In your economic development plans, you mention multiple infrastructural, technical and financial reforms to farming. However a issue that seems to have gone largely unmentioned is the process of Land Reform. Unreformed land practices mean you can’t easily or quickly implement new innovations, due to the land being fragmented or held in common. So it seems a Enclosure or something similar should be a major part of any plan. But of course they come with some nasty social issues to address.
As for the question of land reform:
- To start with, we don’t really know how land is distributed in Westeros. There doesn’t seem to be any textual evidence for common land being a thing, but that doesn’t mean it does or doesn’t exist. Likewise, there isn’t a very clear description of hierarchies of land tenure among the peasantry.
- I would take exception to the argument that land being evenly distributed or held in common would necessarily prevent innovations in agriculture. Rather, it would simply require different forms of social coordination – a lot of medieval agriculture was coordinated through manorial courts, for example.
As for the guilds:
- That certainly is the picture of guilds that we get from Adam Smith et al., but whether that’s the whole story is another question. The guilds, as I have written, primarily existed to ensure a balance between labor supply and labor demand that would allow for their members to earn a living wage. Whether that’s viewed as stifling trade depends on one’s position vis-a-vis labor supply and labor demand: it’s certainly to the advantage of the merchant that there be as many weavers as possible, but that’s not to the advantage of the weavers, if they’re underemployed and poorly paid as a result.
- Indeed, when it comes to the long-run of economic development, I don’t think you get the critical mass of skilled workers, especially skilled workers with capital, one needs to kick off a commercial and later industrial revolution without a guild system to train and protect them, especially in the fledging phases of development. This last part becomes particularly clear when you see how often guild masters become merchants and industrialists themselves, once again in the early phases of economic development.
- Finally, economic development and the development of capitalists are not the same objective.