Name: Commerce, Agriculture, and Slavery: Crash Course European History #8
Uploaded: 2022-06-03T02:28:49.000Z
Duration: 15 min 34 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

So, last time, we were focusing on queens and kings and rivalries.Today we're gonna

程度の副詞

take a break from struggles over religion and political disputes that made for so much

violence and look instead at some basics of everyday life--the foods people ate centuries

ago, the kinds of things people bought and sold, and changes in the kinds of lives people

I know developments in agriculture and commerce may seem like sidelines to the main political

show—I mean, there's a reason it's called Game of Thrones and not like, Game of Slightly

Improved Seed Quality--but I'd argue that history is about how people lived, and what

And if you think about our lives today, our leaders are important.

But as Miroslav Volf said, Politics touches everything, but politics isn't everything.

On a day-to-day basis, our lives are also shaped by the kinds of goods and services

available to us, and our professional and personal opportunities.

Whether you go to school, whether you get enough to eat, the kinds of freedom you do

and do not enjoy... those are the big questions we're exploring today.

INTRO The citizens of many European nations today

have long life expectancies, and a top standard of living.

Europe also comprises the largest developed economic market place and a major region of

In the early fourteenth century a major famine erupted, with further famines across the centuries.

Trade was local and regulated by guilds—that is, by organizations of individual artisans

and traders that determined the number and type of goods that could be produced and marketed.

In the late middle ages Europe was a subsistence economy, with little if any agricultural surplus.

If princes could satisfy their appetite for food and drink on a regular and reliable basis,

they were virtually alone in experiencing a consistently happy and full stomach.

In 1500, Europe was not exceptional in life expectancy or in many other measures of well-being.

But in the early modern period, roughly between 1500 and 1750 the situation gradually improved,.

And I know that seems impossible, given all the religious strife, and wars, and massacres

But during this period, population actually rose;

In Britain, for instance, the population almost doubled between 1700 and 1800.

Historians attribute this rise to developments in agriculture, sometimes called an agricultural

revolution that unfolded alongside all that warfare.

And there was also a growth in commerce, often called a commercial revolution, and of course,

the Columbian exchange, which made new nutritious foods--from potatoes to corn--available to

But the agricultural revolution was also driven by innovation that dramatically boosted agricultural

For starters, it was discovered that planting certain crops, like turnip and clover, could

replenish soil, which was one example of crop rotation--farmers would plant one crop in

a field one year, and then another the next year, rotating 2 or at times three crops to

add nutrients to the soil. and the great thing about crop rotation is

that it decreased the amount of farmland that needed to remain fallow each year--that is,

Secondly, with the Dutch pioneering some advances, land reclamation occurred across Europe.

This entailed converting marshes and other previously unusable land into farmland.

Enclosure occurred when wealthier farmers bought up or simply took common land (land

Private farms were able to innovate faster than communities,

which required consensus in group decision-making.

And fourth, there were new inventions such as the seed drill and a plow that could be

drawn by two instead of six or eight farm animals.

The new plow cut down on expenses and the seed drill made planting more accurate with

Both of these new tools, by the way, copied Chinese inventions.

But while enclosure and more mechanized farming practices did mean more overall food, and

therefore more overall wealth, not everyone benefited, because a decrease in common land

meant that fewer people had direct access to land for their own use.

So one example of all these innovations can be seen in the life of [[TV: Elizabeth of

Sutherland]] Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, who inherited some 800,000 acres in Scotland.

Was there some kind of hair fish trend at the time?

Let's move on from lighthearted hair fish jokes and talk about people being wrested

from their land.So, Elizabeth removed hundreds of tenants from her estate, then created unified

acreage for farming and raising sheep with the help of day laborers.

These landless workers were cheaper, and also unlike the tenant farmers who had lived on

the land previously, day laborers did not have longstanding claims to inhabit and work

The Countess was known for chasing villagers away from their land with her own hands, and

also for innovations that increased productivity even as Sutherland's former tenants became

So more overall food, but on land controlled by fewer people.

So obviously, this Agricultural Revolution entailed massive social dislocation that included

the rise of poverty, migration of disenfranchised farmworkers to cities and also to other continents,

and even as overall agricultural production rose, some among the poor starved.

And this period of European history is still widely debated in part because ideas of private

property and inequality of wealth remain resonant today, but whether this modernization helped

or hurt humanity again depends on your perspective.

To many, it meant trauma and impoverishment as people were removed from lands their families

But these changes also helped fuel greater overall food production, population growth,

larger cities, and more space for all kinds of specialized labor, from shoemaking to theater.

I mean, it's no coincidence that Shakespeare and Marlowe were writing as English agricultural

Another ingredient in the rising population and overall output of food was the inflow

of novel plants from the Americas and other parts of the world.

Potatoes and maize, for example, were grown on the marginal land that was previously seen

Farmers started experimenting with all the new crops, but especially with maize and potatoes

that could produce super-abundant...did the world just open?