last one, tavern & market stuff

----------------------
Jon Stephen Miller
Department of English
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa  52242
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Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 09:51:58 -0400
From: H-Net Reviews <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: McCants on Muldrew, _The Economy of Obligation_

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (August, 1999)

Craig Muldrew. _The Economy of Obligation:  The Culture of Credit
and Social Relations in Early Modern England_.  Early Modern
History.  New York:  St. Martin's Press, 1998.  xvii + 453 pp.
Bibliographical references and index.  $69.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-312-21565-7.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Anne E. C. McCants <[log in to unmask]>,
Department of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The economic history profession has recently witnessed a resurgence
of interest in the cultural underpinnings of past economies.
Prominent examples, to name just a few, can be found in Peter
Temin's Presidential Address to the Economic History Association in
1996, in the sweeping argument of David Landes' _The Wealth and
Poverty of Nations_ and of most direct relevance to the work in
question here, Deirdre McCloskey's Presidential Address to the EHA
in 1997.  Muldrew's book then makes a timely appearance, given its
dedication to a reconstruction of the "culture of credit" as it
existed in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Craig Muldrew (Department of History and Civilization, European
University Institute--Florence) takes as his broad subject both the
material realities of the early modern English marketplace, and the
cultural milieu in which those realities manifested themselves.
Thus, he investigates probate inventories, shop account books,
household expenditure diaries, and civic tax schedules, as well as
the court records of debt litigation, family correspondence,
personal diaries, sectarian sermons, and a large prescriptive
literature written for the middling householder and small tradesman.
The intellectual reach of his sources even extends to the natural
law theorists of the seventeenth century, such as Thomas Hobbes,
Richard Hooker and Gerard de Malynes to name just the most famous.
In this literature he finds, as did Max Weber and countless others
after him, an almost excessive attention paid to the themes of
diligence and frugality.  But contra Weber, Muldrew does not see
this primarily as evidence for the profit motive of capitalism in
its early manifestations.  Rather he argues that all this advice was
fundamentally about the preservation of reputation in a society
where credit was the key to market participation, and thus wealth.
It should be further noted that the word _credit_ for Muldrew means
more the "social communication and circulating judgment about the
value of other members of communities" than it does our more
typically modern usage as a financial sum or a claim on assets (p.
2).  Thus, early modern marketplace exchanges dependent on credit
were typically solidified only after hours of negotiation in a local
tavern, over drinks and in front of witnesses.  In this insistence
on the communicative (even persuasive)  aspects of the marketplace,
Muldrew's work strongly reinforces the argument made by McCloskey
that economic historians can only ignore social variables (which
McCloskey sometimes short-hands as "sweet talk") at their peril.

The first part of the book will be the most familiar territory for
economic historians.  For it is here that Muldrew makes most use of
quantitative techniques to answer a number of important questions of
fact, as it were.  He begins with an effort to reconstruct the sheer
magnitude of market transactions in early modern England, and to
date with some precision the impressive rise in marketing during the
sixteenth century, from what was already an arguably "commercial"
medieval England.  He attributes the economic boom of the decades
after 1550 to the expansion of marketing stimulated by the demand
generated by the demographic expansion then underway.  In fact, on
the basis of a limited number of probate inventories, a handful of
account books, and a more voluminous court record, he argues that
this was England's "most intensely _concentrated_ period of economic
growth before the late eighteenth century" (pp. 20-21); and
moreover, that the late sixteenth century was not the period of
absolute immiseration that it would appear to have been on the basis
of the Phelps-Brown and Hopkins real wage index.  Relative poverty
may indeed have been on the rise, but he claims that at least the
poor households which were inventoried lived about as well, if not
better, than their fifteenth-century peasant equivalents (p. 32).
This latter claim is a very strong one, and probably needs much more
evidence before we disregard the implications of the real wage
series entirely.  Nonetheless, much of the argument is compelling,
despite the fact that it rests only on indirect types of evidence
(admittedly from several different types of sources).  What these
strong claims should really do is stimulate the profession to dig
anew for yet more data which can either confirm or refute his
revisionist position, particularly as it pertains to the lower end
of the economic spectrum.

The sixteenth century is not the only place, however, where Muldrew
takes on one of the sacred tenets of the historiography of the
English economy. Part of his project also challenges the long
accepted figures for the size of the English economy at the end of
the seventeenth century as devised by the contemporary political
arithmeticians Gregory King, William Petty and Charles Davenant.
Muldrew argues that their figures, designed as they were to evaluate
the taxable and thus cash portion of the economy, grossly
underestimate the scale of all marketing in England, dependent as
most of that was on the extension of local (oral) credit.  Muldrew's
estimate for total national consumption in the latter part of the
seventeenth century (146,000,000 pounds) is over three times greater
than King's contemporary estimate of total household income (p. 90).
While this calculation depends critically on the representativeness
of only seventeen household account books from a period of over a
century and across the social scale, it does have the significant
advantage of including purchases made on credit.  If Muldrew's
calculations can be confirmed by further research (preferably with a
much larger data base than his seventeen account books), they will
force us to fundamentally rethink the magnitude of the economic
transition from the early modern to the industrial period. T his
could prove to be additional evidence of the significance of the
so-called "industrious revolution" of the early modern period.

This however is not Muldrew's main agenda, but merely a by-product
of his work for other purposes.  The real agenda here is to
demonstrate, given the extreme scarcity of metal coinage throughout
this period, the intense reliance that commerce of this magnitude
placed by necessity on mechanisms of informal credit.  Even more
importantly, Muldrew stresses the implications of such widespread
and interlocking networks of credit for the exacerbation of tensions
between the households of consumers and producers, which were, of
course, merely the same households wearing their various many hats.
With the initial mid-sixteenth century boom, these tensions played
themselves out in an explosion of debt litigation and an outpouring
of moral literature on the perils of the prodigal (that is the
indebted)  life.  With time, adjustments were made to the legal
system and new forms for public credit were established which
allowed credit to "become less dependent on individual morality" (p.
329).  Marketing could not only continue at its new high level, but
even expand, without the security of the social fabric being
irreparably damaged.

This is a fascinating book and one which I highly recommend.  It
moves comfortably between the quantification of material life in
early modern England, and the way that life was understood by
contemporaries.  Historians of the economy and historians of ideas
will both find much in this book to stimulate further research in
their respective fields.  Finally, it offers a potent reminder that
the now dominant utilitarian understanding of economic behavior as
essentially individualistic and fundamentally competitive, is not
always an appropriate model for studies of even strongly
market-centered economies.  Trust (and trustworthiness), and by
extension, cooperative behavior, were essential to the generation of
wealth by households in early modern England.  Thus it is that
Daniel Defoe could write as late even as 1726 that "He that gives no
trust, and takes no trust, either by wholesale or by retail ... is
not yet born, or if there ever were any such, they are all dead"
(quoted on p. 95).

References

David S. Landes, _The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Are Some So
Rich and Others So Poor?_. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.

Deirdre N. McCloskey, "Bourgeois Virtue and the History of P and S,"
_Journal of Economic History_, June 1998, 58 (2): 297-317.

Peter Temin, "Is It Kosher to Talk about Culture?," _Journal of
Economic History_, June 1997, 57 (2): 267-87.


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