Great Wave

by Fischer, David Hackett;

  17. Albert Soboul, Guy Lemarchand, and Michele Fogel, Le siècle des lumières (2 vols., Paris, 1977), 1:230–79; especially chap. 4, “l’apparente stabilité agricole.”

  18. Canadian economist Harold Innis was one of the first to explain that this was so because marginal returns increased when labor and capital were transferred from Europe to America. For example, a fixed unit of a fisherman’s labor became more productive when it was shifted from the North Sea to the Grand Banks. The same pattern also appeared in agriculture, extractive industry, and many branches of commerce and manufacturing.

  19. Plumb dated this great transition “very near the year 1700.” Other scholars found its beginnings in the English Restoration of 1660, or in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. To refine Prof. Plumb’s analogy, the water became ice in a series of freezings and thawings. See J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (Harmondsworth and Baltimore, 1967), 13.

  20. Alekssandr A. Kizevetter, “Portrait of an Enlightened Autocrat,” in Mare Raeff, ed., Catherine the Great: A Profile (New York, 1972), 3.

  21. He dated this period as the century that began with the founding of the French Academy (1635) or the birth of Louis XIV (1639); Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (Paris, 1756), of which the last part was called Le Siècle de Louis XIV (London, 1926), 2.

  22. Edward Gibbon, Autobiography, ed. M. M. Reese (London, 1970), 15.

  23. The rationalism of the early Enlightenment has been mocked in the twentieth century by cynics, skeptics, and relativists who take a perverse pleasure in demonstrating the contradictions of an eighteenth-century faith in the sovereign power of reason. The philosophes of the Enlightenment, were they transported to our own time, would be much amused by this attitude. They would be quick to point out the absurdity of reasoned arguments for the omnipotence of irrationality in human affairs, and the fatuity of a fashionable academic industry that uses empirical evidence to support the dogmas of radical skepticism and historical relativism.

  24. C. B. A. Behrens, Society, Government, and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia (London, 1985), 160.

  25. Patrick Chorley, Oil, Silk, and Enlightenment: Economic Problems in Eighteenth-Century Naples (Naples, 1965), 9.

  26. Jean Ehrard, “L’idée de nature en France a l’aube des lumières (Paris, 1963; édition Flammarion, 1970), 43.

  The Price Revolution of the Eighteenth Century

  1. Pierre Gaxotte, Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1968); Leon Bernard, The Emerging City: Paris in the Age of Louis XIV (Durham, 1970); Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism: An Essay (New York, 1968); Jean Aymar Pignaniol de la Force, Description de Paris (8 vols., Paris, 1742); Robert Henard, La rue Saint-Honoré (2 vols., Paris, 1908); A. de Boislisle, “Notice historiques sur la place des Victoires et sur la place Vendôme,” Memoires de la Societé de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de France 15 (1888).

  2. Edmond Jean François Barbier, Chronique de la régence et du règne de Louis XV, 1718–1763 (8 series in 123 parts, Paris, 1857) II, 80.

  3. In Paris, an inflection-point appears as early as 1710, in a set of price series by Jean Tits-Dieuaide, “L’evolution du prix du blé dans quelques villes d’Europe occidentale du XVe au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E. S. C. 42 (1987) 529–48. Other price-historians have placed the turning point in or about the year 1729.

  4. Ibid., figure 1, p. 543; Anne Bezanson et al., Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1720–1775 (Philadelphia, 1935) 422–24; Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, Perspective of Wages and Prices, 30.

  The inflection-point for the price-revolution of the 18th century varies from one price series to another, according to commodity, currency, method, and place. In general, earlier dates appear for urban grain prices in nominal currency. The inflection-points came a little later for rural prices of mixed commodities in silver equivalents.

  5. B. A. Holderness, “Prices, Productivity, and Output,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 6, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989), 84–274; A. H. John, “Statistical Appendix,” in ibid., 973–1155; Peter J. Bowden, “Agricultural Prices, Wages, Farm Profits, and Rents,” in ibid., vol. 5.2, 1640–1750, (Cambridge, 1985), 84–274; “Statistics,” in ibid., 827–902; Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur appendix.

  6. Winifred Rothenberg, From Market Places to a Market Economy; The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, 1992); idem, “The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855,” Journal of Economic History 41 (1981) 283–314; idem, “A Price Index for Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” ibid. 39 (1979) 975–1001; for the British officer’s money and the system of “bookkeeping barter,” see W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724–1775 (Cambridge, 1945), 15, 17–21.

  7. F. Ouellet and J. Hamelin, Le mouvement des prix agricoles dans la province de Quebec (1760–1815) n.p., n.d.; idem, “La crise agricole dans le Bas-Canada,” Etudes Rurales 7 (1962) 36–57; John H. Coatsworth, “Economic History and the History of Prices,” in Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds., Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, 1990), 22.

  Ruggiero Romano suggests a different reading of Latin American evidence: an “inverse movement of prices in Ibero-America and Europe.” The evidence in Johnson and Tandeter is rather more mixed, and suggests a variation on the patterns that appear in Europe and North America. Cf. Ruggiero Romano, “Movimento de los precios y desarrollo económico: El caso de Sudamérica en el siglo XVIII,” Desarrollo Económico 3 (1963) 31–43; and idem, “Some Considerations on the History of Prices in Colonial Latin America,” in Johnson and Tandeter, eds., Essays on the price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America, 35–71.

  8. M. Cartier, “Notes sur l’histoire des prix en Chine du XIVe au XVIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 24 (1969) 1876–89; idem, “Les importations de métaux monetaires en Chine: Essai sur la conjoncture chinoise,” ibid., 36 (1981) 454–66; P. Liu and K. Huang, “Population Change and Economic Development in Mainland China since 1400,” in C. Hou and T. Yu, eds., Modern Chinese Economic History (Taipei, 1977), 61–81.

  9. The price of English coal per chaldron rose from 21 shillings in 1687 to 82 shillings in 1813. Wheat increased from 21 shillings in 1731 to 126 shillings in 1800 and went even higher by 1812. For price relatives and the rise of energy prices in the eighteenth century, see Beveridge, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, 434–36.

  In France the pattern of price relatives was much the same. On the subject of firewood, Labrousse writes, “La hausse de longue durée est la plus forte de toutes celles que nous avons observée sur le marché des produits [dans le] XVIIIe siècle: elle atteint 91% … L’amplitude de la hausse … parait imputable en grande partie a des disboisements massifs.” See C. E. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (2 vols., Paris 1933), and La crise de l’ économie française a la fin de l’ancien régime et au debout de la Revolution (Paris, 1944), 343–47.

  10. It might be noted that agricultural price relatives appear to have correlated with the proportion of each commodity traded in the market. Thus, a larger fraction of cheaper grains and beans were consumed by their producers than was the case with other foodstocks.

  11. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, 1541–1871; 402–7; also D. V. Glass, “Population and Population Movements in England and Wales, 1700–1850;” and Louis Henry, “The Population of France in the Eighteenth Century,” both in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population and History (London, 1965), 140, 434–56.

  12. Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations, 192.

  13. Family reconstitution projects have obtained the following mean age at first marriage for women in this period: four parishes in West Flanders, 1680–1739, 23.6; sixteen parishes in Yorkshire, 1662–1714, 23.6; five parishes in Nottinghamshire, 1701–36, 24.3; two parishes in Bas Qu
ercy, 1700–39, 23.7; two parishes in Germany, 1691–1750, 25.7. Higher ages appeared in urban populations and in Scandinavia; lower ages were common in American colonies. Age at last birth and age-specific intramarital fertility in later child-bearing years also rose moderately in this period. The evidence is brought together in Flinn, European Demographic System, 1500–1820.

  14. Georges Lefebvre, Les paysans du nord pendant la révolution française (Bari, 1959), chaps. 2–6; similar evidence appears in Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976), 68–108.

  15. Esther Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (London, 1965); idem, Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends (Chicago, 1981).

  16. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix, II, 393–95.

  17. On commercial paper, see Baxter, House of Hancock; A. H. John, “Insurance Investment and the London Money Market of the Eighteenth Century,” Economica new ser. 20 (1953) 137.

  18. Eli Heckscher, “The Bank of Sweden . . .,” in J. G. Dillen, ed., History of the Principal Public Banks (The Hague, 1934), 1760; Richard A. Lester, Monetary Experiments: Early American and Recent Scandinavian (Princeton, 1939); Joseph Ernst, Money and Politics in America, 1755–1775 (Chapel Hill, 1973); Bruce D. Smith, “American Colonial Monetary Regimes: The Failure of the Quantity Theory and Some Evidence in Favour of an Alternative View,” Canadian Journal of Economics 18 (1985) 531–56.

  19. Homer, History of Interest Rates, 160.

  20. Decennial means of interest rates on long-term British securities (old 3 percent annuities before 1752 and 3 percent consols thereafter) increased as follows from 1730 to 1789:

  The source is Homer, History of Interest Rates, 162, 177.

  21. Christopher Clay, “The Price of Freehold Land in the Later Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 27 (1974) 173–89; Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations, 212–15; Arthur Young, An Enquiry into the Progressive Value of Money in England (London, 1812); d’Avenel, Histoire économique, 2: 508; D. Zolla, “Les variations du revenu et du prix des terres en France au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle, Annales de l’Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques (1893–94).

  22. A summary of the evidence appears in Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations, 199; see also Elizabeth W. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1934), 117–18.

  23. A. P. Usher, “The General Course of Wheat Prices in France, 1350–1788,” Review of Economic Statistics 12 (1930) 162; Gilboy, “Cost of Living and Real Wages in Eighteenth-Century England,” 135.

  24. Robert Jenkins (fl. 1731–38) appeared before Parliament in 1738 and testified that while sailing on the high seas from Jamaica to London, he was boarded by a Spanish garda-costa who seized his cargo, lashed him to the mast and tortured him by tearing off his ear. When asked what he had felt while “in the hands of such barbarians,” he replied that he had “committed his soul to God and his cause to his country.” Other evidence later suggested that he may have lost his ear in an English pillory, but patriotism ran high, and a powerful West Indian lobby demanded action. In 1739, war was declared, “amidst the rejoicings of the mob, the ringing of bells, and the Prince of Wales toasting the multitude from a city tavern.” (Temperley in Royal Historical Society Transactions 3d ser. 3; G. Hertz, afterward Sir Gerald Berkeley Hurst, British Imperialism in the Eighteenth Century; Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760 (Oxford, 1939; 2d ed., rev. by C. H. Stuart, 1962), 210.

  25. Usher, “General Course of Wheat Prices,” 162; Gilboy, “Cost of Living,” 135; Ruth Crandall, “Wholesale Commodity Prices in Boston during the Eighteenth Century,” Review of Economic Statistics 16 (1934) 117–82.

  26. M. W. Flinn, “Trends in Real Wages, 1750–1850,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 27 (1954) 397–413; also G. N. Von Tunzelmann, “Trends in Real Wages, 1750–1850, Revisited,” ibid., 33–49; E. W. Gilboy, Wages in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1934).

  27. Eleanor Barber, The Bourgeoisie in Eighteenth-Century France; Robert R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution (2 vols., Princeton, 1959–64), I, 459; Martin Göhring, Weg und Sieg der modernen Staatsidee in Frankreich (Tübingen, 1947).

  28. Reflections on the Present High Price of Provisions, and the Complaints and Disturbances Arising Therefrom (London, 1766). A copy of this pamphlet is in the New York Public Library.

  29. The livre became the franc in the Revolution; in 1789, the exchange rate was five livres to the U.S. dollar.

  30. Homer, History of Interest Rates, 169.

  31. L. Stuart Sutherland, “Sir George Colebrooke’s World Corner in Alum, 1771–73,” Economic History 3 (1936) 237–58.

  32. Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (New York, 1978), 84, 122–24.

  33. The importance of price movements in the Swiss revolutions is discussed in Patrick O’Mara, “Geneva in the Eighteenth Century: A Socioeconomic Study of the Bourgeois City” (thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1956).

  34. David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York, 1994), 76–77.

  The Revolutionary Crisis

  1. Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, 72.

  2. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix, II, 598.

  3. Jean Egret, The French Prerevolution, 1787–1788 (1962; Chicago, 1977), 31–59.

  4. Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (New York, 1973), 10; Lefebvre errs in his belief that the industrial and commercial depression of the 1780s was a French phenomenon, caused by the reduction of customs barriers and a flood of English imports. In fact the English economy was also much depressed, and that of America as well.

  5. This anecdote was recorded in the Gazette Nationale, ou Le Moniteur Universel, 15 July 1790; P. M. Zall, Banjamin Franklin Laughing (Berkeley, 1980), 162.

  6. “Let them eat cake” (“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”) was attributed to “a great princess” in the sixth book of Rousseau’s Confessions. This work was drafted at least two years before the Queen came to France in 1770; the other statements appear in Lefebvre, Great Fear, 37.

  7. George E. Rudé, “Prices, Wages, and Popular Movements in Paris during the French Revolution,” Economic History Review 2d ser., 6 (1954) 246–67.

  8. Of 954 people granted the honor of “vainqueur de la Bastille,” occupations are known for 661. Of that number, five-sixths were artisans, masters or journeymen or shopkeepers; the rest were mainly bourgeois; Jacques Godechot, The Taking of the Bastille (1965, N.Y., 1970); G. Durieux, Vainqueurs de la Bastille (Paris, 1911), on the price of grain and the Bastille, see Georges Lefebvre, “Le mouvement des prix et les origines de la Révolution française,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 14 (1937) 289–329.

  9. George Rudé, “Prices, Wages, and Popular Movements,” 246.

  10. Price movements and political events in France, were associated as follows, from 1787 to 1815:

  For general discussion of these relationships see Lefebvre, “Le mouvement des prix et les origines de la Révolution française,” 289–329; Rudé, “Prices, Wages, and Popular Movements,” 247–67.

  11. Still the best short survey of world revolution in this period is Jacques Godechot, Les révolutions, 1770–1799 (Paris, 1963); this work also is valuable for its historiography and copious bibliography. For more extended accounts see idem, La grande nation (2 vols., Paris, 1956); and especially Palmer, Age of Democratic Revolution.

  12. Palmer, Age of Democratic Revolution, I, 178.

  13. On hyperinflations in the eighteenth century, see Seymour E. Harris, The Assignats (Cambridge, 1930); and Anne Bezanson, Prices and Inflation during the American Revolution: Pennsylvania, 1770–1790 (Philadelphia, 1951).

  14. Emmanuel Coppieters, English Bank Note Circulation, 1694–1954 (The Hague, 1955), 13–34; Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1957); statistics for the United States appear in J. Van Fenstermaker, The Developm
ent of American Commercial Banking, 1782–1837 (Kent, Ohio, 1965); a survey of events in France appears in Labrousse et al., Histoire économique et sociale de la France 2:367–410.

  15. Lyman L. Johnson, “The Price History of Buenos Aires during the Viceregal Period,” and Richard L. Garner, “Prices and Wages in Eighteenth-Century Mexico,” both in Johnson and Tandeter, eds., Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, 1995), 164–65, 80–81; Sevket Pamuk, “Money in the Ottoman Empire, 1326–1914,” in Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914 (Cambridge, 1994) 970; Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey, 1880–1914 (Chicago, 1980).

  16. A contrary finding is reported by Tits-Dieuaide, who writes that wheat prices in European cities increased two or three times faster in the sixteenth century than in the eighteenth. The problem here is that her eighteenth-century series are not coequal with the price revolution; they begin as early as 1703, thirty years before the beginning of the long inflation, and end in the period 1753–90, before its climax. See Jean Tits-Dieuaide, “L’evolution du prix.”

  Overall, during the price-revolution of the sixteenth century, prices quintupled in 180 years, at an annual rate of 1 percent. In the price-revolution of the eighteenth-century, an index of English consumables increased by a factor of 3.6 from their nadir in 1734 to their peak in 1813—an annual rate of increase of approximately 1.7 percent.

  17. Joel Mokyr and N. Eugene Savin, “Stagflation in Historical Perspective: The Napoleonic Wars Revisited,” Research in Economic History 4 (1979) 198–259; G. Hueckel, “War and the British Economy, 1793–1815: A General Equilibrium Analysis,” Explorations in Economic History 10 (1973) 365–96; N. J. Silberling, “British Prices and Business Cycles, 1779–1850,” Review of Economic Statistics 5 (1923) 223–60; Eli Heckscher, The Continental Blockade: An Economic Interpretation (Oxford, 1922); A. K. Cairncross and B. Weber, “Fluctuations in Building in Great Britain, 1785–1849,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 7 (1956) 283–97; A. C. Clauder, American Commerce as Affected by the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1793–1812 (Philadelphia, 1932).