Editor’s Note: This is part of a monthly series showing the work of the Sustainable Farm Systems project
The Sustainable Farm Systems (SFS) project tackles the sustainability of agriculture from a diversity of perspectives. This international and interdisciplinary project pulls together various stories on energy and materials flowing through farming communities, the spread and diffusion of land use regimes across time and space and the evolution of nutrient dynamics in the long run. Our Austrian case study adds an important perspective. In looking at phenomena related to manorialism – the institutional “glue” holding together agrarian societies in Western Europe from the Middle Ages until the Liberal Reforms of 1848 – we put flesh on the bones of the stories on sustainable agriculture. Disentangling the complex web of social relations within farming communities, provides insights on the agents of agricultural – and maybe even sustainable – change.
The environmental history of Austria´s agriculture has widely been accepted as a history of backwardness. In the first half of the nineteenth century, main features of the “first agricultural revolution” – e.g. shortening or abandoning of fallow land, integration of leguminous crops into more complex rotations, introduction of stable keeping – were nearly absent in the core provinces of the Habsburg Empire. Agricultural thinkers of the time debated manorial structures and traditional feudal bonds as prime reasons for rural backwardness – at least until they were finally abolished in 1848. Peasants had few incentives to modernize their humble farmsteads and intensify land use on their small plots. They were obliged to deliver substantial fractions of their harvest to feudal lords as taxes and tithes. Additionally, regular compulsory (corvée) labour within the manorial economy impeded efficient and continuous cultivation of household fields, particularly during the peak of the harvest season. Also, Austrian landlords lost strategic interest in questions of agricultural modernization of their large demesne landholdings on the eve of industrialization. Accordingly, most of the landlords had never been on any field in person or seen the stables from the inside. Ploughing fields, yoking a horse and bringing in the harvest were considered peasant activities solely, and not part of their noble business.
Numerous similar accounts on seigneurial agriculture can be found in archives across the country. Accordingly, many of today´s rural and economic historians have re-told different facets of this story on agricultural stagnation. Using socio-ecological methods developed as part of the larger SFS project, our case study challenges this assumption. The estate of Grafenegg, one of the wealthiest and politically most important manorial systems in Early Modern Austria, serves as our principal area of investigation.
Rich archival material enables us to explore the most important socio-ecological relations between landlords and peasants, their farms, animals and fields. To do so, we have integrated some of the most promising sources of Austria´s agricultural history. The Franziszeischer Kataster (Franciscean cadastre) is a comprehensive land survey covering the whole Habsburg Monarchy (530.000 km2 in total). Unlike earlier (and mostly incomplete) attempts in the 18th century, the Franciscean cadastre provides a solid and scientifically valid basis for tax calculation across the empire. From 1817 to 1856, Habsburg expert commissions undertook a series of geodetic in-field surveys on the level of single land parcels for each of the villages in the provinces. Numerous maps (scale 1: 2.880) were created, showing very detailed landscape elements down to a 1m resolution.
This land survey – and all the documentation that comes with it – gives very detailed information on the peasant economy (yields, rotations, livestock numbers, forestry, etc.) and may be considered one of the most important sources for agricultural and land use history in Austria. Still, it lacks detailed insights into manorial resource use, as the state did not levy any taxes on noble estates. To fill this blind spot in Austria´s agricultural landscape we rely on another promising – yet under-researched – source for agricultural and environmental history: the Naturalhauptbuch (NHB). These manorial bookkeeping records were issued by seigneurial bailiffs administering demesne agriculture and provide comprehensive data on the manorial agro-business. They give detailed account on annual stocks, inputs and outputs to and from the manorial farmsteads, and therefore allow us to trace important resources flowing through the entire manorial system.
This land survey – and all the documentation that comes with it – gives very detailed information on the peasant economy (yields, rotations, livestock numbers, forestry, etc.) and may be considered one of the most important sources for agricultural and land use history in Austria. Still, it lacks detailed insights into manorial resource use, as the state did not levy any taxes on noble estates. To fill this blind spot in Austria´s agricultural landscape we rely on another promising – yet under-researched – source for agricultural and environmental history: the Naturalhauptbuch (NHB). These manorial bookkeeping records were issued by seigneurial bailiffs administering demesne agriculture and provide comprehensive data on the manorial agro-business. They give detailed accounts of annual stocks, as well as inputs and outputs to and from the manorial farmsteads, and therefore allow us to trace important resources flowing through the entire manorial system.
We use the rich information from these two sources to investigate the distribution of central resources within manorial agriculture. Our assessment of the respective availability of food, land and labour for each of the landlords´ and peasants´ farms yielded surprising results. We did not find too much stagnation or backwardness in our reconstructions. Instead, what we found was a more complex picture. Grafenegg landlords ran large agro-businesses with plenty of natural and monetary capital at their disposal. The demesne economy was highly differentiated on the inside: the peasants formed the main workforce running the huge enterprise – from direct physical cultivation of the manorial fields to more specialized tasks, e.g. sheep rearing, brick making, milling, and bookkeeping. Within the manorial economy, access to food was strikingly unequal. We found that the landlords monopolized approximately a third of the total food produced in the system! This significant share was drained out of the local land use system and sold on regional markets, so that heavily needed foodstuffs were redirected towards the growing urban, commercial and manufacturing centres. This huge surplus extraction created a situation of stark scarcity for the peasants and pushed them towards the edge of subsistence – which may account for the “stagnation” and “backwardness” found in so many sources and histories.
How did the peasants react to this situation of scarcity? How did they make a living under the conditions of severe subsistence pressure? One option was to engage in the Grafenegg labour market to create a modest monetary income. Our estimates suggest that already 30% of the potential labour time available sufficed to cultivate the entire demesne. Therefore, we may assume that the peasants heavily competed on the local labour market. We needed to look for their alternative strategies. In sharp contrast to many writers in Austrian historiography, our data lets us believe that the second option was of utmost importance – intensification of land use. To raise agricultural production, peasants invested more labour into the same – and limited – plots of land. But this increase in production did not come without costs. Intensification created severe pressure on the local agroecosystems, as it accelerated soil mining and environmental degradation. The Grafenegg case shows that pressure on the peasants was translated into pressure on the land, threatening the sustainability of the whole manorial agricultural system.
Michael Neundlinger
I look forward very much to this work being published. I wondered what kind of indicator of ‘backwardness’ you were expecting to find? Most economic historians would look at yields per hectare (even better, net yields per hectare) and labour productivity. It has become clear since the 1980s that the ‘east Elbian’ economies were much more commercial both among landlords and peasants than previous models would have supposed. Yet on the indicators I’ve just mentioned they’re still (from what I have read) performing pretty poorly compared to some economies further west, where the real rental burden on tenant farmers might be just as high.
Dear Paul,
thank you for your message. We have submitted a manuscript to Historia Agraria recently, and hope to get accepted and published in the next months.
With our paper we were trying to challenge ideas on backward peasants and modern lords – admittedly a very huge debate in economic and rural history, and elsewhere – with a look on the resources available for different farmsteads. We have assessed the net food availability for each of the farms involved, expressed as nutritional energy available for each of the inhabitants, as well as nutritional energy produced per hectare agriculturally used land. So I guess this comes rather close to your idea of “net yields per hectare”. Aspects of labour were tackled using time budgeting. We have linked resource production (and maintenance) with the respective time needed, arriving at an approximation of potential labour time available for each of the farms. So we found that the farms with access to lesser resources had abundant labour at their disposal – and the opposite situation on the large demesnes. Speaking of intensification would require an assessment of the labour productivity per farm, we totally agree. This will be one of our next steps in the project.
Also in the paper we tried to link our results to broader discussion on agrarian change and the advent of agrarian capitalism. At the moment, I think that we need more data and interpretation here. Still, first assumptions may be drawn from our project. Austrian landlords had huge resource capital at their disposal, making them potential agents of agrarian change. But as we have seen, the peasantry had to find very efficient and intensive ways of using their (limited) resources, which may have also created an upswing towards raising yields and economic growth, i.e. a peasant path to agrarian capitalism. So we believe that the question here is not about either landlords, or peasants – but on the “symbiotic” relation binding them together. In the next part of the project we will try to link the questions raised in this paper to aspects of soil fertility. Using nutrient budgeting we may arrive at an interesting analysis of connections between surplus, scarcity and agro-ecological sustainability.
Many thanks Michael! The ‘classic’ approach to peasant economics is to argue that peasant incomes (measured in monetary and purchasing power terms, at least) remained low because with ‘excess’ labour they only shifted into other activities when the return to labour fell below average costs rather than marginal costs, while commercial farms hiring labour did so until marginal returns matched marginal costs. Thus a more ‘peasant’ society ends up with a more inefficient allocation of labour and lower per capita incomes. This seems to be something like the situation you are describing, so in a way, a classic version of ‘backwardness’, although not because peasants are somehow irrational or lords too feudal (the institutional explanation). However, that also begs the question – why don’t lords just buy peasants out if they can produce more efficiently, in terms of market costs? Of course, you may have found a degree of specialisation within the manorial and peasants sectors reflecting relative labour costs.
Dear Paul, thank you very much! I think you made a very good point on the economic dimension to our resource approach. Having in mind the rich archival material, I think that we could try to integrate cost and return aspects for peasants and landlords alike. E.g. the cadastral records provide information on the relative factor costs within peasant agriculture. Similarly, the manorial records follow an “input-output” style of accounting, revealing many aspects of cost and return and the economic “rationale” behind it. At the moment we are focussing on a slightly different aspect. We are integrating the manorial accounting data to link food availability to the monetary aspects. I think that in the accounting books we may find out more about the rent and wage structure in the manor, and also about the labor division and specialization in the system. Also, I really like your argument on “buying out” the peasants. I´d seem very plausible here, although the landlords are not buying their land, but their labor force. The demesnes and also the manorial manufactures (brick making and sheep rearing in our context) needed plenty of working hands. Based on that, we will use local prices to include marketable produce into our food budgets, arriving at something like a total “socio-ecological” income.