UID:
almahu_9949598809202882
Format:
1 online resource (229 pages).
ISBN:
9781003092896
,
1003092896
,
9781000990645
,
1000990648
,
9781000990638
,
100099063X
Series Statement:
Routledge studies in the modern history of France
Content:
"Historians, since the 1960s, argue that the French economy performed as well as did any economy in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to the opportunities for profit available on the market, especially the large consumer market in Paris. Whatever economic weaknesses existed did not stem from the social structure but from exogenous forces such as wars, the lack of natural resources, or slow demographic growth. This book challenges the foregoing consensus by showing that the French economy performed poorly relative to its rivals because of non-capitalist social relations. Specifically, peasants and artisans controlled the lands and workshops in autonomous communities and did not have to improve labor productivity to survive. Merchants and manufacturers cornered markets instead of being subject to the market's competitive imperatives. These distinctive features of capitalism, primitive accumulation (the dispossession of peasants and artisans) and the competitive obligation faced by merchants and manufacturers to reinvest profits in order to keep the profits, did not prevail until the state imposed them in a process lasting for a century after the 1850s. For this reason, it was not until the 1960s that France caught up to (and in some cases surpassed) its economic rivals"--
Note:
French agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: growth without development -- Industrialization from the old regime to the post-revolutionary era: non capitalist opportunity-driven growth -- The first transition to industrial capitalism from the 1850 to the 1920s: imposing competitive imperatives -- The agricultural revolution of the fifth republic after the end of the 1950s -- Slow growth, relapse, and flourishing capitalist industrialization from the interwar period to the 1970s.
Additional Edition:
Print version: Lafrance, Xavier. Transition to capitalism in modern France Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024 ISBN 9780367553005
Language:
English
DOI:
10.4324/9781003092896
URL:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003092896
