Social History and Agricultural Productivity: The Paris Basin, 1450-1800

This paper uses a sample of leases and a new method to examine total factor productivity in the Paris Basin during the years 1450-1789. After defending the methodology, the paper analyzes he results from the sample, which should dispel the myth of agricultural stagnation in Old-Regime France, at least in the Paris Basin

Un nouvel indice de la productivite agricole: Les baux de Notre Dame de Paris, 1450-1789

This paper presents a new method of measuring agricultural productivity in the era before agricultural censuses, a method that relies on evidence concerning prices and land rental rates to calculate the total factor productivity of agriculture. The method is both more informative and more reliable than the typical comparisons of crop yields and output per worker, and the paper explains it using a sample of leases drawn from the archives of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The analysis of this sample reveals some of the causes of agricultural growth under the Old Regime and suggests that the agriculture of the période was capable of considerable development, at least in the Paris Basin. What growth occurred, though, was extremely sensitive to political crises

Sharecropping and Investment in Agriculture in Early Modern Times

the paper examines the spread of sharecropping that followed a wave of investment in agriculture in sixteenth - and seventeenth-century France. Using results from the modern theory of share contracts, it argues that sharecropping was a means of risk sharing that favored both landlords and tenants. Although the evidence used in this paper comes from France, the results may well apply to other areas of early modern Europe

Public Economics and History: A Review of Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, Edited by Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel

Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States greatly expands our knowledge of the history of premodern fiscal systems and raises important questions about the political economy of premodern states. Answering those questions can help explain how states developed the capacity to tax; why tax levels and government-spending patterns varied greatly in the past, even though per capita incomes were similar; how government debt and representative institutions arose; and, last but not least, why some premodern states expanded and others collapsed. But firm answers to those questions will have to combine the history outlined in Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States with systematic data and formal models of political economy

Early Modern France: 1450-1700

[Introduction] It is always said," observed Richelieu in his Testament politique, "that money forms the sinews of the state." Most historians of early modern France would agree. "Absolutism was, in large part, the child of the fisc," notes one influential essay on early modern France, and a chorus of recent works repeats the same refrain. Fiscal crises, it seems, provoked nearly every change in the French political system from the Hundred Years War to the Revolution; and the tax system brings into sharper focus than any other facet of the French state both the limits of absolutism and the peculiar nature of liberty in France

Economic Theory and Sharecropping in Early Modern France

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenth- and seventeenth century France--a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations early modern historians have tended to rely upon

Social History and Taxes: the Case of Early Modern France

[Introduction] Apart from a flurry of interest in tax revolts ten years ago, social historians of early modern Europe have by and large ignored taxation. Their neglect is perhaps understandable, given that social history itself arose as a revolt against traditional political history and all that it entailed, including the operations of the fisc. The fact that details of early modern fiscal systems often lie interred in tedious administrative histories or that many political historians themselves seem to overlook matters of interest to social historians of course only compounds the problem

The Economic Theory of Sharecropping in Early Modern France

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France-a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations upon which early modern historians have tended to rely

Taxes and Agrarian Life in Early Modern France: Land Sales, 1550-1730

Between 1550 and 1730, privileged investors in France--nobles, officers, and wealthy merchants--bought up enormous quantities of land from peasants. The transfer of property has attracted considerable attention from historians, but it has never been satisfactorily explained. The paper invokes the tax exemptions the privileged enjoyed to account for the transfer--an explanation that fits both the chronology of the land sales and the identity of the purchasers. The paper then examines how the tax system throttled growth in the agricultural sector