The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (review)

Landers has ventured out of his narrow field of demographic history to write an eccentric book, in which he weaves together themes from demographic, military, and technological history. Almost everyone is likely to learn something from reading this rich and detailed book, since few readers are likely to have expertise in all of the fields throughout the long period that Landers studies. The work covers a huge amount of material, many centuries, many topics, and all of the European continent. It makes for fascinating, if somewhat disjointed reading.

The book deals with some important issues for those who feel that institutional change was at the center of economic change in the development of Europe. The economy's performance largely depended on the rules that determined the relations between economic agents, including rulers. But rulers were also constrained, by the capabilities of their military power and that of their rivals, and military power was determined by the parameters of technology and organization in pre-1750 economies. Armies were limited by their sphere of operation; by their need to feed and supply themselves; by their ability to control their own soldiers, the local population, and resources, as well as deal with fortifications, towns, and natural obstacles; and—often most importantly—their ability to avoid infectious disease. These interactions tell an absorbing story. The way Landers chooses to tell it is to hop freely over the entire continent and 2,000 years, plucking his examples more or less at will from anything between the Peloponnesian and the Napoleonic wars. This unsystematic use of examples illustrates many points, but questions about how typical the examples chosen are and how frequently the events described occurred are left unanswered.

Much of the new institutional-historical economics is concerned with the strength of the state. Landers points out that the control that the government exerted on the economy was limited by the degree of its monopoly on violence in its area, as well as the efficiency of the "production function of violence." Landers emphasizes the importance of geography and topography in determining outcomes. The analysis of their combination with military capabilities (technology and resources) produces many useful insights about Europe's development. It is a shame, therefore, that Landers does not refer to the new literature on institutions, such as the work of Greif or Epstein, since the rise of institutions that make economic growth possible was clearly constrained by military power, which depended on economic potential and technology.¹ Yet, the width of his research is such that it seems petty to fault him for not addressing one more body of work.

The book is particularly useful in explaining the geographical background of European political fragmentation, often cited as a crucial causal factor in the competitive state system that was allegedly a key factor in Europe's institutional, and eventually economic, transformations. Landers notes the difficulties of military supply, organization, transport, communications, and political control in an age when violence was limited by technology and resources, the ubiquity of local as opposed to centralized control, and the vagueness and permeability of boundaries. Sovereignty was always and everywhere ambiguous and contestable, often overlapping, and it pertained to people and resources that correlated with—but were not identical to—spatial units.

The central theme around which the book is organized is Wrigley's idea of the pre-1750 world as an "organic economy" (that depended on vegetables and animals for its energy and raw materials as a base), as opposed to the "mineral economy" that emerged during the Industrial Revolution.² The parameters of pre-1750 war, Landers argues, much like the parameters of population and production, were set by the dependence of the military on the land and what it produced. The practical exercise of political power was constrained by the parameters of this organic economy.

This reviewer has never found this distinction all that...