Classical Economy and Wood Shortage Flashcards
1
Q
RONALD SHEPHARD - ECONOMISTS
A
TURGOT - DIMINISHING RETURNS - SCHUMPETER: MORE IMPORTANT THAN SMITH
- Turgot introduced the ‘law of diminishing returns’. Schumpeter: ‘it embodies an achievement that is nothing short of brilliant and suffices in itself to place Turgot as a theorist high above Adam Smith’.
- Loosely worded, proposition asserts that as equal quantities of capital and labour are applied successively to a given plot of land, the output resulting from these applications will increase monotonically at first up to a point, after which further applications will result in decreasing product increments tending to 0.
2
Q
SCHABAS - ECONOMISTS
A
SMITH VS JS MILL - QUESNAY VS MARSHALL - MID-18 -> MID-19TH C. - JEVONS TP - PHYSICAL CONSTRAINTS
- Adam Smith thought nature was wise, just and benevolent; whilst JS Mill thought it was imprudent, unjust and cruel.
- Francois Quesnay - wealth was a gift of nature, whereas Alfred Marshall - it could be defined only in terms of property claims, and thus as a human institution.
- Classical economy - fluid term. Some extend between Petty and Marx, others between Smith and Cairnes. Schabas uses term as shorthand for a body of ideas that spans the period from die mid-18th century to the mld-nineteenth.
- Denaturalisation of the economy was triggered by the incipient rise of industrialisation and growing sophistication of the economy.
- “Nature meant for Smith the humanly unhindered or unobstructed, and this more amply means what is not confounded by the misplaced interventions of human reason: letting nature take its course, letting men do as they are instinctively prompted to do”
- Jevons’s Coal Question (1865) marks the point at which economists turned away from natural resources. It Is highly ironic that one of the vanguard of the neoclassical school would still use strong Malthusian analysis.
- The leitmotiv of classical economics pointed to the physical constraints of nature setting limits to human prosperity. Human agency was still subordinate to the forces of nature, although there were glimmerings of paths for conquest. We will see JS Mill that man can come to be almost fully in charge of his destiny, although wealth is still bounded. With the neoclassical theory that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s, wealth’s cast in terms of mental satisfaction or utility and, thereby, become truly delimited.
3
Q
JONSSON - ECONOMICS
A
SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT LAB - SMITH, HUME VS NATURAL HISTORIANS (LINNEAUS, POIVRE, BANKS)(FMC VS ECONOMIC NATIONALISM)
- ⁃ David Hume, Adam Smith, and their successors in the classical liberal tradition, nature served as a handmaiden for exchange in a double sense. They looked to the natural world for a model of self-regulating balance that justified their own faith in market exchange.
- The liberal current of classical political economy give way to militaristic loyalism and Malthusian pessimism at the end of the eighteenth century. A strong conservative tendency was present already at the epicentre of enlightened debate in the 1750s.
- In other words, the laboratory of Highland improvement gave rise to rival programs of modernization
- the eighteenth century saw the emergence of two rival ecologies of commerce: cosmopolitan free trade versus economic nationalism.
- Classical economy> Hume>Smith>Malthus>Ricardo / Natural historians>Linnaeus>Poivre>Banks
- The major disagreement behveen Smith and the natural historians concerned the resilience and stability of nature. Smith read natural history selectively in order to underscore the benign operation of natural systems across the globe. Laissez faire, lassez-passer. In contrast, natural historians assumed a complex and fragile world in which the self-regulating properties of natural systems could be disrupted. To some degree, this perception reflected the European encounter with new climate zones and habitats. In part, it also registered the convulsions of the colonization process, ranging from famine and epidemics to resource depletion and falling biodiversity.
- While contemporary natural historians like Poivre worried about climate change and soil erosion, Smith’s model assumed a stable and bountiful natural order immune to large-scale disaster, in which cycles of abundance and scarcity followed an essentially moderate path between extremes.
4
Q
HARTLEY - WOOD
A
EVELYN - RS - WREN
- Focuses on Sylvia by Evelyn. Suggests that the Foresters, following in the footsteps of Baconian logic, entered the RS and promoted experimentation to boost yield. This included the likes of Hale and Christopher Wren.
5
Q
WARREN - ECONOMY
A
COLONIALISM - COMMODIFICATION OF LAND - PROPERTY OWNERSHIP
- The appropriation and commodification of land constituted an economic revolution in Europe, and in colonial possessions it assumed truly spectacular dimensions… The most dramatic example since the time of John Locke was the US. There, laws encouraged parcelling out Western lands, and thereby helped to create a vast, property owning middle class.
6
Q
TRIBE - CAMERALISM
A
Cameralism - German Economic Affairs
- Good government and the promotion of happiness turn out to involve ever-extending work of regulation - from rulers of dress, through order and cleanliness of in the streets, to rules on the export and import of goods.
- Polizei and oeconomy served the same ends, and in this respect they were synonymous.
- One of the first writers on German economic affairs of the state was J.H.G., in Curieuser und nachdencklicher.
- Sir James Steuart’s Inquiry was better known and more frequently cited than Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith was widely ignored. For 20yrs it had little interest, until the phase of ‘Smithianism’ began. (Reason unclear - some suggest it was the poor translation by Schiller; but then again, many Northern Germans read English) .
- Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason liberated economics from the determinism of a practical philosophy based upon Leibniz and Wolff.
7
Q
CHANDRA MUKERJI - FORESTRY
A
Colbert 1669 - Cartography - Land Rationalisation and Commodification - Assertion of Power
- Examines the Colbert forest reforms in 1669 via the accounts of Froidour.
- Traditional view: The reform of French forests in the 1660s has often been described as a means of rationalizing the landscape to suppress peasant culture and empower the state.
- Merchant & Scott suggest that the reformers rationalised the spaces they studied, and destroyed indigenous relations to the environment, using techniques of political cartography and control that were becoming widespread in the late 16th and 17th centuries. (IMPORTANT PART B)
- Mukerji contends the intent was to make the crown more of a presence to nobles in remote areas rather than making peasant areas more legible to the government.
8
Q
BUTLER - CLASSICAL ECONOMY
A
Smith - Truck and Barter (moral) - Division of Labour
- Smith recognised that both sides benefited from trade, not just the seller; he realised that the market was an automatic mechanism that allocated resources with great efficiency; he understood the wide and fertile collaboration between different producers that this mechanism made possible.
- Smith showed that free trade between nations, and between individuals at home too, left both sides better off.
- Specialisation improved efficiency through: skill via repetition, less transitional time, labour saving devices.
9
Q
WARDE - CLASSICAL ECONOMY
A
Smith - Limits (lack of concern) - Chemists, not Economists concerned by degradation
- Adam Smith - ‘did not worry about limits’.
- Classical political economy emerged precisely at the time when such limits were first becoming a matter of concern – and yet barely considered them. The idea that ‘Man deals in nothing but earth’ was not considered a serious constraint to economic development, still less the idea that the earth could become less.
- The framing of political economy, once integrated with new theories of the soil, did permit the identification of a new systemic risk: the degradation of the land. But this argument was not advanced by the economists, but by men working in agronomy who had also become preoccupied with making their work relevant to the wider polity.
10
Q
FOSTER - MARX
A
Newtonian World View - Nature governed by external mechanics of Providence
- Marx has been perceived as not interested in ecology; however in recent studies, this idea has been completely reversed.
- Marx’s materialism is said to have led him to emphasise a kind of “Baconian domination of nature and economic development, rather than asserting ecological values.”
- Marx analysed the human alienation from nature in a sophisticated and ecologically sensitive form. This tendency was reinforced by concerns regarding human subsistence and the relationship to the soil, and the whole problem of capitalist agriculture. Central to this thinking was a concerning regarding the antagonistic division between town and country.
- Newtonian world view - nature governed by external mechanical laws determined by divine providence.
11
Q
FRITZBØGER - A WINDFALL FOR MAGNATES
A
Denmark - Magnates - Privatisation of Commons
- Fritzboger traces the wood scarcity issue in Denmark, which contributed to the rise of enclosure (privatisation of common ownership) and the enactment of statutes mandating preservation of woodlands. This approach had some similarity with English law, notably, one owner among any number could force a partition - a court-conducted division of the commonly owner forest into privately owned parcels. The striking difference here however was the fact that such law placed restriction on the division of land into very small pieces. This division principle worked strongly in the favour of landowners. “Danish forest history documents the ability of elites to manipulate legal rules to their own continuing advantage. Breaking up the commons, in addition to any efficiency advantages, also appears to have been a means of making tenants more productive and docile. According to one estate bailiff writing in 1791, ‘as long as the peasants remain or want to remain in common, frequent gatherings will cause boozing and brawls.’ The title’s “windfall for the magnates” refers to the fact that, as the growing scarcity of wood made forests more and more valuable, by and large forests owned in common ended up in the hands of the nobility.
12
Q
WARDE - WOOD SHORTAGE
A
Govt power legitimation - Scarcity in fragmented polities - SW Germany + Venice show state involvement to secure supply
- Claims governments used scarcity concerns (fictional or actual) to legitimate regulation of woods.
- Fears of scarcity arose where the polities controlling a particular region were highly fragmented, providing political barriers to the acquisition of fuel resources that might not be geographically far removed, and allowing wood-rich lords to encourage bidding among consumers.
- Paul Warde’s research in southwestern Germany and Karl Appuhn’s study of Renaissance Venice demonstrate that, although vastly different geographically and economically, in both regions the fear of wood scarcity spurred the involvement of state authorities to make sure adequate supplies of forest resources existed
13
Q
JACOB SOLL - ECONOMY
A
Dutch - mercantilism envied - Petty & Colbert -> lang of accounting for state admin.
- Soll essentially deconstructs the history of Holland as a first mover in the mercantile world - signposting its moves towards a more globalised form of operation. Holland’s wealth and political economy became the world-standard, and many nations attempted to emulate the success of the nation, namely through the restructuring of the government to introduce notions of political economy.
- Soll examines England and France as case studies; and within that, William Petty (who looked towards new measures of national income and taxation through financial and social statistics) and Colbert (FR) who adopted a language of accounting and political economy for state administration
14
Q
HOUGHTON - IMPROVEMENT
A
- Post-Civil War was a turning point in improvement. Significant move by gentry into improvement.
15
Q
TONY WRIGLEY - ECONOMY
A
- World limited by the photosynthetic constraint of the organic economy.
16
Q
JAMES SCOTT - ECONOMY
A
- Technology made authorities treat nature as more malleable + controllable.
17
Q
Nachhaltigkeit
A
- fundamental to new scientific forestry in Germany. By 1730, Brunswick forestry Johann Georg von Langen started a ‘Forsteinrichtung’ (planning of the forest). In 1761, Duchess Anna Amalia initiated in 1761 the first general survey of forests of the German territorial state. Amalia’s foresters and ‘jägermeister’ had the year 2050 on their time prediction horizons.
18
Q
Cameralism
A
- Government as agent of prosperity. Increasing social prosperity shores up princely power. Cameralists attempted to convince the ruler that they had essential knowledge (had to justify existence). Government attempted to produce surveys to regulate natural resource. In practice, ineffective. The process by which Cameralism was displaced by Nationalökonomie has traditionally been dealt with in terms of the impact of Smithianism on a moribund subject- the reception of the Wealth of Nations providing the framework for an understanding of the pace and extent of this displacement. Physiocracy also became more pronounced in popular if not academic circles.
19
Q
Foresters
A
- Tended to be men of law, maths and science. Believed they had the capacity to make the most desirable and sustainable forests. 1840s - formal examination of foresters essential in Austria. Apex in 1860s.
20
Q
Improvement
A
- Introduced by the scientific revolution. Driven by ingenuity and virtue. Rather than being utilitarian, improvement found power in its appeal to self-improvement.
21
Q
Scientific Forestry
A
- ‘a new husbandry’ - using technologies of survey, measurement and control.
22
Q
Vitalism
A
- Nature as life-force. Seen as keystone between earlier and later discussions of nature.
23
Q
French Wood Shortage
- Who was Carlowitz?
- When was forestry taught in university?
- Quote Hartig
A
- Saxony - Director of Mines - Sylvicultura Oeconomica - 1713 - sustainability. Saving Europe from economic and social disaster by preserving and strengthening the Christian culture and wonders of nature.
- Forestry instruction began at university from 19th C. -> Important -> Heinrich von Cotta, 1817.
- 1804 - Georg Hartig: ‘“Forest mensuration and forest management planning, or to determine exactly the present and future sustainable cut, or to establish a trustworthy cutting budget, is, indisputably, one of the most important responsibilities in any forest administration. .… Every wise forest administration has to draw up such sustainable forest management plans that allow so high utilisation rate of forest as possible, nevertheless, so that the administration looks after interests of future generations so that a fair distribution of interests between the present and future generations will come true.’
24
Q
French Wood Shortage
- What happened in Scotland?
- How did Hume and Smith respond to the situation?
- What response did they make to finite land supply?
- What was the geographical accident?
- What was dramatic in the mid-18th century?
A
- Highland region now seemed a society on the edge of collapse, burdened with surplus population, exhausted resources, and permanent natural disadvantages. Paradoxically, the fear of limits emerged precisely at the moment when Enlightenment ideology and industrialization began to make sustained economic growth imaginable.
- The environmental and ethnic peculiarities of the region were employed to justify a model of improvement based on accommodation rather than assimilation. In contrast, the liberal strategy of David Hume and Adam Smith had no need for special treatment. If the Highlands could not be integrated into the commercial order of the south, then the region must remain an economic backwater of no consequence.
- The finite supply of land, they thought, must eventually block all progress. Although such fears proved premature to say the least, they have been revived in recent times by natural scientists and environmentalists who worry that a finite biosphere cannot sustain for long the exponential growth of the global economy.
- Geographic accident made the Scottish Highlands a laboratory of the Scottish Enlightenment. The central problem of classical political economy, how a rich and a poor country might prosper together, divided not just Scotland from England and other more prosperous nations but also Scotland from itself.
- Highland improvement in mid-18th c was dramatic. The headlong rush provoked questions about the destructive consequences of agrarian capitalism. The lawyer improvers who attacked feudal vestiges like entail and primogeniture grappled with the possibility that excessive commercialism might threaten the basis of their own authority as landowners.
25
Q
French Wood Shortage
- What did the Prussian throne critique in 1740?
- What did the Cameralists promote?
- Where did Cameralism develop?
A
- 1739-40 - Prussian throne critiqued The Prince (Machiavelli). Friedrich stated: “The interest of a prince is thus to populate a country, to make it flourish, not to devastate and destroy it”
- 1600s - following Schroeder, belief that ‘without a flourishing population, the revenues of the ruler inexorably decline.’ Solutions to securing rulers power: promotion of the higher strata, gaining trust of common people, plundering the rich’.
- Cameralism developed (potentially accidentally) in northern German Protestant universities - Halle, Frankfurt an de Oder, Rinteln.
26
Q
French Wood Shortage
- What did French kings do, traditionally?
- What did Colbert’s reforms do?
- What motivated Colbert?
- What techniques were used?
- How did some families act independently?
- How did locals oppose?
- What did Froidour conclude?
A
- Traditionally, French kings gave enormous autonomy to rural nobles, and in return had them collect taxes, administer lands, and run the courts as agents of the monarchy.
- Colbert’s independent surveillance was to make it difficult for these families to use forests at their own will.
- Colbert was driven by moral terms. Land needed to be understood and managed for the collective benefit. Territory should be improved. (Protestant ethics).
- Cartographical techniques: arpentage and bournage.
- Arpentage: drawing a chain with measured segments through a forest and along its boundaries - allowed drawing of parcels of land.
- Bournage: earth-based counterpart: meant setting out property markers to indicate the boundaries of a forest as it had been measured by the foresters and represented on paper.
- Opposition to be expected - culturally imbued in the people of Languedoc. Local nobles not loyal to nobility.
- Great families in the mountains often treated their lands as separate principalities, minting their own coins, setting up their own courts, levying their own taxes, and controlling uses of natural resources.
- Froidour was first sent into the Midi-Pyrenees, assuming that he was entering a hostile region precisely to bring the state’s policies to the recalcitrant population there.
- “The heights of the mountains are covered with woods that belong to the king, which the locals exploit freely under the pretext that they have traditional rights of usage, and have abused them to such an extent that there is nothing but brush” - Froidour
- In the mountainous area, peasants had to down trees to make meadows for growth - Froidour saw this as destruction.
- The forestry papers made ‘the territorial state palpable far from Versailles’
27
Q
Spanish Wood Shortage
- What occurred in Germany?
- What did disputes rest upon?
- What did Helmhard von Hohberg observe?
- Detail wood consumption in Madrid and Italy
- What did Foresters note?
A
- Agrarian unrest in Germany frequently took the form of widespread wood theft in the years upto and including 1848. The law gave the landowner the power to disproportionately fine those found guilty, which particularly angered Karl Marx.
- Disputes relied on the invocation of positive law, natural rights, common interests.
- German agronomist Wolf Helmhard von Hohberg observed, ‘Were we not to have wood, then we would have no fire, then would we have to eat all meals raw and freeze in winter, we would have no houses, would also have no lime or bricks, no glass, no metal, we would have neither table nor doors, neither stools or other furnishings’. In short, wood was the raw material that permitted early modern life.
- 1680 Madrid - 1.4kg wood per capita per day, rising to 2.15kg in late 18th century.
- 1861 - Italy - 1.9kg/ day.
- Foresters noted that managing wood stock was difficult to predict with variation between compartments of land. A reconfiguration of woodland space required the abolition of common rights over private.
28
Q
Spanish Wood Shortage
- When was there a wood shortage in Spain?
- How much wood did a galleon require?
- Why was there a wood shortage?
- What balance did the state need to strike?
- Why did Felipe seek information about his domain?
- What became increasingly important in the 16th century?
- What did the Armarda do?
- Who made an important map?
A
- Later, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when the crown wanted timber from one of these municipal commons, it argued that the land really still belonged to the king, and “Your Majesty has the right of entry to fell trees in municipal forests just like one of the local inhabitants.”
- a galleon of about 560 tons required about 900 oak trees, and galleys built in Barcelona used approximately 200 to 300 pine trees each.
- Timber resources were essential for maintaining the fleets that controlled Spain’s transatlantic empire in the sixteenth century.
- Madrid had to balance local interests and imperial demands. The crown could push its demands only so far until a town would refuse to carry out plantation quotas or pay certain fines.
- Felipe II sought information about his monarchy that included all kinds of geographic information, not just forests. He combined multiple approaches to learn about the natural and cultural resources of his realm, including questionnaires, maps, and bureaucratic reports. There is no reason to doubt that the king thought each of these approaches would provide useful information about the varied resources of his realms and could potentially contribute to better government.
- Meanwhile, Felipe II commissioned multiple mapping projects and enhanced the use of maps for war and administration. The questionnaires, for example, resulted in the production of stunning maps of Spain’s overseas possessions, including the first map ever of the western Pacific Ocean region. Maps became increasingly important for monarchs and their governments in the sixteenth century.
- The pressure on traditional sources of timber for shipbuilding sent Felipe in search of new sources. It is well known that in the period after the Armada, Spain was forced to import more materials and a greater number of ships. The fact that Felipe also searched for more sources of timber within Spain itself is often overlooked.
- Identified things such as Valcanera, this forest had no pine trees, but it featured very abundant (abundantı´ssimo de) oak trees, mostly very old. The master shipbuilder from Barcelona believed the larger ones would be suitable for shipbuilding, but there were few that could be used for the joints and braces.
- Jorge Setara’s map, royal legislation for the forests of Guipu´zcoa and Vizcaya, road construction near the Monastery of Benifasar, forest inspections in Catalonia, and other developments mentioned earlier, all contributed to the territorialization of state power in Spain from the middle of the sixteenth century.
29
Q
Key Events - Classical Economy
- Detail key moments in Venice in terms of wood shortage?
A
- 1408 -> Venice secured rights over wood in Montello district to meet wood demands.
- 1476 -> Doge issued regulation for use of oaks throughout community forests on terra firma. By 16th century, wood use of private interests highly circumscribed.
30
Q
Key Actors - Classical Economy
Gifford Pinchot (US Chief of the Bureau of Forestry)
- Where did Pinchot train?
- What did he criticise?
- Who did he advice
- What did he publish in 1905?
A
- Trained in Prussian forest-academy
- Criticising the ‘cut out and get out’ approach to forestry, claimed that the 1890s saw the ‘most rapid and extensive forest destruction even known’. During this period, however, to waste timber was a virtue, not a crime in the likes of the US.
- Under Theodore Roosevelt, the leitmotif of ‘wise use’ came to characterise Pinchot’s approach to forestry.
- 1905 - ‘The Use of the National Forest Reserves’ - ’the prime object of the forest reserves is wise use. While the forest and its dependent interests must be made permanent and safe by preventing overcasting or injury to young growth, every reasonable effort ill be made to satisfy legitimate demands’.
- Concept rooted in the ethics of classical utilitarianism described by Bentham and Mill - ‘greatest good for the greatest number’
31
Q
Key Actors - Classical Economy
Rau, 1800
- What concerns did Rau have?
- What did Rau recommend to governments?
- What are the conditions for prosperity?
A
- Emphasised dangers of commercial freedom: absence of checks on poor workmanship, absence of means of knowledge transmission.
- Government should regulate activity for common good; including examinations for artisans.
- Post-Smithian: having accepted the role of guild organisation, he argues that commercial liberty is utopian.
- Government should not only maintain peace and order, but also regulate and administer the conditions of production and distribution.
- Conditions for prosperity: ‘personal freedom, security of property, education, a system of credit and finance’
- Where Smith dedicates the greatest amount of space to the sources of government revenue, Ray dedicates the greater parts of his work to industry and trade.
