Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450-1815 (review)

The invention of economics, ‘queen of the social sciences’, is usually credited to an eighteenth-century Scotsman. As an academic discipline it has barely been around for a century. And it only started having a serious influence on western government policy after the First World War. Economics is the child of our times.

So it is not surprising that many historians are wary of applying its mathematics and theoretical models to earlier ages. Since its birth, however, there have always been those who have claimed that the logic of economics is universal; that economics was less an invention than the discovery of how human beings, in their material environment, have behaved over the centuries. Peter T. Hoffman is one of these universalists. “It is certainly possible to apply economics to traditional societies,” he proclaims without reserve.

If a prize were offered for poetry told in numbers it should go to Peter Hoffman. His management of statistics and his inventiveness in assessing French rural behavior in the early modern era are fascinating. He calculates seventeenth-century crop yields, for instance, by drawing regressions on a Norman seigneurial grain levy. He gauges the effect of Paris’s population growth on agricultural innovation through the decline, over two centuries, in standard deviations of local growth rates in the Paris Basin—for growth rates should “close in on one another, as weaker tenant farmers were replaced by dissatisfied landlords.” All the while, Hoffman assures us that his main text is “accessible to those who have no quantitative training and no knowledge of economics”. By and large, this is true. For those who insist on taking the dip, Hoffman has nonetheless preserved over sixty pages of appendices made up of graphs, algebraic formulas, and regressions with dependent and dummy variables—and the probe of the t-statistic.

The whole book is built around a single formula for estimating growth, ‘Total Factor Productivity’. TFP was invented in the early 1990s by the cliometricians Donald McCloskey and Robert Allen. Applied to 22 different localities in France, and three regions in England and Germany, “it paints,” Hoffman tells us, “the clearest picture ever available of the potential for growth in the Old Regime countryside.” With his series established, he attempts to identify regions and periods which witnessed growth, and also determine “what caused their good fortune and what spared them from stagnation.”

Is it all mathematical fantasy? There are moments when the reader may quiver a little, as when Hoffman decides to base his estimates of factor and product shares in the whole of the Paris Basin—the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries inclusive—on a rare account book discovered on a farm 150 kilometers north of Paris for the year 1765. Now, TFP is based on a ratio of land, labor and capital prices to their costs, weighted by these estimated shares; so one could expect a miscalculation here to be serious. But actually it is not: Hoffman’s statistical tests are most convincing.

Behind the numbers lies the $64,000 question, economic growth. It is, admits Hoffman, a “perplexing mystery”, indeed the “great enigma of history”. Despite—and in many ways because of—all the literature on the subject we have succeeded in creating enormous barriers to our understanding. Hoffman lays the main responsibility on historians who, as I mentioned, are so wary of economics. Particularly guilty are the historians of France, who have developed a kind of ‘consensus’ that divides the country’s past into two periods, traditional and modern. In the first of these—extending to the Enlightenment and beyond—it is usually argued that there was no growth, that the rural economy stagnated: one recognizes immediately the famous vision of a société immobile, so castigated by American Marxists. But the Marxists themselves, contends Hoffman, have been drawn into the consensus by splitting French history into their own traditional and modern periods, ‘feudal’ and ‘capitalist’. Our confusion over economic growth, thinks Hoffman...