I showed this post to my brother (an avid amateur scholar of history and economics). He pointed out that pre-industrial agrarian societies had a labor surplus (not his source, just one I found hastily).
Using the nineteenth-century case study of Grundherrschaft (manor) Grafenegg, we offer a first attempt at conceptualizing and empirically scrutinizing resource use and distribution in (late) Central European seigneurial agriculture.We integrate rich archival material to reconstruct the distribution of three central resources –land,food and labour– among the agrarian agents (e.g.manorial farmsteads, peasant farms and smallholdings).We found that the three central resources in preindustrial agriculture were distributed unequally between the various farmsteads involved; labour was abundant, whereas food and land were scarce.The labour surplus extracted by the landlords caused subsistence pressure on most of the peasants, forcing them to use their modest resource base more efficiently,which in turn had effects on the local agroecology.
He also pointed out that people in subsistance economies tend to focus on minimizing the risk of starvation, rather than maximizing the risk of profit. It’s hard to bank food from year to year to benefit from increased productivity, but if you don’t produce enough for the present year, you can starve to death.
These factors combined might diminish the drive to invest in risky labor-saving and profit-increasing innovations like the threshing machine.
I showed this post to my brother (an avid amateur scholar of history and economics). He pointed out that pre-industrial agrarian societies had a labor surplus (not his source, just one I found hastily).
He also pointed out that people in subsistance economies tend to focus on minimizing the risk of starvation, rather than maximizing the risk of profit. It’s hard to bank food from year to year to benefit from increased productivity, but if you don’t produce enough for the present year, you can starve to death.
These factors combined might diminish the drive to invest in risky labor-saving and profit-increasing innovations like the threshing machine.