Thoughts on pre-modern family economics
This post is intended as a way to gel some thinking I’ve done over the years on how to think about pre-modern economics, specifically the economics of a peasant household. This draws from reading I’ve done over the years, though I owe a lot specifically to Bret Deveraux’s “Bread, How Did They Make It?” and “Clothing, How Did They Make It?” series of posts.
Let’s start by imagining a hypothetical pre-modern farmer. Let’s call him Jim. Suppose Jim is experienced, having been raised from childhood to be a farmer. Suppose also that Jim has all the different tools and such that are typical to his preferred style of farming.
(Note: the word “farmer” is sort of an anachronism here, since farming as an occupation only makes sense when everyone is assumed to have some specific occupation. In the pre-modern world, working the land would be kind of assumed unless you had some more specific vocation or profession going on. A better term would probably be something like “peasant” but I’m going with “farmer” because I feel like “peasant” brings a lot of weird baggage. “Farmer” brings baggage too of course, but it’s different baggage).
If we give Jim access to all the land he wants and tell him to grow as much food as possible, what happens? Well, he’ll pick the best chunk of land he can find and will cultivate it to the max. Importantly, he will grow much more food than he could possibly eat on his own.
I think this is really important to understanding agricultural economics - one person’s labor can grow way more food than that person needs. If you consider it from first principles, this basically has to be true. If it wasn’t true that one person could grow enough food to live on, then agriculture wouldn’t work at all. We’d all be stuck hunting and gathering. So an individual needs to be able to grow at least enough food for themselves, plus some number of non-working dependents (children at the very least cannot work for some number of years). In reality, it turns out there is enough cushion for many non-farming dependents, though the exact number will vary depending on land quality.
Jim can’t grow infinite food by himself, of course. If my understanding of this is right, then his bottleneck would likely be the harvest. Harvesting tends to happen all at once, and is very labor intensive, so as a solo farmer, Jim would be very busy during that time. If he was smart and optimizing things, he might try to spread out the time of the harvest, perhaps with different crops that become ready for harvest at different times, or maybe by harvesting some fields earlier than is ideal, just in order to get around the labor bottleneck.
In reality, labor is rarely the bottleneck for agricultural output. Households tend to grow to fit the size the land is able to support. That means that there are almost always significant labor surpluses in the countryside, especially outside of the harvest period.
If you’re like me, you might wonder why they do it this way. Doesn’t it make more sense to have only the minimum number of people working the land, and have them grow food for everyone else? Shouldn’t such a society be able to support a ton of people who are focused on producing other sorts of goods? It seems like everyone would benefit from some division of labor.
What prompted me to write this post was I realized: they did do this. Just not the way we do it in the industrialized era. It was actually really common for more than half the labor capacity of a society to be devoted to manufacturing household goods, preparing food, and other non-agricultural activities.
But these activities were not typically done by specialized firms outside the household. They were mostly done internally within each household. Specifically, by the women of the household.
In many societies, it was common for the bulk of agricultural labor to be done by men (though it is very common for women to be involved during the harvest). This means that these societies set aside something like half their available labor for non-agricultural activity.
Today, we tend to think of “women’s work” mainly in terms of cooking, cleaning, and raising kids. And these were definitely a big part of what women did. But women were also responsible for manufacturing all the clothing for their household. This did not just mean sewing cloth. It meant spinning raw fiber (from flax or wool or whatever else) into thread, then weaving that thread into cloth, and then finally assembling that cloth into clothing. Spinning, in particular, was extremely time-consuming, and many pre-modern women spent basically all their free time spinning thread just to try and stay on top of their household’s clothing needs.
We don’t usually think of it this way, but we could think of every pre-modern household as being a clothing factory with a farm attached. A huge amount of society’s labor capacity was devoted to the manufacture of clothing. It’s just that without industrial technology, clothing was so labor-intensive that the capacity allocated to it was fully saturated making what to us seems like a modest output.
Conceiving of things this way also allows us to re-imagine what was going on in the early industrial revolution. A lot of the earliest industrial machines were focused on ways to use external energy sources (like coal) to drastically accelerate the manufacture of textiles. The earliest factories made textiles, and were staffed mostly by women. This was a huge game-changer because clothing was the main sort of manufacturing practiced in the large majority of households.