Commerce Forms the Environment

Class 2: Commerce Forms the Inter-regional and Intra-regional Division of Labor

Reading: Pirenne, Polanyi

Film: The Wilderness Idea

Class 3: Historical Perspective

Reading: End history. Overview of 3 main books; start Daly

Internet:

Assignment: Discussion of term paper

Pirenne: The Middle Class & The Ecology of Freedom

Civilization does not exist anywhere without commerce and industry. Another way of looking at this is to realize that commerce creates a spatial division of labor, thus shapes the human environment. The end results were spectacular improvements in the human condition.

The revival of trade in the 12th century created the city, political autonomy from the restrictive feudal order, and municipal institutions of local self-government. Merchants were the authors of this succession to feudal, soil-based culture. The results were a new relationship between the natural world and the social world.  It was a Revolution.

The city and the country enjoy a symbiosis, mutually benefiting each other through chains of import (food) and export (goods). This symbiosis evolved from Medieval fairs, thus reviving trade over longer distances, allowing more spatial division of labor and higher standards of living. All this was done with these consequences:

• Opportunity for a surplus of agriculture brought to cities, increasing intensity of cultivation, raising land values and improving standard of living of the increasing rural population.
• The division of labor of the manor was superseded
• The increase in the carrying capacity of cities: "Stadt Luft macht frei!" A new social form came into being, providing freedom, civic culture, and growing prosperity.
• Commercial suburbs pressed outside the gates of the towns.
• Manufacturing yet used water or animal and human power. Scale and power sources were within human proportions.
• Towns need walls for security, a commercial legal code, wharves, warehouses, roads, water supply, sanitation and waste disposal, churches, hospitals. The physical and institutional infrastructure became the function of the new burghers. Quote pp 152-3.

The emerging human environment intertwined city life and rural culture. The city dwellers, predominantly merchants finding a "free space" within Medieval hierarchy, represented a high level of civic culture. The towns, chartered as free islands in the feudal sea, prospered, spread, grew, and intertwined a very modern world of agriculture, suburbs, and long distance trade.

©Wayne Hayes, Ph.D.:ProfWork®
Business and the Environment, Summer, 1999
whayes@orion.ramapo.edu
June 02, 1999 04:11:09 PM