1. PSIR205
Week 2

2. Society and Economy Under the Old Regime in the Eighteenth Century
Pre-revolutionary Europe
1) aristocratic elites
2) established churches
3) urban labour force and guilds
4) a rural peasantry
Major features of life in the old regime
Maintenance of tradition: Nobles and peasants did not want change
Nobles: ancient rights vis-à-vis monarchs
Peasants: customary manorial rights to have access to particular lands, courts, or grievance procedures
Hierarchy and privilege:
Corporate nature of social relationships
Communities: not existence of individual rights
Community: village, the municipality, the nobility, the church, the guild, a university, etc.

3. The Aristocracy Varieties of Aristocratic Privilege
British nobility:
four hundred families
eldest male members sat in the House of Lords
Nobles invested in commerce, canals, urban real estate, mines
French Nobility:
nobles (of the sword and of the robe)
Some nobles sat in Versailles (the famous royal court of the French monarchy)
Nobles were exempted from some taxes: taille (land tax), vingtieme (twentieth of income), and corvee forced labour on public work
Nobles could collect feudal dues and had hunting and fishing privileges
East European Nobility:
Poland: Szlachta totally exempt from taxes after 1741
Austria and Hungary: The nobility enjoyed judicial powers over the peasantry
Prussia: the position of Junker nobles became stronger; they established the bureaucracy
Russia: Peter the Great created a noble class
Aristocratic resurgence
1) all nobilities intended to make it more difficult to become a noble
2) They strived to keep important positions in the state: officer corps in the army; the senior posts in the bureaucracies; and uppers ranks of the church
3) the nobles tried to use aristocratically controlled institutions against the power of the monarchies
4) the nobility attempted to improve its financial position by acquiring exemptions from taxation or by collecting higher rents from the peasantry

4. The land and its tillers
Land was the economic basis and the foundation of the status and power of the nobility
Peasants and serfs:
Free peasants (English and French) and serf-like peasants (Germany, Austria, and Russia)
Burden of taxation fell on the tillers
Obligation of Peasants:
France: Feudal dues: use-for-payment, corvee
Austria, Prussia: robot (serfs to provide to the lords)
Russia: serfs were economic commodities; six days a week of labour (barschina)
Southeastern Europe: landlord was often an absentee; landlords protected peasant from bandits
Peasant rebellions: Pugachev’s rebellion and others. Rebels were against property rather than persons: they sought reinstating traditional rights and practices; they were against unfair pricing; heavy feudal dues, brutal landlords and overseers, unjust officials
Aristocratic domination of the countryside: The English Game Laws

5. Family structures and the family economy
Households:
Northwestern Europe: married couple, their children, and their servants; nuclear family-like. Children left home in their teen period to work as a servant in other families
Eastern Europe: large families; in Russian families wives were older
The family economy: the household was the basic unit of production and consumption; everyone in the household worked (no idleness)
Women and the family economy: the function of her capacity to establish and maintain a household; marriage was economic necessity; housework for women already started by the age of seven; saving money fro dowry
Children and the world of the family economy: contagious diseases and childbirth affected child mortality; wet nursing was common in urban areas; the idea of preserving the life of abandoned children developed during the late seventeenth century (Paris Foundling Hospital, London Foundling Hospital); interest in educating children emerged

6. The Revolution in Agriculture
New Crops and New Methods:
Dutch landlords and farmers devised better ways to build dikes and to drain land
New crops: clover; turnip
Using iron pillows to turn the earth
Crop rotation
More animals more food, as animals supplied fodder for the soil
Enclosure replaces open-field method: fencing of common land, which nobles owned but rented to the farmers
Enclosure created the entrepreneurial attitude
Limited Improvements in Eastern Europe: Only method to increase production was to bring untilled land under pillow
Expansion of the Population: Increased population required more food production.

7. Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century
A revolution in consumption
Industrial leadership of Great Britain
New Methods of textile production
The impact of the agricultural and industrial revolutions on working women

8. The growth of cities Patterns of preindustrial urbanization
Urban classes
The urban riot
Jewish population and the age of the ghetto