Page:The Evolution of Modern Capitalism.djvu/34

14 THE EVOLUTION OF

about 11,000,000. In Spain the population showed an extraordinary decline during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The English population estimated at nearly 2,000,000 at the time of Doomsday, seems to have grown very slightly for three centuries, reaching not more than two and a half millions by 1377, in the last year of Edward III. During the following two centuries and a quarter the pace of growth was more rapid, for at the end of Elizabeth’s reign it is estimated at some 5,000,000. From this time the rate of growth again declined, and 6,000,c00 was not attained until nearly the middle of the eighteenth century.

Mere growth of population, however, in lands, large parts of which were uncultivated or poorly cultivated, does not in itself explain the formation of a proletariat. As we traced the beginnings of “capital” to the accumulated ground- rents, so we must trace the beginnings of a mobile wage- earning class to agricultural and industrial changes which detached large numbers of the rural population from their earlier status as small owners or holders of land, or as labourers with some stake in the profits of the farm they helped to work. Agricultural reforms, involving more pro- ductive utilisation of land and better business methods, were the chief instruments of change. In Great Britain and upon the Continent the primitive agriculture of feudal.

1 Mr. Cunningham gives the following selected estimates of the population of England and Wales from 1688 onwards (Growth of cases Mee ‘vol. iii, Pp. 935):—

1688 .. 5,500,520 G. King, in Davenant Works, vol, ii. p. 184. LOO Mra st m5 5/4.7/55000 1710 ... 5,240,000 T7205 505,000

1730 .. 5,796,000

1740... 6,064,000 Statistical Journal, vol. xliii. p. 462.

1750 ... 6,467,000 1760 ... 6,736,000 1770 .. 7,428,000 1780... 7,928,000 L700 Fai.) 9507/5,000)) 180r ... 8;892,536 LOULe gs LON 04,226 a a Aes Accounts and Papers, 1852-53, xxxv.-xxxtii, TSATs sly, OLA, 140

LOS Lessa t7,027,009