Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist Agronomy: the Case of Brescia

Abstract

This article analyses the process of primitive accumulation in the Brescia region (Venetian Lombardy) from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, examining its relationship with the emergence of capitalist agronomy. The study aims to show how a massive transfer of landed property from non-citizen to citizen proprietors of Brescia created the social and economic conditions for a capitalist agriculture based on wage labour.
The analysis draws on archival sources including the Catastico brescian of Da Lezze (1609-1610), the reports of Cattanio (1623), documents from the State Archives of Brescia and Venice, and the agronomic treatise by Agostino Gallo, Le vinti giornate dell'agricola (Brescia, 1567), a key source for understanding the new capitalist organization of agricultural enterprise.
The author demonstrates that the principal mechanism of peasant expropriation was the Venetian fiscal system: the fiscal separation between city and territory in 1440 exempted citizens from charges on their territorial landholdings, transferring the full tax burden onto non-citizen possessors who were forced to sell their land. This cumulative process led first to the spread of sharecropping and then to its replacement by direct exploitation at the proprietor's own expense (biolcheria), involving the centralization of means of production, division of labour, and agricultural wage labour.
The agronomic thought of Gallo illustrates the ideology of this transformation. The productive results were considerable - flax, cheese, silk, and cereals fed distant markets - but despite these favourable conditions the region failed to generate genuine capitalist development, a problem the author poses in conclusion as an open research question.