Great Wave

by Fischer, David Hackett;

  For Germany, see M. J. Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Deutschland vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum Beginn des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leiden, 1936–49), a series of price studies centered on six German cities; idem, “Price Data from Munich, 1500–1700,” Economic History 3 (1935) 63–78; W. Koppe, “Zur preisrevolution des 16 Jahrhunderts in Holstein,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinsche Geschichte (1955); Hans Helmut Wächter, Ostpreussiche Domänenvorwerke im 16 und 17 Jahrhundert (Würzburg, 1958); Otto Dittmann, Die Getreidepreise im der Stadt Leipzig im XVI und XVII Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1889); Wilhelm Koppe, “Zur Preisrevolution des 16. Jahrhunderts in Holstein,” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte 79 (1955); Volkmar von Arnim, Krisen und Konjunkturen der Landwirtshaft in Schleswig-Holstein vom 16 bis zum 18 Jahrhundert (Neumunster, 1957).

  For eastern Europe, see Stanislas Hoszowski, “The Revolution of Prices in Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries,” Acta Polonia Historica 2 (1959) 7–16; idem, “L’Europe centrale devant la révolution des prix,” Annales E.S.C. (1961), partly tr. as “Central Europe and the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Price Revolution,” in Burke, ed., Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe; Essays from Annales, 84–103. The same anthology also includes essays by Z. P. Bach on Hungary and Marian Laowist on economic movements throughout Europe; see also Jan Szpak, Rewolucja cen XVI wieku a funkcjonamie godpodarki dworskiej w starostwach Prus Krolewskich (Cracow, 1982), with a full summary in English; Tibor Wittman, Az‘arforrdalom’ e’s a vilagpiaci kopcsolatok kezdeti mozzanatai (1566–1618) [The price revolution and fundamental factors in market relationships throughout the world] (Budapest, 1957); for Russia, see Jerome Blum, “Prices in Russia in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 16 (1956) 182–99.

  Scandinavian prices are studied in Ingrid Hammarström’s excellent essay, “The ‘Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century’: Some Swedish Evidence,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 5 (1957) 118–54, which is also one of the best overviews of the price revolution in general.

  On the Middle East, see O. L. Barkan, “The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: A Turning Point in the Economic History of the Near East,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 6 (1975) 3–28; and K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (New York, 1985).

  On price relatives, a valuable work is Clyde George Reed, “Price Data and European Economic History: England, 1300–1600,” (thesis, University of Washington, 1972); also R. A. Doughty, “Industrial Prices and Inflation in Southern England, 1401–1640” Explorations in Economic History 12 (1975) 177–92.

  On rates of change and fluctuations, a helpful study is Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide, “L’évolution du prix du blé dans quelques villes d’Europe occidentale du XVe au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 42 (1987) 529–48.

  On wages and the cost of living, in addition to the work of Abel, Phelps-Brown, d’Avenel, and Gibson and Smout cited above, a major work is Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (New York and London, 1989). Older studies include B. L. Hutchins, “Notes towards a History of London Wages,” Economic Journal 9 (1899) 599–605, and 10 (1900) 103–4; E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Wage-Rates and Prices: Evidence for Population Pressure in the Sixteenth Century,” Economica 24 (1957) 289–306; and idem, “Builders’ Wage Rates, Prices, and Population: Some Further Evidence,” Economica 26 (1959) 18–38. An English study of wages that quarrels with the Phelps-Brown-Hopkins index is D. Woodward, “Wage Rates and Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England,” Past & Present 91 (1981) 28–46.

  For wage movements in other nations, see Earl J. Hamilton, “Wages and Subsistence on Spanish Treasure Ships, 1503–1660,” Journal of Political Economy (1929); Hertha Hon-Firnberg, Lohnarbeiter undfreie Lohnarbeit im Mittelalter und zu Beginn der Neuzeit (Baden b. Wein, 1935); M. Baulant, “Les salaires du Bâtiment, 1490–1726,” cited above; E. Scholliers, De Levenstandaard in de XVe en XVIe eeuw to Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1960); Aldo de Maddalena, “Preise, Löhne unde Goldwesen im Verlauf der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung Mailands,” in Ingomar Bog, ed., Wirtschaftliche und soziale Strukturen im saekularen Wandel (Hanover, 1974); Brian Pullan, “Wage Earners in the Venetian Economy, 1550–1630,” Economic History Review 16 (1964) 407–26; Cristobal Espejo, “La carestia de la vida en el siglo XVI y medios de abarataria,” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 24–25 (1920–21); B. H. Putnam, “Northamptonshire Wage Assessment of 1560 and 1667,” Economic History Review 1 (1927–28) 124–34.

  On population movements, see Edward Anthony Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (New York and Cambridge, 1989), 566; Julian Cornwall, “English Population in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Economic History Review 23 (1970) 32–44; M. M. Postan, “Some Economic Evidence of Declining Population in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 2 (1949–50) 221–46; F. J. Fisher, “Influenza and Inflation in Tudor England,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 18 (1965) 120–29.

  On climate, in addition to the work of Le Roy Ladurie cited above, see Micheline Baulant, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Michel Demonet, “Une synthèse provisoire: Les vendages du XVe au XIXe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 33 (1978) 763–71; Micheline Baulant and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Les dates de vendages au XVIe siècle . . . ,” Mélanges en l’ honneur de Fernand Braudel: Méthodologie de l’histoire et des sciences humaines (Toulouse, 1973); C. Harrison, “Grain Price Analysis and Harvest Qualities, 1465–1634,” Agricultural History Review 19 (1971) 135–55.

  Monetarist interpretations are revived with various shades of enthusiasm in Dennis O. Flynn, “A New Perspective on the Spanish Price Revolution: The Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments,” Explorations in Economic History 15 (1978) 388–406; D. N. McCloskey, Journal of Political Economy 80 (1972) 1332–35; D. L. Gadiel and M. E. Falkus, “Comment on the Price Revolution’,” Australian Economic History Review 9 (1969) 9–16.

  On the money supply the literature is very large; see, in addition to works of Hamilton cited above, C. H. Haring, “American Gold and Silver Production in the First Half of the Sixteenth-Century,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 29 (1915) 433–79; John U. Nef, “Silver Production in Central Europe, 1450–1618,” Journal of Political Economy 49 (1914) 575–91; Fernand Braudel, “Monnaies et Civilisations: De l’or du Soudan à l’argent d’Amerique,” Annales E.S.C. 1 (1946) 9–22; and A. Attman, The Bullion Flow between Europe and the East, 1000–1750 (Goteborg, 1981).

  English money is the subject of Albert Feaveryear, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money (2d ed., revised by E. Victor Morgan, Oxford, 1963); G. D. Gould, The Great Debasement (Oxford, 1970); C. E. Challis, “Currency and the Economy in Mid-Tudor England,” Economic History Review 25 (1972) 313–22; J. D. Gould, “The Great Debasement and the Supply of Money,” Australian Economic History Review 13 (1973) 177–89; idem, “Currency and Exchange Rate in Sixteenth-Century England,” Journal of European Economic History 2 (1973) 149–59; C. E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (New York and Manchester, 1978); idem, Currency and the Economy of Tudor and Early Stuart England (Oxford, 1989); idem, ed., A New History of the Royal Mint (Cambridge, 1992).

  On France the leading study is Frank C. Spooner, The International Economy and Monetary Movements in France, 1493–1725 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).

  Italian monetary history in this period includes Carlo Cipolla, La moneta a Firenze nel cinquecento (Bologna, 1987); idem, Mouvements monétaires dans l’état de Milan (1580–1700 (Paris, 1952); G. Pesce and G. Felloni, Le monete genovesi (Genoa, 1975).

  The difficult problem of velocity, the most elusive term in the monetarist equation, is discussed in J. A. Goldstone, “Monetary versus Velocity Interpretation of the ‘Price Revolution’: A Comment,” Journal of Economic History 51 (1991) 176–81; and N. J. Mayhew, “P
opulation, Money Supply, and the Velocity of Circulation in England, 1300–1700,” Economic History Review 2d ser., 48 (1995) 238–57.

  Fiscal factors are discussed in Alvaro Castillo Pintado, “Dette flotante et dette consolidée en Espagne de 1557 à 1600,” Annales E.S.C., 18 (1963) 745–59; Charles J. Jago, “The Influence of Debt on the Relations between Crown and Aristocracy in Seventeenth-Century Castile,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 26 (1973) 218–36; Ladislas Reitzer, “Some Observations on Castilian Commerce and Finance in the Sixteenth-Century,” Journal of Modern History 32 (1960) 213–23; Bernard Schapper, Les rentes au XVIe siècle: Histoire d’un instrument de crédit (Paris, 1957).

  On money and banking and means of payment, a pathbreaking work is Marie-Thérèse Boyer-Xambeu, Ghislain Deleplace, and Lucien Azodi, Private Money & Public Currencies: the Sixteenth Century Challenge (Paris, 1986; Eng. tr. Armonk, N.Y., 1994)

  The movement of interest rates is followed in Sidney Homer, A History of Interest Rates (2d ed., New Brunswick, 1977).

  For the history of land, rent, and real estate prices, see Eric Kerridge, “The Movement of Rent, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 6 (1953–54) 16–34; H. G. Koenigsberger, “Property and the Price Revolution (Hainault, 1474–1573),” Economic History Review 2d ser. 9 (1956) 1—15; David E. Vassberg, ‘The Sale of “Tierras Baldias’ in Sixteenth-Century Castile,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975) 629–54; idem, “The Tierras Baldias:Community Property and Public Lands in Sixteenth-Century Castile,” Agricultural History 48 (1974) 383–401; D. Zolla, “Les variations du revenu et du prix des terres en France au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Annales de l’École Libre des Sciences Politiques (1893–94); Helen Nader, “Noble Income in Sixteenth-Century Castile: The Case of the Marquises of Mondejar, 1480–1580,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 30 (1977) 411–28; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Changes in Parisian Rents from the End of the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century,” in The Territory of the Historian (Chicago, 1973), 61–75.

  Outstanding among many local and regional studies for this period are Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans de Languedoc (2 vols., Paris, 1966) and Carla Rahn Phillips, CiudadReal, 1500–1700; Growth, Crisis, and Readjustment in the Spanish Economy (Cambridge, 1979).

  On social disturbances during the price revolution, see Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke, The German Peasant War of 1525—New Viewpoints (London, 1979); Pieter Geyl, The Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609 (1932, New York, 1966; 2d ed., London, 1966); Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1982), 1:122–39.

  On contemporary responses and the development of monetary theory in the sixteenth-century, see Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544–1605 (Oxford, 1952); Jean Bodin, La réponse de maistre Jean Bodin, Avocat en le Cour, au paradox de Monsieur Malestroit . . . (1568; ed. Henri Hauser, Paris, 1932); idem, “Les ‘Coutumes’ considérees comme source de l’histoire des prix d’après Jean Bodin,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 19 (1931); other early expressions of the quantity theory include Noel du Fail, Balivernes et contes d’Entrepal (1548); Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Annals of the Emperor Charles V (Oxford, 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 (1603, London; New York, 1972). Some of these works are discussed in A. E. Munroe, Monetary Theory before Adam Smith (1923; New York, 1966); R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, Tudor Economic Documents (3 vols., London, 1924); George Hakewill, An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World (2d ed., Oxford, 1630); Paul Harsin, les doctrine monétaires et finacières en France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1928); J. Y. Le Branchu, Ecrits notables sur la monnaie, XVIe siècle.

  Other relations between social and economic history are explored in C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700 (Cambridge, 1984); J. A. Goldstone, “Urbanization and Inflation: Lessons from the English Price Revolution of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” American Journal of Sociology 89 (1984) 1122–60.

  On cultural and economic history, see William J. Callahan, Honor, Commerce, and Industry in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Boston, 1972); L. A. Clarkson, “Inflation and the Moral Order,” History Today 36 (1986) 10–14; Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore, 1926).

  The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

  General surveys of this subject include Roland Mousnier, Les XVIe et XVIIe Siècles (Paris, 1954, 4th ed. 1965; rev. ed. London, 1976); Henry Kamen, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe, 1550–1660 (1972, New York, rev. ed., London, 1976); and Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975), with bibliographical notes and appendix.

  Two indispensable anthologies of journal literature on the general crisis are Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (New York, 1965) and Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (1978, London, 1985). Another major essay is Josef Polisensky, “The Thirty-Years’ War and the Crises and Revolutions of Seventeenth-Century Europe,” Past & Present 39 (1968) 34–63.

  Historiographical essays include Theodore K. Rabb, “The Effects of the Thirty Years War on the German Economy,” Journal of Modern History 34 (1962) 40–51; Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, “Historiographical Review: Germany and the Seventeenth Century Crisis,” Historical Journal 35 (1992) 417–41; and John Theibault, “Towards a New Sociocultural History of the Rural World of Early Modern Germany” Central European History 24 (1991), 304–24.

  The idea of a “general crisis” in the seventeenth century is challenged by E. H. Kossmann, “Trevor Roper’s ‘General Crisis,’” Past & Present 18 (1960) 8–11. With the progress of demographic and economic research, many scholars have now come to accept the idea of a general crisis in a sense more profound than political historians originally intended.

  Marxist approaches appear in Eric Hobsbawm, “The Overall Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century,” Past & Present 5 (1954) 33–53; Immanuel Wallerstein, “Y a-t-il une crise du XVIIe siècle?” Annales E.S.C. 34 (1979) 126–44; B. F. Porshnev, Frantziia, Angliiskaia Revoliutsiia i Evropeiskaia Politika (v’ Ceredina XVII) (Moscow, 1970), from which excerpts for English readers appear in P. Dukes, “Russia and Mid-Seventeenth Century Europe: Some Comments on the Work of B. F. Porschnev,” European Studies Review 4 (1970) 81–88; Witold Kula, Théorie économique du système féodal; Pour un modéle de l’ économie polonaise XVIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1970); Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974); and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York, 1974).

  Malthusian models appear in Pierre Goubert, “Historical Demography and the Reinterpretation of Early Modern French History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (1970) 37–48; Wilhelm Abel, Massenarmut und Hungerkrisen im vorindustriellen Europa (Hamburg, 1974); Andrew Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford, 1978); François Lebrun, “Les crises démographiques en France aux XVIIe at XVIIIe siècles,” Annales E.S.C. 35 (1980) 205–25; Luis Granjel, “Las epidemias de peste en España durante el siglo XVII,” Cuadernos de Historia de la Medicina Española 3 (1964) 19–40; Bernard Vincent, “Les pestes dans le royaume de Grenade aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,” Annales E.S.C. 24 (1969) 1511–13. For a critique, see D. M. Palliser, “Tawney’s Century: Brave New World or Malthusian Trap?” Economic History Review 2d ser. 35 (1982) 339–53; Carlo M. Cipolla, Cristofano and the Plague: A Study in the History of Public Health in the Age of Galileo (Berkeley, 1973); with a critique by George Rosen in Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975) 83–86; B. Bennassar, Recherches sur les grandes épidemies dans le nord de l’Espagne à la fin du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1969);

  An ecological ap
proach within a broadly Malthusian frame appears in Victor Skipp, Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden, 1570–1694 (Cambridge, 1978). Models of exogenous climate change are explored in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine:A History of Climate since the Year 1000 (Garden City, 1967; New York, 1971), Gustaf Utterstrom, “Climatic Fluctuations and Population Problems in Early Modern History,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 3 (1955) 27–28; and the works of H. H. Lamb, cited above.

  For a cultural history of the crisis, see Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975). Other works include Alexander Augustine Parker, Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe, 1599–1753 (Edinburgh, 1967); R. Mandrou, “La baroque européen: Mentalité pathétique et révolution sociale,” Annales E.S.C. 15 (1960) 898–914; G. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Princeton, 1973).

  For one great work of literature in its historical context see Pierre Vilar, “Le temps du Quichotte,” Europe 34 (1956) 3–16, available to English readers as “The Age of Don Quixote,” in Peter Earle, ed., Essays in European Economic History, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1974) 100–12;

  A classic of German literature by a German soldier (actually a regimental clerk) in the Thirty Years’ War is H. J. C. von Grimmelhausen, The Adventurous Simplicissimus tr. A. S. Goodrick (Lincoln, 1962); a discussion is Hans Dieter Gebauer, Grimmelshausens Bauerdarstellung: Literarische Sozialkritik und ihr Publikum (Marburg, 1977).

  Most local and regional studies tend to combine elements of these various Marxist, Malthusian, cultural approaches in pluralistic interpretations, which in the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly stressing material causes and cultural results. See, e.g., Carla Rahn Phillips, Ciudad Real, 1500–1700, cited above; William Hunt, The Puritan Movement: The Coming of Revolution in an English County [Essex] (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Gerald Lyman Soliday, A Community in Conflict: Frankfurt Society in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Hanover, 1974); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans de Languedoc, cited above; Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730 (Paris, 1960); B. Bennasar, Valladolid au siècle d’or (Paris, 1969); Rudolf Schlögl, Bauern, Krieg, und Staat: Oberbayerische Bauernwirtschaft und frühmoderner Staat im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1988).