Screen LibraryThe transition to capitalism in modern France : primitive accumulation and markets from the old regime to the post-WWII era /
"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 e...
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| Published: |
Routledge,
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| Publisher Address: | Abingdon, Oxon : |
| Publication Dates: | 2024. |
| Literature type: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Series: |
Routledge studies in the modern history of France
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| Summary: |
"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 non-capitalist social relations. Specifically, peasants and artisans controlled the 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. These distinctive features of capitalism, primitive accumulation (the dispossession of peasants and artisans) and the competitive obligation faced by merchants and manufacturers to reinvest profits in order to keep the profits, did not prevail until the state imposed them in a process lasting for a century after the 1850s. For this reason, it was not until the 1960s that France caught up to (and in some cases surpassed) its economic rivals"-- |
| Carrier Form: | 229 pages ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages [197]-221) and index. |
| ISBN: |
9780367553005 0367553007 |
| Index Number: | HB501 |
| CLC: | F156.5 |
| Call Number: | F156.5/L169 |
| Contents: | French agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: growth without development -- Industrialization from the old regime to the post-revolutionary era: non capitalist opportunity-driven growth -- The first transition to industrial capitalism from the 1850 to the 1920s: imposing competitive imperatives -- The agricultural revolution of the fifth republic after the end of the 1950s -- Slow growth, relapse, and flourishing capitalist industrialization from the interwar period to the 1970s. |