C H A P T E R F I F T E E N
Market and Nature
hat we call land is an element of nature inextricably inter-
woven with man's institutions. To isolate it and form a mar-
ket for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our an-
cestors.
Traditionally, land and labor are not separated; labor forms part of
life, land remains part of nature, life and nature form an articulate
whole. Land is thus tied up with the organizations of kinship, neigh-
borhood, craft, and creed—with tribe and temple, village, guild, and
church. One Big Market, on the other hand, is an arrangement of eco-
nomic life which includes markets for the factors of production. Since
these factors happen to be indistinguishable from the elements of hu-
man institutions, man and nature, it can be readily seen that market
economy involves a society the institutions of which are subordinated
to the requirements of the market mechanism.
The proposition is as Utopian in respect to land as in respect to la-
bor. The economic function is but one of many vital functions of land.
It invests man's life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a
condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and the seasons. We
might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as car-
rying on his life without land. And yet to separate land from man and
to organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a
real-estate market was a vital part of the Utopian concept of a market
economy.
Again, it is in the field of modern colonization that the true sig-
nificance of such a venture becomes manifest. Whether the colonist
needs land as a site for the sake of the wealth buried in it, or whether he
merely wishes to constrain the native to produce a surplus of food and
raw materials, is often irrelevant; nor does it make much difference
whether the native works under the direct supervision of the colonist
[187]
[188] The Great Transformation
or only under some form of indirect compulsion, for in every and any
case the social and cultural system of native life must be first shattered.
There is close analogy between the colonial situation today and
that of Western Europe a century or two ago. But the mobilization of
land which in exotic regions may be compressed into a few years or de-
cades may have taken as many centuries in Western Europe.
The challenge came from the growth of other than purely com-
mercial forms of capitalism. There was, starting in England with the
Tudors, agricultural capitalism with its need for an individualized
treatment of the land, including conversions and enclosures. There
was industrial capitalism which—in France as in England—was pri-
marily rural and needed sites for its mills and laborers' settlements,
since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Most powerful of all,
though affecting more the use of the land than its ownership, there was
the rise of industrial towns with their need for practically unlimited
food and raw material supplies in the nineteenth century.
Superficially, there was little likeness in the responses to these chal-
lenges, yet they were merely stages in the subjection of the surface of
the planet to the needs of an industrial society. The first stage was the
commercialization of the soil, mobilizing the feudal revenue of the
land. The second was the forcing up of the production of food and or-
ganic raw materials to serve the needs of a rapidly growing industrial
population on a national scale. The third was the extension of such a
system of surplus production to overseas and colonial territories.
With this last step land and its produce were finally fitted into the
scheme of a self-regulating world market.
Commercialization of the soil was only another name for the liq-
uidation of feudalism which started in Western urban centers as well
as in England in the fourteenth century and was concluded some five
hundred years later in the course of the European revolutions, when
the remnants of villeinage were abolished. To detach man from the
soil meant the dissolution of the body economic into its elements so
that each element could fit into that part of the system where it was
most useful. The new system was first established alongside the old
which it tried to assimilate and absorb, by securing a grip on such soil
as was still bound up in precapitalistic ties. The feudal sequestration of
the land was abolished. "The aim was the elimination of all claims on
the part of neighbourhood or kinship organizations, especially those
of virile aristocratic stock, as well as of the church—claims, which ex-
Market and Nature [189]
empted land from commerce or mortgage."* Some of this was
achieved by individual force and violence, some by revolution from
above or below, some by war and conquest, some by legislative action,
some by administrative pressure, some by spontaneous small-scale
action of private persons over long stretches of time. Whether the dis-
location was swiftly healed or whether it caused an open wound in the
body social depended primarily on the measures taken to regulate the
process. Powerful factors of change and adjustment were introduced
by the governments themselves. Secularization of church lands, for in-
stance, was one of the fundaments of the modern state up to the time
of the Italian Risorgimento and, incidentally, one of the chief means of
the ordered transference of land into the hands of private individuals.
The biggest single steps were taken by the French Revolution and
by the Benthamite reforms of the 1830s and 1840s. "The condition
most favourable to the prosperity of agriculture exists," wrote Ben-
tham, "when there are no entails, no unalienable endowments, no
common lands, no right or redemptions, no tithes...." Such freedom
in dealing with property, and especially property in land, formed an
essential part of the Benthamite conception of individual liberty. To
extend this freedom in one way or another was the aim and effect of
legislation such as the Prescriptions Acts, the Inheritance Act, the
Fines and Recoveries Act, the Real Property Act, the general Enclosure
Act of 1801 and its successors,
1
as well as the Copyhold Acts from 1841
up to 1926. In France and parts of the Continent the Code Napoleon in-
stituted middle-class forms of property, making land a commerciable
good and making mortgage a private civil contract.
The second step, overlapping the first, was the subordination of
land to the needs of a swiftly expanding urban population. Although
the soil cannot be physically mobilized, its produce can, if transporta-
tion facilities and the law permit. "Thus the mobility of goods to some
extent compensates the lack of interregional mobility of the factors; or
(what is really the same thing) trade mitigates the disadvantages of the
unsuitable geographical distribution of the productive facilities."*
Such a notion was entirely foreign to the traditional outlook. "Neither
with the ancients, nor during the early Middle Ages—this should be
* Brinkmann, C, "Das soziale System des Kapitalismus," in Grundriss der Sozialo-
konomik, 1924.
1
Dicey, A. V., op. cit., p. 226.
* Ohlin, B., Interregional and International Trade, 1935, p. 42.
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