Taxation-driven manure scarcity trapped French peasants in soil exhaustion cycles

Evidence

In France, despite a strong peasantry that maintained its rights to small landholdings, the state extracted surplus value in the form of taxes, thereby making adequate manuring of the land impossible. With population growth and increased demand for grain, land devoted to the pasturing of animals was cut back. Lack of manure again led to cultivation of poorer soils and further depletion of pasture, which in turn reinforced the scarcity of animals and lack of manure. The seventeenth century was a period of zero population growth in rural areas, marked by large numbers of famines. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 275

Categorization

• DEFINE: A concrete instance of a self-reinforcing feedback loop — a definitional example of ecological degradation driven by surplus extraction rather than self-interest.
• XREF: connects to: Waste-siting creates a self-reinforcing land-value deprivation cycle — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 360; Landlord surplus extraction stripped peasants’ means to manure, exhausting soils — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 267; Even renewable resources face depletion when consumption outpaces replenishment — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2925 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Exploitative agrarian structures can persist after their original causes vanish #expands (0.80) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1609
• Even renewable resources face depletion when consumption outpaces replenishment #qualifies (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2925
• Scarcity-induced domestic controls spawn further stagnation and graft in revolutions #corroborates (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 133