41. John U. Nef, “Silver Production in Central Europe, 1450–1618,” Journal of Political Economy 20 (1941) 575–91. An heroic attempt to place the history of precious metals in a global context appears in Frank C. Spooner, The International Economy and Monetary Movements in France, 1493–1725 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972) pp. 9–86. Spooner concludes that gold was the dominant metal in Europe from 1400 to about 1450; that silver became dominant from 1450 to the early seventeenth century; and that thereafter a pluralistic monetary system prevailed: gold, silver, copper and credit. Spooner identifies major flows of silver from central Europe, gold from Africa, gold and silver from Mexico and Peru, copper from Hungary, Sweden and Japan. As the supply of each metal expanded its price fell, and the price of other metals rose in movements of great complexity. By studying these price relatives, Spooner is able to establish a chronology with remarkable precision, but the critical monetarist problem of quantity remains elusive; and the problem of velocity is even more difficult.
42. Blum, “Prices in Russia,” 188.
43. Frank Spooner has estimated the quantity of coinage in France, and correlated it with wheat prices in Paris from 1520 to 1680. The results are most interesting. Annual fluctuations in wheat prices were not closely associated with the quantity of money coined each year. But when Spooner compared prices with a moving average of annual coinage through the period 1522–1680, he obtained a high correlation (approximately .70) between the two series. This association grew even tighter when the moving average of total coinage was lagged by five years.
But what is most interesting for our wave model is that the the coefficients of correlation between coinage and prices were highest in the period 1551–1610. They were lower and very mixed in 1522–1550, and tended to disappear altogether in 1611–1680.
Spooner’s evidence is complex, and problems of interpretation are full of difficulty on these questions. Nevertheless, two general conclusions appear to emerge. First, the quantity of the money supply clearly had an effect upon price levels in France. Second, that effect was not constant through time: it was strongest and most consistent in the middle and later stages of the price-revolution, and comparatively weak and erratic in the first and last stages.
Spooner himself interprets his own results somewhat differently, but in a manner consistent with this analysis. “In general,” he writes, “the comparison of the two series of coinage and prices cannot be said to show a highly significant correlation. . . . On the other hand, in the longer term, an association exists between periods of violent price changes and periods of heavy coinage. This remains roughly valid for the inflation of the second half of the sixteenth century, when coinage reached a peak in 1587. It also remains pertinent for the period 1625–1657, covering the great recoinages of the 1630’s and early 1640’s. . . . Monetary flows cannot have been wholly responsible for the movement of prices; they were important but their causal nature must not be overstressed. In this, prudence is necessary.” See Frank C. Spooner, The International Economy and Monetary Movements in France, 1493–1725 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 274–80.
44. Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544–1605 (Oxford, 1952), 91; H. Hauser, ed., La response de Jean Bodin à M. de Malestroit, 1568 (Paris, 1932); other early expressions of the quantity theory include Noel du Fail, Balivernes et contes d’Entrepal (1548); Gomara, Annals of the Emperor Charles V (1557); [Thomas Smith?], Discourse of the Common Weal (London, 1581); Gerard de Malynes, A Treatise of the Canker of England’s Commonwealth (London?, 1601); and the same author’s England’s View, in the Unmasking of Two Paradoxes; with a Replication unto the Answer of Maister John Bodine (London, 1603). Some of these works are discussed in A. E. Munroe, Monetary Theory before Adam Smith (1923; New York, 1966); Claude Nicolet, “Les variations des prix et la ‘théorie quantitative de la monnaie’ à Rome, de Cicéron à Pline l’Ancien,” Annales E. S. C. 26 (1971), 1203–27.
45. Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, I, 74.
46. George Hakewill, An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World (2d ed., Oxford, 1630); quoted in F. J. Fisher, “Influenza and Inflation in Tudor England,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 18 (1965) 120–21.
47. John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (1963; New York, 1966), 205.
48. For a summary of this work see the various essays in Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke, The German Peasant War of 1525—New Viewpoints (London, 1979). Of fourteen essays in this volume, mostly by young German scholars, the majority find close links between the peasants’ war and the price-revolution.
49. Pieter Geyl, The Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609 (1932; 2d ed., London, 1966), 94.
50. This is the conclusion of three leading historians. “It will no longer do to cut off religious or political aspects of sixteenth-century life from economic factors,” they write, and offer evidence of a “link between the iconoclast movement and the high price of grain.” See Verlinden, Craeybeckx and Scholliers, “Price and Wage Movements in Belgium in the Sixteenth Century,” 68.
51. Barry E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge, 1959).
52. Brenner computed decennial averages and standard deviations of English grain prices (in shillings per quarter) as follows:
The source is Y. S. Brenner, “The Inflation of Prices in Early Sixteenth-Century England,” 231–232.
53. Lane, Venice, 332.
54. This is the argument of F. J. Fisher, “Influenza and Inflation in Tudor England,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 18 (1965) 120–29.
55. In Haarlem, Dutch scholar Lauris Jansz wrote a play called Van’t Coren (“About Corn”) dated November 4, 1565, which was furious attack on “monopolists.” See Verlinden, Craeybeckx and Scholliers, “Price and Wage Movements in Belgium in the Sixteenth Century,” 67.
56. Blum, “Prices in Russia,” 199.
57. Albert Feaveryear, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money (2d ed., rev. by E. Victor Morgan, Oxford, 1963), 63.
58. R. B. Outhwaite, Inflation in Tudor and Stuart England (1969; 2d ed., 1982) 54; W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720 (3 vols., Cambridge, 1912) I, 78–85.
59. Jaime Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain (Princeton, 1969), 384.
60. J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (New York, 1966), 207–8, 228, 260, 265, 283–4, 287, 329, 352; see also idem, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, England, 1970) 54–78.
61. Outhwaite, Inflation in Tudor and Stuart England, 45.
The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
1. The general crisis of the seventeenth century is a historiographic issue of high complexity. The idea appears to have been suggested by English Marxist Eric J. Hobsbawm, who argued that a “general crisis” continued from the early seventeenth century into the early eighteenth century, and that it can be explained by an “elaborated or modified version of the Marxist model of economic development;” that is, a revolutionary transformation from feudal to capitalist stages.
Other historians accept the idea of a general crisis, but interpret it in different ways. In 1960, the English conservative Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that this event was “a crisis not of . . . the system of production, but of the State, or rather of the relation of the State to society.” Agrarian historians such as Slicher van Bath and Wilhelm Abel suggested that the crisis was one that occurred periodically in the agricultural system of western Europe. Historical demographers believed that the general crisis was “a revival of famines, plagues, and crises of subsistence.” Environmental historian Victor Skipp approached the crisis of the seventeenth century “not merely in terms of the struggle of class against class, man against man, but with mindfulness of the wider, often sadder, yet surely essential, ecological perspective.” T. K. Rabb saw it as a crisis of valu
e and belief.
A few skeptics do not think that there was a “general crisis” in any of these meanings. Perez Zagorin and A. D. Lublinskaya believe that the disturbances of the seventeenth century were not exceptionally severe and that they were disconnected events, broadly distributed through space and time.
There are at least three issues here. The first is whether or not there was a systemic crisis in the seventeenth century. The answer to this descriptive question is certainly in the affirmative. The clearest evidence is demographic. The early seventeenth century was the only period in European history since the Black Death when population declined. To this demographic evidence, economic data might be added primarily in the form of price and wage and rent movements. The political aspect of this question is more doubtful, because we do not have a calculus of controlled comparison for political disturbances. Nevertheless, as to both wars and revolutions, the list of seventeenth century disturbances in the period 1610–60 seems to this observer far greater both in number and magnitude than those of any comparable period in the sixteenth century. Recent attempts to compile “statistics of deadly quarrels” confirm this conclusion.
The second question is when exactly the crisis of the seventeenth century happened. Various dates have been assigned in the period from 1550 to 1715. The evidence is strongest for the years from 1610 to 1660. Most historians accept these dates, or something like them.
The third question is whether the disturbances of the seventeenth century may be explained as Hobsbawm’s Marxist crisis in the system of production, or Trevor-Roper’s crisis in the relation of state and society, or Abel’s agrarian crisis, or the demographers’ population crisis, or Flinn’s environmental crisis, or Rabb’s cultural crisis. In the judgment of this historian, the last five interpretations are correct, but none is broad enough to encompass the event. The purpose of the present work is to offer another model that might survive this test.
See Eric Hobsbawm, “The Overall Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century,” Past and Present 5 (1954) 33–53; Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (London, 1965); Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1978, 1985); Victor Skipp, Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden, 1570–1694 (Cambridge, 1978); Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, especially I, 122–39; Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975).
2. On the question of when the price-revolution reached its climax, readers will find different answers in the literature. René Baehrel found that prices in Provence ceased rising and began to fall during the 1590s; see Une croissance: La basse Provence rurale . . . (Paris, 1961). Pierre Goubert, on the other hand, concluded that in Beauvais the turning point came later, in the mid-seventeenth century. Spooner and Braudel suggest that the great wave crested in southern Europe during the 1590s and in northern Europe during the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The evidence collected for the present work shows in many areas a double peak, both very high.
3. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642; 23, 52, passim; J. D. Gould, “The Trade Depression of the Early 1620s,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 7 (1954) 81–90; “The Trade Crisis of the Early 1620s and English Economic Thought,” Journal of Economic History 15 (1955) 121–33.
4. Le Roy Ladurie found “late or very late wine harvests” in “seven successive years: 1591, 1592, 1593, 1594, 1595, 1596, and 1597 . . . [the 1590s are] the coldest decade from this point of view since the beginning of the sixteenth century.” Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine (1967; New York, 1971), 67.
5. Gustaf Utterstrom, “Climatic Fluctuations and Population Problems in Early Modern History,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 3 (1955) 27–28.
6. Andrew Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford, 1978), 133–54.
7. He adds, “Recent work has demonstrated that its effects cannot be dissociated from those of famine.” François Lebrun, “Les crises démographiques en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Annales 35 (1980) 205–25.
8. Parker and Smith, eds., The General Crisis, 10–11; Sancho de Moncada, Restauración politica de España, ed. J. Vilar (1619; reprinted Madrid, 1974.
9. Ruggiero Romano, “Between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Economic Crisis of 1619–22,” in Parker and Smith, eds., General Crisis 165–225; Huguette and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650) (7 vols., Paris, 1955–57); Nina Ellinger Bang, Tabeller over Skibsfart og Varentransport gennem Oresund, 1497–1660 (3 vols., Copenhagen, 1906–23); F. C. Lane, “La marine marchande et le trafic maritime de Venise . . .,” in Les Sources de l’histoire maritime . . . (Paris, 1962); Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–1642; S. C. van Kampen, De Rotterdamse particuliere Scheepsbouw in de tijd van de Republiek (Assen, 1953); J. C. van Dillen, Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van het Bedriffsleven en het Gildewezen van Amsterdam (2 vols., The Hague, 1929–33).
10. Cambridge Economic History of Europe, IV, 42.
11. Ibid., IV, 44.
12. Some scholars believe that war was a spur to economic growth; others take the opposite position. See Braudel, Mediterranean, 1:409; John U. Nef, “War and Economic Progress, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review 12 (1942) 13–38; idem, War and Human Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1950); Niels Steensgaard, “The Seventeenth-century Crisis,” Parker and Smith, eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 26–56, 39; originally published as “Det syttende Arhundredes Krise,” Historisk Tidsskrift 12 (1970) 475–504.
13. Steensgaard, “Seventeenth Century Crisis,” 42.
14. R. Pillorget, Les mouvements insurrectionnels de Provence . . . (Paris, 1975); most scholars agree that economic grievances were central to these movements, often operating in combination with other issues of a political or religious nature; R. Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings (London, 1971).
15. Rabb, Struggle for Stability, 38.
16. Parker and Smith, General Crisis, 17.
The Equilibrium of the Enlightenment
1. One of the best general reviews of the evidence is still Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, 152–81, “Abschwung und Depression.” But what Abel calls stagnation and depression might be understood more accurately as equilibrium. He studied his subject from the perspective of the landowner. Others had different experiences.
2. Ibid., 166.
3. Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates,” 196–315.
4. D’Avenel, Histoire économique de . . . tous les prix en general, 3:508. The evidence in this pioneering work has been criticized, and techniques of price compilation are now much more refined in many ways. But d’Avenel’s broad conclusions are generally confirmed by subsequent research.
5. H. J. Habakkuk, “The Long-Term Rate of Interest and the Price of Land in the Seventeenth Century,” Economic History Review 1 (1952–53) 27.
6. Homer, History of Interest Rates, 142, 155.
7. Ibid, 305.
8. A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food, and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 1995) 170; E. Jutikkala, “The Great Finnish Famine in 1696–7,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 3 (1955) 48–63; R. E. Tyson, “Famine in Aberdeenshire, 1695–1699: Anatomy of a Crisis,” in D. Stevenson, ed., From Lairds to Louns: County and Burgh Life in Aberdeen, 1600–1800 (Aberdeen, 1986), 32–51.
9. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans de Languedoc (Paris, 1966, 1969), 290–91, tr. by John Day as The Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana, 1974), 244. Why did France suffer more than England? Appleby finds that in France most grain prices tended to fluctuate together, but in England they rarely rose or fell as one. He concludes that English agriculture was more diversified than that of France. It is also probable that per capita income was higher in England, and that the margin of subsistence was not as narrow as in France.
10.
On the history of dissettes, see Levasseur, Les prix aperçu de l’histoire économique, appendix
11. Morineau writes, “La seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle ne saurait plus être regardé comme l’aride désert sans or ni argent que l’on a souvent décrit.” Morineau, Incroyables gazettes, 566. Morineau’s series for the arrival of American treasure in Europe appears in ibid., 563, and in “Des métaux prècieux américains.”
12. Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV, tr. Martyn P. Pollack (London, 1962), 349; Ernest Labrousse et al., Histoire économique et sociale de la France, vol. 2, Les derniers temps de l’age seigneurial aux préludes de l’age industriel (1660–1789) (Paris, 1970), 393–95.
13. On bills of exchange, see Raymond De Roover, L’évolution de la lettre de change (Paris, 1952); John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978), 19.
14. Louis Dermigny, “Circuits de l’argent et mileux d’affaires au XVIIIe siècle,” Review Historique 112 (1954) 239–278; and idem, “Une carte monetaire de la France au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 10 (1955) 480–93; McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775 87; Fernand Braudel and Frank C. Spooner, “Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750” in E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 4, The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, (Cambridge, 1967), 378–486.
15. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, 1541–1871, appendix A.3.
16. A summary of evidence from more than 200 family reconstitution projects in England, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany, and Italy, appears in Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500–1820 (Baltimore, 1981), 102–37.
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