The genesis of the capitalist farmer: towards a Marxist accounting history of the origins of the English agricultural revolution

Abstract

The paper argues that accounting and other evidence supports Marx's theory that capitalist farmers drove an English ‘agricultural revolution’ that began in the sixteenth century but took hold from the late seventeenth century. Historians often say England had an agricultural revolution, but disagree over what it was, when it occurred, what caused it, and its consequences. Modern historians usually define it tautologically as ‘revolutionary’ increases in output and productivity. Early historians argued that a new ‘commercial’ or ‘capitalist’ mentality drove the revolution, and some modern historians stress the need for farmers to become ‘businessmen’, but no one precisely defines this mentality. The paper defines the capitalist mentality rigorously using Marx and accounting and outlines a testable history of the genesis of capitalist farmers, who should appear wherever farmers using wage labour participated in socialised capital. It argues that the historical evidence supports the prediction from Marx's theory that the geographical distribution of ship ownership in England should correlate with agricultural improvement. The paper argues that the published evidence on farmers’ accounts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries directly supports Marx's theory. It concludes that accounting historians can make a critical contribution to a major debate by testing the theory against the large archive of farmers’ accounts that survives.