Lifecycle land decumulation strategies in a seventeenth‐century rural community
利用荷兰南部一个村庄的年度土地记录，研究发现尽管土地市场活跃，但土地分配总体稳定，并提出了前工业时代土地“减持”的概念。
Abstract Economic historians have tried to better understand how and why land was redistributed in rural communities, although our empirical insights have been limited by a lack of serial evidence for land distribution within the same locality across a long period. This article exploits the unusual survival of Veldboeken (field books), which allow a careful annual reconstruction of land distribution within an unremarkable seventeenth‐century village in the south of the modern‐day Netherlands. We show that, despite high levels of dynamism in the local land markets, including high and changing levels of leasehold, varying and flexible tenancies, and frequent transfers of land between parties, the overall aggregate distribution of land did not change very much over time. Employing a systematic lifecycle analysis of active land‐market participants, we advance a broader concept of pre‐industrial ‘decumulation’ – where landowners and land users used adaptive mechanisms within the land market to not just consolidate land but also work out ways of getting rid of it and achieve optimal (and often smaller) farms and estates. Accordingly, we do not find any social logic or natural tendency towards accumulation, consolidation, and greater inequality.