The moral economy of the Shire

Here’s the intro:

There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and because I am the way that I am, every time I see it, it makes me start thinking. “Are there taxes in the Shire? If not, how does the government function? Are there worries? Does the lack of taxes relate to the lack of worries? How do people think a whole economic system built around drinking and pipe-smoking even works?” Luckily, I think there are answers to this. Tolkien does not describe the political economy of the Hobbits in any detail, because it’s rarely relevant to the story, but I think we can learn a lot about it from what he does mention. In Tolkien’s legendarium, the Shire is built out an idealized version of rural English society. By looking at how he depicts this–and what eventually happens to it–we can learn a lot about how these sorts of societies function and change over time, and what the benefits and drawbacks of living life Hobbit-style really are.

More:

This is a society organized around family and clan dynamics, where power flows not from the office, but from who you know, and the web of favors, debts, and relationships you can call upon. The Tooks are not powerful because they hold the Thainship, they hold the Thainship as a signifier of being “the first family” of the Shire, in terms of wealth and influence. The Mayor of Michel Delving’s main job is to preside over banquets because, in a political structure like this, those sort of social events are where everything is actually decided and established, in the subtle, informal relationships between the families who own everything. There’s no bureaucracy or administrative apparatus because there is no need for one. The Shire is not conducting war or diplomacy or trade, and isn’t administering large populations of subjects, and there would be no reason for the Oldbucks, Brandybucks, Tooks, etc to support the kind of centralization of state power that could challenge their informal reign.

From everything we’re told, the Shire is a very agriculturally productive region, which helps explain the lack of debt-peonage or other forms of unfree labor. It also explains the relative “looseness” of the system we’re looking at here; the gap between the lower gentry and upper yeomanry isn’t very large, and most families are able to support themselves with only minimal assistance.

The other term we need to know if we want to understand the Shire is “clientelism”, perhaps more commonly refereed to as “patron-client relationships”. This is a social-political structure that emerges organically in many different contexts, and consists of a set of mutual, hierarchical obligations between powerful “patrons” and a network of “clients” who depend on them, economically, socially, or politically. It seems likely, from what we see of the Shire, that clientelism is the main organizing force within Hobbit politics. This would be far from unusual, in this sort of system.

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The title of this post is taken from the 1976 book The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott, which I read in undergrad. The book analyzes a series of peasant insurrections in Indochina and Burma in the 1930s, and argues that their root causes was the disruption of traditional sociopolitical and cultural norms, the so-called “moral economy” by colonialism and market capitalism. Of key importance was his contention that the casus belli was not only, or even primarily, increased exploitation in a purely material sense, but the disruption to traditional patronage networks that had sustained them for generations. Peasant households should not be seen as small businesses, trying to maximize their annual profits, but as people trying to survive. A single failed harvest could mean death, and in this situation, the patronage networks were a vital social safety net. A peasant in this system gave most of his income to his landlord, without fail, but he could trust that in case of disaster, he would have some recourse.

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Lotho Sackville-Baggins was a member of the Shire’s gentry, and it seems a relatively powerful one. He made contact with Saruman–we’re never told how–and thus gained access to a source of capital outside the traditional Hobbit system via foreign trade, which allowed him to accumulate enough economic control to emerge as de facto ruler, bringing in foreign mercenaries to suppress local resistance and beat down his competitors. In Tolkien’s writing, Sauron and Saruman represent the forces of modernity, tearing down tradition and continuity, and this is just yet another example of that, the social order being corrupted by money and power, undermining the Way Things Should Be. It is no coincidence that the counter-revolution is led by Frodo, Pippin, and Merry–scions of some of the leading families of the gentry–or that Lotho’s main opposition came from that same establishment.

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So, what does this all mean? There is an unfortunate tendency for these sorts of essays to be framed as REVEALING THE SURPRISINGLY DARK HIDDEN REALITY OF THE SHIRE or whatever, which is not the point I’m trying to make. When I write about the economics and politics of fictional worlds, it is usually because we, consciously or otherwise, base much of our understanding of the real world off of our perceptions of them. I think Tolkien was very aware of the sort of society he was depicting in the Shire, and that he was describing an idealized, imaginary version of it that never quite worked as well as one would hope.