Divisions of labour: agricultural productivity and occupational specialization in pre-industrial France
Economic historians frequently employ estimates of the share of the active population engaged in agricultural work as a statistical indicator of economic progress. They presume that in the past increases in per caput income were always associated with the displacement of labour from food production to manufacturing and the provision of services. The logic of this assumption is that in a closed economy the only way labour can be reallocated from the production of foodstuffs to that of other commodities is through a rise in agricultural labour productivity. This connection is considered to be so strictly monotonic that students of early modern and early industrial Europe have inferred the productivity of agricultural labour from estimated trends in the share of the population occupied in farming.2 This leads to the striking discovery that agricultural labour productivity in northern Europe rose steadily between the seventeenth century and the early nineteenth, which is apparently difficult to reconcile with rising food prices and falling real wages, suggesting strongly diminishing returns to agricultural labour and growing stress on the food supply in the face of accelerating population growth in the later eighteenth century.3 The apparent displacement of labour from agriculture to industry between i6oo and i8oo is even more paradoxical, bearing in mind that mechanization of agricultural operations on a massive scale was delayed until after i840, and that the agricultural innovations of the early modern period tended to be labour using rather than labour saving.4 International comparative advantage provides a possible resolution of the paradox and may in part explain the British case after I780.' But the redeployment of the labour force in non-agricultural activity before i850