Was there an industrious revolution in ? Julie Marfany, University of Cambridge ([email protected])

Jan de Vries‟ concept of an industrious revolution has quickly become part of the lexicon of economic history.1 Readers will no doubt be familiar with de Vries‟ hypothesis that, over the early modern period, households in and North America gradually reoriented their economic activities away from self-sufficiency and self-provisioning towards the market. This reorientation took the form of increased specialisation in whichever activities commanded higher remuneration, often commercialised or proto-industry; a switch from domestic provision of foodstuffs and clothing to purchasing these goods on the market, thereby releasing more labour time for other activities; and an overall intensification of labour. This intensification of labour took the form of increased market production by women and children, longer working hours and a longer working year. Neither the idea of a shift in the allocation of labour, nor the intensification of this labour are new ideas. The first is inherent in earlier theories of proto-industrialisation and the origins of agrarian capitalism.2 The second idea lies behind the coining and first use of the term “industrious revolution” by Japanese historians.3 What makes de Vries‟ use of the term distinct is his emphasis on the motivation behind such changes: the desire on the part of individuals and households to acquire new consumer goods. Drawing on studies of inventories post mortem, de Vries argues that an industrious revolution in early modern Europe was associated with the acquisition of a wider range of goods by households ever further down the social scale. In his most recent work, de Vries goes further still by arguing that the industrious revolution as he conceives it only occurred in north-western Europe, particularly England and the Netherlands.4 Only in this region, according to de Vries, were markets sufficiently open and, more importantly, were family ties and family structures sufficiently “weak” to allow individuals the freedom to allocate their labour efficiently and consume the goods they wished to consume. Specifically, de Vries attributes this freedom of action to the distinctive north-west European pattern of late marriage and high proportions remaining single, and to the nuclear family. In his words, the “claustrophobic bonds of

1 Jan de Vries, “Between purchasing power and the world of goods: understanding the household economy in early modern Europe” in J. Brewer and R. Porter, Consumption and the world of goods (London, 1993), pp. 85- 132; idem,“The industrial revolution and the industrious revolution”, Journal of Economic History, 54, 2 (1994), pp. 249-70. Since these articles, he has refined his hypotheses and synthesised a large volume of empirical evidence from the secondary literature in The industrious revolution. Consumer behaviour and the household economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge, 2008). 2 A few examples of key works are: R. Domínguez Martínez, El campesino adaptativo. Campesinos y mercado en el norte de España (Santander, 1996); Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, Sobre la transición al capitalismo en Castilla. Economia y sociedad en Tierra de Campos (1500-1830) (Valladolid, 1987); Hans Medick, “The proto- industrial family economy: the structural function of household and family during the transition from peasant society to industrial capitalism”, Social History, 3 (1976), pp. 291-315. See also the special number of Journal of Family History, 17,2 (1992). 3 The term was first coined by Akira Hayami in a Japanese-language publication in 1967, and first used by him in English in 1986. See de Vries, Industrious revolution, pp. 78-82 and K. Sugihara, “The East Asian path of economic development. A long-term perspective” in G. Arrighi, T. Hamashita and A. Selden (eds.), The resurgence of East Asia. 500, 150 and 50 year perspectives (London, 2003), pp. 78-123. 4 De Vries, Industrious revolution, pp. 9-19. extended kinship” denied southern European families the chance to be industrious consumers and thus, eventually, to be the protagonists of an industrial revolution. These bold claims of de Vries‟ are problematic for various reasons. Historians of England remain to be convinced that households responded to markets in the ways hypothesised by de Vries.5 Also, the “European marriage pattern” could be found in areas not characterised by increased consumption.6 A more serious problem, however, is that the consumption patterns and household behaviour of southern Europe are relatively unknown. Nonetheless, there is at least one area of southern Europe which did see over the eighteenth century an expansion of markets, increased commercialisation, specialisation in commercial viticulture and proto-industrialisation, all leading to an industrial revolution based on textiles which in many ways resembles that of England.7 At the same time, though, this was a region characterised by extended families bound by particularly strong ties, upheld by distinctive inheritance customs.8 This region is Catalonia, long considered to be something of an exception on the European “periphery”, to use Sidney Pollard‟s term.9 This paper seeks to investigate whether or not an industrious revolution can be said to have occurred in Catalonia. To do so, I use a case study of a proto-industrial community, Igualada, in central Catalonia. Over the eighteenth century, Igualada participated in the key transformations undergone by the region as a whole.10 First, an increased expansion of commercial viticulture: the area under cultivation tripled between 1720 and 1860, with almost all of this new land being cleared for vines.11 This expansion was achieved in the main through the cultivation of small plots on particular forms of emphyteutic contract known as rabassa morta contracts.12 These conferred quasi-property rights on cultivators, and are associated by many historians with an intensification of family labour. At the same time, various places in central Catalonia witnessed a process of proto-industrialisation, based initially on the production of woollen cloths for local markets and for the Spanish interior, and from the 1780s onwards on the spinning and weaving of cotton for eventual sale in interior and colonial markets. Igualada was one of the most successful proto-industrial centres: in the 1760s, it was the leading producer of woollen cloths in Catalonia, and by the 1820s, it was

5 Mark Overton, Jane Whittle et al., Production and consumption in English households, 1600-1750 (London, 2004). 6 Sheilagh Ogilvie, “Consumption, social capital and the „industrious revolution‟ in early modern Germany”, Journal of Economic History, 70,2 (2010), pp. 287-325. 7 Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne. Recherches sur les fondements économiques des structures nationales (Paris, 1962), 3 vols. 8 Llorenç Ferrer Alòs, Pagesos, rabassaires i industrials a la Catalunya central (segles XVIII-XIX) (, 1987), Ch. 7. 9 S. Pollard, Peaceful conquest. The industrialization of Europe 1760-1970 (Oxford, 1981), p. 206. 10 For an overview of Igualada‟s economic development over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see J.M. Torras Ribé, “Trajectòria d‟un procés d‟industrializació frustrat”, Miscellanea Aqualatensia, 2 (1974), pp. 151- 197 11 Francesc Valls Junyent, La dinàmica del canvi agrari a la Catalunya interior. L’, 1720-1860 (Barcelona, 1996), pp. 76-9, 85-91. 12 For an overview of the rabassa morta contract in English, see Juan Carmona and James Simpson, “The „rabassa morta‟ contract”. The most detailed study is Belén Moreno, La contractació agrària a l’Alt Penedès durant el segle XVIII. El contracte de rabassa morta i l’expansió de la vinya (Barcelona, 1995). See also Ferrer, Pagesos, pp. 439-65; Valls, Dinàmica, Ch. 5. the second centre for spinning and the fourth for weaving cotton after Barcelona.13 Some years ago, I carried out an extensive family reconstitution for the period 1680-1819, to which can be added numerous other sources. Most relevant of these other sources to this paper is a sample of 522 inventories post mortem. These represent all the inventories found in the notarial archives for the period 1680- 1829 that were complete and legible.14 It should be stressed, however, that these inventories represent only a fraction of the total population. For the same period, I reconstituted some 8,700 families. Put another way, the inventories correspond to only 6.5% of adult deaths during this period. Moreover, the sample is unrepresentative in other ways. Only 12% of the inventories are of goods left by women, and comparison with other sources makes clear that here, as elsewhere, they are biased towards the better-off. To give just one example, we know from tax records (cadastres) that 38% of Igualada households rented their accommodation in 1765 and 60% by 1824. By contrast, only 24% of the inventoried households lived in rented homes. The social bias of inventories is worth emphasising, since it is a fundamental weakness in de Vries‟ argument for more widespread consumption down the social hierarchy.

Table 1: Inventoried households recording evidence of productive activities, 1680-1829 1680-1754 1755-1829 N % N % Agriculture 145 84.8 278 79.2 Proto-industry 50 29.2 150 42.7 Crafts 39 22.8 74 21.1 Goods & services 13 7.6 54 15.4 Retailing 21 12.3 44 12.5 Professional activities 12 7.0 24 6.8 Food production for use 136 79.5 291 82.9

With these caveats in mind, therefore, the 522 inventories were analysed for evidence of the economic activities practised by households and for consumption patterns.15 Although all except two inventories included in the header the occupation of the individual in question or that of the spouse of the deceased for women, this occupational title was not taken by itself as evidence of that productive activity. There had to be some equipment recorded in the inventory or some other indicator of active production.16 The economic activities are shown in Table 1. Agriculture refers either to landholdings, or to ownership of agricultural tools. Proto-industry refers to any equipment for textile production, such as spinning wheels, looms, stocks of cloth etc. Crafts were represented by the relevant tools. Goods and services included bakers and butchers, innkeepers, muleteers and carters.

13 See J. Marfany, “Is it still helpful to talk about proto-industrialization? Some suggestions from a Catalan case study”, Economic History Review (forthcoming, 2010); Jaume Torras, Fabricants sense fàbrica. Els Torelló, d’Igualada (, 2007). 14 The majority are to be found in the Arxiu Notarial d‟Igualada. A few volumes are in the Arxiu de la Corona d‟Aragó, Barcelona. 15 The methodology followed here is similar to that used by Overton, Whittle et al., Production and consumption. 16 There were therefore sixteen inventories with no evidence of productive activities recorded, termed “unproductive households” by Overton et al. Ten were inventories of women‟s possessions; others were of so- called “part households”, that is, of lodgers and those living with kin. Retailing included merchants and shopkeepers. The category of professional activities designates physicians, lawyers, notaries and priests, where the usual evidence of such activity was ownership of relevant books. Finally, food production for use was indicated by ownership of bread-making equipment and, less commonly, for curing meat, making or distilling spirits, where there was no indication that the scale of such activities was commercial. The picture that emerges is of traditional household economies, combining some degree of landholding or land cultivation with another activity, and by and large continuing to process some of their own food over the course of the period. Land cultivation remained the principal source of income for Igualada households. Overwhelmingly, landownership was small scale. Table 2 gives the breakdown over time of landholding for inventoried households. The rise in the proportion of landless households almost certainly underestimates the proportion within the population as a whole, since landless households were less likely to leave inventories. Amongst those with land, the proportions of households with holdings under five jornals rose significantly, compared with the proportion of those with over ten.

Table 2: Land ownership in Igualada according to inventories, 1680-1829 Jornals1 1680-1754 1755-1829 N % with land % total N % with land % total No land 38 22.2 107 27.8 <2 11 8.3 6.4 18 7.4 5.6 2-4.99 43 32.3 25.1 103 42.2 28.0 5-9.99 33 24.8 19.3 63 25.8 18.4 10-49.99 39 29.3 22.8 47 19.3 16.5 50-99.99 4 3.0 2.3 8 3.3 2.3 100+ 3 2.3 1.8 5 2.0 1.5 Total with 133 244 land Total 171 351 1. A jornal = 0.498 hectares.

What is important to stress here is that most households owned less land than the ten jornals or five hectares considered the minimum for self-sufficiency by Catalan historians.17 Josep Colomé has estimated the monetary outputs that would be yielded by a plot of land of fewer than five hectares, and has concluded that families with holdings of such a size would not be able to cover more than 20% of their reproduction costs, leaving aside savings and such extra payments as dowries.18 At the same time, however, Colomé estimates that, except perhaps during the vine harvest, such holdings would not occupy even one man full-time, let alone an entire family. Participation in other activities was thus essential if these households were to make ends meet. Increasingly, these other activities included proto-industry. While the number of households for whom this was the main economic activity, that is, households headed by

17 Rosa Congost, Els propietaris i els altres. La regió de Girona 1768-1862 (Vic, 1990), p. 79; Ferrer, Pagesos, p. 210 18 J. Colomé, “Pequeña explotación agrícola, reproducción de las unidades familiares campesinas y mercado de trabajo en la viticultura mediterránea del siglo XIX: el caso catalán”, Revista de Historia Económica (2000), pp. 281-307. clothiers, weavers and the like, rose, just over half (55%) of the 200 households with evidence of proto-industrialisation in their inventories had it as a by-employment. In the majority of cases (72%), this was limited to spinning. Only six households had looms. Again, the scale of the activities tended to be small, even among those households headed by someone with a textile occupation. Some clothiers had invested in a range of equipment and were engaged in all stages of the production process, but most woollen weavers had just one loom and no more. This pattern did not change with the shift to cotton. Even after mechanisation began with the introduction of the spinning jenny, most cotton manufacturers had operations that did not go far beyond the labour of an extended family. In a 1820 survey of the cotton industry, the mean number of spinning jennies was 4.5 per manufacturer, the mean number of looms 3.8.19 Small-scale production had many advantages, including flexibility in meeting changing demand. It was also, however, a mode of production that was heavily dependent on what one historian has termed the “self-exploitation mechanism of the proto-industrial family”.20 Self-exploitation has also been seen as a key feature of the rabassa morta contract: the easy access to land and quasi-property rights provided by this contract made it attractive to cultivators to take on such small plots of land, but returns were only possible after several years of intensive labour.21 The contract was indeed most often used where landowners wanted land cleared of trees, rocks and so on for planting vines: the labour costs of doing so were borne by the cultivator and his family. In terms of an industrious revolution, therefore, the changes in the Catalan economy were promoting individuals to work harder. An intensification of labour cannot be proved on the evidence of inventories and is generally hard to capture: it is impossible to say in most contexts how many hours people were working. In the case of Catalonia, however, there are indirect indications that people were working harder. In the first instance, there is anecdotal evidence that people were increasingly working on Sundays and feast days. Edicts against shops staying open on Sundays and feast days, such as that issued by the authorities in Barcelona in 1785, were not new in the eighteenth century.22 What was new was a growing number of voices arguing in favour of greater industriousness. Although some writers of the period expressed the view that the number of religious feast days needed to be reduced as a spur to greater industry, it seems that in practice, working on Sundays and religious holidays was already often tolerated.23 Arthur Young was surprised, on attending mass at , “to see great numbers of men going out of the town with their reap hooks to cut their corn, the same as on any other day; this must be with the leave of their priests, and to give that leave argues a liberality I had not been taught to expect.”24 In Igualada, the parish priest, Francisco Davesa, left money in his will for 270 masses for working days which, winter and summer

19 Arxiu Municipal d‟Igualada, lligall 28.1, unpaginated manuscript, dated 16th June 1820. 20 P. Hudson, The genesis of industrial capital. A study of the West Riding wool textile industry c.1750-1850 (Cambridge, 1986). 21 Congost, Els propietaris, pp. 64-7. 22 R. de Amat i de Cortada, Baró de Maldà, Calaix de sastre, I, (Barcelona, 1987), pp. 171, 152. For earlier examples, see H. Kamen, The phoenix and the flame: Catalonia and the Counter-Reformation (London and New Haven, 1993), pp. 198-201. 23 See, for example, M. Barba i Roca, El corregiment i partit de Vilafranca del Penedès a l’últim terç del segle XVIII ed. A. Sabaté (Vilafranca del Penedès, 1991), p. 82, on transferring certain feast days to Sundays. 24 A. Young, “Tour in Catalonia”, Annals of Agriculture, 8 (1787), p. 227. alike, were to be held before sunrise, so that labourers and artisans could attend mass without missing any working time.25 According to the mayor, Gálvez, in 1789, “there are few days on which people do not work apart from those that are ordained as holidays” and “no man, woman or child is idle at any time of year”.26 In the second instance, there is evidence of an intensification of female labour. Much proto-industrial production, particularly spinning, was women‟s work. According to contemporary accounts, the woollen industry employed 3-4,000 women in Igualada and the surrounding area by the 1770s. A survey of the cotton industry in 1820 counted 1,886 women employed, mostly in spinning. Most importantly, such employment was most likely performed on top of other chores, as elsewhere in Europe and Asia.27 Certainly, as Table 1 shows, domestic food processing did not decline, and tasks such as breadmaking were female tasks. An important indication of this is the evidence that breastfeeding declined over the period. Over the eighteenth century, the mean interval between births fell from 33.1 months to 29.3 months. A fall of nearly four months, in the absence of any other cause, is commensurate with a decline in the mean length of time spent breastfeeding of 4-6 months. The most likely reason for women to curtail breastfeeding would be pressures of work, as evidenced for the Lyon silk industry.28 Returning to de Vries, the question still remains as to what motivated such industriousness. Was it associated with changing consumption habits? Table 3 provides an overview of consumption in Igualada, based on the presence of different types of goods in the inventories. The goods were chosen mainly for comparative purposes, as being indicators of a tendency towards “luxury” or greater comfort, or as new goods, in the case of caffeinated hot drinks, here mainly chocolate, and tobacco. The patterns in Table 3 are similar to those found by Bélen Moreno in her study of the Penedès region, to the south of Igualada.29

Table 3: Inventories recording certain goods over time 1680-1754 1755-1829 1680-1829 N % N % N % Clocks & watches 1 1 36 10 37 7 Pictures 100 58 194 55 301 58 Mirrors 47 27 114 32 161 31 Books 20 12 60 17 80 15 Gold items 61 36 59 17 120 23 Silver items 102 60 158 45 260 50 Hot drinks utensils 21 12 155 44 176 34 Tobacco 6 4 17 5 23 4 Sheets 159 93 337 96 496 95

25 ACA, Notariales, Igualada 825, Vicens Cots, Testaments, f.140r-149r, will of Francisco Davesa. 26 J.M. Torras Ribé, La de l’Anoia a finals del segle XVIII (Barcelona, 1993), pp. 365-6. 27 Lorna Weatherill, Consumer behaviour and material culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London, 1988), Table 7.1 on p. 143; R. Sarti, Europe at home. Family and material culture 1500-1800 (New Haven and London, 2002), pp. 189-91; Osamu Saito, “Gender, workload and agricultural progress: Japan‟s historical experience in perspective” in R. Leboutte (ed.), Proto-industrialisation. Recherches récentes et nouvelles perspectives (Geneva, 1996), pp. 129-51. 28 D.M. Hafter, “Women who wove in the eighteenth-century silk industry of Lyon” in idem (ed.), European women and pre-industrial craft (Bloomington, 1995), pp. 52-4. 29 Belén Moreno, Consum i condicions de vida a la Catalunya moderna. El Penedès, 1670-1790 (Vilafranca del Penedès, 2007). Shirts 132 77 287 82 419 80 Forks 36 21 185 53 221 42 Spoons 99 58 278 79 377 72

Compared with England and the Netherlands at the same dates, as well as with urban France at least, what changes there were in consumption were relatively modest, particularly ownership of books, pictures, mirrors, clocks and watches. Significant gains were to be found only in a few areas: drinking chocolate, forks and spoons, suggesting some aspiration to greater comfort among a wide span of households. Even here, such gains were by no means universal. Even before the pronounced social bias in the representativeness of the inventories is taken into account, there is little sense here of widespread consumption changes reaching far down the social scale, as claimed by de Vries. Instead, changes in consumption appear to have been associated with more marked social differentiation. Table 4 gives just one way in which this association can be shown, namely, the percentages of households owning the goods in Table 3 according to how much land they owned. Among landless households, occupation becomes a better measure of wealth than the absence of land, since the relatively high levels of consumption are driven largely by the inventories of priests and other professionals, often living as lodgers or in the households of other family members who often owned books, watches or tobacco-related items by virtue of their education, background and, in the case of books, professional needs. Once landless households are taken out of the picture, however, Table 6.5 shows a steady rise in the presence of pictures, mirrors, books, chocolate pots, gold and silver the more land households possessed, with often a sharp jump in levels of ownership above 50 jornals. If land is acceptable as a proxy for wealth, then the extent to which households participated in old and newer forms of consumption depended very much upon their position in the social hierarchy.

Table 4: Percentages of households owning goods according to landholdings, 1680-1829 Clocks Pictures Mirrors Books Hot Tabacco Gold Silver Shirts Sheets Forks Spoons drinks No land 6 43 21 17 30 4 19 40 83 90 39 62 <2 j 0 38 14 7 21 0 7 34 79 90 24 59 2-4,99 j 3 49 22 5 27 3 19 41 83 95 30 70 5-9,99 j 10 63 28 16 36 2 21 54 74 98 46 80 10-49,99 7 80 57 23 44 6 38 77 80 97 60 84 50-99,99 33 100 92 42 83 17 50 75 75 100 92 100 100+ j 38 100 88 75 88 50 50 88 75 100 88 88

Most households in Igualada were therefore not working harder in order to consume significantly more. While some aspiration towards greater comfort cannot be discounted, other motives have to be sought for this particular industrious revolution. In one of the earlier versions of his work on the “industrious revolution”, de Vries acknowledges the role that “coercive forces” such as taxation and poverty may have played in fostering market dependence and an intensification of labour, but nonetheless argues that households still chose to respond to such coercion by developing new consumer tastes.30 In his most recent

30 De Vries, “Purchasing power and the world of goods”, pp. 116-7. and fullest statement of his theory, coercive forces of this kind are excluded from the picture. In Catalonia, various coercive forces operated upon the decisions of households as effectively, if not more so, as any modest consumer aspirations. In the first instance, as already noted, many more urban households were paying rent by the early nineteenth century, a question surprisingly neglected by historians. The Igualada cadastres record which households still owned one or more houses, since these were liable for tax. By 1824, the percentage of households who owned a house was down to 40 from 62 in 1765. Comparative figures for rent are not available for Igualada, but it is likely that they were rising. Barcelona rents in 1780 represented anywhere between 15 and 30% of an unskilled labourer‟s wages.31 Moreover, the overall burden of taxation increased over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The cadastre was a new tax for Catalonia, imposed in 1716 as part of the Bourbon reforms. The Napoleonic wars brought various new extra contributions to be paid by households, with the result that all regions of were paying more taxes per capita in 1813 than they had been in 1791.32 In Catalonia, the burden had increased from 16.8 reales per capita to 43.5. In addition, it was levied as a fixed sum for each locality, the raising of which sum from the inhabitants was then left to the discretion of local authorities. This allowed for considerable abuse and inequality in the distribution of the tax. Tello has estimated that for many localities, the cadastre represented double the amount paid in other dues, such as tithe.33 Most importantly, it had to be paid in cash, not kind, forcing communities to sell grain or other produce. As well as this, the burden of feudal dues was increasingly transferred down to the smallest landowners or tenants as land was transferred via rabassa morta contracts and the like. Not only the entry payments but also the shares of the crops due to the landlord often also had to be paid in cash or in grain, rather than as a share of the grape harvest. This insulated landlords from rising grain prices over the eighteenth century, while simultaneously forcing cultivators into greater market dependency to meet not only their obligations but also to feed their households. The very fact of specialisation in viticulture meant households were forced to buy grain on the market. To return to the question posed by this paper: was there an industrious revolution in Catalonia? In terms of de Vries‟ model, the evidence from Igualada suggests only to a limited extent. There were some changes in consumer behaviour over the eighteenth century, but these were modest by northern European standards. The items commonly associated by historians with greater leisure, culture and luxury, such as clocks and watches, books and paintings, were restricted in Catalonia to a fairly small elite. Only the most basic items, such as cutlery and new drinks such as chocolate had a wider diffusion, and even these had still not attained the status of everyday goods by the early nineteenth century, particularly when we remember that inventories are not representative of the whole social spectrum. It might be argued that the Catalan case merely confirms de Vries‟ hypothesis that an industrious revolution could only take place in north-west Europe. However, the caveat concerning the social bias of inventories applies across Europe, and therefore calls into

31 E. Badosa Coll, “Els lloguers de cases a la ciutat de Barcelona (1780-1834)”, Recerques, 10 (1980), pp. 139- 56. 32 Domínguez Martínez, El campesino adaptativo, pp. 121-39, esp. Table 37 on p. 128. 33 E. Tello, “Vendre per pagar. La comercialització forçada a l‟Urgell i a la Segarra al final del segle XVIII”, Recerques, 23 (1990), pp. 144-8. question for all regions the strength of de Vries‟ association between a consumer revolution and an industrious revolution. The hypothesis remains to be proven. More importantly, de Vries‟ insistence on making consumption the only motor of industrious behaviour makes the whole concept of an industrious revolution less flexible in its application and therefore less useful to historical analysis than the concept as originally devised by Hayami. In the original version, the idea of an industrious revolution focused attention on the idea of a labour- intensive route towards industrialisation and thus allowed for fruitful comparison across regions in terms of the forms such an intensification of labour might take and the circumstances in which it might arise. This paper is intended as a call for just such a comparison.