impede land consolidation and enclosures. ii) The question is an important one, in the context of the Gerschenkron-Gregory debate: (1) First, to repeat: Since Gerschenkron focuses exclusively on Post-Emancipation peasant agriculture under traditional communal farming, within the obshchina-mir system, he certainly gives the reader the impression that the government had sought to protect and promote this system, if for fiscal and administrative reasons, to be considered later. (2) On the other hand the statistics that Paul Gregory provides make sense – and they do make sense – only if a significant proportion of agricultural production, after 1880, took place outside the regime of communal agriculture. (3) though we should also reflect that historically communal agriculture elsewhere had not prevented agricultural growth. iii) What government emancipation policies did to promote enclosures, even if unintentionally: (1) Government compensation in the form of redemption bonds for only 80% of assessed value, of the land plus capital in the form of servile labour, meant that the serf seeking both personal redemption (liberation) and secure property rights, had two choices: to borrow or some other way acquire the remaining 20% of the capitalized value to secure both land and liberty, or yield to the landlord anywhere from 35% to 75% of his tenancy lands (i.e., in the form of those interspersed and scattered plough strips in the great open fields. (2) As we saw earlier, peasant transfers to landlords of such Open Field tenancy lands: amounted to 13% of agricultural lands in the Russian Empire, minus Poland (where the peasantry clearly had made very substantial gains. such transfers to enclosing landlords was 23% in Ukraine and were as high as 41% in the Volga region: from Saratov to Samara (Kuibyshev ) clearly indicting (at least, to me) that where the prospects for commercialized agriculture were high, and where land productivity was higher, the landlords engaging in Emancipation (with Redemption bonds) had much stronger incentives to encourage or force servile tenants to cede lands to them (3) The question of intermixing demesne (domain) and peasant tenancy strips: As I also argued – though admittedly without conclusive evidence – one effect of Peasant Emancipation under the Redemption Laws was
Sub-total of Peasant Rents 10,693 100.00% 10,693 15.92% Foreign Peasants': Short Term Rents Labour Services 1,609 66.68% Rents in kind: in grain 804 33.32% Sub-total of 'Foreign Peasants' Rents 2,413 100.00% 2,413 3.59% TOTAL VALUES 67,156 100.00% Source: William Hagen, ‘How Mighty the Junkers? Peasant Rents and Seigneurial Profits in Sixteenth-Century Brandenburg’, Past & Present, no. 108 (August 1985), p. 100. Table 2. Output per Agricultural Workers ca 1850 in Europe and USA COUNTRY Grain in bushels * Livestock Outputs ** Net Output: US = 1 Net Output measured in calories (Britain = 1) USA (North) 297 8.54 1.00 0.99 Great Britain 223 5.66 0.95 1.00
measured in million of calories COUNTRY 1810 1840 1860 1880 1900 1910 Britain 14.0 17.5 20.0 23.5 22.5 23.5 France 7.0 11.5 14.5 14.0 15.5 17.0 Germany 7.5 10.5 14.5 22.0 25.0 Russia 7.0 7.5 7.0 9.0 11.0 USA 21.5 22.5 29.0 31.0 42.0 Source: Paul Bairoch, ‘Niveaux de développement économique de 1810 à 1910,’ Annales: Économies, sociétés, civilisations, 20 (1965), 1096, Table 1. Table 4. Output of Principal Grain Crops of Selected European Countries, in millions of quintals, in decennial averages, 1871-90 to 1905-14 Great Decade Britain France Germany Russia
1890 1,074 487 1,503 3,064 7,393 41.44 1891 669 471 1,338 2,478 6,705 36.96 1892 1,183 459 1,500 3,142 7,335 42.84 1893 1,680 462 1,692 3,834 8,309 46.14 1894 1,758 490 1,721 3,969 8,922 44.49 1895 1,556 490 1,866 3,912 9,407 41.59 1896 1,591 545 1,960 4,096 9,834 41.65 1897 1,307 555 1,840 3,702 9,535 38.83 1898 1,588 555 1,972 4,115 10,069 40.87 1899 1,869 569 2,016 4,454 11,583 38.45 1900 1,885 576 1,983 4,444 11,329 39.23 1901 1,588 567 1,903 4,058 11,118 36.50 1902 2,143 579 2,135 4,857 12,005 40.46 1903 2,079 578 2,047 4,704 12,201 38.55 1904 2,437 569 2,252 5,258 12,791 41.11
1900-04 185 588 156 151 Source: Raymond W. Goldsmith, ‘The Economic Development of Tsarist Russia, 1860-1914,’ Economic Development and Cultural Change, 9 (1961), 441- 75. The following table presents Gregory’s revisions of Goldsmith’s estimates, to include non-European Russia, and also to account for a decline in the seed-output ratio. Table 8. Growth of Russian National Income, 1883 - 1913 (Annual Growth Rates) Period Agriculture Industry Trade/Services National Income 1883/7 to 1897/1901 2.55 5.45 2.50 3.40 1897/1901 to 1909/13 3.00 3.60 2.80 3.10