The Transition to Capitalism in Modern France
Xavier Lafrance, "The Transition to Capitalism in Modern France "
English | ISBN: 0367553007 | 2023 | 236 pages | EPUB | 1089 KB
English | ISBN: 0367553007 | 2023 | 236 pages | EPUB | 1089 KB
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 noncapitalist social relations. Specifically, peasants and artisans controlled 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.
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