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RISK and RISK MANAGEMENT in ENGLISH AGRICULTURE, C.1750–1850

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RISK and RISK MANAGEMENT in ENGLISH AGRICULTURE, C.1750–1850 U N I V E R S I T Y O F O X F O R D Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History Number 51, October 2003 RISK AND RISK MANAGEMENT IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURE, c.1750–1850 DAVID R. STEAD U n i v e r s i t y o f O x f o r d Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History 1 Hans-Joachim Voth and Tim Leunig, Did Smallpox Reduce Height? Stature and the Standard of Living in London, 1770–1873 (Nov. 1995) 2 Liam Brunt, Turning Water into Wine — New Methods of Calculating Farm Output and New Insights into Rising Crop Yields during the Agricultural Revolution (Dec. 1995) 3 Avner Offer, Between the Gift and the Market: the Economy of Regard (Jan. 1996) 4 Philip Grover, The Stroudwater Canal Company and its Role in the Mechanisation of the Gloucestershire Woollen Industry, 1779–1840 (March 1996) 5 Paul A. David, Real Income and Economic Welfare Growth in the Early Republic or, Another Try at Get- ting the American Story Straight (March 1996) 6 Hans-Joachim Voth, How Long was the Working Day in London in the 1750s? Evidence from the Court- room (April 1996) 7 James Foreman-Peck, ‘Technological Lock-in’ and the Power Source for the Motor Car (May 1996) 8 Hans-Joachim Voth, Labour Supply Decisions and Consumer Durables During the Industrial Revolution (June 1996) 9 Charles Feinstein, Conjectures and Contrivances: Economic Growth and the Standard of Living in Britain During the Industrial Revolution (July 1996) 10 Wayne Graham, The Randlord’s Bubble: South African Gold Mines and Stock Market Manipulation (Au- gust 1996) 11 Avner Offer, The American Automobile Frenzy of the 1950s (Dec. 1996) 12 David M. Engstrom, The Economic Determinants of Ethnic Segregation in Post-War Britain (Jan. 1997) 13 Norbert Paddags, The German Railways — The Economic and Political Feasibility of Fiscal Reforms Dur- ing the Inflation of the Early 1920s (Feb. 1997) 14 Cristiano A. Ristuccia, 1935 Sanctions against Italy: Would Coal and Crude Oil have made a Difference? (March 1997) 15 Tom Nicholas, Businessmen and Land Purchase in Late Nineteenth Century England (April 1997) 16 Ed Butchart, Unemployment and Non-Employment in Interwar Britain (May 1997) 17 Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Human Bonding: Parents and their Offspring in Early Modern England (June 1997) 18 Dan H. Andersen and Hans-Joachim Voth, The Grapes of War: Neutrality and Mediterranean Shipping under the Danish Flag, 1750–1802 (Sept. 1997) 19 Liam Brunt, Nature or Nurture? Explaining English Wheat Yields in the Agricultural Revolution (Oct. 1997) 20 Paul A. David, Path Dependence and the Quest for Historical Economics: One More Chorus of the Ballad of QWERTY (Nov. 1997) 21 Hans-Joachim Voth, Time and Work in Eighteenth-Century London (Dec. 1997) 22 Tim Leunig, New Answers to Old Questions: Transport Costs and The Slow Adoption of Ring Spinning in Lancashire (Feb. 1998) 23 Paul A. David, From Keeping ‘Nature’s Secrets’ to the Institutionalization of ‘Open Science’ (July 2001) 24 Federico Varese and Meir Yaish, Altruism: The Importance of Being Asked. The Rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe (May 1998) 25 Avner Offer, Epidemics of Abundance: Overeating and Slimming in the USA and Britain since the 1950s (Nov. 1998) [Continued inside the back cover] RISK AND RISK MANAGEMENT IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURE, c.1750–18501 DAVID R. STEAD (University of York) 1 This paper develops research undertaken for my doctoral thesis which was funded by the ESRC. For criticism and suggestion, the author is indebted to Avner Offer, Michael Turner, David Jenkins, Jane Humphries, Leigh Shaw-Taylor, Jacqueline O’Reilly, and audiences in Lund, Manchester, Ox- ford, Wakefield, and York. Permission from York City Archives and the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford to cite documents is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies. 3 Abstract This article scrutinises the claim that the residual claimant in English agriculture was the fixed-rent tenant farmer rather than the landlord. Examination of methods of agricultural insurance and risk management indicates that the income risks of farming were sizeable, not straightforward to manage, and largely borne by the tenant. Thus the farmer’s profit appears to have fluctuated by more over time and space than did the rent paid to the landlord. Attempts are made to assess changes over time in the nature and size of the production and price risks that farmers were exposed to. 4 RISK AND RISK MANAGEMENT IN ENGLISH AGRICULTURE, C.1750–1850 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the greater part of agricultural land in England was owned by landowners who leased it out to tenant farmers for a fixed annual rent. Approximately 83 per cent of the income from British ag- riculture in 1808 came from tenants, and in the late 1880s the English and Welsh tenancy sector comprised about 82 per cent of the total number of farmers and 85 per cent of the overall cultivated acreage.2 A widely recognised stylized fact is that, despite the far from trivial lingering on of the pre-existing tenurial system of copyhold and lifeleasehold, by the third or fourth quarter of the eighteenth cen- tury most tenanted English farmland was occupied under fixed-rent leases. As for sharecroppers, Adam Smith wrote: ‘They have been so long in disuse in England that at present I know no English name for them’.3 A farmer signing a fixed-rent lease contracted to bear the entire income risks of farming. The fixed-rent tenant agreed to pay a certain money rent to the land- lord irrespective of the profitability of the harvest, ensuring that the landowner’s income, at least in contract, was insulated from the risks of an unprofitable year. England’s tenurial system, Offer has argued, therefore contradicted the tradi- tional Ricardian conception of agricultural rent, where the landlord’s rent was supposed to form the fluctuating residual of agrarian income. English landowners were able to convert ‘rent from a residual surplus into a fixed overhead … mak- ing the farmer absorb residual fluctuations’. He was also sceptical of claims that there was significant landlord/tenant sharing of risk outside the formal tenancy agreement by the landowner granting remissions of rent or allowing rent arrears in bad years.4 This article develops Offer’s analysis in two ways. First, it seeks to more precisely assess the nature and size of income risks in English agriculture during c.1750–1850, a period for which the data in his wide-ranging paper was limited. Second, it surveys in more detail some of the risk management and insurance strategies that were available to substantial fixed-rent tenant farmers. The discus- sion is of historical significance partly for the small contribution it makes to the history of the insurance industry, but chiefly because of what it implies about the 2 Mingay, ‘The farmer’, pp. 761–2; Turner et al., Agricultural rent, p. 68. 3 Smith, Wealth of nations, p. 346. For a good sense of the slowly changing tenurial system, see Turner et al., Agricultural rent, pp. 24–32. 4 Offer, ‘Farm tenure’, quote from pp. 8–9. 5 attitudes to risk of English landed society and the information it provides on the business of farming in England, a topic where the literature is ‘remarkably thin’.5 What follows also has a minor bearing on the claims for the insurance provided by the open field system, either McCloskey’s well-known argument that scatter- ing allowed farmers to achieve a diverse portfolio of land, or Bekar and Reed’s recent contention that scattering transformed land into a more liquid savings in- strument. These models predict that one precondition for the enclosure of Eng- land’s open fields that occurred during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was that many farmers no longer required the insurance provided by scattering, either as risks fell or superior alternatives emerged. McCloskey has already supplied some important evidence on these points, but a closer inspec- tion of risk and risk management by the occupiers of large enclosed farms pro- vides a useful supplementary test.6 Section I of this paper reports quantitative evidence on the size of some spe- cific farming risks during this period, and finds that their magnitude was far from insignificant and did not always fall over time. Section II examines the impor- tance of commercial agricultural insurance, and sections III and IV survey some of the methods of informal insurance available (that is, risk-reducing arrange- ments not codified as formal contracts), with the former section focusing on farm diversification and the latter on landlord/tenant risk sharing. None of these methods, it is argued, reduced the risk faced by fixed-rent farmers to trivial pro- portions. Other forms of risk management – notably accessing the capital mar- ket, forward contracts, and part-time off-farm employment – are undoubtedly noteworthy but fall outside the limited scope of this article. Section V seeks to quantify the overall extent and allocation of risk by considering data on farmers’ profits, landlords’ rents, and farming failures, and as is concluded in section VI, provides some empirical support for the argument that farmers were the residual claimants. 5 Turner et al., Farm production, p. 29. 6 Bekar and Reed, ‘Open fields’; McCloskey, ‘English open fields’, amongst a large and growing literature. 6 I The income risks that fixed-rent English tenant farmers contracted to bear were assuredly non-trivial. It is a commonplace that, even today, farming is one of the most precarious of industries on account of uncertainties over output and price. The quantity and quality of produce resulting from a given bundle of inputs is typically uncertain because of the impact of the largely exogenous and unpre- dictable variables of weather, pests, and disease.
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