Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [72]
Worst of all, the French farm economy was incapable of providing enough food to supply the city all the time. Even at the best of times, bread remained much more expensive in Paris than in London—workers in Paris spent 50 to 60 percent of their earnings on bread; in London, 35 to 40 percent. In Paris, food riots were frequent throughout the period, while in countries with more commercialized systems of agriculture they were largely unknown.10 This is at least a partial explanation of France’s famous lack of stability: Mass starvations and bread-price shocks preceded the 1848 revolution (which was almost entirely an arrival-city event), the July revolution of 1830, and the rise of the Commune in 1871 (which was launched in the arrival city of Montmartre). France’s use of peasant parcelization, rather than urban reform, won a certain sort of rural stability, but its cost was a perilous loss of economic and political stability.
THE URBANIZING SHOCK OF ENCLOSURE
Elsewhere in Europe, an equally profound transformation was having an effect as dramatic as the French Revolution. In the Low Countries, in Scandinavia, in the German states, and, especially, in England and Wales, farmers were learning to intensify their yields and turn agriculture into a high-employment business through a set of innovations known as high farming. Beginning as early as the sixteenth century, but transformed into an almost universal practice in England and northwestern Europe between 1750 and 1870, farming became a high-productivity business by means of several innovations: large-scale drainage, irrigation, and use of fertilizers; new technology, such as steel tills, seed drills, and threshers; better animal feed and selective breeding; crop rotation, buoyed by new fallow and fodder crops; and high-yield food crops, like potatoes, turnips, and sugar beets.
In many ways the perfect complement to Europe’s population boom, high farming required far more labor per hectare, sometimes by a factor of three, and therefore increased rural employment; it also produced many times more food, ending the Malthusian trap in which the land had seemed insufficient to support a growing population and making its host countries far less vulnerable to food shortages and famines. The extremely fast growth of urban populations created large and lucrative markets for cash crops and provided a powerful incentive for landowners to shift to intensive commercial farming.
High farming required common grazing and field lands to be cleared, unified into sufficiently large holdings, and enclosed. The lives of its inhabitants—the peasants, rural laborers, and landless casual workers and vagrants—were disrupted dramatically and sometimes tragically. Economic studies have shown that many improved their lot, especially the better-off peasants who were able to gain title to their land and become high-intensity farmers and employers.11 Viewed from the distance of the present, the sudden shift to commercial agriculture across much of Europe looks like a net gain. “Enclosure meant more food for the growing population, more land under cultivation and, on balance, more employment in the countryside; and enclosed farms provided the framework for the new advances of the nineteenth century,” one important historical study concluded.12
But this instant end to subsistence-level peasant farming, combined with the era’s fertility boom, created a surplus population of tens of millions who abandoned the countryside—by choice or by decree—and sought work in cities, either in their own country or across the Atlantic. In some cases, this was a flight of desperation. It caused a massive shift from rural poverty to urban poverty, with varied results.
Nothing anywhere in the West quite approached the horror or inhumanity of Ireland’s transition from peasant agriculture, enacted by colonial laws that were