-term oscillations during the second millennium CE (Braudel 1988, Cameron 1989, Fischer 1996). Furthermore, the concept of oscillations in economic, social, and political dynamics was not discovered by the Europeans. Plato, Aristotle, and Han Fei-Tzu connected overpopulation to land scarcity, insufficient food supply, poverty, starvation, and peasant rebellions (Parsons 2005). The Chinese, for example, have traditionally interpreted their history as a series of dynastic cycles (Reischauer 1960, Meskill 1965, Usher 1989, Chu and Lee 1994). The fourteenth-century Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldun developed an original theory of political cycles explaining the history of the Maghreb (Inayatullah 1997). Are these phenomena, which at first glance seem very diverse, actually related? In this book we examine the hypothesis that secular cycles—demographic-social-political oscillations of very long period (centuries long)—are the rule rather than the exception in large agrarian states and empires.
1.2 A Synthetic Theory of Secular Cycles
The brief review in the previous section focused mainly on the controversies between advocates of various processes as dominant influences. In the heat of the debate, however, the opposing sides tend to simplify and caricature the views of each other. For example, it is clear that neither purely demographic nor purely class conflict explanations of secular cycles work very well when confronted with data. On the other hand, a synthetic theory that incorporates both of these (and some other) processes may provide us with a viable hypothesis that can be tested with data. The idea is that secular cycles can only be understood as a result of the interaction between several interlinked variables—economic (including demography), social structure (particularly, how the elites interact with the producing population and the state), and political (state stability or collapse). In the following paragraphs we sketch the outlines of such a synthetic explanation. Our explicit focus is on agrarian societies, that is, those in which more than 50 percent of the population (and typically above 80–90 percent) is involved in agriculture.
The Demographic Component
The demographic component of the theory is based very much on the original insights of Malthus and Ricardo, further developed by neo-Malthusians such as Le Roy Ladurie and Postan. The key variable is the population density in relation to the carrying capacity of the local region. The concept of carrying capacity was developed by ecologists in the context of the logistic model, invented by Paul Verhulst and popularized by Raymond Pearl (Pearl and Reed 1920). Carrying capacity is defined as the population density that the resources of the habitat can support in the long term (for an excellent discussion of human carrying capacity from an ecologist's point of view, see Cohen 1995). Resources usually refer to food, although in some environments the limiting resource may be the availability of water or fuel. Carrying capacity thus is an upper ceiling on population growth. From the point of view of economics, this limit arises because labor inputs into production suffer from diminishing marginal returns.
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