For Africa, see M. Malowist, “The Social and Economic Stability of the Western Sudan in the Middle Ages,” Past & Present 33 (1966) 3-15; E. W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (Oxford, 1958); J. Devisse, “Routes de Commerce et échanges en Afrique occidentale en relation avec la Méditerranée,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 1 (1972) 42–73, 357–97.
For evidence of a global change in climate, see A. T. Wilson, “Isotope Evidence for Past Climatic and Environmental Change,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1980) 241–50.
APPENDIX C
The Seventeenth Century: A World Crisis?
In the year 1649, an English pamphleteer invented a fictional “interview” in the Elysian Fields between two newly arrived heads of state: Charles I of England and the Sultan Ibraham, who had been emperor of the Ottoman Turks. Both had just been executed by their angry subjects. The shades of these murdered monarchs met in the afterworld, and commiserated with one another on their common fate. (Lord Kinross, Ottoman Centuries; The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire [New York, 1977], 19, 317).
Other rulers might well have joined that ghostly conversation. More than a few met violent ends during the general crisis of the seventeenth century. This event was not limited to Europe. It developed in every part of the inhabited world.
China’s Ming dynasty, which had come to power in the crisis of the fourteenth century, collapsed in the seventeenth century. Its disintegration was so complete that a bandit chieftain named Lu Tzu-ch’eng took control of the capital city of Beijing. The humiliation of the ruling dynasty was so great that the last Ming emperor hanged himself in 1644. During the mid-seventeenth century, the Chinese people suffered severely from famine, disease and disorder. Demographic evidence shows clearly that these were not routine miseries of a sort that were visited upon every generation. The population of China fell in the seventeenth century for the first time since the crisis of the fourteenth century—a pattern very similar to that in Europe.
India also experienced a time of troubles in the same period. Here too, the early seventeenth century was an era of economic stagnation, rising prices, falling population, growing inequality, hunger and pestilence. In 1616, bubonic plague returned to the subcontinent. Millions of Indians sickened and starved while the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan (1628–58) built the beautiful Taj Mahal at great expense for his wife—a testament of private love and material inequality. In 1658 Shah Jahan was deposed and imprisoned. After his death in that same year, a civil war broke out among his sons. Religious strife became intense, and the Mogul Empire began to disintegrate. This event opened the way for European conquest of the Indian subcontinent.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the Bornu Empire and the Mangding Empire both collapsed. In the Middle East, the Persian Empire began to disintegrate after the death of the great Shah Abbas (1587–1629). The Ottoman Empire decayed rapidly in the reign of Sultan Murad the Maniac, a sadistic madman who ruled from 1623 to 1640. He was followed by Ibrahim the Wretched, who went quietly insane. In 1648, the unfortunate Ibrahim was overthrown and executed—hence his Elysian conversation with Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649.
Persistent unrest also occurred in the American colonies of New England, New France, Virginia, New Spain, New Netherland, Brazil, and the Caribbean islands. The strife that developed in the New World throughout the seventeenth century has been interpreted by colonial historians in parochial ways, as consequences of local events. These events were also part of global trends in the period from 1618 to 1650. The crisis of the seventeenth century was a time of troubles throughout the world.
APPENDIX D
America and Europe: One Conjuncture or Two?
In 1963, a leading economic historian posed a problem about the movement of prices in America and Europe. Ruggiero Romano suggested that major pricetrends in the Old World were fundamentally different from those in the New World. In his own pathbreaking inquiries into the economic history of Latin America, he reported evidence that during the eighteenth century prices were stagnant in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, that a chronic shortage of money existed, and capital accumulation and economic growth lagged behind Europe. From this pattern Romano concluded that there was an “inverse movement of prices in Ibero-America and Europe.” He also suggested that New France and British America were similar to Latin America in their price trends. See 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 Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds., Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, 1990), 35–71.
Romano’s pioneering thesis has inspired much research on the price history of Latin America during the eighteenth century. The evidence is now beginning to flow in some abundance. Most of it suggests that latin American price movements were a variation on European trends, but not an inverse pattern.
The debate centers on the eighteenth century. In that period, the reader will remember that European prices had shown no upward trend until the decade 1730–40. Thereafter they rose until the early nineteenth century, In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, prices fell or remained on the same level until 1750, and continued to do so in some places such as Salvador and Potosi until as the 1780s. But in Mexico, Chile, and other parts of Latin America, prices were generally rising from yhe 1760s. By the late 1780s, the pricerevolution of the eighteenth century was operating broadly there. Historian John Coatsworth writes of Latin America in general that “in all cases for which there are data, commodity prices were rising in the 1790s and during the war years that followed.” See John H. Coatsworth, “Economic History and the History of Prices,” in Johnson and Tandeter, eds., Essays on the price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America, 22.
In New France, price-trends were very similar, with a rising tendency during the late eighteenth century, and surges during the period from 1793 to 1817. See F. Ouellet and J. Hamelin, Le mouvement des prix agricoles dans la province de Quebec (1760-1815) (n.p., n.d.;idem, “Lacrise agricoledans le Bas-Canada,” Etudes Rurales 7 (1962) 36–57.
In the United States, many inquiries have found the same trends and timing as in western Europe. This pattern appears in the wholesale price indices of Warren and Pearson, the research of Arthur Cole, in the Bezanson index of wholesale prices in Philadelphia, and the Taylor index of wholesale prices in Charleston, South Carolina. Similar patterns also appear in the research of Winifred Rothenberg on agricultural prices in New England. The evidence appears in George F. Warren and Frank A. Pearson, Prices (New York, 1933), 11-27; Arthur H. Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1700–1861 (Cambridge, 1938) 153–67; Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray and Miriam Hussey, Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 1749–1861 (Philadelphia, 1936), 392; George Rogers Taylor, “Wholesale Commodity Prices at Charleston, S.C., 1732–1791,” Journal of Economic History 4 (1932) 356-77; idem, “Wholesale Commodity Prices at Charleston, S.C., 1796–1861,” ibid., supplement, 848–68; 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.
Price series in some parts of Latin America come closer to the Romano model, and everywhere there were differences between colonial price movements and those of Europe. Small markets for locally traded commodities showed various idiosyncracies. Prices movements for manufactured products moved differently in the early years of colonial history. The dependency of many colonies on the price of a single dominant staple crop caused differences as well. But these patterns were variations on the central theme. Throughout the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century there was one great conjuncture, not two.
APPENDIX E
> Cycles and Waves
Frank Manuel once remarked that every idea of history comes down to either the circle or the line. One might add that most models of price history are either the cycle or the wave. This inquiry centers on a wave-model, which has become increasingly dominant in the literature, because it solves many conceptual problems. In historical scholarship, waves of the past are the wave of the future.
Most early research on recurrent price movements was very different in its purpose. It was mainly a search for cycles rather than waves. Many scholars have gone looking for cycles in price movements, and few have been disappointed. Learned journals called Cycles, Kyklos, Futures, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change have published essays that report evidence of many different cyclical rhythms in modern history. They include Kondratieff cycles (with a period of fifty years), Kuznets “long swings” (twenty to twenty-five years), Labrousse “intercycles” (ten to twelve years), Juglar trade cycles (seven to eight years), and Kitchin business cycles (three to four years).
The largest and most controversial literature is about Kondratieff cycles, which are sometimes mistakenly called long waves. They are thought to have caused major depressions every half century, circa 1815, 1870, 1929, and 1970. The seminal monograph was written by Nikolai D. Kondratieff, head of the Moscow Institute for Business Cycle Research, and published in Russian in 1925. A German translation appeared as “Die langen Wellen der Konjunktur,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 56 (1926) 573–609. An abridged English translation was published in The Review of Economic Statistics 17 (1935) 161–72. A complete English text is in Review 2 (1979) 519–62. The model was elaborated by Kondratieff in The Long Wave Cycle (1928, rpt., New York, 1984).
As Kondratieff himself was careful to point out, similar models had been put forward by A. Spiethoff in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaft (1923). They had also been discussed by two Dutch socialists: S. de Wolff in “Prosperitats-und Depressionsperioden,” Lebendige Marxismus (Jena, 1924); and even earlier by C. van Gelderen, “Springvloed: Beschouwingen over industrieele ontwikkeling en Prijsbeweging,” De Niewe Tijd 18 (1913).
Marxist critics, including Trotsky and many Old Bolsheviks, condemned Kondratieff cycles as an economic heresy. In 1930, Kondratieff was sent to Siberia, where he died in a Communist concentration camp. See Richard B. Day, “The Theory of Long Waves: Kondratieff, Trotsky, and Mandel,” New Left Review 99 (1976) 67–82. An excellent historiographical essay on the diffusion of Kondratieff’s work is Jean-Louis Escudier, “Kondratieff et l’histoire économique Française,” Annates E.S.C. 48 (1993) 359–83.
French and German historians have always been much interested in Kondratieff cycles, more so than their American and British colleagues. Extended discussions include Gaston Imbert, Des mouvements de longue durée Kondratieff (Aix en Provence, 1959), and Ulrich Weinstock, Das Problem der Kondratieff-Zyklen (Berlin, 1964).
In the English-speaking world, historians have contributed comparatively little to this subject, but social scientists have written at length upon it. Interest surged during the 1930s in works such as Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles (New York, 1939); then declined, and revived in the 1970s. The best introduction to a large literature is Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age (New Haven, 1988), a careful, honest and thought-provoking work which analyzes 33 attempts by various scholars to test the existence of the Kondratieff cycle, mostly with positive results. Goldstein’s excellent bibliography also lists hundreds of works, not so much by historians, but by political scientists and sociologists on various aspects of this question. For other discussions, see Donald V. Etz, “The Kondratieff Wave: A Review,” Cycles (1973) 73–74; J. J. Van Duijn, The Long Wave in Economic Life (1979, rpt., Boston, 1983); John C. Soper, The Long Swing in Historical Perspective (New York, 1978); Casper Van Ewijk, “A Spectral Analysis of the Kondratieff Cycle,” Kyklos 35 (1982) 468–99; T. Kitwood, “A Farewell Wave to the Theory of Long Waves,” Universities Quarterly — Culture, Education and Society 38 (1984) 158–78; Irma Adelman, “Long Cycles: Fact or Artifact?” American Economic Review 55 (1965) 444–63; R. Hamil, “Is the Wave of the Future a Kondratieff?” Futurist 13 (1979) 381-84; J. P. Harkness, “A Spectral Analysis of the Long Swing Hypothesis in Canada,” Review of Economics and Statistics 50 (1968) 429–36; Rainer Metz, “‘Long Waves’ in English and German Economic Historical Series from the Middle of the Sixteenth to the Middle of the Twentieth Century,” in Rainer Fremdling and Patrick K. O’Brien, eds., Productivity in the Economies of Europe (Stuttgart, 1983) 175–219; idem, “Long Waves in Coinage and Grain PriceSeries from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” Review 7 (1984) 599–647; Paolo S. Labini, “Le problème des cycles économiques de longue durée,” Economie appliquée 3 (1950) 481–95; Jos. Delbeke, “Recent Long-Wave Theories: A Critical Survey,” Futures 13 (1981) 246–57; M. N. Cleary and G. D. Hobbs, “The Fifty-Year Cycle: A Look at the Empirical Evidence,” in Christopher Freeman, ed., Long Waves in the World Economy (London, 1983); Heinz-Deiter Haustein and Erich Neuwirth, “Long Waves in World Industrial Production, Energy Consumption, Innovations, Inventions and Patents and Their Identification by Spectral Analysis,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 22 (1982) 53–89; Ghalib M. Baqir, “The Long Wave Cycles and Re-Industrialization,” International Journal of Social Economics 8 (1981) 117–23; K. Eklund, “Long Waves in the Development of Capitalism?” Kyklos 33 (1980) 383-419; Hans Bieshaar and Alfred Kleinknecht, “Kondratieff Waves in Aggregate Output?” Konjunktur Politik 30 (1984); David M. Gordon, “Stages of Accumulation and Long Economic Cycles,” in Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Processes of the World System (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1980); Alfred Kleinknecht, “Innovation, Accumulation and Crisis: Waves in Economic Development,” Review 4 (1981) 683-711; Ernest Mandel, Long Waves of Capitalist Development (Cambridge, 1980).
The literature on Kondratieff’s long cycles, for all its abundance, has a shallow empirical base. Many historians continue to doubt the very existence of Kondratieff cycles. Skepticism centers on the period from 1873 to 1893, for if the economic downturns in those years were no more severe than those of 1819, 1826, 1837 and 1859, then the Kondratieff pattern loses much of its salience and most of its shape. See S. B. Saul, The Myth of the Great Depression, 1873–1896 (London, 1896); and Solomos Solomou, “Kondratieff Waves in the World Economy, 1850–1913,” Journal of Economic History 46 (1986) 165-69.
Another weakness appeared in the 1970s when many Kondratieff-minded scholars predicted a “coming collapse of capitalism” that stubbornly refused to come, despite many dire warnings. See, e.g., Jay W. Forrester, “We’re Headed for Another Depression,” Fortune Jan. 16, 1978; Geoffrey Barraclough, “The End of an Era,” New York Review of Books 21 (1974) 14–20; and Cesare Marchetti, “Recession 1983: Ten More Years To Go?” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 24 (1983) 331–42.
Evidence for a Kondratieff pattern in earlier periods of history is even weaker than in the modern era. Kondratieff himself believed that his cycles did not occur before 1790. Other scholars have claimed to find evidence of the same rhythm throughout the modern and even the medieval era, but the empirical evidence is very soft.
My own judgment is that a cycle of approximately fifty or sixty years does in fact appear in many social indicators, and has been confirmed by various statistical methods including business cycle analysis, trend deviation, moving averages, and spectral analysis, to name but a few. But this pattern is not stronger than other cyclical rhythms, and it is much weaker than the secular trend with which it is sometimes confused. Kondratieff’s “long wave” may be merely a multiple of generational “long swings,” which move round the secular trend and vary broadly from one swing to the next in timing and intensity. Much of the energy devoted by American social scientists to the study of the Kondratieff cycle has been misdirected. Their efforts might be more usefully applied to the examination of recurrent wave-like
secular trends which have more solid foundations in historical fact, though less predictive power.
Shorter cycles of thirty years also have been found in farm prices and harvest fluctuations by Beveridge, Goubert, and many recent writers on the world economy in the twentieth century. This pattern is sometimes (but not always) associated with solar activity. It has not been rigorously tested and is not generally accepted by most economists or historians today. But it keeps being rediscovered in descriptive studies. Cf. Stanley Jevons, “The Solar Period and the Price of Corn,” in Jevons, ed., Investigations in Currency and Finance (London, 1884).
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