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Lessons from History, or the Perfidy of English Exceptionalism and the Significance of Historical France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Robert H. Bates
Robert H. Bates
Affiliation:
Political Science at Duke University
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Abstract

Theories of development are derived from readings of history. Modern historical research challenges many of the basic beliefs about how economies develop. More specifically, recent research suggests that the lessons drawn from the history of industrialization in England are highly misleading. The article thus challenges the empirical foundations for much of classical and Marxian development theory.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , July 1988 , pp. 499 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1988

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References

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10 For France, see Louise Tilly (fn. 6), 25. Stevenson too stresses that food riots occurred even after subsistence crises had ended in England (fn. 6, pp. 40ff).

11 Louise Tilly (fn. 6), 52.

12 As noted above, members of the agrarian community would on occasion be net purchasers of food, and therefore would resist higher prices for it. This was particularly true of cottagers and farm laborers, who at times of subsistence crises faced both a lowering of the wage rate and higher food prices; they would therefore be particularly motivated to resist the “exportation” of food. For a brilliant analysis, see Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).Google Scholar

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19 Kathryn Norberg, “Dividing up the Commons: The Political Economy of EighteenthCentury French Agriculture,” paper prepared for the Caltech-All University of California Conference (fn. 17).

20 Twenty-seven had no knowledge of the law.

21 Norberg (fn. 19), 7.

22 Also see the discussion in Bates, Robert H., “Some Conventional Orthodoxies in the Study of Agrarian Change,” World Politics 36 (January 1984), 234–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is not to deny that there were cases where the poor depended upon common rights, for pasture, for forest products, or for gleaning, and where they allied themselves with those who resisted the break-up of common lands. In general, however, it appears to have been the local elites who dominated the commons.

23 See, for example, the discussion in Bates, Robert H., Markets and States in Tropical Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981).Google Scholar

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50 As Rude has shown, the rebellions by the London mob correlated with the price of bread. See Rude (fn. 8).

51 Robert Brenner, forthcoming.