Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. (Reviews).

Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain.

New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000. xii + 372 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-300-08391-2.

"History," the late Lawrence Stone once remarked, "must be about change or it is nothing." Inspired by the need to understand historical change, he and other historians of his generation explored the social and economic history of early modern England with an eye toward discovering the nature of the Marxist "transition from feudalism to capitalism." Most of them concluded that Marx was right: the old feudal aristocracy of the Middle Ages was gradually being superseded by the wealth and acquisitiveness of an advancing class of capitalists and that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England were critical in that transition This explanatory framework, however, was challenged by a subsequent generation of historians, who often pointed to the resilience of the old order and to a lack of capitalist consciousness among the new order, and who, in contrast to the older generation, seemed eager to show that little changed in history.

The debate lay dormant for several decades. Now in his book, Earthly Necessities, Keith Wrightson, the distinguished English social historian, has chosen to revive the debate. But engaging in debate about the transition from feudalism is only part of Wrightson's purpose. Earthly Necessities is an unusual and welcome book. On one level it is a masterly survey of English social and economic history from approximately 1450 to 1750 that can exist quite apart from historiographical wars. Nevertheless, it is on a second and interpretive level in which Wrightson revisits the issue of the nature of change in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, where Early Necessities is most interesting.

While Wrightson avoids the "feudalism to capitalism" terminology, his central argument is that the early modern period was indeed a turning point in British economic and social history. This turning point represented first a move away from the individualized household society of the Middle Ages toward the gradual creation of an integrated national economy in which market relationships were decisively expanded.

In many ways, this emergence was completely unexpected. The principal agents of the change were actually threatening and potentially divisive. Between 1450 and 1600 the population of Britain and Europe grew dramatically, and at the same time, prices, particularly of foodstuffs, rose by roughly 600%. These new demographic and economic forces destroyed many of the established patterns of social and economic life in Britain. Landless peasants and the urban classes were especially devastated by inflation. On the other hand, fairly well-to-do landowners and farmers benefited from increased demand and higher prices. But the lower classes could not survive forever under the strains of inflation, and, if they were to survive, some new economic opportunities would have to appear.

It is to this question of how a thriving national economy managed to emerge from these difficulties, that Wrightson devotes the last half of his book. Between the 1560s and the 1640s, national income of England and Wales doubled. Expanding agricultural production, urban growth, development of new industries, such as the "New Draperies" and mining, availability of credit, and the intensification of trade, are all parts of Wrightson's answer.

But the Great Economic Surge was not completed until after the Civil Wars. By 1700 England was a great power. This final triumph occurred largely because English trade became truly long-distance and international, and the English state developed a system of public credit by which scarcely conceivable levels of credit could be raised and expended on wars preventing French control of Europe.

By the end of the book, Wrightson's transition is clearly defined. A patchwork of informal, agrarian, localized economies gave way to an integrated, capitalist market economy. So, are we back at the Marxist transition from feudalism to capitalism? No, because Wrightson thinks the changes were set in motion blindly, animated by a demand for goods, generated by demographic expansion, not by class advance.

Wrightson's argument seems difficult to contest, and his book most welcome. A distinguished economic and social historian, after decades of study and reflection on his chosen field, decides to summarize his views. He has a compelling thesis; Scotland, Wales, and women are all thoroughly integrated into the text. We need more books like this.