Great Wave

by Fischer, David Hackett;

  Figure 2.16 shows a decline in population during the general crisis of the seventeenth century, the only period after the fourteenth century when the population of Europe declined. Sources include Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (New York, 1978); Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population (Cambridge and Oxford, 1992); J. Nadal, La población Española (Barcelona, 1984).

  Famine, pestilence, and economic depression were accompanied by war. During the entire century from 1551 to 1650, peace prevailed throughout the continent only in a single year (1610)—a record unmatched since the fourteenth century. These conflicts were remarkable not only for their frequency but also their ferocity. By far the most destructive was a cluster of religious and political conflicts that historians call the Thirty Years War (1618–48). This great conflict was a catastrophe for central Europe. Historian Gunther Franz estimates that the population of Germany declined by 40 percent from 1618 to 1648— a larger proportion than were killed by the Black Death. Other scholars think that losses was not so high, but all agree that the human cost of the Thirty Years War was very great. Large sections of middle Europe were laid waste. There was also a brutalization of the spirit in the Thirty Years War; appalling atrocities routinely occurred.10

  Germany was not alone in her suffering. Broad areas of France, England, Scotland, Ireland and the Low Countries were also ravaged by war in this period. Flanders became once again the charnal house of Europe.

  A few regions escaped the general carnage. Switzerland managed to keep war at bay. Many of its young men went off to fight and never came home again, but the Swiss republics themselves remained secure in their Alpine redoubts. They were so much the exception that a German visitor in Switzerland wrote, “The country appeared to me so strange . . . as if I had come to Brazil or China. There I saw a people going about their business in peace. . . . Nobody stood in fear of the foe; nobody dreaded pillage, nobody was afraid of losing his property, his limbs or his life.”11

  During the early seventeenth century, the armies of Europe reached their largest size since the Roman era. Their upkeep imposed heavy costs at the same time that public revenues were reduced by the combined effect of famine, pestilence, war, depression, regressive taxation and monetary inflation. They also were put to frequent use in most of Europe. War became highly destructive of life and wealth and happiness during this period. Historian John Nef writes, “For suspicion and hatred, devastation and hardship, there was to be nothing quite like it again until the twentieth century.”12

  Needy governments resorted to all the usual forms of fiscal folly. Some tried deficit financing on a large scale. Others systematically debased their coinage. Many tried to wring more taxes from sullen and resentful populations. As governments desperately attempted to increase their revenues, the suffering people of Europe were goaded to acts of violent resistance.

  The result was an age of revolutions in virtually all European states. Most of these overturnings were caused by fiscal problems. In Iberia, major revolutions broke out in Catalonia and Portugal (1640) when Spanish ministers tried to raise large revenues. In England, an ill-fated attempt by Charles I to obtain more money from his subjects led to full-scale civil war, which ended in the execution of the king himself. In France, a series of rebellions called the Frondes developed from 1648 to 1654, primarily as a result of fiscal disputes between the Parlement of Paris and the Crown. In Naples, the revolt of the fisherman Masaniello occurred after the kingdom had been drained of its wealth by the Spanish government (1647). In Sicily a revolution began at Palermo (1647); its rallying cry was “Long live the King and down with taxes.”13 Denmark experienced a revolution from the right that created an absolutist monarchy in 1660, as a direct consequence of a fiscal crisis.

  Even in Switzerland, there was a Peasants’ Revolt (1654), which happened after the government ordered a major depreciation of its currency. The Ukraine had its “Great Ukrainian Revolution” from 1648 to 1654. In Hungary, there was the Durucz movement. The Netherlands experienced a bloodless coup d’état which broke the power of its ruling Stadtholders (1650). Sweden went through a constitutional crisis (1650). The people of Scotland and Ireland suffered a series of bloody rebellions and repressions from 1638 to 1660.

  Smaller peasant risings also occurred throughout Europe in exceptionally large numbers. In the south of France alone, one historian has counted no fewer than 264 insurrections between 1596 and 1660—a larger number than in any other period of that region’s history. Most were protests against intolerable economic conditions.14

  The general crisis of the seventeenth century left its mark upon the culture of an age. The greatest works of literature, painting, philosophy and theology in this era commonly expressed a mood of increasing pessimism and despair. After 1601, Shakespeare turned from his Elizabethan comedies and histories to his great tragedies— Hamlet (1600–01), Othello (1604), Macbeth (1605–06), King Lear (1605–06). These works were dark visions of a disordered world that seemed to conspire against human hope and happiness. At the same time, Cervantes produced perhaps the greatest masterpiece of Spanish literature, Don Quixote (1605, 1615), which for all its mordant humor was a sad and bitter description of a world that had dissolved into social chaos.

  The great painting of the period captured the same themes in different ways—in the demonic fantasies of Pieter Brueghel (1564–1638), the spiritual suffering of El Greco (1548?-1614?), the brooding melancholy of Rembrandt (1606–69), the sensual violence of Rubens (1577–1640), and the bizarre grotesqueries of the Italian mannerists.

  The philosophy of the period was similar in tone. The leading example was the work of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), with its organizing assumption that the natural condition of man was “poor and solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Another dark vision of the world flowed from the pen of Oxford clergyman Robert Burton (1577–1640), in his treatise on sadness and disappointment called The Anatomy of Melancholy. There were always a few hopeful voices who cried out against despair. This was also the age of Descartes (1596–1650), and his affirmation of enduring values in an unstable world. But Descartes described his intellectual journey as that of “a man who walks alone in the darkness.”15

  In theology this was the era of neo-Calvinism—the narrowest, darkest, bleakest, and most pessimistic form of Christianity that has ever been invented, more so even than the theology of Calvin himself. As formally defined by the Synod of Dort (1618–19), the “five points” of neo-Calvinism asserted that most people and all infants were irretrievably sunk in a state of total depravity and inexorably condemned to eternal damnation; that Christ died not for everyone but only for a chosen few; that human beings were utterly without power to achieve their own salvation. Here was yet another cultural expression of an era in which people felt that the world was entirely beyond their power to control. In a later and happier age neo-Calvinism would make no sense at all, but in the early seventeenth century it seemed to fit the facts of the human condition.

  The crisis of the seventeenth century was marked by a revival of religious strife. Protestants and Catholics became increasingly militant and uncompromising; the result was angry and bloody conflict in virtually all European states. In England, the Puritans combined religious and political ideas in a single movement that overturned the government. In Poland, Catholic nobles destroyed most of the Protestant churches in that nation. In the Ukraine, the revolt of the Cossacks was in part a religious movement.

  Throughout central and eastern Europe, the people of Russia, Poland, and Germany expressed their unhappiness in the customary way, by slaughtering the Jews. Chmielnicki’s rebellion in Poland was wildly antisemitic. From 1648 to 1658, more than 700 Jewish settlements were destroyed; perhaps 100,000 Jews were killed.16

  The suffering of Europe in the general crisis of the seventeenth century was comparable to that of the fourteenth century. But this time Europe suffered in a different way. The seventeenth century was a period of
falling population, but the magnitude of its decline was much smaller than in the fourteenth century. The scale of misery did not approach the demographic disaster that had been caused by the epic famines and Black Death of 1348.

  The economic collapse was also not as severe as before. The pace of price-inflation was greater this time, but the magnitude of price fluctuations was less extreme than in the medieval price-revolution. The variance of prices fell by half from one of these great waves to another. Periods of scarcity were less severe in their impact upon prices, and they occurred less frequently. Even the worst years of this period were not nearly comparable with the famines of the fourteenth century.

  Beyond doubt, a long-term improvement had taken place during the intervening years in productivity, production and per capita income. Markets had become larger and more tightly integrated. Even the worst miseries of this dark era were measures of material progress. During the crisis of the fourteenth century, high medieval civilization had collapsed. In the crisis of the seventeenth century, the civilization of early modern Europe was shaken to its deepest foundations. But it survived.

  The Equilibrium of the Enlightenment, 1660–1730

  In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the great crisis came to an end. After a period of transition, a new equilibrium appeared throughout Europe. It established itself, more or less at the same time, in France, England, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and Scandinavia, and also in European colonies throughout the world.1

  Figure 2.18 follows the price of grain in Paris, London and Berlin. In all three cities it fell sharply after 1661, then fluctuated on fixed level from 1670 to 1730. The source is Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur: eine Geschichte der Land und Ernahrungswirtschaft Mitteleuropas seit dem hohen Mittelalter (1935, Hamburg and Berlin, 1966).

  This new change-regime might be called the equilibrium of the Enlightenment. Its historical dynamics were similar in many ways to the equilibrium of the Renaissance. This was not a system at rest. It was a complex structure of countervailing movements, much like the counterpoint of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), or the baroque harmony of George Frederick Handel (1685–1759), whose lives and music perfectly captured the cultural spirit of an age.

  The material components of this equilibrium may be summarized in a few sentences. The price of grain ceased rising, fell sharply, and then began to find a level. Food and energy came down, manufactures went up, and the general price level began to fluctuate on a fixed and level plane. Wages rose. Rents and interest fell. The distribution of wealth and income became a little more equal. Population, production, and productivity grew slowly. There were many local variations—price-inflation in Chile, wage-declines in Germany—but the major trends were strong and consistent.

  Figure 2.19 follows the price of Maryland tobacco (pence sterling per pound), and Barbadian sugar (shillings per hundredweight). Their movements were broadly similar to those of wheat prices in Europe during this period. The sources are Russell Menard, “Farm Prices of Maryland Tobacco, 1659–1710,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 68 (1973) 80–85; Carville Earle, The Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement: All Hallow’s Parish, Maryland, 1650–1783 (Chicago, 1975), 16; Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (St. Lawrence, Barbados, 1974), 496–97.

  Figure 2.20 finds that money wages and real wages were rising in the period from 1650 to 1740, while rents and rates of interest were falling. The source is Peter J. Bowden, “Statistics,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 5.2, 879.

  Some historians of agriculture have perceived this period as a time of rural depression. So it was at the start. Reports from the European countryside told a story of falling farm prices and growing poverty among landowners. In 1685, the intendant of Rouen wrote, “The poverty is such that a farmer who bought a woollen garment had to do without a linen one. The peasant women, who used to love wearing red and blue petticoats, seldom have them now. They are very poorly dressed and mostly make do with white linen.”2

  But throughout the period from 1650 to 1730, returns to labor slowly increased. In England and France, nominal wages went up for manual laborers and skilled artisans alike. Real wages increased even more rapidly, nearly doubling for laborers and building craftsmen in the south of England from 1650 to 1740. Continental workers did not fare as well as their English counterparts; wages fell in parts of Germany. But throughout western Europe, farm laborers and artisans tended to improve their material condition.3

  At the same time that wages rose, rents came down. France’s pioneering price historian the Vicomte d’ Avenel calculated that the rent of one hectare of farmland fell from the equivalent of 12.8 francs in 1651–75 to 7.5 francs by 1701–25. Subsequent research by academic specialists has confirmed his general findings in France, England, Italy, Germany and most parts of Europe.4 Interest rates also declined in this period. The maximum lawful rate of interest in England fell from 10 to 6 percent in the seventeenth century. Further, economic historian H. J. Habakkuk discovered that interest actually charged by moneylenders declined even more sharply than the legal maximum. During the general crisis of the seventeenth century, English creditors had tended to charge the highest allowable rate. By the century’s end, actual rates had fallen below the statutory limit.5 French rentes declined from 10 to 4 percent. In England by the year 1735, the yield on long annuities sank as low of 3 percent. Dutch commercial loans drifted downward to 2 percent or even less in this period.6

  Figure 2.21 finds evidence of a long decline in rural rents, from a peak in the 1660s to a trough in the 1730s. Similar trends appeared throughout Europe. The source is Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur.

  While interest rates were falling and wages were rising, commodity prices tended to fluctuate within a fixed range from 1650 to 1735. The price of grain fell in nearly all European countries, but other prices rose a little. Overall, the general price level remained approximately the same—a pattern typical of price movements in every period of equilibrium. Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila Hopkins observed of their own price series in this period there was “constancy in the general level, and this surprising stability, as it seems to us, was maintained through fluctuations of two or three years’ span, due no doubt mostly to the harvest, whose violence seems no less extraordinary.”7

  Figure 2.22 shows that interest rates declined in western Europe in the period 1600–50 to 1700–40. The source is Homer, History of Interest Rates, 156–58, 161–65, 172–78.

  Both scholars were startled by the strength and resilience of these persistent patterns, which often were violently disrupted by extraneous events, and yet always recovered their equilibrium through a period of seventy years. “What was the secret of this stability,” they asked, “and how was it held through such vibration?”

  The violence of vibration was sometimes very great. Changes in the weather continued to cause sharp and sudden fluctuations in harvest prices. The people of France suffered severely when shortages drove grain prices very high in the grand disettes of the mid—1670s, and again in 1694–99, 1708–09, and 1713.

  The worst crisis occurred in the years from 1694 to 1700. The weather turned wet and very cold. Once again, the glaciers advanced through alpine valleys. Arctic icefields expanded so far to the south that Eskimos in their kayaks appeared in Scotland. A major famine occurred in Finland, and northern parishes in Scotland lost a third of their population. The south of England was less severely affected, but everywhere in the English-speaking world these cruel years were remembered as “King William’s Dearth” and “the barren years.”8 In Languedoc, food was so desperately short in 1694 that the poor were reduced to eating grass—a thin bread made of couch-weed and sheep entrails. In Narbonne, a priest wrote that the people looked like “skeletons or spectres” (des équelletes ou d’espectres), as they wandered far from their parishes, in searching of some way to “prolong their listless lives.”9


  Climatic stresses were much the same as in the crisis of the 1590s, but this time the cultural and economic consequences were very different. Grain prices briefly surged to record levels in the 1690s, but when the weather improved price levels fell as rapidly as they had risen, and equilibrium was restored. After 1700, scarcities came less often and were less severe, but they kept on coming in the early eighteenth century without ending the material equilibrium. Altogether, the economics of the ancien regime resembled the movements of an eighteenth-century carriage on a rough country road. The vehicle jolted violently from rut to rut. The irritable passengers were thrown painfully against one another. The carriage itself swayed dangerously with every strain—but it continued to advance.10