Successful Counterreformation and its effects upon affected states

My point is that those policies were extremely old. Enclosure was the cause celebre, but it was no more oppressive than tithes, serfdom and conscription had always been. There was no time in which the English peasant was free to live as he wished without being exploited by those above him. After all, before the sheep barons there were the lords of the manor - indeed, the two were usually the same person.

Jumping from serfdom to enclosure means ignoring a good two, three centuries of English history. English serfdom pretty much collapsed by the 15th century (and unlike in France and Scotland, the English gentry retained few seigneurial rights), but enclosure doesn't begin until the late 16th century, and isn't finalised until the 19th century. There's a whole society of free tenant farmers that emerges in that gap, who were no more serfs than they were proles.

Fair enough, I'm afraid I have to confess ignorance here, mostly. There was still practically arbitrary taxation and plenty of religious purges to keep them busy, of course.

Sure enough, rural life wasn't any sort of utopia. But over the 17th and 18th century centuries, you're looking at a free, land-holding peasantry being gradually stripped of its rights and privileges and having its property expropriated; rendered both servile and proletarian. The transition is from people with some rights and some measure of prosperity to people with almost no rights and no prosperity to speak of. And that's the world which gave birth to British industrialism, casting a pretty considerable shadow of doubt over Cutlass' assertion that a free and enfranchised populace was the condition of economic development.

Traitorfish said:

"Why Nations Fail" is an economic text, though, not a history one, so they're trying to establish general principles of economic development, not a record of economic development as it actually occurred. So they can say thinks like "a free working class promotes economic growth", but that doesn't imply that economic growth indicates the existence of a free working class. As I mentioned previously, Britain saw enormous economic growth in the early-to-mid 19th century, but this was a period in which British workers remained legally servile, which made activities such as e.g. trade union organising a criminal offence. History precedes models.

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It's both an economic and a historical text. While they aren't specifically historians, and it isn't specifically a historical text, they are looking at the historical context of what happened. The problem with all of the studies on development is that no one has ever really been able to look at the picture and see why some things worked, and some things didn't.

So you say labor was significantly repressed in this era, and by modern standards you are right. But commoners generally, even the lowest classes of them, had more freedom in their property and their work than in pretty much any complex society prior to that time. That is, the ability of the lords to confiscate the work of the laborer was never less than it was then previously. And that opening was a wedge by which people could act in their own interest and build these inventions, and the businesses which followed on from them. Just the right of a commoner to own a patent is a huge step forward in the economic liberty of the common person.

So sure, it's less than today. But it was more than it had been previously. And that is the key point, in that as the people got more of an ability to keep the proceeds of their own innovation, they innovated more. And while this may not have applied to every commoner in Britain, it did apply more to a larger number of them than had previously been true.

Cutlass said:

It's both an economic and a historical text. While they aren't specifically historians, and it isn't specifically a historical text, they are looking at the historical context of what happened. The problem with all of the studies on development is that no one has ever really been able to look at the picture and see why some things worked, and some things didn't.

So you say labor was significantly repressed in this era, and by modern standards you are right. But commoners generally, even the lowest classes of them, had more freedom in their property and their work than in pretty much any complex society prior to that time. That is, the ability of the lords to confiscate the work of the laborer was never less than it was then previously. And that opening was a wedge by which people could act in their own interest and build these inventions, and the businesses which followed on from them. Just the right of a commoner to own a patent is a huge step forward in the economic liberty of the common person.

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Right, but as Park and I have been saying, this doesn't describe the condition of the greater part of the European population. When English industrial capitalism emerges in the late 18th century, it relies on a class of labour which is less enfranchised, less protected and less prosperous than its ancestors. Even those sections which retain some independence and security, such as the weavers, lack the economic or legal standing of the free peasantry, so they're disposed of with relative ease.

Additionally, we have to recognise the role of slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas, which was the literal opposite of free labour, but also absolutely integral to the development of European capitalism. Sugar, tobacco and cotton play are central to the development of 19th century capitalism, but they rely on treating millions of people as chattel, so it seems basically spurious to say "this happened because: freedom".

Not freedom for all. But a greater amount of freedom for at least some who were not the previous economic elite.

That seems like a considerable retreat from your original position, that "whether a nation became rich or poor [...] had to do with whether the people at the top would or would not allow the people at the bottom to be free and prosperous".

Cutlass said:

Not freedom for all. But a greater amount of freedom for at least some who were not the previous economic elite.

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That is explicitly not the case. If you're going to decide historical fact is irrelevant in the face of theory, you're welcome to, but you can't change what those facts because you're armed with theory.

ParkCungHee said:

That is explicitly not the case. If you're going to decide historical fact is irrelevant in the face of theory, you're welcome to, but you can't change what those facts because you're armed with theory.

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Well, then you have 2 different interpretations of 'historical facts'. I should take yours over a Harvard and MIT professors why?

Traitorfish said:

That seems like a considerable retreat from your original position, that "whether a nation became rich or poor [...] had to do with whether the people at the top would or would not allow the people at the bottom to be free and prosperous".

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Maybe somewhat. But not all that much. It was still a very great increase in the freedom of action and property of many, even if it wasn't for all.

Yes, and - as TF has pointed out - an even greater decrease in the freedom of action and property of many others. The British class system has never been totally rigid: there have always been people on the top and people on the bottom, but who those people are has always been subject to change, to some extent or another.

Cutlass said:

Maybe somewhat. But not all that much. It was still a very great increase in the freedom of action and property of many, even if it wasn't for all.

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How many, though, and in what ways? That's the actual content of your claim, that certain people acquiring certain freedoms lead to certain outcomes, so it can't be glossed over.

Traitorfish said:

How many, though, and in what ways? That's the actual content of your claim, that certain people acquiring certain freedoms lead to certain outcomes, so it can't be glossed over.

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Patents, for one. Access to the courts in a way that the outcome is not predecided by class. No arbitrary taxation or confiscation of property.

If a farmer is considering buying a plow, but the increase in his product will all be taken by his landlord, he won't buy the plow. Nor will he improve his land by building walls or drainage. But if he can keep it, or at least a substantial portion of it, then he will.

That's really the point that I was trying to get to. It was not a sudden 1 step process from 15th century peasantry to the 21st century liberal democracy. But rather it was steps that allowed people, just ordinary people, to keep the extra product of their work, investment, innovations. When people can prosper by doing something better, even if only somewhat so, then they will. When they cannot, then they won't. And maybe this applies to only portions of the population. But even that is going to have a superior result than having only the lords get all the increased product.

The thesis of why nations don't develop is that the elite of those nations have more to gain by not permitting development, and the power to enforce that. And because of that no one is willing to take the risk or do the work.

Now things like the Poor Laws and the labor oppression you and Park is talking about is a push back by the lords who don't want to lose their power by losing their relative wealth. And that can be seen everywhere. Both then and now. Reagan and Thatcher are just part of that universal pushback by elites who loath sharing power and prosperity.

But growing portions of the population could make wealth for themselves. And they did. And the wealth of nations is the wealth of all of the people in those nations. So a growing share of the population which could work and aspire towards wealth means a growing wealth of the nation as a whole.

Now certainly extracting wealth from ever more people, as the chattel slavery plantation system did, also brought a great deal of wealth in. And at the dawn of the industrial era slavery produced more wealth than industrialization and innovation. But the wealth produced by industrialization eventually eclipsed the wealth of plantations.

The 18th century was a starting place. And your argument seems to be that it's not the ending place, so it's not the answer.

Cutlass said:

Patents, for one. Access to the courts in a way that the outcome is not predecided by class. No arbitrary taxation or confiscation of property.

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Patents, when they were introduced by Charles I, were no more than a means of continuing the banned practice of granting government monopolies - a few went to genuine innovations, but most were simply a way of raising money for the crown by granting favoured businessmen the right to fleece people as they wished.

Cutlass said:

Patents, for one. Access to the courts in a way that the outcome is not predecided by class. No arbitrary taxation or confiscation of property.

If a farmer is considering buying a plow, but the increase in his product will all be taken by his landlord, he won't buy the plow. Nor will he improve his land by building walls or drainage. But if he can keep it, or at least a substantial portion of it, then he will.

That's really the point that I was trying to get to. It was not a sudden 1 step process from 15th century peasantry to the 21st century liberal democracy. But rather it was steps that allowed people, just ordinary people, to keep the extra product of their work, investment, innovations. When people can prosper by doing something better, even if only somewhat so, then they will. When they cannot, then they won't. And maybe this applies to only portions of the population. But even that is going to have a superior result than having only the lords get all the increased product.

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Right, but as Park and I have said, the 16th through 18th centuries saw the reverse of that process in England, the abolition of traditional rights and expropriation of property which made the majority of the English population less able to retain the product of their work. The outcome of this process, the creation of an agricultural capitalism and the creation of a large body of rural proletarians was the starting place for British capitalism.

It's not just that the late 18th century was unpleasant, oh dear, thank god we've moved past that, it's that this unpleasantness was in the first place historical novel, and in the second place the condition of subsequent developments. That it was not, in fact, something which merely happened before capitalism, which capitalism later rectified, but part of the process by which capitalism actually came into being.

Cutlass said:

If a farmer is considering buying a plow, but the increase in his product will all be taken by his landlord, he won't buy the plow. Nor will he improve his land by building walls or drainage. But if he can keep it, or at least a substantial portion of it, then he will. .

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Rack Renting wasn't protected against until after the Land War.

ParkCungHee said:

Also by "Protestant Prussia" we mean "Prussia, who's King was a Protestant." And by "Catholic Rivals" we mean "German states with who's Monarchs were Catholics." It's not like Catholics were alien to the Prussian state, or that they represented some sort of natural underclass.

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I can't agree with this. You are obviously forgetting about the principle "Cuius regio, eius religio", established in the HRE in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_regio,_eius_religio

According to this principle, you must either convert to religion of the Monarch, or you shall be expelled and move to another realm of another Monarch.

Outside of the HRE there were exceptions to that rule, e.g. in the PLC only serfs had to convert to religion of their lords, while free persons didn't have to:

http://traditionsacrosseurope.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/tradition-of-religious-tolerance-in-poland/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Confederation

But the impact of that extraordinary in European scale religious tolerance was later (during the 1600s) ended by the success of Counterreformation:

http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/eceurope/refpol.html

I don't think Park's forgetting, so much as he's aware that Europe. 1555 and c.1871 were not the same place, specifically in that the latter did not contain a Holy Roman Empire to which the principle of "cuius regio, eius religio" might apply.

OK but Counterreformation is not 1871, but the 1500s and the 1600s.

In the 1800s Prussia had also Catholic citizens as the result of its previous expansion, for example as the result of the partitions of Poland.

In Silesia of the 1800s lived Catholics because Silesia had previously been part of the Catholic Crown of Bohemia and of the Catholic Habsburg Empire.

In Royal Prussia lived Catholics, because Royal Prussia was part of the Kingdom of Poland all the way since before the Reformation until 1772.

But in the 1500s and the 1600s nearly everyone in Ducal Prussia was Protestant, including also Poles from Mazovia who settled in its southern regions.

Actually some of Polish Mazurs who settled in Ducal Prussia were Protestants escaping religious inequality in Poland after the Counterreformation.

Other Mazurs settled in Ducal Prussia already before the Reformation (during the 1300s, 1400s and early 1500s) but later converted to Protestantism.

Mazurs are an ethnographic group of Polish people, who lived in Mazovia (where they originally came from), East Prussia, Podlachia, Sudovia, Belarus and Lithuania (as the result of Mazur colonization). All of Mazurs in East Prussia (Ducal Prussia) were Protestants, while most of them in other regions - Catholics. The same applies to Lithuanians - those from Lithuania Minor (eastern half of Kaliningrad Oblast) were nearly all Protestants. Unlike Lithuanians from other regions.

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Ducal Prussia was not part of the Holy Roman Empire yet the principle of "cuius regio, eius religio" was applied there by the Hohenzollerns.