11 - Some Commercial Implications of English Individualism

Summary

Some thirty years ago and more, Alan Macfarlane dropped a sizeable bombshell. He told us, with some vigour, what we always knew to be true but had been inclined to overlook: that in England, property was owned by individuals and not by kin groups, and that the individual owners of property had the right of sale without reference to kin, even their children. Macfarlane saw this mostly in terms of the ownership of land and, as will be recalled, held that the sale of land was frequent and the continuity of ownership within families limited. This prompted much debate and even some empirical research, and having contributed to both, especially with Henry French, I hope that it might now be agreed both that Macfarlane’s insight is correct, but that people disposed of their land, or disinherited their heirs, much less often than Macfarlane supposed on the basis of a fairly cursory analysis of the evidence from Earls Colne. Moreover, it might also be agreed that the individualistic possession of land is by no means solely an English phenomenon, but a north European one at the least, and perhaps the necessary consequence of both the demographic conditions common to northern Europe but also the capitalistic (or at least market-orientated) behaviour of peasants – or do we mean farmers?

Other forms of property barely featured in Macfarlane’s analysis. Neither he nor anyone else has really thought about the consequences of English Individualism for economic endeavour in general. Yet there might be something worth saying here, even if there is a danger of any discussion of these questions becoming a statement of the obvious or familiar. In this chapter we concentrate on trade with some sideways glances towards agriculture. From time to time we will give some illustrations from a relatively late source, the autobiography of the bachelor Lancaster grocer William Stout (1665–1752).

I

Trade in late medieval and early modern England was conducted by individuals trading on their own behalf for their own profit. This is not to say that partnerships were unknown, but they were not common. The sixteenth century saw the emergence of trading on joint-stock lines, but this too was normally to meet specific purposes, notably the need to raise capital beyond the ability of single individuals or where the risk of trade was so great that it needed to be shared.