(Re)production
In the seventeenth century reproduction was not relegated entirely to the realm of nature. Aristotle set the classical precedent for analyzing families in economic terms. His first piece of advice to men who wanted to prosper was to acquire slaves.
His second was to capture the economic benefits of raising children. He described an implicit contract between the generations:Nor do mankind beget children merely to pay the Service they owe to Nature, but also that they may themselves receive a benefit; for the toil they undergo while they are strong and their offspring weak is repaid by that offspring when it in turn is grown strong and the parents by reason of age are weak.44
Children were valuable to nations as well as families as future farmers, taxpayers, and army conscripts. In 1669, French Minister of Finance Colbert explicitly invoked the patriarchal power of the state, outlawing emigration on the grounds that anyone born in France assumed a lifelong obligation to remain there.45 In the 1680s, Sir Josiah Child pronounced that the riches of cities and nations consisted in the ‘‘multitude of their Inhabitants” and that emigration would, therefore, impoverish the Kingdom.46
The English mercantilists believed that the country should export as much as possible and minimize its overseas purchases. They insisted that population growth could become a fountain of income, as well as of sol- diers.47 Gregory King bragged that England was ‘‘better peopled” than Europe in general.48 Sir William Petty observed that families nurtured the homunculus of capitalism: ‘‘Hands being the Father, as Lands are the Mother and Womb of Wealth.’’49 Petty considered human beings themselves a store of wealth. His calculations of the value of the English people emphasized losses incurred when they were killed, mutilated, or imprisoned, or subjected to epidemics such as the Plague.50
Petty assumed that all family members other than young children were productive (he cited specific evidence that the children of Norwich between the ages of six and sixteen produced considerably more than they consumed).51 He tallied married women alongside their husbands as coworkers: ‘‘For the tillage of 500,000 Acres of land for Corn, Men and their Wives, 100,000...
Taylors and their Wives, 45,000, Millers and their Wives, 1,600, and so on.’’52 Likewise, Gregory King, tallying the British labor force a few years later, counted married women. In his view, the only persons who decreased rather than increased the wealth of the nation were seamen, soldiers, paupers, and personal servants.53Such implicit definitions of productive labor provided a rationale for greater public assistance to the needy. An anonymous eighteenth century tract urged that, ‘‘every poor man that has a numerous family be looked on as a great benefactor to his country; and all that have more children than they can comfortably maintain, be allowed sufficient to assist them.’’54 But positive valuations of childrearing would soon fall out of fashion, along with other aspects of mercantilist theory. The vigorous expansion of the market economy, combined with declines in mortality, shifted attention from human labor to financial capital as a factor of production. Trade itself came to be seen as the driving force of capitalist development, even if it led to deficits, loss of gold, or fertility decline.