Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 2 (2014), p. 362

Reading Waddell’s incisive, incessantly questioning, and extremely impressive work, I kept finding sections, particularly in chapters 1 and 4, that I wished to set for undergraduates. At the same time, I wondered what they would make of them. At their best, modern history undergraduates are supremely goal-oriented readers, stripping through swathes of literature at lightning speed with a locust-like appetite for synthesis. Their objective is to identify and typify arguments, and (ideally) to formulate a synthesis that will encapsulate a subject, and answer the question. Brodie Waddell’s self-consciously disruptive tome may therefore come as something of a shock.

A large number of sacred cows were harmed in the writing of this book. Waddell has no truck with much of the received ancestral wisdom that British social history has passed down the generations since the early twentieth century. Out goes Weber’s Protestant Ethic (‘neither the world… nor Protestantism were particularly “capitalist” well into the eighteenth century’, p. 80, n. 215). Out goes E. P. Thompson’s distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘market economy’ (because repeatedly it becomes reduced in practice ‘to a superstructural façade supported by the “real” economy’, p. 12). Out goes a ‘declension’ narrative that began with Tawney, which construes the economic and social history of early modern England as ‘the process of economic “modernisation” – essentially the shift from a “moral economy” to an “amoral economy”’ (p. 18), from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft via ‘the World We Have Lost’.

In its place, Waddell introduces a new, non-linear narrative. At its heart is the idea that economic life and thought in early modern England was always governed by moral ideals, primarily those of English Protestantism. This was not a moral framework which either endorsed unrestrained accumulation, or (pace Weber) encouraged it inadvertently by the desire to seek material assurances of God’s favour. Rather, it was and remained, a creed that was highly judgemental in matters economic, that placed social responsibilities to the poor above untrammelled individual acquisition, that sanctioned ‘direct action’ by the poor in times of dearth, that remained uncomfortable with usury, that continued to threaten the miser and the covetous with the pains of hell, and regarded ‘contract’ as inferior to the social bonds of patriarchal authority, lordship and reciprocity. He emphasizes the ways in which the widespread social acceptance of these values ensured that the poor could invoke them effectively to secure redress. This was not by knowing Scott-ian manipulation of the ‘public transcript’, or self-conscious acts of Thompson-ian patrician ‘hegemony’. Rather, it was because the dictates of conscience combined with entrenched notions of paternalism, stewardship and patronage, to form a relatively uncontested (and perhaps unconsidered) habitus understanding of the moral imperatives of economic relations.

Waddell’s source material is primarily, but not exclusively, the stuff of more ‘cultural-history’ approaches (sermons, ballads, chapbooks), focusing on the discursive content and boundaries of such values. However, he takes pains also to investigate lived experiences and practices through a wide range of other source material, including corporation records, guild books, personal memoranda, equity cases and parish vestry sources. There is scope for his argument to be pursued through a fuller and further-reaching exploration of these latter materials, and this is likely to form the basis of his next project.

Since this book was published, Andy Wood has produced his most recent monograph, The memory of the people. Custom and popular senses of the past in early modern England (Cambridge U. P., 2013). While the perplexed undergraduate mind might rebel at the prospect, it is worthwhile reading both works together. Wood’s highly nuanced analysis of an all-encompassing popular understanding of ‘customary’ ways of governing, sharing, conserving, exploiting and apportioning resources, communal and individual assets and entitlements tends to fall within the ‘declension’ narrative criticized by Waddell. However, it also emphasizes a conceptual point that would strengthen Waddell’s discussion of household duties and communal bonds in chapters 2 and 3. This is Wood’s demonstration that profound social conflict can occur within a single discursive field – so that landlords and tenants might both agree implicitly on the importance of limiting exclusive rights to private property by allowing the poor to glean corn, and might express this through a shared common moral language, but might fight bitterly over its precise practical implications. This is not merely the revival of a hoary reductionist, materialist objection to taking expressed values seriously. Rather, it suggests that contests over genuinely shared meanings and values are just as powerful as the cleavages of base and superstructure so beloved of earlier generations of social historians. It also implies that Waddell is correct to argue that we should not expect such contests to resolve themselves in any neat teleology of the ‘rise of capitalism’ or the ‘decline of neighbourliness’, either.

So, this is a book to confound the undergraduate desire for a linear narrative, an either/or argument, and a neat and tidy concluding paragraph. I hope that it also a work that causes some conceptual reconfigurations within English social history. The last person really to attempt the task was Alan Macfarlane in 1978, with The origins of English Individualism. Ultimately, Macfarlane’s book was better at challenging the sufficiency of existing grand narratives of modernization and capitalist development, than in convincing practitioners that individualism began with the sources of English local history, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In effect, Waddell is trying to argue the reverse, that English Individualism never superseded morally bounded economic discourses until the advent of utilitarian principles around 1800, and that it never swept all other challengers from the field. Historians, whether in embryo as undergraduates, or as fully fledged practitioners, still remain change-seeking animals, who sometimes overlook arguments that push against this reflex. This is much too good a book to deserve such a fate.