6. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1975, 772–76.
7. Braudel made these problems more difficult to solve by two errors in his own work. He entangled the pattern of great waves with Kondratieff cycles, which are certainly a second-order problem, and possibly a non-problem. He also limited his inquiries too narrowly in time and space. For a discussion of Kondratieff cycles see appendix E.
8. Fernand Braudel, Perspective of the World (1979; New York, 1984), 82.
9. See pp. 82.
10. Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, 292.
11. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix, La crise de l’économie française, the same argument is made by a student of Labrousse, M. A. Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des prix et des revenus en France de 1798 à 1820 (Paris, 1949); Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, 1–16, 292–97.
12. For other complaints see David Landes, “The Statistical Study of French Crises,” Journal of Economic History 10 (1950) 195–211.
13. André Marchal, quoted in Braudel, Perspective of the World, 76.
14. John Eddy, “The ‘Maunder Minimum’: Sunspots and Climate in the Reign of Louis XIV,” in Parker and Smith, eds., General Crisis 226–69.
15. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., Climate and History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton, 1981); compare especially essays by Jan De Vries and Christian Pfister, with author attempting to find a mediating position (pp. 19–50, 85–116, 241–50).
16. There are at least three other explanations of wealth distribution in the literature: the Pareto model, which attributes inequality mainly to constant genetic factors; the Marxist model, which links it to long movements in the organization of the means of production; and the Kuznets “inverted U model,” which argues that inequality increases when more economic growth begins and diminishes as rapid growth continues. None of these models fits the empirical patterns of change in wealth distribution. See S. Robinson, “A Note on the U Hypothesis Relating Income Inequality and Economic Development,” American Economic Review 66 (1976) 437–40; Williamson and Lindert, American Inequality, 281–94 and Appendix L, above.
17. Quoted in May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307–1399 (Oxford, 1959), 50.
18. C. Lowell Harris, Inflation: Long-Term Problems, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, 31 (New York, 1975).
19. New York Times, Oct. 4, 1995. At present the various data-gathering agencies of the U.S. government have compiled only one single series of statistical data through the full span of American history—a set of population estimates that are grossly inaccurate through the first two centuries. There are no comprehensive price or wage series for American economic history before 1890, except those compiled by individual scholars; no comprehensive data on production except for the past century; and no satisfactory data on wealth distribution for any period of American history. These historical data are necessary to give context and meaning to current indicators.
20. Hugh Rockoff, “Price and Wage Controls in Four Wartime Periods,” Journal of Economic History 41 (1981) 381–401.
21. Levy, Dollars and Dreams, 13n.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Published Sources for the History of Prices
The historian of prices must possess or control three separate techniques at least, those of the archivist, of the statistician, and of Sherlock Holmes.
—William Beveridge, 1929
THE AMERICAN ECONOMIST Thurston Adams began his research on the history of prices in Vermont by inviting the people of that state to send him farmers’ account books from the period 1790–1840. He was amazed to receive four tons of records.
This embarrassment of riches exists very generally in the history of prices. No definitive bibliography exists for this subject, partly because of the vast abundance of primary and secondary materials. The most recent general bibliographies published separately in English appeared more than eighty years ago: the New York Public Library’s List of Works in the Library Relating to Prices (New York, 1902) and Hermann H. B. Meyer, Select List of References on the Cost of Living and Prices (Washington, 1910). More restricted in coverage are economic bibliographies such as Paul Wasserman, Sources of Commodity Prices (New York, 1959), and Joe S. Bain, Literature on Price Policy and Related Topics, 1933–1947; A Selective Bibliography (Berkeley, 1947).
Historical bibliographies appear in Ruggiero Romano, ed.,I Prèzzi in Europa dal XVIII sècolo a òggi (Turin, 1967), 569–90, which is specially helpful on the large and very rich Italian journal literature. An excellent bibliography is attached to Georges and Geneviève Frêche, Les prix des grains, des vins et des légumes à Toulouse (1486–1868): Extraits des Mercuriales suivis d’une bibliographic d’histoire des prix (Paris, 1967), which was meant to supplement bibliographies in C. E. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et revenus en France, au XVIIIe siécle (Paris, 1933), 5, 11–12, 650–64. These two works are very strong for the rich harvest of monographs that appeared in France. German bibliographies have been published in the works of Alfred Jacobs and Wilhelm Abel, cited below. Many local studies cited in these works are not repeated here. Also useful is W. H. Chaloner and R. C. Richardson, Bibliography of British Economic and Social History (Manchester, 1984); and Derek H. Aldcroft and Richard Rodger, Bibliography of European Economic and Social History (Manchester, 1984), which is limited to literature in English for the modern period. A second edition appeared in 1992. Bibliographies also appear in various volumes of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe, especially volume 4, 605–15. A Price History Newsletter (1984) has been issued by the American historian John McCusker. Specialized bibliographies are noted below.
The following survey of printed materials is far from definitive, but it attempts to include major published works of general interest on the history of prices. Inevitably many titles have been missed. Additions and corrections are welcome for future editions. The bibliography is divided into the following parts:
primary sources
mercuriales
price currents
historical compilations
serial publications
materials on the analysis of primary sources
secondary sources
general works
economic theory
social theory
historical models
general works on related subjects
period-specific secondary sources
ancient civilizations
the medieval price-revolution
the crisis of the fourteenth century
the equilibrium of the Renaissance
the price-revolution of the sixteenth century
the crisis of the seventeenth century
the equilibrium of the Enlightenment
the price-revolution of the eighteenth century
the revolutionary crisis
the Victorian equilibrium
the price-revolution of the twentieth century
Mercuriales
The growth of the literature on prices has an historical rhythm which is linked to price-revolutions themselves. The first important serial publications appeared during the price-revolution of the sixteenth century, when price records began to be compiled in weekly or monthly market surveys called mercuriales. The earliest long series known to the author were kept in the city of Toulouse and have been published in Georges and Genevieve Freche, Les prix des grains, des vins et des légumes à Toulouse (1486–1868), cited above. Another run of mercuriales exists for Paris from as early as 1520. They are analyzed in Micheline Baulant[-Duchaillut] and Jean Meuvret, Prix des céréales extraits de la mercuriale de Paris (1520–1698) (2 vols., Paris, 1960–62). Yet another set of mercuriales for seven market towns in the northern part of the Ile-de-France is published in J. Dupaquier, M. Lachiver and J. Meuvret, Mercuriales du pays de France et du Vexin Français, 1640–1792 (Paris, 1968).
A large journal literature on these sources, with major contributions by Ma
rc Bloch, Pierre Chaunu, C. E. Labrousse, and others, is surveyed by George and Geneviève Frêche. To their excellent bibliography might be added Jean Georges, “Les mercuriales d’ Angoulême, de Cognac et de Jarnac (1593–1797),” Bulletin et Memoires de la Societé d’Histoire et Archeologie de la Charente 64 (1920); J. C. Humblot, “Les mercuriales de Langres du XVe au XIX2 siècle,” Revue de Champagne et de Brie 9 (1897); R. Vaschalde, “Les mercuriales du Vivarais,” Bulletin de la Societé d’Agriculture du Departement de l’Ardèche (1874); Abbe Merle, “Mercuriales de la Grenette de Boen au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle,” Bulletin de la Diana 24 (1931); Jean Meuvret, “Les prix des grains à Paris au XVe siècle et les origines de la mercuriale,” Paris et Ile-de-France 2 (1960) 283–311; Franz Irsigler, “La mercuriale de Cologne (1531–1797): Structure de marché et conjoncture des prix céréaliers,” Annales E.S.C. 33 (1978) 93–114. On methodological problems, see C. E. Labrousse, “Comment controler les mercuriales? Le test de concordance,” Annales d’Histoire Sociale 2 (1940) 117–30.
Price Currents
As early as the 1580s, small newspapers called price currents began to appear in Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and other commercial centers of western Europe. They spread slowly to the English-speaking world, not appearing in London until the late seventeenth century, or in America until the late eighteenth. By the mid-nineteenth century, price currents were published in European colonies throughout the world, from Havana to Hong Kong and Calcutta. During the 1950s, a very good set of price currents was buried in the basement of the Maryland Historical Society, where the author discovered them as a schoolboy and spent happy hours turning their musty pages when he was supposed to be conjugating his Latin verbs.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prices were also reported in general newspapers and magazines. Contemporary essayists commonly derived their economic data from these sources, which in many commercial centers have not been systematically collected and published. Discussions of these materials appear in Jacob M. Price, “Notes on Some London Price Currents, 1667–1715,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 7 (1954–55) 240–50; idem, “A Note on the Circulation of the London Press, 1704–1714,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 31 (1958) 215–24; N. W. Posthumus, “Lijst van documenten,” Economisch-Historisch Jaarboek 13 (1927) xliii-lx; L. W. Hanson, Contemporary Printed Sources for British and Irish Economic History, 1701–1750 (Cambridge, 1963); and John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978).
Early Historical Compilations
The modern historiography of prices came of age in the mid-nineteenth century with the publication of the first large-scale national compilation in England by Thomas Tooke and William Newmarch, History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation from 1792 to 1856 (6 vols., London, 1838–57).
This work inspired other large projects in England, France, and Germany. The first of them was James E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England from the Year after the Oxford Parliament (1259) to the Commencement of the Continental War (1793) Compiled Entirely from Original and Contemporaneous Records (7 vols., Oxford, 1866–1902). A critique appears in Paul Mantoux, “Le livre de Thorold Rogers sur l’histoire des prix et l’emploi des documents statistiques pour la période antérieure au XIXe siècle,” Bulletin de la Societé d’Histoire Moderne (1903).
Rogers was followed by Georges d’Avenel, Histoire Économique de la proprieté, des salaires, des denrées, et tous les prix en général depuis l’an I200 jusqu’en l’an 1800 (7 vols., Paris, 1894–1926); and Georg Wiebe, Zur Geschichte der Preisrevolution des XVI und XVII Jahrhunderts (1894, Leipzig, 1895).
These scholars brought together large quantities of data from the manuscript records of manors, universities, monasteries, etc., as well as from price currents and individual account books. Their methods were later criticized for lack of rigor. D’Avenel was thought to have compiled his sources without discriminating sufficiently as to quality or place of origin. Rogers was accused of methodological errors by the standards of subsequent research. Wiebe was criticized for having relied in some instances on secondary sources of doubtful merit. Nevertheless, these pathbreaking works put the history of prices upon a new empirical foundation. They were also among the first to discover the major patterns of secular change that are discussed in this work. Much of the data they collected remains useful and even indispensable today.
During the early twentieth century, much scholarship in economics took the form of price compilations. The Review of Economic Statistics was crowded with contributions on price history and methodological essays on problems of concordance, series-splicing, weighting, and indexing.
The most important product of this research appeared in the 1920s, when American scholar Earl Hamilton began to publish the results of his inquiries on Spanish prices and American treasure—an immense feat of learning. Hamilton’s work was controversial from the start. It was intensely criticized by American economic historians such as John U. Nef and extravagantly praised by British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Serious weaknesses have become apparent with subsequent research: notably its misreading of periods of price-revolution as good times, and price-equilibria as bad times. Fernand Braudel has written of his conversations with Hamilton at Simancas in 1927. The American scholar said, “in the sixteenth century, every wound heals, every breakdown can be repaired, every lapse can be made good.” This was true of economic elites, and also of ordinary folk in the early years of price-revolutions. But for most people, most of the time, the opposite was the case. It was only after the work of Henry Phelps-Brown that historians took a broader view, and began to understand that the material condition of most people grew better in periods of price-equilibrium and worse in times of price-revolution.
That elitist bias was very strong in Earl Hamilton’s work, as it was in the early work of Fernand Braudel and Wilhelm Abel and most other historians of that generation. Even so, Hamilton’s scholarship was held in deservedly high respect by most colleagues who worked on related subjects, especially by French historians who would later be known as the Annales school. Half a century after it began to appear, Hamilton’s work retains its reputation, even among historians who do not share its social or its monetarist assumptions. It remains a monument of careful scholarship.
Earl Hamilton’s success, and the catastrophic failure of the world economy in 1929, stimulated a surge of interest in price history. The result was the founding in 1930–31 of the International Scientific Committee on the History of Prices, the largest and most sustained effort at international collaboration historians have ever undertaken. The initiative came from William Beveridge in England. Coordinated projects were undertaken in France by Henri Hauser, in Germany by Moritz Elsas, in Austria by A. F. Pribram, in the Netherlands by Nicolaas Posthumus, in Denmark by Astrid Friis and Kristoff Glamann, and in the United States by Arthur Harrison Cole.
The international committee on prices recommended standard procedures, drew up a list of twenty five types of commodities, and agreed on base periods for the computation of price indices. Despite these attempts to achieve common standards, individual price histories sponsored by the committee differed in many ways. Some were content merely to compile lists of nominal prices; others converted their data into silver equivalents—a procedure the committee recommended. Some works were based on institutional records; others on published price lists. Most works were national in scope but tended to be based upon data from a comparatively small number of sources. Even so, rapid progress was made in the publication of price materials, until World War II intervened. This work is discussed in Henri Hauser, “Un comité internationale d’enquête sur l’histoire des prix,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Socialé 2 (1930) 384–85; and Arthur Harrison Cole, “American Research in Price History,” University of Pennsylvania Bicentennial Conference, Studies in Economics and Industrial Relations (Philadelphia,
1941). A history of this effort is Arthur H. Cole and Ruth Crandall, “The International Scientific Committee on Price History,” Journal of Economic History 24 (1964) 381–88.
During the 1920s and 1930s, many leading historians throughout the world devoted themselves to problems of price history. The great French historian Marc Bloch did much of his work on medieval money and prices. Young Italian scholar-intellectuals became price historians; among them were Amintore Fanfani and Luigi Einaudi, who would later occupy the highest political offices in their nation. The brilliant British polymath Lord Beveridge was deeply interested in the history of prices and made a major contribution. His original purposes were far removed from those of most price historians. “My own interest in the subject,” Beveridge wrote, “.… arose not from general considerations but from the belief that the study of prices could be used to throw a light upon the problem of periodicity of harvests and so of weather.”
Whatever Beveridge’s purposes may have been, his scholarship was excellent, and his flair and imagination appeared in one of the most lively methodological essays to flow from a scholar’s pen, “A Statistical Crime of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Economic and Business History 4 (1929) 528, a discourse on techniques of price history, centering on a fraud in the fixing of wheat prices at Exeter. A lively and intelligent study of this extraordinary figure is José Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, 1977).
In the 1920s and 1930s, historians were not alone in this work. Leading economists throughout the world also studied descriptive problems of price history. They included François Simiand in France; Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes in Britain; Irving Fisher, Earl Hamilton, and Simon Kuznets in the United States; and Nikolai Kondratieff in the Soviet Union. All were drawn to the subject by a faith in the possibility of objective knowledge about historical change and a belief that economics was an inductive science.
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