Regions, Institutions, and Agrarian Change in European History (Economics, Cognition, and Society)

Rosemary Hopcroft ends her book stating "...that the modern world, rather than being antirural, ... has strong rural roots".

This indeed is an extremely modest way to summarize her major result. Not only because it does not distinguish her results from the position of Immanuel Wallerstein who credits commercializing landlord for the pre-industrial modernization of the world. She actually empirically refutes Wallerstein's position. It is the peasants themselves that achieved progressive agrarian change: the more so, the less they were restricted by manorial (i.e. installed and upheld by the lord) and communal rules.

The result is arrived at by work that places Hopcroft in the best traditions of theory- led historical-comparative social science. The theory is borrowed from the new institutional economics (Coase, North, and Williamson) that explains institutional change with the help of the concepts of property rights and social or transaction costs. Because I don't return to that point I here note that Hopcroft's treatment of (the protection of) property rights is somewhat confusing. She correctly distinguishes more efficient property rights from less efficient ones: "Less communal property rights were more efficient than communal rights."(p. 52) Nevertheless she presents the empirical finding that effective state protection of property rights has different efficiency consequences, depending on the nature of the property rights, as a sort of anomaly where in fact the results straightforwardly follow from her theory. The research design is taken from the best tradition of empirical historical sociology: comparison of carefully chosen historical cases (England, The Netherlands, France, Germany and Sweden) which are presented as near narratives; nevertheless, analysis in terms of central concepts, which not only can easily be recognized in the chapters reporting on the cases, but in addition to that are actually treated as variables and in that way amenable to causal analysis.

Hopcroft shows that a region's score on a dimension, which ranges from a more communal regulation of economic affairs to a situation where individual initiative is less communally restricted, explains its economic progress. The less communally restricted condition is empirically shown to be more conducive to success. She also shows the interaction of this dimension with other factors as ecology, demography, local class relations (lord peasant relations), access to markets, the state, and warfare.

As her empirical analysis is scholarly convincing, her results must be read as a refutation of neo-Marxist and modernization theory, the last stressing the inescapable victory of modern technology against the forces of tradition, alike. Neo-Marxist are shown to capitalize on a spurious relationship between feudalism and communal agricultural systems. Modernization theorists cannot really explain the historic persistence of regional differences in economic structures.

As Hopcroft does not deny the operation of class forces, not to mention the effects of state policies and international relations, the best way to understand her book can probably be formulated as follows. It places Barrington Moore's (1966) famous analysis of the rise of the modern world in a broader perspective. Moore explained the political outcomes of the transition to the industrial world from the more or less peaceful solution of the 'peasant problem', essentially conceptualized as a lord- peasant problem. If Hopcroft is right, which I think to be the case, Moore's theory is a special case of Hopcroft's more general explanation. From Hopcroft's analysis follows that in more individually oriented regions the relations between peasants and landlord must be expected to be relatively peaceful as the peasants in such regions as a rule enjoy legally enforceable rights and even a measure of representative government. Her position in this respect is akin to the analyses of the same political developments, which were put forward by Daniel Ragin in his book on Social Change in the Modern Era (1986).

Like other recent research, e.g. Avner Greif's modeling of the economic consequences of more collective (Merchants in North Africa)) versus individual cultures (their counterparts in medieval Genoa) Hopcroft's book leaves the reader with an intriguing puzzle. The distinction between more communal versus less communal regulated regions is treated as exogenous in the explanatory model. This makes one wonder how it came to be that some regions were more communal and others less so. Subsequent research should, I think, be directed to this intriguing question. From her book in general and explicitly from the last page I gather that Rosemary Hopcroft wold put her cards not on "language or ethnic origin" (i.e. culture, FK) but on the "incentive structure". She might be right. From the evidence provided by Hopcroft it is clear that the explanation has to take account of the fact, that the more communal regions at the same time were the regions, which enjoyed the best ecological conditions. So the question might very roughly be: Why do human populations facing better ecological conditions develop cultures, which in the longer term inhibit progress, whereas human populations living in worse conditions achieve the opposite results. It would be very interesting if the explanation sought for could build on the ideas of Jared Diamond as expounded in his Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). His 'geographic determinism' could be very helpful. An additional advantage would that in this way a much needed bridge were built between historical sociology/ economy and non- biological reductionist evolutionary anthropology, i.e. evolutionary anthropology that acknowledges the impossibility of explaining socio-cultural diversity from (biological) constants.