Impact of the Industrial Revolution 549The farther east one went in Europe, the more peasants remained fettered
by obligations to lord and state. Russian serfs needed permission to leave
their villages. In Silesia, peasant families still owed lords more than a hun
dred days of labor a year, for which they were to provide a team of animals;
they were obligated to repair roads and to make various payments in kind.
Peasants also paid the equivalent of a third of their produce to the lord or to
the state in taxes. Such obligations, particularly to lords, were often deeply
resented. More than a hundred Russian landlords or their stewards were
murdered by their peasants and serfs between 1835 and 1855. In 1846,
peasants in Austrian Galicia rose up and slaughtered their lords. Even when
entrepreneurial landlords began commuting such payments in labor and in
kind into cash, this did not end subsistence agriculture in parts of Central
Europe and most of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
The rural poor ate rye bread, porridge, and vegetables such as potatoes in
northern Europe, cabbage in Central and Eastern Europe and in Russia,
and onions and garlic in France. For many people, meat was little more than
a distant memory of a wedding feast. When they could afford to eat meat,
poor people were most likely to eat tripe, pigs' ears, or blood sausage. Most
peasants who owned animals could not afford to slaughter them. Fish was
relatively rare on peasant plates, except near the sea or a lake or pond in
which they were allowed to fish or could get away with it (although even the
English and Scandinavian poor could afford herring, fished in enormous
quantities in the Baltic Sea). Water, however contaminated, remained the
drink of necessity for the poor; in southern Europe they drank poor-quality
wine, and in northern Europe they drank beer when they could, or cider,
although both were relatively expensive.
UrbanizationThe first half of the nineteenth century brought about a marked urbaniza
tion of the European population, as the percentage of people living in towns
and cities rose rapidly (see Table 14.3). In 1750, two British cities had more
than 50,000 inhabitants (London and Edinburgh); in 1801 there were
eight, and by mid-century, twenty-nine. London’s population rose from
about 900,000 in 1800 to 2,363,000 in 1850. At mid-century, half of the
population of Britain resided in towns. French and German urbanization
proceeded at a significantly slower pace than that of Britain and Belgium. In
1851, only a quarter of the French population lived in urban areas, which
were then defined as settlements of at least 2,000 people.
Yet Paris grew from about 550,000 in 1801 to a million inhabitants in- Stockholm’s population multiplied by four, from 75,000 in 1800 to
350,000 at the end of the century. Smaller towns grew rapidly, as well, such
as Porto in Portugal, which doubled in size in sixty years. Industrial towns
grew most rapidly, but commercial and administrative centers, too, gained
population.