consumption. For those nobles who remained in France, the heated anti-aristocratic social environment dictated more modest patterns of dress and consumption, while the spiraling inflation of the assignats dramatically reduced their buying power. The plunging market for silk, for example, meant that output in the silk capital of Lyons fell by half between 1789 and 1799, contributing to a loss of almost one-third of Lyons' pre-revolutionary population. In the cities entrepreneurship on a small scale flourished, as restrictive monopolies, privileges, barriers, rules, taxes, and guilds gave way. However, the British blockade which began in 1793 severely damaged overseas trade. The wartime exigencies enacted that year by the National Convention worsened the situation by banning the export of essential goods and embargoing neutral shipping from entering French ports. Although these restrictions were lifted in 1794, the British had managed to usurp transatlantic shipping lanes in the meantime, further reducing markets for French goods. By 1796, foreign trade accounted for just 9% of the French economy, compared to 25% in 1789. Agriculture Agriculture was transformed by the Revolution. It abolished tithes owed to local churches as well as feudal dues owed to local landlords. The result hurt the tenants, who paid both higher rents and higher taxes. It nationalized all church lands, as well as lands belonging to royalist enemies who went into exile. The Government in Paris planned to use these seized lands to finance expenditure by issuing assignats. With the breakup of large estates controlled by the Church and the nobility and worked by hired hands, rural France became permanently a land of small independent farms. The rural proletariat and nobility both gave way to the commercial farmer. Cobban says the revolution "bequeathed to the nation "a ruling class of landowners." Most of these new landowners were bourgeois in origin, as the economic uncertainties of the 1790s and the abolition of venal office made land ownership an attractive and safe investment. However, the recruitment needs of the wartime French Republic between 1792 and 1802 led to shortages of agricultural workers. Farmers were also subject to requisition of their livestock by passing armies; the consequent losses of manure negatively impacted the fertility and productivity of the land. Overall the Revolution did not greatly change the French business system and probably helped freeze in place the horizons of the small business owner. The typical businessman owned a small store, mill or shop,