362 Ch. 10 • Eighteenth-Century Economic And Social Change
improve farming techniques. Primitive farming techniques (including
wooden plows that barely scratched the surface of rocky terrain) charac
terized the mountainous and arid land of southern Italy and Sicily, the
Dalmatian coast, southern France, much of Spain, and the Balkans. Peas
ants lacked farm and draft animals and therefore fertilizer, meat, and milk.
Markets and transportation networks remained inadequate to the task of
agricultural modernization.
On the continent, a bewildering variety of land tenures and agricultural
practices under which they were held seemed to set rural poverty in stone.
Most continental farmland remained divided into small strips, and each year
more than one-third of arable land may have lain fallow, with crops rotated
between fields. Traditional peasant agricultural methods also blocked a
major expansion of production. ‘‘Slash and burn” tillage survived in some
parts of Europe where peasants simply burned the stubble on their land
once the harvest had been taken in, replenishing the soil with ash.
The studied attention many English country gentlemen gave to their lands
may be contrasted with the approach of many French, Spanish, and Pruss
ian nobles, content to sit back and live from revenue extracted from peas
ants. While the state had an interest in increasing farm output to generate
additional tax revenue, most royal officials, seigneurs, and churchmen
looked first to better ways of extracting peasant surpluses, not to improving
yields. Nobles resisted occasional royal attempts to reduce the peasants'
obligations, or to change them, such as by commuting labor service to pay
ments in cash or in kind. Furthermore, much of what peasants managed to
produce they owed to landlords, the state, and to a lesser extent, the
Church. “Why should I build a better house,” asked a Bavarian peasant, “so
that my seigneur can line his pockets with the requisite fees to be paid?”
Serfs had even less interest than other peasants in innovation. In Cen
tral and Eastern Europe, an old adage went “there is no land without a lord”
because in most places only a noble, the crown, or the Church could own
land. The absence of independent peasant proprietors left a formidable
obstacle to agricultural development.
Changes on the continent comparable to those taking place in England
were mainly confined to northwestern Europe. In northern France, Flan
ders, the Dutch Republic, Schleswig-Holstein, parts of northern Italy, and
Spanish Catalonia, the fertile land and sufficient capital facilitated invest
ment in commercial agriculture. Moreover, these were regions generally
farmed by people who owned the lands on which they worked, and who
therefore had more incentive to augment production. But even in the less
densely populated countryside of Eastern and southern Europe, more land
was brought into cultivation, as in Russia where the population pushed
into the steppes of the eastern frontier lands.
Other factors, too, contributed to improvements in Western European
agriculture. During the eighteenth century, Europe as a whole experienced
warmer, drier weather, particularly in the summers, in stark contrast to the