Agricultural Perils and Prosperity

Rising populations created increased demand for food and spurred changes in the countryside, too. Although agricultural yields increased by 30 to 50 percent in the first half of the nineteenth century, population grew by nearly 100 percent. Railroads and canals improved food distribution, but much of Europe—particularly in the east—remained isolated from markets and vulnerable to famines.

Most people still lived on the land, and the upper classes still dominated rural society. In France at midcentury, almost two million economically independent peasants tended their own small properties. But in England, southern Italy, Prussia, and eastern Europe, large landowners, usually noblemen, consolidated and expanded their estates by buying up the land of less successful nobles or peasants. As agricultural prices rose, the big landowners pushed for legislation to allow them to continue converting common land to private property.

Wringing a living from the soil under such conditions put pressure on traditional family life. Men often migrated seasonally to earn cash in factories or as village artisans, while their wives, sisters, and daughters did the traditional “men’s work” of tending crops. In the past, population growth had been contained by postponing marriage (leaving fewer years for childbearing) and by high rates of death in childbirth as well as infant mortality. Now, as child mortality declined outside the industrial cities and people without property began marrying earlier, Europeans became more aware of birth control methods. The vulcanization of rubber in the 1840s improved the reliability of condoms. When such methods failed and population increase left no options open at home, people emigrated, often to the United States. Between 1816 and 1850, five million Europeans left their home countries for new lives overseas. When France colonized Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, officials tried to attract settlers by emphasizing the fertility of the land; they offered the prospect of agricultural prosperity in the colony as an alternative to the rigors of industrialization and urbanization at home.

Rural political power remained in the hands of traditional elites. The biggest property owners controlled the political assemblies and often personally selected local officials. Nowhere did the old rural social order seem more impregnable than in Russia. Most Russian serfs remained tied to the land, and troops easily suppressed serfs’ uprisings in 1831 and 1842. Yet in the 1850s railroad construction would begin to transform life in Russia, too, and the railroads would bring with them the same social problems—urbanization, the beginning of industrialization, and a growing awareness of social disparities—that threatened the social and political order in western Europe in the 1830s and 1840s. These new social problems demanded a response. But would that response be reform or revolution?