Praise for The Great Wave

“This year’s best book for investors . . . . Too often, historical perspective on Wall Street
means going back a decade or two. Mr Fischer instead traces inflation data from medieval
times forward, finding evidence of repeated long patterns of rising prices, followed by long
periods of stability. In the process he demolishes some theories of what causes inflation . . . the
thesis is both believable and fascinating, and so is the book.” Floyd Norris, New York Times
annual survey of books in business and economics, 22 December 1996

“Very persuasive . . . a major work that deserves the attention of all historians.” Nancy
Gordon, History, Spring 1997

“Economists can read this book with interest and profit . . .. Fischer is a consummate stylist
and meticulous in his attention to details.” Rondo Cameron, Journal of Economic Literature,
Fall, 1997

“Phenomenal scope and erudition . . .. Fischer’s history of inflation is a thoroughly good read.
He should send the Treasury a copy.” Mark Archer, The Sunday Telegraph, 16 March 1997

“Fascinating reading. Fischer is no sensationalist trying to crank out a pseudo-economic best-

seller, but a serious economic historian . . . a book worth chewing on and digesting.” Barton
Biggs, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Investment Perspectives, July 9, 1997

“Important . . .. Fischer’s scholarship is admirable.” Larry Elliott, The Guardian, 4 March

1997

“Superbly written . . . you’ll never glare at a price tag in quite the same way again.” Kay
Davidson, San Francisco Examiner, 19 February 1997

“Informative and compelling. . . . A panoramic view of the role of prices and the pernicious
effects of inflation down through the ages.” Stanley W. Angrist, Wall Street Journal, 19
December 1996

“A brilliant, bold analysis of the relationship between economics—the prices of things—and

human welfare over 800 years. . . . It also allows us to observe an audacious and prodigiously
learned historian’s mind at work.” William McFeely, Boston Globe, 17 Nov. 1996

“Sumptuous in detail, charming in prose and provocative in implications . . . Historians will

contrive careers out of Fisher’s data.” Andrew Allentuck, Toronto Globe and Mail 14 Dec.
1996

“A provocative and thoughtful tour through history.” The Economist, 19 July 1997

“This is a fascinating book; it is also an important one . . .. Fischer succeeds in demonstrating

that there are recurrent waves of price revolutions in human history . . .. His is a powerful
piece of historical analysis and ought to become part of everyone’s framework of
understanding.” William Rees-Mogg, New Statesman and Society, 14 March 1997

“The best explanation for the wild gyrations at the heart of today’s popular culture I’ve yet
seen.” Nathan Greenfield, Ottawa Citizen, May 4, 1997

“Similar to more popular and populist works that spring up like daffodils and last about as
long . . .. The Great Wave, in contrast, is the real thing, backed by solid research, not the
author’s political leanings . . .. Fischer’s work offers a cautionary story that is readily
understandable and surprisingly compelling.” Bill Peschel, The Herald, Feb 16, 1997

“Intriguing. . . . Mr. Fischer looks at a thousand years of European history, and documents with
fascinating detail long periods of rising prices that are accompanied by social upheaval and
even war, followed by long periods of stable prices accompanied by social calm.” Alan
Murray, Wall Street Journal, 10 February 1997

“Important . . .. combining vivid narrative with shrewd dissections of quantitative evidence . . .

He has described the past and present in ways that inspire interesting questions and offer novel
insights into our condition. Can a historian make a finer contribution?” Thomas Archdeacon,
New York Times Book Review, 5 January 1997

“Delightful . . . truly a delightful book . . .. Fischer’s insights, thought-provoking hypotheses,

and engaging writing style make The Great Wave a book worthy of our attention.” Dudley
Poston, Sinet, August, 1997

“Wise, worthy, and mostly convincing . . . the strength of Fischer’s narrative is the way he
manages to intertwine details of everyday life and familiar aspects of history with the complex
story of the economic underpinnings of the times.” Alan Earls, Boston Book Review

“Fischer is nothing if not an expert storyteller. He has an unerring instinct for the main
narrative line; he decorates with an abundance of detail . . . his book lays out with gentlemanly
thoroughness the great questions that fairly leap out of the numbers.” David Warsh, Boston
Globe

“Tantalizing . . .. A bold thread coursing through the weave of eight centuries of economic
history.” William P. Kucewicz, Markets, April 1997

“Fascinating . . . detailed familiarity with Fischer’s ground-breaking book, and responses to

the difficult questions it raises ought to be required of any investment manager claiming
knowledge of the future path of inflation.” Malcolm Mitchell, Investment Policy, July-August,
1997

“Very readable . . . in an interesting and informative way, the author reminds us of the real
consequences that economic policy has in each person’s life.” Michael Wald, Bureau of Labor
Statistics, Monthly Labor Review, April 1997

“Meticulously assembled price records from Mesopotamia to the modern day . . . the
conclusion is optimistic.” Edward Whitehouse, Financial Times, London, June 5, 1997

“Informative and readable . . . Fischer combines a lively narrative with cogent analysis and
sound advice. Essential for scholarly collections, this fine book will also be appreciated by
lay readers.” David Keymer, Library Journal November 1, 1996

“Fascinating historical facts and anecdotes . . . avoids the fog that obscures much academic
writing.” David R. Francis, Christian Science Monitor, 24 April 1997

“Fischer is well known for providing new insights into important but seemingly commonplace
topics. This he does again in The Great Wave.” William L. Urban, Magill Book Reviews, 1997

“Absorbing narrative . . . economic theorists have long suggested that economic events are
cyclic. But in Fischer’s discerning analysis there have been four great price revolutions in
western history.” David Rouse, Booklist, October 1, 1996

“A bold overview of how ordinary men and women have been protagonists in a drama that
was (in retrospect) nothing less than the modernization of economic life.” Robert Heilbroner,
Civilization, 1996

“Fascinating . . .. Although his main purpose—and greatest contribution—is to describe price

revolutions, Fischer also takes a stab at explaining why they occur. he boldly declares some
preeminent scholars to be embarrassingly wrong. No economist or historian will agree with
everything he says. Many will vehemently disagree. But most will learn a great deal.”
Lexington Herald-Leader, January 26, 1997

“Monumental . . . History shows that periods of deflation can be periods of prosperity, too.
Here’s a strategy for investing in an era of prosperous deflation. Evidence? David H. Fischer’s
monumental history of price movements, The Great Wave.” Thomas Easton, Forbes Magazine,
November 16, 1998
 THE GREAT WAVE
Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History

David Hackett Fischer

Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Bombay
Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam
Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne
Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore
Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1996 by David Hackett Fischer
First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1996
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1999
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fischer, David Hackett, 1935–
The great wave: price revolutions and the rhythm of history /
David Hackett Fischer.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-505377-X
ISBN 0-19-512121-X (Pbk.)
1. Prices—History. 2. Business cycles—History.
3. Economic history. I. Title.
HB231.F48 1996
338.5’2—dc20 95-52161

987654321
Printed in the United States of America
For my parents, with love
Norma and John Fischer
CONTENTS
PREFACE
“Something Like a Seismograph,”

INTRODUCTION
Great Waves in World History

THE FIRST WAVE

The Medieval Price Revolution
The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century
The Equilibrium of the Renaissance

THE SECOND WAVE

The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century
The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century
The Equilibrium of the Enlightenment

THE THIRD WAVE

The Price Revolution of the Eighteenth Century
The Revolutionary Crisis
The Equilibrium of the Victorian Era

THE FOURTH WAVE

The Price Revolution of the Twentieth Century
The Troubles of Our Time

CONCLUSION
From the Past to the Future

APPENDICES
A. Price Revolutions in the Ancient World
B. The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century: A World Movement?
C. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: A Global Event?
D. America and Europe: One Conjuncture or Two?
E. Cycles and Waves
F. Toward a Discrimination of Inflations
G. Money of Exchange and Money of Account
H. Nominal Prices and Silver Equivalents
I. Returns to Capital: Interest Rates as Historical Indicators
J. Returns to Labor: Real Wages and Standards of Living
K. Measures of Wealth and Income Distribution
L. Price Revolutions and Inequality
M. Price Revolutions and Family Disintegration
N. Price Revolutions and Personal Violence
O. Economics and History

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources for the History of Prices
Secondary Sources

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CREDITS

INDEX
FIGURES
Charts, Maps, and Graphs
INTRODUCTION
0.01 Prices in England: Three Series, 1201–1993
0.02 Grain Prices in Europe: The Abel Series, 1201–1960

THE MEDIEVAL PRICE REVOLUTION

1.01 The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century
1.02 The Price of Wheat in England: The Structure of Change
1.03 The Price of Wheat in Italy, France, and England
1.04 English Prices and Population Movements, 1160–1350
1.05 Prices of Oxen, Wheat and Cheese: England, 1210–1325
1.06 Price Relatives in England, 1261–1320
1.07 English Monetary Fluctuations and the Price of Oxen
1.08 Returns to Labor: The Fall of Real Wages, 1270–1340
1.09 Returns to Land: The Rise of Rents, 1201–1350
1.10 The Growth of Inequality in Tuscany, 1307–1427

THE CRISIS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

1.11 Harvest Fluctuations and Famines in England, 1260–1360
1.12 Prices and Crime in Norfolk, England, 1300–1348
1.13 The Black Death
1.14 The Fall of Population in Essex

THE EQUILIBRIUM OF THE RENAISSANCE

1.15 The Fall of Population in Pistoia, 1244–1404
1.16 The Abandonment of Farms in Denmark, 1361–1460
1.17 The Damping of Harvest Fluctuations, 1400–1480
1.18 The Price of Grain in England and Germany, 1360–1490
1.19 Returns to Land in Italy and France, 1400–1460
1.20 Returns to Labor: Real Wages in England and France
1.21 Returns to Capital: The Fall of Interest Rates
1.22 The Growth of Peasant Holdings in England
1.23 The Renaissance of the Fifteenth Century
THE PRICE REVOLUTION OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
2.01 Prices in Spain, England, and Germany, 1475–1660
2.02 The Structure of Grain Prices in Modena, 1452–1610
2.03 English Prices and Population Movements, 1541–1671
2.04 Price Relatives in England, 1450–1650
2.05 The Price of Energy in Andalusia, 1500–1660
2.06 Returns to Labor: The Fall of Real Wages, 1480–1640
2.07 Returns to Land: The Rise of Rent, 1500–1669
2.08 Returns to Capital: Rising Interest Rates, 1500–1599
2.09 American Treasure and Spanish Prices, 1500–1660
2.10 Prices and Coinage of Money in France
2.11 The Growth of Inequality in England, 1544–1627
2.12 Harvest Prices, Famine, and Plague in England, 1480–1620
2.13 Monetary Debasements and Consumable Prices in England

THE CRISIS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

2.14 Instability in English Grain Prices, 1490–1650
2.15 Prices and Property Crimes in Essex, England, 1566–1602
2.16 The Fall of Population in Europe, 1600–1660
2.17 The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

THE EQUILIBRIUM OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

2.18 The Price of Wheat in Three European Capitals, 1660–1730
2.19 Staple Prices in America, 1658–1738
2.20 Returns to Labor: The Rise of English Wages, 1640–1739
2.21 Returns to Land: The Fall of Rent in France, 1650–1729
2.22 Returns to Capital: The Fall of Interest Rates, 1600–1740
2.23 Declining Inequality in England and Wales, 1670–1700
2.24 The Decline of Violent Crime in Kent, 1670–1740
2.25 The Spread of the Enlightenment

THE PRICE REVOLUTION OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

3.01 Prices in England, France and United States, 1720–1820
3.02 The Structure of Change: The Price of Wheat in France
3.03 Price Relatives in France, 1726–1789
3.04 Price Surges in the American Energy Market, 1792–1820
3.5 Prices and Population Movements in England, 1666–1820
3.06 Arrivals of American Treasure in Europe, 1503–1805
3.07 Europe’s Supply of Precious Metals by Place of Origin
3.08 Returns to Capital: The Rise of Interest Rates in Britain
3.09 Returns to Land: The Rise of Rent and Real Estate
3.10 Returns to Labor: The Fall of Real Wages
3.11 Price Movements and Births Outside Marriage
3.12 The Growth of Inequality

THE REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS

3.13 Harvest Fluctuations and English Grain Prices, 1760–1830
3.14 Prices, Crime, War and Depression in England, 1740–1810
3.15 Revolution and the Price of Bread in Paris, 1788–1790
3.16 The Revolutionary Crisis
3.17 Hyperinflation in the American and French Revolutions

THE VICTORIAN EQUILIBRIUM

3.18 Consumable Prices in England, 1812–1914
3.19 Wholesale Prices in Europe and America, 1820–1896
3.20 Returns to Labor: The Rise of Real Wages, 1800–1896
3.21 Returns to Land: Rent and Real Estate, 1800–1880
3.22 Returns to Capital: Falling Interest Rates, 1815–1900
3.23 Distribution of Wealth and Income, 1850–1913
3.24 Prices and Population: Rates of Change, 1761–1891
3.25 Prices and Population: Absolute Magnitudes, 1801–1871
3.26 Money and Prices in the United States, 1820–1856
3.27 Annual World Production of Silver and Gold
3.28 Crime in Chicago, London and Stockholm, 1830–1900
3.29 Bastardy in Britain, 1840–1920
3.30 Alcohol in America, 1810–1900
3.31 The Victorian Equilibrium

THE PRICE REVOLUTION OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

4.01 Prices in the United States, 1896–1996
4.02 Structure of Change, U.S. Prices, 1896–1992
4.03 Slow Beginnings, 1890–1914
4.04 Prices and Money Supply, the United States, 1875–1914
4.05 World Population Growth and U.S. Consumer Prices
4.06 Equality in the United States: Mixed Trends, 1890–1970
4.07 The Rise of Real Wages: United States, 1900–1960
4.08 Price Movements and World War I, 1914–1918
4.09 Hyperinflation after World War I, 1921–1923
4.10 Deflation, Depression, and World War II, 1920–1945
4.11 Price Controls in the United States, 1942–1946
4.12 Hyperinflations after World War II, 1947–1949
4.13 Price Controls in the United States, 1950–1953

THE TROUBLES OF OUR TIME

4.14 Inflation and Capacity Utilization in the United States
4.15 Inflation and Unemployment in the United States
4.16 The Price of Fuel Oil in the United States, 1960–1992
4.17 World Inflation Rates, 1979–1980
4.18 Price Relatives in the United States, 1967–1976
4.19 Returns to Labor: Falling Real Wages, 1960–1990
4.20 Returns to Real Estate: Rising Home Prices, 1966–1993
4.21 Returns to Capital: The Rise of Interest Rates, 1900–1990
4.22 The Growth of Inequality in the United States, 1968–1995
4.23 Crime and Prices in the United States, 1965–1995
4.24 Drugs, Drink, and Inflation in the United States, 1960–1993
4.25 Inflation and Births Outside Marriage, 1920–1990
4.26 Hyperinflations after the Cold War, 1980–1992

APPENDIX
5.01 Price Movements in Ancient Babylon, 1840–1620 B.C.
5.02 A Price Revolution in Ancient Greece, 450–150 B.C.
5.03 Price Revolutions in Ancient Rome: Two Estimates
5.04 The Price of Donkeys in Egypt
5.05 The Price Revolution of the Tenth Century: Portugal
5.06 Great Waves in Chinese History, 800–1800
5.07 Distribution of Wealth in America, 1635–1995
5.08 Births Outside Marriage in England and Wales, 1570–1993
5.09 Homicide Rates in England, 1200–1995
PREFACE
“Something Like a Seismograph . . .”

Of all the recording devices that can reveal to an historian the fundamental
movements of an economy, monetary phenomena are without doubt the
most sensitive. But to recognize their importance merely as symptoms
would do them less than full justice. They have been and are, in their turn,
causes. They are something like a seismograph, which not only measures
the movements of the earth but sometimes provokes them.

—Marc Bloch, 19331

QUANTITATIVE METHODS find many uses in modern historical research. In some hands, they are
tools of descriptive measurement. In others, they become a calculus of conceptual
relationships. A few work with them mainly as rhetorical devices, to “enlarge the historian’s
vocabulary.”2
Not everyone is comfortable with these applications. History teachers know that when the
dreaded word quantification is mentioned in a classroom, undergraduate eyes glaze over.
Numbers too often become numbers of young and restless minds.
It need not be so. If one makes a leap of the imagination, numbers come alive. They do so
both in what they allow us to know and in how they help us to think. Numbers make it possible
for us to put the pieces together. They allow us to compare events that are otherwise
incomparable. They tell us which way the world is moving. They help us to think in general
terms about particular events, and then to test our generalizations against the evidence of
empirical indicators.
Many indicators of that sort exist for the study of recent events, but few reach very far into
the distant past. Only one type of source-material spans the entire range of written history: the
record of prices. We carry these humble documents about with us every day, in the tattered
receipts that accumulate in our wallets and purses. They seem so ephemeral that we scarcely
think of them in historical terms, and yet they survive in greater abundance than any other
quantifiable material.
Price-records come down to us from ancient civilizations of Asia, India, Rome, Greece,
Egypt, Palestine and Mesopotamia. In the dust of old Babylon, archeologists have found large
numbers of clay tablets and cylinders that yield price-series as early as the reign of
Hammurapi (circa 1793–1750 B.C.). In the deserts of Egypt, scholars have found papyri that
record the cost of living in the time of the Pharaohs. The civilizations of Greece and Rome,
China and India all generated a large body of price-records.
Even for the early Middle Ages, where the sources are not as strong, scholars have been
able to put together primitive price-lists (as distinct from price-series) for an astonishing
variety of medieval commodities. We can follow the price of peasant grain, monkish cowls,
knightly armor, and even sacred relics from the sixth to the twelfth centuries. These sources
allow us to reconstruct price movements in a rough way through the darkest period of
European history.3
From the twelfth century to the present, historians have compiled more sophisticated
price-series of very high quality. These data now exist for all European nations, and many
cities and towns.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, complex price-indices have been constructed by
governments throughout the world, in a vast labor of data-gathering that grows ever more
elaborate and precise. Every month, the latest price movements are front-page news in our
morning papers, and lead stories on the evening broadcast.4
With all of this material in hand, it is possible to follow the movement of prices through
nearly four thousand years of recorded history. The interpretive opportunities in these sources
are limited only by the reach of our imagination.
There are as many ways to study a price series as to read a text. On the surface, prices are
a running record of the cost of commodities as they change hands in the market. This is their
most common and familiar meaning. At the same time, they may also be studied in a different
way, as evidence of the changing value of money—which is how some economists prefer to
think of them. On a third level, prices tell us about systems of production, and especially about
structures of exchange—a subject of growing historical importance, as scholars begin to
discover that processes of exchange may have played much of the role that Marx attributed to
the means of production.
On a fourth plane of abstraction, prices become a source for the study of broad historical
movements. To look at the movement of prices in the United States during the nineteenth
century, for example, is to see many things through that one particular lens. In the ebb and flow
of American prices we may observe the cultural effect of the Jacksonian movement, the social
impact of the Civil War, the chronology of the industrial revolution and the geography of the
westward movement. Historical happenings as evanescent as moods of hope and fear may be
measured with high precision by a study of prices. In the history of the American Civil War, a
sensitive indicator of northern hopes was the changing price of government bonds from 1861 to
1865. A barometer of southern fears was the price of slaves as it rose and fell through the same
period. Price movements are a powerful source of inferential knowledge about changing
historical conditions and events.
At a still higher level of abstraction, prices may be studied as clues to the nature of
change itself. That is the purpose of this inquiry. Every period of the past has been a time of
change. The world is always changing—but not always in the same way. We shall find
empirical evidence of distinct “change-regimes” in the past that were often highly dynamic, but
stable in their dynamism. Sooner or later, even the strongest of these change-regimes broke
down in moments of what might be called “deep change.” When it did so, one system of change
yielded to another. Deep change may be understood as a change in the structure of change
itself. In the language of mathematics, deep change is the second derivative. It may be
calculated as a rate of change in rates of change.
 The method of this inquiry is to describe and hopefully to explain the rhythm of change
regimes and deep change in price movements during the past eight hundred years. The purpose
is to enlarge our understanding not only of prices in particular, but also of change in general.
Large questions about the nature of change have tended to belong more to philosophers
than historians, and have been studied mostly by methods of deduction. The growing
accessibility of quantitative evi-dence allows us to convert a metaphysical conundrum into an
empirical question. Dr. Samuel Johnson would have understood. He once ob-served, “That,
sir, is the good of counting. It brings everything to a certainty, which before floated in the mind
indefinitely.”

Wayland, Massachusetts D.H.F.

June 1996

Preface to the Third Printing

The period from 1996 to 1999 is deeply interesting to an historian of prices. The long inflation
of the twentieth century has given way to a new disinflationary trend, and in some sectors to
actual deflation. We have been living through an era of “deep change,” when one “change
regime” yields to another.
To understand these new economic movements, one must look beyond the boundaries of
economics itself. The world-disinflation of the 1990s was driven mainly by demographic
events: most of all by sustained deceleration in rates of population growth. In many nations,
fertility rates have fallen nearly to the replacement level, or even below it. Demographers
believe that the leading cause is a change in the status of women, though other factors are
clearly involved.
The economic consequences of decelerating population growth are slowing demand and
downward pressure on prices throughout the world, which lead in turn to severe financial
crisis in economies that were organized on expectations of very rapid growth.
Social and cultural consequences have been positive. In that respect, this new era in price
history appears to be similar to periods of price equilibrium in the 15th, late 17th and 19th
centuries. It is marked by rapid declines in internal violence, family disruption, and
consumption of drugs and drink. Many leaders take personal responsibility for these new
trends. The true cause runs deep.
In other ways the new era of the late 1990s is entirely without precedent. A novel
tendency in a period of disinflation is a very powerful inflation of asset values, and especially
in the price of common stocks on many exchanges. Here again the cause is to be found outside
the conventional frame of economic analysis, in social and cultural tendencies that have caused
investment in certain classes of assets to increase more rapidly than the supply of assets
themselves. We might have a major problem here, in what an historian would call a shearing
effect, created by countervailing price movements.
Another problem operates on an entirely different level. In periods of deep change,
understanding lags behind the movement of events. The world changes faster than our thoughts
about it. For example, in the late 1990s, central bankers in many countries continued to think of
themselves as inflation-fighters in a new era when greater dangers rose from disinflation or
even deflation. Economists in the 1990s (monetarists especially) predicted that large increases
in the money supply would cause inflation to pick up again, as would have happened a
generation ago. But other factors have been more powerful.
In the United States problems of economic understanding have been compounded by the
effect of economic prosperity. The Japanese in World War II spike ruefully of shoribyo or
“victory disease.” The Greeks called it hubris, and thought that it always ended in the
intervention of the goddess Nemesis. That lady makes her appearance when wave-riders begin
to believe that they are wave-makers, at the moment when the great wave breaks and begins to
gather its energy again.

Wayland Massachusetts D.H.F.

June 1999
THE GREAT WAVE
INTRODUCTION
Great Waves in World History

Upswing in the thirteenth century . . . downswing in the later middle ages .

. . upswing in the sixteenth century which breaks in the seventeenth
century; a third upswing in the eighteenth century . . . what is the meaning
of these movements?

—Wilhelm Abel, 19351

History doesn’t repeat itself—but it rhymes.

—attributed to Mark Twain

THE HISTORY OF PRICES is a history of change. A helpful perspective on the troubles of our time
is a remarkable record of English “consumable” prices since the year 1264, compiled with
great care by Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila Hopkins. This index shows that market prices of
food, drink, fuel and textiles in the south of England have tended to rise for more than seven
hundred years, at an average rate of about one percent each year.2
Price-inflation has been a continuing problem in the past, but it has not been constant in its
rhythm, rate, or timing. Some eras have been more inflationary than others. A few have
experienced long-term price-equilibrium, and even deflation.
If we study the Phelps-Brown-Hopkins index and others like it, we find that most inflation
in the past eight centuries has happened in four great waves of rising prices. The first wave
continued from the late twelfth century to the early fourteenth century, and has been called the
medieval price-revolution. The second was the familiar “price-revolution of the sixteenth
century,” which actually began in the fifteenth century and ended in the mid-seventeenth. The
third wave started circa 1730, and reached its climax in the age of the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic Wars. It might be called the price-revolution of the eighteenth century. The
fourth wave commenced in the year 1896, and has continued since, with a short intermission in
some nations during the 1920s and early 1930s. It is the price-revolution of the twentieth
century.
Figure 0.01 links three different price series. The first is D. L. Farmer’s index of English
wheat prices in shillings from 1210 to 1275. The second is the Phelps-Brown-Hopkins price
index of consumables (grains, vegetables, meat, fish, butter, cheese, drink, fuel, light and
textiles) in shillings for southern England from 1264 to 1954. The third is the Ministry of Labor
index of British retail prices in pounds sterling, 1952–93. All are converted to a common base
of 1451–75=100. Sources include D.L. Farmer, “Some Livestock Price Movements in
Thirteenth Century England,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 22 (1969) 15; E. H. Phelps-
Brown and Sheila Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with
Builders’ Wage-Rates,” Economica 23 (1956) 297–314; B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane,
Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1968) 740–41; idem, Second Abstract of
British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1971); B. R. Mitchell, International Historical
Statistics: Europe, 1750–1988 (New York, 1992); Annual Abstract of Statistics (London,
1972–1994).

These great waves were punctuated by periods of a different nature—when prices fell a
little, then found an equilibrium and fluctuated on a fixed plane. One such era, which might be
called the equilibrium of the twelfth century, coincided with the climax of medieval
civilization. Another could be named the equilibrium of the Renaissance (ca. 1400–1480). A
third may be thought of as the equilibrium of the Enlightenment (1660–1730). The fourth might
be remembered as the Victorian equilibrium, for it coincided with the life of Queen Victoria
herself. All of these periods of equilibrium were marked by fluctuations of high complexity.
None experienced long-term price-inflation.
This alternating rhythm of price-revolutions and price-equilibria was discovered as early
as the eighteenth century. It was studied during the 1930s by French economist François
Simiand, by Italian scholar Jenny Griziotti-Kretschmann, and by German agrarian historian
Wilhelm Abel.3
Abel’s work is still in print after fifty years, and strong in its empiricism. His purpose
was different from that of other scholars. Phelps-Brown and Hopkins had wanted to know
about the movement of monetized wages and prices. Abel was more interested in agricultural
conditions. He studied the price of grain alone, and converted it to kilograms of pure silver,
rather than measuring a market-basket of “consumables” in monetary units.
Abel found a wave-pattern that was similar in timing to the Phelps-Brown-Hopkins
series, but different in its trend. His revolutions in the price of grain rose more steeply than did
consumables in general, and were followed by periods of sharp decline rather than by price-
equilibrium. Even so, the same long waves appear in both series. They have been documented
in many studies, and are the most robust pattern of secular change in the history of prices—
more so than Kondratieff cycles or any other cyclical rhythm, which must be derived by
“detrending” the data.
This wave-pattern is familiar to European scholars, but it is not well known in the
English-speaking world. The reason why makes a story in its own right, and one that appears in
an appendix to this work. Suffice to say that when French historian Fernand Braudel mentioned
early modern wave-movements in a history of capitalism, American reviewers responded with
expressions of surprise, bewilderment, and outright disbelief.
Most historians in the United States are familiar only with one great wave, the price-
revolution of the sixteenth century. Its successor, the inflation of the eighteenth century, has
been much discussed by French scholars in relation to the revolution of 1789, but it is little
known in America or Britain where its effects were less dramatic. The medieval price-
revolution is even more obscure, because it is distant from our time and its sources are
inaccessible. The price-revolution of the twentieth century is misunderstood for opposite
reasons: the data are overwhelming, and the event is so close to us that we have trouble
thinking of it in historical terms.4
Figure 0.02 represents decennial movements in the price of grain in five European nations
from 1201 to 1960. It includes wheat in England, France and Italy; and rye in Austria and
Germany. Prices are decennial means, converted to silver equivalents (grams of pure silver
per 100 kilograms of grain). The source is Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur:
Eine Geschichte der Land und Ernährungswirtchaft Mitteleuropas seit dem höhen
Mittelalter (1935; Hamburg and Berlin, 1966), appendix. The raw data are from price lists of
Rogers, d’Avenel, Barolini, Parenti, Magaldi, and Fabris, listed in the bibliography.

Economists in the United States also have little memory of these historical events, except
for the price-revolution of the sixteenth century, which is distantly remembered as proving the
truth of the axiom that inflation is “always and everywhere primarily a monetary phenomenon,”
as the American economist Milton Friedman wrote in another context. Otherwise, the author
has found that price-revolutions in general are (with some exceptions) entirely unknown to
most economists, political leaders, social planners, business executives, and individual
investors, even as they struggle to deal with one price-revolution in particular.5
This collective amnesia is partly the consequence of an attitude widely shared among
decision-makers in America, that history is more or less irrelevant to the urgent problems
before them. An exception shows the power of this rule. In 1980, American economist Lester
Thurow advised his colleagues that they could not understand the inflationary surges of that era
without entering the distant realm that he quaintly called “the long ago.” By “the long ago,” he
meant the year 1965.6
There are signs that these attitudes may be changing. So turbulent and unpredictable have
been the events of the late twentieth century, that even the most atemporal minds have begun to
realize that history is happening to them. Academic interest in this subject also has a strong
wave-like rhythm of its own. The discipline of price history, which flourished during the
1930s, is now in the early stages of revival.
The purpose of this inquiry is to stimulate growing interest in this subject, by studying
each price-revolution in turn, and then by comparing one with another. We shall describe the
four great waves in their most important aspects: first, their timing, magnitude, rhythm,
volatility, and the sequence of secular change in price levels; second, the pattern of price
relatives for different types of commodities; third, the movement of real wages; fourth, the
pattern of change in rent and interest. The same questions will be asked about periods of price
equilibrium, one of which may be approaching.7
The second task is to explore the question of cause. Braudel himself believed that these
great waves were the strongest secular pattern in modern economic history, but he thought that
the task of explaining them was the “most neglected” problem in historiography, and
“impossible” to solve.
Even so, price historians in Europe have suggested seven causal explanations, which
might be called the monetarist, Malthusian, Marxist, neoclassical, agrarian, environmental, and
historicist models. Monetarists understand movements in the “general price level” as changes
in the value of money, caused mainly by variations in its quantity and velocity. Malthusians
think of price movements in a different way as a material representation of the changing value
of commodities that money might buy, caused primarily by imbalances between demographic
and economic growth. Marxists think that price movements represent the changing terms of
transactions within social systems, mainly between social classes. Neoclassical models
perceive prices as indicators of change in the flow of supply and demand, and explain price-
revolutions as the result of imbalances in market-relations, caused by various demand-centered
or supply-side events, or by changes in the structures of market-conditions themselves.
Agrarian approaches link prices mainly to harvest conditions. Environmental models
understand price-movements as ecological indicators which register imbalances between
human activity and its natural environment. Historicists explain things in their particulars, and
think of each price-revolution as a unique event with its own ad hoc explanation.
Each of these approaches has taught us something useful about their common subject. All
are flourishing today. The differences between them rise in large part from their assumptions
about what prices are, and what the world is made of. They are theoretical constructions, but
all of them also make strong empirical claims that can be tested against historical evidence.
This inquiry will attempt to frame another model that might combine their strengths and correct
their weaknesses.
The third assignment is consider the consequences of price-movements, or more precisely
the consequences of movements that prices represent. These consequences have been profound,
and never more so than in our own time. The darkest tendencies of our troubled era—the
growth of violence and drug use and family disruption which many people identify as the most
urgent social problems of our age— are closely connected to price movements (or, again, the
movements that prices represent). Most students of these social problems are entirely unaware
of these linkages, which bring a new perspective to an understanding of the causes of our
present discontents.
Some of the brightest moments in modern history have also been linked to the rhythm of
material events. This was so for the renaissance of the twelfth century, the renaissance of the
fifteenth century, the age of the enlightenment, and the Victorian era.

A Caveat for the Critical Reader

Before we begin to study these relationships, a caveat is necessary. It should be understood
clearly that the movements we are studying are waves—not cycles. To repeat: not cycles, but
waves.
Cyclical rhythms are fixed and regular. Their periods are highly predictable. Great waves
are more variable and less predictable. They differ in duration, magnitude, velocity, and
momentum. One great price-wave lasted less than ninety years; another continued more than
180 years. The irregularities in individual price-movements make them no more (or less)
predictable than individual waves in the sea.8
Even so, all great waves had important qualities in common. They all shared the same
wave-structure. They tended to have the same sequence of development, the same pattern of
price-relatives, similar movements of wages, rent, interest-rates; and the same dangerous
volatility in later stages. All major price revolutions in modern history began in periods of
prosperity. Each ended in shattering world-crises and were followed by periods of recovery
and comparative equilibrium.
These great waves also differ from cycles in their epistemic status. We know about them
in different ways. Cycles must be teased from the data, commonly by statistical inferences in
which the evidence is “filtered” and “detrended” by various techniques. The great waves are
different in that respect. They appear on the surface of the evidence. To observe them no
filtering or detrending of the data is required. Each great wave is the major price-trend in its
own era. No theoretical models or statistical massages are needed to summon them from
recalcitrant sources. To discover these secular trends in the data, it is necessary to do
something that is very simple, and yet immensely difficult for many academic scholars. One
must learn to look the evidence in the face, without fixed ideological, theoretical or
epistemological preconceptions. We are sometimes told that this is impossible. So it is—for
some people.9
This book is written mainly for general readers who share the author’s interest in
understanding patterns of historical change for their own sake. It also has a message for
practical business leaders, journalists, investors, and ordinary citizens. Today, we are living in
the late stages of the price revolution of the twentieth century. Disaster does not necessarily lie
ahead for us. This book does not predict the apocalypse. It does not attempt to tell the future.
To the contrary, it finds that uncertainty about the future is an inexorable fact of our condition.
But it also finds evidence that what happens in the future is contingent on our choices in
the present, which derive from our memory of the past. The result of this inquiry strongly
suggests that when we make our economic choices, we would do well to improve our powers
of recall, and to remember some very hard-won lessons of historical experience. If our
purpose is to master the dangerous dynamics of our contemporary world, or merely to survive
them, then we must remember the past—even the distant past. We must also learn to think of the
present and future as part of an historical continuum.
Many readers who are literate in economics will remember the special meaning of the
Keynesian dictum that in the long run we are all dead. The events of the twentieth century
should have taught us that this idea, in its most common application, is very much mistaken.
American economist Herbert Stein, after a term of service in Washington, wrote ruefully in
1979, “we woke up to discover that we were living in the long run, and were suffering for our
failure to look after it.”10
To that end, this history begins more than seven centuries ago, on a market day in a
medieval cathedral-town. The date was September 8, 1224. The place was Chartres.
THE FIRST WAVE
The Medieval Price Revolution, 1180–1350

Greet prees at market maketh deere ware.

—Chaucer’s wife of Bath

CHARTRES, September 8, 1224, the festival of the Virgin’s Birth. For more than a week, the
country roads to this cathedral town were clogged with crowds of pilgrims. Some were pious
peasants who wished to thank the Virgin for hearing their prayers. Others were worldly
merchants who came to buy and sell at the great market-fair called the Septembresce.
Their journey brought them to the golden plain of Beauce, prosperous wheat country in the
heart of France. In early September, the rolling fields were bright with ripening grain, and the
last scarlet poppies of the summer were still in bloom beside the dusty roads. In the distance,
footsore travellers could see their destination long before they reached it. The beautiful blue
silhouette of Chartres Cathedral soared high above the horizon, and was visible for many miles
across the open countryside.
The great building that loomed before them, and still stands today, was the seventh
cathedral of Chartres. The fate of the other six made a catalogue of medieval miseries. The
first had been wrecked by the Duke of Aquitania in 743, and the second had been ruined by the
Vikings in 843. The third cathedral had been destroyed in 962, and the fourth had been pulled
down in 1020. The fifth and sixth had burned in 1134 and 1194.
After each of these catastrophes, the people of Chartres acted quickly to rebuild a
structure that was vital to their faith and fortunes. In 1134 and again in 1194, they unhitched
animals from their carts and placed themselves in the traces to haul stone for the new
cathedral. That act of piety was remembered as the Cult of the Carts.
“At Chartres,” one chronicler wrote, “men began with their own shoulders to drag
wagons loaded with stone, wood, grain and other materials to the workshop of the church,
whose towers were then rising . . . one might observe women as well as men dragging [carts]
through deep swamps on their knees, beating themselves with whips.” People of every rank
joined in the Cult of the Carts. “Whoever heard in all the generations past,” another chronicler
wrote, “that kings, princes, mighty men of the world puffed up with honors and riches, men and
women of noble birth, should bind a bridle upon their proud and swollen necks and submit
themselves to wagons.”1
The new cathedral that they built at Chartres was one of Christendom’s holiest shrines. Its
sanctuary held the tunic that the Virgin Mary was thought to have worn when Jesus was born.
Many pilgrims purchased replicas of this garment. Others bought sacred shirts called
chemisettes which soldiers wore beneath their armor and pregnant women draped over their
swollen bellies. During the festival of the Virgin’s birth, the sale of these sacred articles
brought a large income to the people of Chartres.
In the year 1224, this cathedral town was the capital of Europe’s richest province—an
area of 13,000 square miles and a thousand churches. It was called the “great diocese” even in
Rome. The town had become a center of trade and industry, specially renowned for textiles,
weapons, and leather goods.
The hub of this thriving economy was the Cathedral itself. During the festival, much
buying and selling took place within the church. Food and firewood were sold inside the south
door. Manufactured goods were available at the north door, where buyers and sellers haggled
over prices. The side aisles of the nave became a labor-exchange, where artisans gathered in
anxious circles around employers. The crypt was given over to the wine merchants. The south
cloister was opened to the stalls of the money-changers. So lucrative were the rents paid by
these much-hated men that a lively competition developed for their business between the
Cathedral’s canons and deans, who controlled different parts of the building. The great
cathedral was both a religious and an economic institution.2
At the same time it was vital to its community in another way. Every great work of
architecture is a cultural symbol. Chartres was a case in point. The beautiful cathedral
perfectly symbolized an era that Charles Homer Haskins called the Renaissance of the twelfth
century.3 This was the period when medieval civilization reached its highest level of cultural
achievement. In the twelfth century, Romanesque architecture attained its peak of perfection. At
the same time, the new Gothic style appeared full blown in the cathedrals of Paris (1163) and
Canterbury (1175), as well as Chartres itself (1194). The people of France constructed more
than eighty new cathedrals, 500 abbeys and 10,000 parish churches during this era—a building
program that consumed more stone than the pyramids of Egypt, and more labor than the roads
of Rome.4
Great universities were founded at Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salerno. Rapid progress
was made in the revival of classical learning. Immortal works of Europe literature were
recorded in the vernacular— Le Cid in Spain, the Nibelungenlied in Germany, the Chansons
de Geste in France, and the Arthurian Legends in Britain.
The twelfth century was also an epoch of high importance in political history. It was an
era of great kings. Henry II of England (1154–89), Frederick Barbarossa of Germany (1152–
90), Philip Augustus of France (1180–1223), and Alfonso II of Castile (1126–57) all claimed
the title of Emperor, and enlarged their power and dominions. The twelfth century was also the
great age of feudalism, when complex rules of chivalry and heraldry and primogeniture were
elaborately codified. It was a time when new charters were granted to towns, gilds, and
corporations. The twelfth century in Europe was marked by the simultaneous development of
monarchy, aristocracy and popular government in open and pluralistic systems that were
unique to the Western world. Power was broadly distributed among kings, clergy, nobles and
commons.
The twelfth century was an age of European expansion. The last major invasions by
Magyars, Saracens, and Moslems had come to an end by the year 1050. Thereafter, the
population of Europe slowly began to increase. It did so in northern Italy and southern France
as early as the year 1000. In Spain, historians still speak of the great repoblación that
commenced about 1150.
Europeans began to move outward. The first crusade began in 1096, and was followed by
many others in the 12th century. This also was the time of the Drang nach Osten—the
movement by Teutonic Knights into eastern Europe. It was the age of the great Scandinavian
migrations, west from Norway to North America, and east from Sweden to Russia.
 All of these movements rose from an expanding demographic base. Families, cities,
markets, gilds, and fairs multiplied everywhere in Europe. Centers of commerce and industry
grew at a great rate. As late as the year 1100, Paris had been a small settlement, largely
confined for its own security to an island in the Seine. By 1215 it had become a city of perhaps
50,000 souls. The economy of medieval Europe rapidly developed from a comparatively
primitive system of barter exchange toward a more complex system of market relationships.
The growth of population and the increase of wealth were roughly in equilibrium during
the twelfth century. Prices remained comparatively stable throughout this period. The only
major economic problem was the so-called “money-famine” of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries—an event that would occur in most eras of price equilibrium throughout modern
history. The growth of population and prosperity had created demand for a larger circulating
medium. With precious metals in short supply, the people of Europe began to use what
historian David Herlihy calls “substitute money”—not barter or commodity money, but liquid
assets of high value called mobilia, such as silver jewelry, furs, fine textiles and even books.5
By the year 1100, the hunger for specie was so great that the canons of Pistoia’s St. Zeno
Cathedral melted down their great crucifix and used it for money. German princes sold their
imperial seals. English nobles exchanged their silver sword mounts, and French bishops
converted their golden chalices into cash. The theologian Fulbert of Chartres justified these
practices with the casuistry that it was better to sell sacred vessels to Christians than to pawn
them into the hands of Jews.6
This money-famine was only a hint of economic trouble in a period of high prosperity
throughout Europe. The architecture of Chartres Cathedral perfectly captured the soaring
optimism of its age. The geometry of its great rose windows symbolized a dynamic equilibrium
that had appeared in the economy of Europe. The solid strength of the cathedral building
embodied a union of social order and spiritual harmony. The bustle of commerce within its
walls represented the prosperity that seemed to have become a permanent part of western
culture in the early thirteenth century.
But it was not to be. Ironically, the era when Chartres was built was a time of a deep
change in European history—a moment when one change regime yielded silently to another.
Even as the great vault of the Cathedral was completed in the year 1224, dangerous stresses
were beginning to develop within the structure of medieval civilization.
A symptom of trouble, and also in part its cause, was a movement that might called the
medieval price revolution. This was a long wave of rising prices that began late in the twelfth
century, and continued to the middle of the fourteenth century.
In its earliest stage, the new trend was nearly imperceptible. It first appeared as a minor
price-flutter in medieval market-fairs such as the Septembresce. By the festival of 1224, the
pilgrims of Chartres would have noticed that prices were a little higher, especially for
firewood and food that was for sale inside the south door. Manufactured goods at the north
door were also up a little, but not as much as food and fuel. The money-changers were getting
more for their services, and the laborers who anxiously sought employment in the nave would
have noticed that wages were beginning to lag behind the rising cost of living.
All of these changes were still of minor magnitude in the year 1224. The price-revolution
had barely begun. But once underway, it would continue for more than a century. Many years
later it would end in a catastrophe so complete that scarcely anything of medieval civilization
survives today except the beautiful blue silhouette of Chartres Cathedral, which still soars
triumphantly above the scarlet poppies on the golden plain of Beauce.

The Medieval Price Revolution Begins, circa 1180–1230

Many years ago, the brilliant British polymath William Beveridge hypothesized that there had
been a “price-revolution of the middle ages.” That idea was at first ignored or rejected by
medieval historians, who regarded its author as a trespasser on their turf.7
Trespasser or not, Lord Beveridge was correct in his belief. Toward the end of the
twelfth century, prices began to rise throughout medieval Europe in a new trend that was
destined to continue for more than a century. In England where evidence is most abundant, the
inflection-point of this new trend appears to have come about the year 1180.8
By the measure of modern movements, the medieval pricerevolution advanced at a very
slow pace. Economic historian Michael Postan estimates that “the secular rise of prices
between say 1225 and 1345 proceeded at a rate not higher than 0.5 per cent per annum.”9

Figure 1.02 analyzes patterns of change in English wheat prices (1330/1–1346/7 =100). Prices
are for harvest years (e.g., 1347 = Michaelmas, Sept. 29, 1346, to Michaelmas, Sept. 29,
1347). Data are from a price series by D. L. Farmer in H. E. Hallam, ed., The Agrarian
History of England and Wales, vol. 2, 1042–1350 (Cambridge, 1988), 779–91. Trends are
fitted with an Excel 5.0 program.

Even so, this great inflation of the medieval era was great because it was general
throughout the Western world, and because it continued for a very long time. It happened in
England, France, Italy, Germany, Iberia, and every other part of Europe where prices have
been studied.10 Throughout that broad region, its impact was not perfectly uniform. The pace of
inflation was comparatively rapid in the north of Italy, moderate in England and France, and
slowest in eastern and northern Europe; but no part of the Western world is known to have
escaped it.11
Why did medieval prices go up? Some historians find the cause in an expansion of the
money supply; others, in the growth of population. Both factors were involved, but population
appears to have been the prime mover. Before 1150, as we have seen, the population of Europe
had been slowly increasing. After 1170, its rate of gain accelerated. In Picardy, the rural
population doubled during the last quarter of the twelfth century (1175–1200), and kept
growing rapidly for three generations thereafter. Similar trends appeared in England, France
and Germany.12
Figure 1.03 compares the medieval price revolution in three parts of Europe, where trends
were much the same in the thirteenth century, but different in the play of contingent events
during the crisis of the fourteenth century. These data were compiled by Wilhelm Abel from
price series of Rogers (England); d’Avenel (France); Bartolini, Fabris, Magaldi and Parenti
(Italy). The source is Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, appendix.

During the thirteenth century, large parts of rural Europe became more densely settled than
they would ever be again until the twentieth century. One study of the Lincoln fens on the east
coast of England finds that the number of inhabitants reached a level in 1287 that would not be
exceeded until 1950. Similar patterns have been discovered in the English counties of
Devonshire, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Cambridgeshire, Warwickshire and Norfolk.13
The cause of medieval population-growth was mainly an increase in fertility, not a
decline in mortality. After a long period of comparative stability and growing prosperity,
women throughout Europe married at earlier ages and decided to have more children. The
result was a medieval baby boom that began in the twelfth century and continued for many
years.14
This medieval baby boom had important economic consequences. It changed the age-
structure of the population. As long as it continued, a larger proportion were dependent
children. Fewer were mature adults in the prime of their productive years. This happened at
the same time that people needed more food, fuel, houses and land. Demand for life’s
necessities expanded more rapidly than supply could increase. Inexorably, prices went up.15
Figure 1.04 finds a strong association between prices and population growth in medieval
England. The sources for population are point estimates by H. E. Hallam (1983) and E. Miller
(1991); and for grain prices a series by D. L. Farmer, ail in The Agrarian History of England
and Wales, II, 537; III, 4–5.
Figure 1.05 shows the long rise of agricultural prices in Angevin England. As in other price
revolutions, the price of staple foodstuffs and energy led the advance, and were also the most
volatile. The source is D. L. Farmer, “Some Livestock Price Movements in Thirteenth Century
England,” Economic History Review 2d ser., 22 (1969) 15.

Not all prices increased at the same rate. The most rapid rises appeared in the price of
energy, food, shelter and raw materials— items most heavily in demand during a period of
population growth, and least elastic in their supply.16 Specially striking was the price of
energy. In England from 1261 to 1320, the price of firewood and charcoal rose faster and
farther than that of any other commodity. The cause was not hard to find. During the late twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, Europe rapidly cut down its forests, consumed its timber, and burned
its brushwood for fuel. Timber and charcoal began to be imported over increasing distances,
and the great coal fields of England, Belgium and France began to be exploited on a large scale
during this period. London suffered severely from smoke pollution in the thirteenth century.17
Close behind the soaring cost of energy came price-rises for food-stuffs of various kinds
—particularly for grain, meat, and dairy products that were the staples of life in medieval
Europe. This trend was evident everywhere in the Western world, where a grain market was
well established by the early thirteenth century.18
By contrast with energy and food, the price of finished manufactures such as cloth and
nails increased comparatively little—less than the cost of raw materials such as wool and iron.
The inflation of industrial prices was moderate, because the supply of manufactured goods
could be expanded more easily to meet rising demand.
A case in point was the cost of armor. This, the leading “consumer durable” in medieval
Europe, was mainly designed to make a more durable consumer. Iron skullcaps called coifs
were worn not merely by soldiers but also by traveling merchants who lived in a world where
consumer complaints were forcefully expressed. The price of iron coifs and body armor in the
thirteenth century behaved very much like that of washing machines and refrigerators in the
twentieth century. It rose in nominal terms, but fell in relation to other commodities for which
supply was less elastic.19
Altogether, historian Michael Postan observes that “movements of agricultural and
industrial prices did not synchronize” with one another during the medieval price-revolution.
This distinctive pattern of price-relatives was typical of a demand-inflation. It appeared in
every great wave without exception.20
Figure 1.06 represents the relative movement of commodity prices in England from 1261–70 to
1311–20. As in most price revolutions, the cost of energy and food rose most rapidly.
Manufactured goods lagged behind. Prices are decennial means, computed from raw data in J.
E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, I, 1259–1400.

This population-driven inflation was reinforced by material pressures of many other

kinds. An economic consequence of population-growth was an expansion of trade. In England,
the number of weekly markets licensed by the Crown grew at an accelerating rate from 1180 to
1274. These medieval markets were mainly places for the local exchange of firewood, grain,
livestock, bread, ale, cloth and “chapman’s wares” such as coal, salt and fish.21
The growth of commerce stimulated industrial development, at such a pace that medieval
historian Jean Gimpel speaks of an “industrial revolution of the thirteenth century.” Dye works,
fulling mills and iron works multiplied throughout Europe. Some operated on such a scale that
the effects of environmental pollution by medieval industries still scar the landscape of Europe
seven centuries later.22
The growth of commerce and industry had major consequences for monetary systems.
Expanding markets increased the velocity of money in circulation. This added a monetary
inflation to a demand inflation, and caused prices to keep on rising, once the increase had
begun.

Cultural Responses to the Medieval Price Revolution

In the mid-thirteenth century, the medieval price-revolution entered a new stage. Inflation rose
beyond the limits of previous price fluctuations. As it did so, people began to think about it in a
different way— not as a sequence of fluctuations, but as a secular trend. Many years ago, a
German scholar discovered that during the middle decades of the thirteenth century (circa
1230–60), medieval writers changed their language of economic description. When they
referred to rising grain prices, they shifted their Latin terms from fames to caristia. Fames
meant famine, hunger, short harvests. Caristia (from the adjective carus, costly, dear) meant
high prices in general and the high cost of living.23
This change of terms from fames to caristia meant that the increase in the price of food
was no longer perceived to be mainly a matter of fluctuations in the size of the harvest. It was
now recognized as a general inflation. People had begun to awaken to the fact that the rising
cost of living was not a short-run disturbance but a long-term movement.
This discovery set in motion a series of cultural responses that caused prices to rise
higher. One of the most important of these inflationary responses was an expansion of the
money supply. Silver was the most common coin in commercial exchanges within Europe
during the thirteenth century. Gold tended to become the leading currency in international
trade.24
The supply of these precious metals was remarkably small in the medieval West. Scholars
have estimated that as late as the year 1500, all the gold in Europe would have fit within a
two-meter cube (that is, eight cubic meters in all).25 The supply of silver was much larger, but
still very small by modern standards. As late as 1200, England’s silver stock totaled only
about 300 tons, and would have fit into a fourteen-meter cube. Altogether, it amounted to only a
few ounces of sterling for every man, woman and child in the realm.26
At the same time, there were also heavy losses of silver from Europe. France’s
unfortunate King Louis IX (1214–70) was captured on a crusade in the year 1250. His royal
ransom (together with expenses of the crusade itself) cost his nation 240 tons of silver—a
heavy burden on a medieval economy.27
During the thirteenth century, a major effort was made to expand the supply of silver in
Europe. Old mines opened again in Hungary and the Harz Mountains. New mines were brought
into operation. Output was increased by new technologies.28 By the end of the thirteenth
century, production may have risen as high as fifty tons a year.29 Much of this metal was turned
into currency. Mints throughout Europe coined money on demand; merchants commonly
appeared with a supply of silver, and asked to have it converted into coin, which was done for
a fee.30
Silver stocks expanded throughout Europe in the thirteenth century. One study finds that
silver coins minted in England rose from 200,000 pounds in the period 1210–18, to more than
500,000 in the 1240s, and above 1,000,000 pounds in the 1280s. As the quantity of money
increased, its value declined. The effect was to drive prices higher.31
Gold, which had drained away from Europe during the early Middle Ages, now began to
flow in again. Some of it was stolen by Venetian pirates, Teutonic knights and French
crusaders. More was gained in trade, and large quantities of bullion were imported from the
mines of Africa. In the mid-thirteenth century, the Italian city-states became the first in the West
to mint gold coin since the fall of Rome. Genoa may have been the earliest trading town to do
so, as early as 1249. The people of Florence followed with gold florins in 1252. Venice began
to issue gold ducats in 1284. The ducat became renowned for its stability, by keeping its gold
content unchanged for more than five hundred years, from 1284 to the fall of the Venetian
republic in 1797. The quantity of gold and silver in circulation, and probably their velocity as
well, increased during the late thirteenth century, and added to inflationary pressures.32
Despite these increases, historian Carlo Cipolla observes, “the supply of precious metals
proved to be relatively inelastic throughout the whole period, and the growth of the demand for
silver for monetary purposes exceeded the supply.” To solve this problem, a variety of other
monetary expedients were adopted. Commodities were used as money in addition to gold and
silver. Pepper, for example, became a form of currency in the seaport cities of southern
Europe. New credit instruments such as contracts of exchange and bank transfers expanded
rapidly.33
Metal coins were also systematically debased. In Italy and France particularly, mint-
masters reduced the content of silver in their coins, and increased the quantity of base metal.
Individuals acted in other ways to diminish the value of money that passed through their hands.
Coins were clipped, filed, scraped, and washed despite ferocious penalties. Cipolla finds
evidence that debasements “became more rapid between the middle of the thirteenth century
and the fourteenth century.”34
The continuing rise in commodity prices during the later stages of the price-revolution
was linked to these monetary factors. Deliberate increases in the quantity of precious metal,
debasements of various kinds, and the development of other instruments of exchange all sent
prices higher. But the money supply was not a deus ex machina that descended inexorably
upon the economy. It was an artifact of human will and purpose. People responded to the
discovery of caristia by deliberately expanding the quantity of money. In cultural terms their
actions helped individuals and institutions to cope with high prices, but had the collective
effect of driving prices higher. The price-revolution thus became a self-reinforcing process.
High prices increased demand for money. When the demand was met by increased supplies of
money, and growing velocity, prices were driven higher.

Figure 1.07 explores the impact of money on prices. It finds an association in movements
around the central tendency. Recoinages lowered prices; debasements inflated them. The
source is D. L. Farmer, “Some Livestock Price Movements in Thirteenth-Century England,”
Economic History Review, 2d ser., 22 (1969) 21.

Other responses to rising prices appeared in the movement of wages, rents and interest. In
the early stages of the great wave, wages had kept pace with prices, and during some decades
even increased more rapidly. But as inflation continued in the mid-thirteenth century, money
wages began to lag behind. As a consequence real wages fell, slowly at first, then with
growing momentum. By the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries real wages were
dropping at a rapid rate. In 1320 real wages in western Europe were 25 to 40 percent lower
than they had been a century before.35
At the same time that real wages fell, rents and interest rose sharply. Returns to
landowners generally kept pace with inflation and even exceeded it. The old notion that feudal
and manorial lords were hard pressed by falling real income during price-revolutions has been
contradicted by much research. In many parts of Europe, rents and land values increased even
more rapidly than the price of energy and food. The pioneering French price historian Georges
d’Avenel may have been the first to discover that rents reached very high levels during the late
thirteenth century—the “highest recorded levels in all of the Middle Ages.” Subsequent
research has solidly confirmed d’Avenel’s findings. The rate of increase in rent appears to
have been greater than 2 percent a year—twice the inflation of grain prices in the later stages
of the price-revolution.36
Figure 1.08 finds that returns to labor kept up with the rising cost of living in the beginning of
the medieval price revolution, but lagged behind in the later stages (circa 1265–1330). The
data are in D. L. Farmer, “Prices and Wages,” in H. E. Hallam, ed., The Agrarian History of
England and Wales, Volume II, 1042–1350 (Cambridge, 1988) 777.

Manorial lords had many ways of protecting their income against inflation. They could
impose new fines and feudal dues upon the peasantry, and often did so. They also possessed
monopolies of milling—in effect, owning the water and even the wind in their territories. The
chronicle of Jocelin de Brakelond tells of a free spirit named Herbert the Dean who built
himself a mill, and defended it with an argument that “free benefit of the wind ought not to be
denied to any man.” His lord was reduced to paroxysms of fury, and swore that “by God’s face
I will never eat bread till that building be thrown down.” Conflicts of this sort commonly
ended in the triumph of the lord.37

Figure 1.09 examines returns to landed capital in France and Germany, and finds that rents and
real estate values rose more rapidly than wages and the general price level. Sources include
Robert Fossier, La terre et les hommes en Picardie, 1:581; Karl Lamprecht, Deutsches
Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1886) 2:614–615.
 In the late thirteenth century, manorial lords aggressively expanded their economic
privileges. At St. Albans, just north of London, the Abbey constructed its own grist and fulling
mills, and forbade the inhabitants to take their grain and cloth anywhere else or even to process
them in their homes. The result was an insurrection in 1274. When Queen Eleanor passed
through St. Albans, she was met by a vast throng of weeping women, reaching out their hands
in supplication and crying “Domina, misere nobis.” The Queen tried to help them, but the
Abbot of St. Albans took his case to the King’s court and won. Strife continued at St. Albans
for many years, while the abbots waxed fatter and the peasants grew thinner. Similar scenes
were enacted throughout Europe.38
At the same time, rates of interest also rose very high. In the Italian city states, interest
charged in actual transactions increased from 12 percent a year before 1230, to 20 percent
later in the century. This rise was greater than the average increase of commodity prices. Real
interest rose at a time when real wages were falling.39
Men of wealth were able to profit by the price-revolution in many ways. Powerful Italian
merchants, for example, obtained laws that allowed them to insist on being paid in gold florins
or ducats which held their value, but permitted them to pay wages and taxes in silver coins
which were much debased. As a consequence, rich merchants grew richer, and the poor sank
deeper into misery and degradation.40
This growing gap between returns to labor and capital was typical of price-revolutions in
modern history. So also was its social result: a rapid growth of inequality that appeared in the
later stages of every long inflation. A case in point was the commune of Santa Maria
Impruneta, six miles south of Florence in the hills of Tuscany. In 1307, the richest tenth of
Impruneta’s families held about 33 percent of its wealth. By 1427, their holdings had increased
to 50 percent. At the same time the poor sank deeper into distress. The wealth of the bottom
half of the population sharnk from 21 percent to 6 percent. The rich were growing richer. At
the same time, much evidence survives of the rapid growth of rural poverty and homelessness
during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.41
Yet another set of cultural responses to inflation created disparities of a different kind:
fiscal imbalances between public income and expenditures. Governments fell deep in debt
during the middle and later years of the thirteenth century. As spending outran revenues,
monarchs borrowed heavily from domestic and foreign merchants. In Constantinople, the last
Latin Emperor Baldwin II (1217–1273), was so hard pressed for ready cash between 1237 and
1261 that he surrendered the Crown of Thorns as collateral for loans by Venetian bankers.
Public deficits began to grow out of control—another dangerous tendency that developed in the
later stages of every price-revolution and gravely weakened the spring of government.42
Figure 1.10 finds that wealth inequality increased in the late stages of the medieval price
revolution, and the early years of the Renaissance equilibrium. The cause appears in figures
1.08 and 1.09: a rise in real returns to capital and a fall in real returns to labor. The evidence
consists in the distribution of assessed wealth in the Italian commune of Santa Maria
Impruneta, six miles south of Florence. Data are from the èstimi of 1307 and 1330, and the
catasto of 1427, in David Herlihy, “Santa Maria Impruneta: A Rural Commune in the Late
Middle Ages,” in Nicolai Rubenstein, ed., Florentine Studies (Evanston, 1968), 242–76. The
data are organized in a Lorenz Curve which measures wealth shares in the population by
decile.
The Third Stage: Growing Instability
In the late thirteenth century, the medieval price-revolution entered another stage, marked by
growing instability. Prices rose and fell in wild swings of increasing amplitude. Inequality
increased at a rapid rate. Public deficits surged ever higher. The economy of western Europe
became dangerously vulnerable to stresses that it might have managed more easily in other
eras.
In the late thirteenth century, the growth of population was pressing very hard against
resources. Many people found themselves living precariously near the edge of survival. As the
number of people increased, lands of lesser quality had been brought into cultivation. Farmers
on these poor lands had to work much harder to scratch a living from the soil. Production and
productivity fell for both land and labor. Many were driven to the margin of subsistence.43
For peasant farmers in that situation, the most immediate perils arose from changes in the
weather. Throughout western Europe, the size of the harvest had always varied from one
season to the next. Rainfall was the vital factor. In Europe, unlike other parts of the world, the
great danger was too much rain rather than too little. Heavy rains in midsummer beat down the
ripening grain and rotted it in the fields. Wet years, more than dry ones, brought short crops and
soaring prices.
There had been seasons of scarcity even in the best of times. Most years had their dreaded
disettes, which were the intervals that came after the last grain crop had run out, and before the
new crop came in. Disettes occurred even in normal years. When things went wrong there
were grand disettes, and scarcity became starvation. From 1260 to 1320, the rhythm of grain
prices in England and Wales showed that grand disettes increased in frequency, severity and
duration. Similar patterns appeared in greater or lesser degree throughout western Europe. In a
time when people were living closer to the margin, the effect of harvest fluctuations was to
create dangerous instabilities.44
Even in normal times, the margin was so narrow that a shortage of only 10 percent in the
harvest caused severe suffering among impoverished peasant families. A shortfall of 20
percent meant starvation. And these were not normal times. The social effect of even small
variation in the climate was enlarged by a growing imbalance between population and
resources.
Within the villages of medieval Europe, the effect of harvest fluctuations on farm prices
was compounded by other problems in medieval markets. Agricultural conditions were apt to
vary from one region to another, even from one village to the next. The transportation of bulk-
commodities such as wheat or barley across the countryside was not easy in the thirteenth
century. Scarcity and surplus often existed within a few miles of one another. In Normandy
during the year 1180, wheat fell to one livre at Norrancourt where the market was glutted. At
the same time, the price was ten livres at Mortain and sixteen livres on the Cotentin peninsula,
which suffered a shortage. These places were only a few miles apart.45
Added to market problems were monetary disturbances. As prices rose in western
Europe, governments manipulated their coinage with an increasingly heavy hand: sometimes
debasing it by reducing the quantity of silver; sometimes restoring its value by recoinages.
These repeated acts had an impact upon price levels. Debasements drove prices up; recoinages
brought them down again. Economic historian David L. Farmer has shown that the price of
oxen fell after each recoinage in England during the thirteenth century.46
The effect of repeated recoinages and debasements in the thirteenth century was to
increase the instability of markets and prices. When one medieval state debased its coinage,
merchants responded by carrying their silver to another kingdom and having it reminted in a
currency that held its value. In France, for example, Philip the Fair debased his silver coins so
severely that Geoffroi de Paris protested that “the king was playing the magician, transforming
60 into 20 and 90 into 30.”47
Moneyed men carried their silver across the channel, and had it struck as English sterling.
In 1305, John de Everdon, England’s Warden of the Exchange, reported that the “merchants
were daily bringing silver there in great quantities,” so much so that the mint was running six
weeks behind. The quantity of England’s money supply surged from 1305 to 1310, and prices
of even the most humble commodities increased sharply. Eggs, which had cost less than four
pence a hundred before 1305, suddenly rose above sixpence in 1306. The price of a laying hen
doubled, from one penny to more than twopence. A historian of this sudden inflation concludes
that the leading cause was a change in the size of the money supply.48
Exchange rates also became highly unstable in the fourteenth century. Governments tried
to stabilize their fragile economies by imposing export controls. The effect was often the
opposite of what was intended. England’s Edward I, for example, tried to make things better by
forbidding the export of English coins in 1299. By 1307, he had prohibited the removal of
foreign money as well. He also pegged gold at an artifically high level relative to silver. These
policies caused increasing distortions in exchange rates, which in turn created dislocation in
English trade.49
Other sources of instability were financial in their nature. In the late thirteenth century, a
major crisis led to the disruption of credit and banking in the western world. The great Italian
banks dangerously overextended themselves by lending heavily to monarchs and private
borrowers. These loans were highly lucrative—for a time. They brought prosperity to the north
of Italy, and especially to the city of Siena, which in the words of one leading historian was
“for seventy-five years the main banking center of Europe.” As Siena flourished in the
thirteenth century, its citizens began to build a great cathedral which was intended to be the
largest in Europe. The magnificent architecture of its central square, which today delights so
many tourists, was created by the prosperity of this era.50
In the year 1298, Siena’s banking boom came suddenly to an end, with the failure of its
greatest bank, the Gran Tavola of the Buonsignori. This was a world bank, with agents
throughout Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Among its borrowers were great merchants,
cities, nobles, kings and even the Pope himself. Increasing numbers of these loans went sour. In
the year 1298, a banking panic began in Siena. The Buonsignori managed to hold things
together for nearly a decade, but finally in 1307 the great bank collapsed. Many lesser
enterprises failed with it.
The economy of Siena did not recover from this disaster for many years. Work on the
great cathedral was abandoned. The building stands today in the same unfinished state as when
workers downed tools in the fourteenth century. The city’s magnificent central square is still
frozen in time—a fiscal Herculaneum that had been engulfed by the great wave of the thirteenth
century.51
Siena’s loss was at first a gain for the city of Florence. In the early fourteenth century
there were three great Florentine banks—the Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli—and many smaller
ones such as the Mozzi, Franzesi, Pulci, Rimbertini, Frescobaldi and Scali. Some of these
enterprises grew even larger than the Sienese houses that had preceded them. The bank of the
Peruzzi, for example, had fifteen branches throughout the world, and was bigger than the
Medici Bank would ever become.
The big Florentine banks made foreign loans to the kings of England and Naples. This
was a dangerous business. Once it had begun, the loans grew inexorably larger. The banks
could not call them in, for fear of default or confiscation. The results were inexorable.
Early in the fourteenth century Florentine banks began to fail. The Mozzi went under in
1302, the Franzesi in 1307, the Pulci and Rimbertini in 1309, the Frescobaldi in 1312, and the
Scali in 1326. Six houses failed in 1342. Then, in 1343 and 1346, the three great houses of the
Peruzzi, Acciaiuoli and Bardi all collapsed with a great crash. Not for many years would
banking enterprise recover in Tuscany.
Behind these events, many factors were operating at the same time: climatological,
demographic, monetary, commercial, fiscal and financial. Together they unsettled social
relationships throughout Europe, and caused deep suffering among the poor.
Monarchs attempted to impose price regulations with little success. In the fourteenth
century, powerful elites condemned price controls as unnatural, ineffectual and immoral, much
as other economic moralists would do in the twentieth century. The Canon of Bridlington wrote
in 1316, “How contrary to reason is an ordinance on prices, when the fruitfullness or sterility
of all living things are in the power of God alone, from which it follows that the fertility of the
soil and not the will of man must determine the price.”
The arguments of medieval theologians differed in detail from those of modern
neoclassical economists, but the conclusions were much the same. Price controls were
condemned in the fourteenth century both as constraints upon the free market, and as violations
of the will of God. In every price-revolution, as we shall see, propertied and powerful elites
would oppose economic controls and profit by their absence.
As prices rose and fell and rose again, complex linkages and multipliers began to operate.
Rising prices led to a need for larger stocks of silver and gold, which drove prices higher still.
Great kingdoms and small city states teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. They struggled to
survive by borrowing heavily at ruinous rates of interest, and by debasing their money, thereby
introducing powerful instabilities into the price system of western Europe. Manorial lords
maintained their incomes by raising rents. A growing peasant population brought marginal
lands into cultivation, causing productivity to fall. More workers competed for fewer jobs, and
wages lagged behind price increases. As real wages fell, the margin of subsistence became
paper-thin. There was less security against any sort of trouble, at a time when danger was
increasing. Medieval Europe had come to the edge of disaster.
The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century
The first years of the fourteenth century were a time of dark foreboding for the suffering
peasantry of Europe. The economy of the Western world was in deep disorder. Material
inequalities had dangerously increased. The growth of population far outpaced the means of its
subsistence. The cost of food and firewood surged to high levels. Poverty and hunger increased
in many parts of the Western world.
Then, in the summer of 1314, the weather turned cold and very wet. Rain fell incessantly.
Crops rotted in the fields. Grain harvests were late and desperately short. In England,
Parliament asked King Edward II to impose price controls on farm products. He speedily did
so. Royal sheriffs rode through the realm proclaiming maximum prices for food, poultry and
livestock.
These disturbances seemed at first to be merely another routine disaster of a sort that had
often afflicted medieval Europe. Crops had fallen short before. In the winter of 1314, people
tightened their belts and prayed for better times.
But the next harvest was worse. The spring of 1315 brought heavy rain throughout Europe.
Stormy weather lashed the continent for months. Dikes collapsed in England and the Low
Countries. Entire fields washed away in France. Villages were destroyed by rising rivers in
Germany. Once again grain and fodder crops failed. This was not merely a set of local
shortages. It was, in the words of historian Henry Lucas, “a universal failure of crops in 1315 .
. . from the Pyrenees to Slavic regions, from Scotland to Italy.”1
In England during the year 1315, the price of wheat rose eightfold, from five shillings to
as much as forty shillings. Hungry livestock sickened and died. The chronicles tell of a “great
murrin” which took a heavy toll of domestic animals. Impoverished peasants ate cats, rats,
reptiles and insects. Many tried to survive on animal droppings. Others ate the leaves from the
trees. In London, Paris, Ypres, Breslau and Utrecht, the streets were littered with dying people.
Gangs of starving laborers roamed the countryside in search of food. Crime became
widespread—mostly the theft of food, or anything that could be exchanged for food.2
The economy of Europe, already dangerously fragile, disintegrated under a stress that it
might have survived at another time. People sought scapegoats for their suffering. Millers and
bakers became favorite targets. In France, the people of Paris staged a mass punishment of
bakers who had been found guilty of mixing their flour with animal droppings. Sixteen bakers
were lashed to wheels in public squares and made to hold bits of rotten bread in outstretched
hands, while they were beaten and reviled by the multitude.3
Figure 1.11 measures annual harvest prices as a percent of decennial means. Abundant crops
drove prices down; scarcity sent them up again. The impact of scarcity grew more severe as
the price revolution continued, reaching a peak in 1315–17, the worst famine in European
history. This graph is created from price series in James E. Thorold Rogers, A History of
Agriculture and Prices in England, vols. I & II.

In England, even the King felt the famine. One chronicle recorded that “when Edward II
with his household stopped at St. Albans at the Feast of St. Laurence [August 10], it was
practically impossible to procure bread for his court.” But large hoards of grain remained in
the hands of kings and noblemen in the west, and Teutonic Knights in the east, and great abbeys
throughout Europe. The ruling few of Europe were slow to open their granaries to feed the
starving many. All of these things happened in the year 1315.4
Then, inconceivably, torrential rains came again in 1316. The grain crop failed a third
year in a row. Europe began to experience the worst famine in its history. When other sources
of food ran out, people began to eat one another. Peasant families consumed the bodies of the
dead. Corpses were dug up from their burying grounds and eaten. In jails the convicts ceased
to be fed; we are told that starving inmates “ferociously attacked new prisoners and devoured
them half alive.” Condemned criminals were cut down from the gallows, butchered, and eaten.
Parents killed their children for food, and children murdered their parents.5
The death toll in this famine is unknown. It must have been very large. The town of Ypres,
with a population of perhaps 25,000 souls, counted 2,794 burials at public expense from May
to October, 1316, not including many others whose families paid for their interments. More
than 10 percent of the population died in pauperis within the span of less than six months.
Many other deaths must have gone unrecorded. Ypres was not unique in its suffering. Some
historians estimate that a tenth of Europe’s teeming population perished in the years 1315 and
1316.6
In the wake of famine, epidemics began to break out. Both people and animals suffered
from a nameless pestilence that spread swiftly through the continent. Some of its symptoms
were similar to those of modern anthrax; others were more like ergotism and dysentery.
Probably this was a polydemic of many different diseases, including some that may be
unknown to modern science.
Famine, epidemics and oppression were followed by an increase in crime. As price-
movements became more volatile, every surge in the cost of living was accompanied by a
sudden increase in criminal violence. Most of these crimes were thefts and robberies by
desperate men and women. Many were homicides, assaults and acts of rage against the cruel
suffering that had been visited upon so many people.
There were also acts of collective violence and insurrection. In rural France, a movement
called the Pastoureaux spread rapidly through the countryside. A great mass of peasants and
laborers gathered in the northwest, and began marching south and east toward the Holy Land,
gaining numbers as they went. On the way, the Pastoureaux attacked castles, sacked
monasteries, burned archives, released convicts, slaughtered Jews, murdered Lepers, and
settled scores with the nobility for many centuries of oppression. They spread terror among the
possessing classes, until finally they were dispersed and hanged by the hundreds. Their gaunt
bodies dangled from the branches of trees throughout the south of France.
Figure 1.12 compares the price of wheat in Norfolk (silver shillings per quarter) with criminal
indictments in the same county. Crimes (in order of frequency) include larceny, burglary,
homicide, robbery, receiving stolen goods, treason, counterfeiting, arson, and rape. The source
is Barbara Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1979),
243, 279.

While these disorders spread through the western world, yet another misery was inflicted
upon the people of Europe. As if famine, pestilence, and social violence were not suffering
enough, this period became a time of bloody war between the sovereign states of Europe.
“Wars are not evenly distributed throughout the centuries,” writes A. R. Bridbury, “they come
in clusters.” He observed that one such run of conflicts began in the year 1294, and continued
for fifty years. Major wars occurred between Scotland and England, England and France,
France and Flanders; many smaller conflicts broke out between German, Swiss and Italian
city-states. Warfare had been endemic in medieval Europe, but Bridbury and others find that its
incidence greatly increased after the year 1294.7
Incessant wars caused economic dislocation—both directly by the destruction that they
visited upon the countryside, and indirectly by their heavy costs as well. A large part of public
spending went for war at the moment when Europe could least afford it.8
Domestic insurrections also occurred in many parts of Europe, with similar result. In
Rome a rebellion broke out against Boniface VIII, a pope who was hated for his despotism and
despised for his impiety. The people of Rome took him prisoner and forced him to resign his
office. He died shortly afterward—of humiliation, the faithful believed. Others suspected
poison. His successor Benedict XI was murdered, and the papacy fled to Avignon in 1305.
There it remained in opulent exile for more than seventy years.
Even Venice, the most stable of Italian city-states, suffered the only major insurrection in
its thousand-year history—an uprising called Tiepolo’s Rebellion in 1310. It was suppressed
by a vigilante group called the Council of Ten, which made itself a permanent part of the
Venetian government, along with secret police, anonymous informers, savage torture, arbitrary
imprisonment, and an apparatus of official terror which today is exhibited to tourists in the
Doge’s Palace. This system of repression was the price of stability in the Venetian republic.
In the monarchies of northern Europe, nobles turned against their kings and toppled them
from their thrones. An aristocratic revolution was organized against England’s Edward II and
his supporters of the hated Despenser family, whose name had become a byword for avarice
and oppression. In September 1324, when the people of England were groaning under the
weight of their accumulated miseries, the young Hugh Despenser had accumulated large
deposits in Italian banks. This money had been extracted from starving peasants on his estates
and from the profits of his offices. Despenser and his father so outraged their countrymen that
they were seized by the rebels and summarily executed. Young Hugh Despenser’s head was
triumphantly displayed on London Bridge, “with much tumult and the sound of horns.”
For England’s much-hated King Edward II, a worse fate was in store. He was forcibly
deposed and cast into a deep dungeon at Berkeley Castle in the west of England. His captors
faced a dilemma. They could not let him live, but neither could they appear to kill their
sovereign. They solved their problem by inventing a unique method of execution that left no
visible marks. The king was seized and tightly bound. A red-hot iron was driven slowly
upward through his anus until it penetrated his brain. It is said that his dying screams could be
heard for miles across the Severn Valley. The folk memory of this event is still alive in
Gloucestershire. Some swear that the death cry of Edward II can still be heard in the silence of
a moonless night.
That savage act of regicide was not an isolated horror. The people of Flanders rose
against their hated French masters in 1302, and killed many of them in an epic slaughter called
the Matin de Bruges. Then they defeated the French nobility in the Battle of the Spurs at
Courtrai. In France, King Louis X (remembered as Louis the Quarrelsome) was deposed in
1316. Twelve years later, the Capetian dynasty collapsed after more than three centuries in
power.
In Sweden after 1290, a civil war between royal brothers ended in a popular insurrection,
in the expulsion of King Birger in 1319 and in the collapse of royal authority. Denmark
dissolved into anarchy after 1332, when King Christopher II was deposed by Gerhard Count
Holstein, who was murdered in his turn. The Holy Roman Empire suffered a protracted civil
war between contending parties called Guelfs and Ghibbelines. The popes were driven into
exile for seventy years, and in Rome a popular revolution led by Cola di Rienzi overthrew the
city’s patriciate. The Italian city-states were consumed by internal conflict. Florence, unable to
govern itself, invited a tyrant named Walter of Brienne, Duke of Athens, and soon found its
liberties crushed beneath his heel.
Order also collapsed throughout eastern Europe. In the year 1304, an army of 6,000
Catalonian mercenaries laid waste to broad areas of Thrace and Macedonia. The Ottoman
Turks first appeared in the early years of the fourteenth century, attacking the Byzantine Empire
and capturing Greek cities in Asia Minor. The Tartars rode eastward from the steppes as far as
the plains of Hungary, and for a time gained effective control of Russia.
These disorders, cruel as they may have been, were not the worst of Europe’s sufferings.
Famine, pestilence, war and insurrection returned repeatedly to Europe during the 1320s and
1330s. Some places—Tuscany for example—suffered worse famines in the period 1328–30
than in 1315–20. Prices surged and declined in great swings. The rural population shrank,
arable lands began to be abandoned, and peasants grew poorer.
At the same time, some of the rich continued to grow richer. This was the period when the
French popes lived in high luxury at Avignon. Pope John XXII (1316–34) spent vast sums for
jewels and ornaments and gold cloth for his vestments. Papal banquets were served on gold
plate beneath gilded frescoes and ceilings. Petrarch protested that even the papal horses were
“dressed in gold, fed on gold, and soon to be shod in gold if God does not stop this slavish
luxury.” The cardinals accumulated great wealth; one Prince of the Church required 51 houses
for his servants. Similar scenes were enacted in royal courts and noble households.
At the same time, many small seigneurs were caught up in the general misfortunes. A
study of the Norman seignury finds evidence of a “sharp collapse of rents” in the fourteenth
century, caused mainly by the decline of population, after the long rise of the thirteenth
century.9
Meanwhile, the peasants suffered and the poor starved. The generation born in this age of
crisis was so debilitated by hunger, disease, exploitation, war and disorder that a few years
later it succumbed to a still greater catastrophe, the worst in world history.10 In 1346 a Tartar
army besieged the Genoese town of Caffa (now Feodosia) in the Crimea. The attackers were
stricken by plague, and converted their misfortune into a weapon of war—catapulting their
dead into the city in a deliberate attempt to spread the infection. This tactic succeeded so well
that the Genoese abandoned the city and fled in their galleys through the Black Sea, the Aegean
and the Mediterranean, carrying with them the plague that came to be called the Black Death.
By October 1347, the Black Death had established itself in Sicily, and spread swiftly to
Africa, Sardinia, Corsica and the mainland of Europe. In January 1348, it reached Venice,
Genoa and Marseilles, where 56,000 people died. By June it crossed the Alps and Pyrenees.
England was infected by December, and Scotland and Scandinavia by 1349. A few cities
miraculously escaped—Milan, Nuremberg, Liège, and several fortunate regions such as Bearn,
as well as much of eastern Germany and Poland where the population was sparse.
But most of Europe felt the full force of the epidemic. Great centers of commerce and
culture suffered severely. The plague found a vulnerable population that had outstripped the
means of its subsistence and was already beginning to decline. Historian Philip Ziegler writes,
“Whatever one’s thesis about the inevitability of the Black Death, it cannot be denied that it
found awaiting it in Europe a population singularly ill-equipped to resist. Distracted by wars,
weakened by malnutrition, exhausted by his struggle to win a living from his inadequate
portion of ever less fertile land, the medieval peasantry was ready to succumb even before the
blow had fallen.”11
We shall never know how many people died in the Black Death. Among England’s parish
clergy, whose deaths were comparatively well recorded, something like 45 percent are known
to have perished. Most scholars believe that the death toll in the general population was
smaller, but still very large. Many historians estimate that Europe lost between 25 and 40
percent of its inhabitants. Altogether, the European population fell from approximately 80
million at its peak in the early fourteenth century to 60 million or less after the Black Death—
the largest decline in the cruel history of that continent.12
Figure 1.14 measures the catastrophic impact of the Black Death (1348) on two communities
25 miles northeast of London. A meticulous study by L. R. Poos also finds that the fall of
population began as early as 1310 and continued in Great Waltham as late as 1400. The source
is L. R. Poos, “The Rural Population of Essex in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History
Review 2nd ser., 38 (1985) 22.

This great depopulation had many economic consequences. The price of food rose sharply
during the epidemic years, then began to fall very rapidly as there were fewer mouths to feed.
At the same time prices of manufactured goods tended to rise, partly because artisans and
craftsmen could demand higher wages, and also because of dislocations in supply. These
countervailing trends—falling agricultural prices and rising industrial prices—were called by
Thorold Rogers a “price scissors.” Their effect was particularly severe after the catastrophe of
the fourteenth century, but they were not unique to this period. Similar movements would also
occur in every other price-revolution. In the years that followed the Black death, the “price
scissors” added much to Europe’s miseries.13
The catastrophe of the fourteenth century was followed by cultural disintegration. Jews
and foreigners were massacred. Among Christians, the practice of flagellation spread rapidly
in cities and the countryside. Processions of Christians scourged one another until their bare
backs ran red with blood. Entire villages and towns were abandoned, the doors and shutters of
the vacant buildings creaking sadly in the wind. Empty churches and deserted castles fell into
ruin. Grass grew in the marketplaces, and the country roads that had been thronged with
pilgrims were reclaimed by weeds and brush.
In the period from 1314 to 1348, the great wave crested and broke in a shattering
catastrophe. As it did so, the people of Europe suffered through the darkest moment in their
history: a terrible time of starvation and pestilence, insurrection and war, persecution and
political chaos. This was more than merely the collapse of the medieval economy. It was the
death of medieval civilization.

The Equilibrium of the Renaissance, 1400–1470

The time of troubles continued in western Europe for many years. It was a long, grinding
misery that lasted a lifetime, and must have seemed an eternity to those who were condemned
to suffer through it.1
The Black Death did not strike merely a single blow. It was one of a family of epidemics
that returned again and again to Europe. In many places the first visit was not the worst. The
Tuscan city of Pistoia, for example, suffered its first great plague in 1339. This was not the
Black Death but another pestilence, which came after famines had weakened the population for
twenty-five years. The epidemic of 1339 probably killed a quarter of Pistoia’s population in
the city itself and the surrounding countryside. Eight years later, in 1347, another pestilence
returned to that region. In 1348 the Black Death arrived, and did its work so thoroughly that the
keeper of the city’s chronicle remembered that “hardly a person was left alive.” Slowly the
survivors struggled to their feet, only to be struck by other epidemics of “mortal fevers” (not
the Black Death but different diseases) in 1357, 1389 and 1393. Then, in 1399, bubonic plague
came back to Pistoia and destroyed half of the city’s inhabitants in one final visitation.
Thereafter, conditions began at last to grow better, but even this period of improvement
was punctuated by lesser epidemics that overswept the town in 1410, 1418, 1423, 1436 and
1457. No other community experienced the same sequence of misfortunes as did the city of
Pistoia, but similar events occurred in most European towns and in much of the countryside as
well.2
While epidemic disease continued to ravage Europe, many parts of the continent were
laid waste by war. This was the period of the Hundred Years War (ca. 1337–1453) between
France and England.

Figure 1.15 shows the impact of the long crisis of the fourteenth century on Pistoia, an Italian
city state thirty kilometers northwest of Florence. The source is David Herlihy, Medieval and
Renaissance Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–1430 (New Haven, 1967),
70. Each campaign reduced large areas to anarchy, and left in its wake wandering gangs of
mercenaries and freebooters who preyed upon the peasantry. Some of these bands were as big
as a modern infantry brigade. When they passed through a rural region, they left a wide swath
of devastation.
 For self-defence, French peasants converted their stone churches into castles. The clang
of bells that had summoned families to worship in time of peace now sounded a warning tocsin
when raiders were in the neighborhood. In the beautiful Loire Valley, peasants retreated at
night to islands in the river. In Picardy, they moved underground into tunnels and caves with
hidden entrances. Another dark age had descended upon Europe.3
One consequence was a continuing decline of population. The number of inhabitants did
not merely fall during the great plague year of 1348. In many parts of Europe it kept on falling,
in a long contraction that persisted from 1315 to 1400. A careful Danish study of farms on the
manors of the Bishops of Roskilde near Copenhagen found that the proportion of abandoned
houses increased steadily for sixty years after the Black Death. The decline of rural population
reached its nadir not in 1348 but half a century later, in the period 1401–20.4
Figure 1.16 measures the impact of falling population on farm tenancy in Denmark. Here again
we find evidence not of a single catastrophe but of a long decline that reached its nadir circa
1400. A large literature on the W stungsproblem (“lost village question”) finds similar trends
throughout Europe. The source is C. A. Christensen, “Aendringerne i landsbyens Økonomiske
og sociale strukur i det 14. og 15. århundrede,” Historisk Tidsskrift 12 (1964) 346.

At the same time that Europe’s population continued to fall and social unrest continued, an
economic problem developed. Money began to disappear. Europe’s stock of silver and gold
contracted sharply during the late fourteenth century. Historian John Day writes, “for the better
part of two decades the European economies were scourged by a genuine scarcity of money.”
In the violence of the fourteenth century, much silver and gold had been lost. Some of it
disappeared into forgotten hordes that are being rediscovered even today. At the same time the
West had an unfavorable balance of trade with Asia, and specie drained rapidly away. Imports
of gold from Africa also declined, and many silver mines in central Europe were abandoned or
became less productive.
After 1390, a severe monetary famine developed. In France, the low point was reached
during the year 1402, when the minting of money virtually came to an end. In Florence, the
minting of silver coins ceased entirely from 1392 to 1402. In London, the entire output of the
Royal Mint was merely eight pounds in silver pennies during the year 1408. The mints of
Flanders closed altogether. Only Venetian gold ducats, which have been called “the dollar of
the middle ages,” continued to be struck in quantity; and even in Venice silver was in short
supply. This money famine was part of a deep economic depression that continued to the end of
the fourteenth century.5
The decline of population and scarcity of money had a powerful effect on European
prices.6 In Pistoia, famine and plague had reduced the population from more than 40,000 souls
in the late thirteenth century to less than 14,000 by the early fifteenth. Houses and estates fell
empty; rents and land values declined roughly in proportion to the loss of population. Grain
prices also came down, but the growing scarcity of labor caused wages to rise.7 The money-
income of unskilled workers in Pistoia doubled from 1349 to 1400, and real wages (measured
in terms of purchasing power) increased in even greater proportion. These trends appeared
generally throughout Europe.8
In the midst of these many tendencies, an important social transformation began to take
place. From the long travail of the fourteenth century, a new society was born. Forms of status
and obligation were altered in fundamental ways. England and western Europe underwent an
economic process that historian M. M. Postan summarizes as the “commutation of labour
services and the emancipation of serfs.” Similar trends also occurred in the cities of northern
Italy, where urban workers improved their material condition. A major cause was the scarcity
of labor that allowed workers to bargain for better terms. This process continued for nearly a
century after the Black Death.
Angry social conflicts broke out as a consequence of this assertiveness. Among them was
the Jacquerie in France (1358), a rebellion of peasants against their masters. Another was the
revolt of the Ciompi in Florence (1378), when the popolo minuto rose violently against the
ruling families of that city.9 A third was England’s great Peasant Rebellion (1381). In that year
there was a insurrection in East Anglia, and the Kentish Rising of Wat Tyler who led his
followers into the streets of London. In many places, peasants burned the manorial rolls that
recorded their servile obligations.10
These rebellions were suppressed, but the conditions that produced them had lasting
consequences. In Postan’s words, a “rapid withering away of servile dues and disabilities”
transformed social relationships. Vestiges of the old obligations remained for many
generations, but Postan concludes that “in general rural serfdom had gone out of the land, and
was all but forgotten by the time Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne of England [in 1558].”
 This transition would have momentous consequences in English history during the early
modern era. England was ahead of France and Germany, and eastern Europe lagged far behind,
but similar trends were stirring in many parts of the Western world.11
At the dawn of the fifteenth century, economic conditions began at last to stabilize in
Europe. Prices ceased falling and began to fluctuate in a more regular way. A long period of
comparative equilibrium followed in the fifteenth century.
Once again, the city of Pistoia represented the general trend. Historian David Herlihy
writes, “After about 1400, Pistoia’s agricultural economy was attaining a new equilibrium, and
was achieving a real if moderate prosperity. Declining commodity prices bespeak a returning
abundance, and profits to investors, reaching 12 percent by the century’s end, registered a
distinct if modest gain. Among the factors which contributed to the new rural prosperity was
the stabilization and then steady growth of the rural population. . . . Population and social
tumult was largely, if not finally, calmed. . . . The new agricultural system of the fifteenth
century . . . provided Pistoia’s Renaissance society with a firm and stable basis for its political
life and for its cultural growth.”12
Similar trends appeared throughout northern Italy. Outbreaks of mortal disease continued,
but they happened less frequently after 1400, and their effects were less severe. The size of
harvests continued to fluctuate from year to year, but the magnitude of price-variations slowly
diminished during the fifteenth century. The Italian city-states entered a long period of slow
recovery, stable growth and dynamic equilibrium in economic and demographic movements
(circa 1405–80). The urban populations of Venice, Florence and Siena began to increase again,
though still remaining smaller than before the Black Death. Commerce and industry revived,
real wages rose buoyantly, and commodity prices continued to decline and stabilize.13
Figure 1.17 shows a growth of stability in harvest prices from 1390 to 1480. Fluctuations
continued, but magnitudes diminished through nearly a century. Major shortages became
progressively less severe. This annual series (as a percent of decennial means) is computed
from data in J. E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vol. 2.

Italy was more advanced in these tendencies than other parts of Europe. North of the
Alps, disorder and instability persisted for another generation or longer. The people of France
suffered through three terrible periods of anarchy, pestilence, war and famine in the early
fifteenth century. During the years from 1413 to 1420, France was afflicted with an insane
monarch (Charles VI), an impotent government, an English invasion, and an internal rebellion
led by a skinner named Simon Caboche. French prices rose to a great height during these
disorders. They went even higher in 1428–30, when an English army besieged Orleans and
burned a Saint, Jeanne d’Arc, at Rouen in 1431. A third time of troubles in France occurred
during the years 1437–39, a period of grand disettes, the return of plague, and the anarchy of
the ecorcheurs. In each of these three eras, French prices surged to very high levels.14

Figure 1.18 shows the long decline of grain prices that continued from 1360 to 1480 in most
parts of Europe. The central tendency was stable for more than a century. The source is
Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, 66; for similar trends in France, see
d’Avenel, Histoire économique, 2:518.

Figure 1.19 shows a long decline in rent from 1360 to 1460, when wages were rising. It also
shows a rise in rent after 1460, when the next price-revolution was underway. Sources include
David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia (New Haven, 1967), and Guy Bois, Crise
du feodalisme: Économie rurale et démographie en Normandie orientale du début du 14e
siècle au milieu du 16e siècle (Paris, 1976).
Figure 1.20 shows a strong rise in real wages from 1351 to 1475, while prices were falling.
After 1476, when the next price revolution began, real wages began to come down. The source
is Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices (New
York, 1981), 28–31; Georges d’Avenel, Histoire économique de la propriété, des salaires,
des denrées, et de tous les prix en générale, depuis l’an 1200 jusqu’en 1800 (7 vols., Paris,
1894–1926).
Figure 1.21 shows the fall of interest rates in the fifteenth century. Levels differed widely:
public securities such as Venetian prèstiti, French rentes and Dutch census loans combined
higher security with lower rates. Commercial loans carried higher rates, but trends were much
the same. The source is Sidney Homer, A History of Interest Rates (2d ed., New Brunswick,
1977), 104–43.

After 1440, conditions began at last to improve in France. During the reigns of Charles
VII “the Well Served” and Louis XI “the Bourgeois,” order was restored, the English were
defeated and anarchy was suppressed. From 1437 to the end of the fifteenth century, prices
stabilized throughout France. Annual price fluctuations diminished, and the cost of grain
remained roughly on the same level for nearly half a century.15
As France lagged behind Italy, so England lagged behind France. That unhappy island
became a byword for political strife in the fifteenth century. A cruel and sordid conflict,
inappropriately named the Wars of the Roses, persisted into the late fifteenth century. So also
did economic instability. But even in England, the amplitude of price fluctuations steadily
diminished after 1440 and real wages improved.16
While real wages increased, returns to capital diminished. Rates of interest fell by 50
percent in France and the Low Countries in the century from 1370 to 1470. Italian rates also
came down, though not so much as in northern Europe. Rents also came down during the same
period, from 1370 to 1460. The same combination of rising wages, falling rents and falling
interest rates also appeared in every period of price equilibrium from the fifteenth to the
nineteenth centuries.
Figure 1.22 finds that when wages rose and rents fell during the fifteenth century, the peasantry
of Europe enlarged their holdings. These English villages are cases in point. In Holywell,
landholders included both customary and leasehold tenants; in Stoughton, they were
freeholders as well as leaseholders and customary tenants. The number of holders fell: in
Stoughton from 62 to 24, and in Holywell from 59 to 49. Sources include Edwin B. Dewindt,
Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth: Structures of Tenure and Patterns of
Social Organization in an East Midlands Village, 1252–1457 (Toronto, 1972), 114; and
Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 141.
This was a difficult time for people who lived on rents and interest. But for most ordinary
folk who earned their bread by daily labor, life was better. Real wages increased. Rents fell.
Returns to labor outpaced rewards to land and capital. New trends slowly began to emerge in
the distribution of wealth. In England, many studies have found that peasants and small
proprietors enlarged their holdings in the fifteenth century.
At the same time that these patterns of equilibrium began to appear in the European
economy, new political trends emerged as well. The second half of the fifteenth century
became an age of strong and successful state-building. This was the era of Poland’s great king
Casimir IV, who united his grand duchy and drove out foreign invaders. In Russia it was the
time of Ivan the Great (1462), the first truly national ruler. It was also the era of Hungary’s
greatest king Mathias Corvinus (1458); of France’s Louis XI (1461), who transformed a
medieval kingdom into a great national monarchy; and of England’s Henry VII (1485), who
founded the Tudor dynasty.
These patterns of demographic equilibrium, economic recovery and political stability
developed in every part of Europe, but not all at the same time. They first appeared in the
territories that bordered the Mediterranean Sea. The early fifteenth century might be
remembered as the Mediterranean moment in modern history. It was an era of prosperity and
proud achievement from the straits of Gibraltar to the Golden Horn.17
In Spain, a new nation was born. Nobody could have predicted it. The future of Iberia
seemed very bleak as late as the year 1410, when the death of Aragon’s King Martin I was
followed by the collapse of Spain’s strongest dynasty. But in 1412 the throne of Aragon passed
to a cadet branch of the family that ruled Castile, and the two strongest kingdoms in Spain were
governed by members of the same clan. Contacts between these kingdoms steadily increased.
In 1469, the foundation of a new national state was created by a marriage of two Spanish
stepcousins, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. A single national religion was
forcibly imposed by the Spanish Inquisition (founded in 1478), and the Spanish church was
protected from interference by a papal concordat in 1482. A system of national law was
established in the Libro de Montalvo (1485). The Moors were expelled from Spain in the
great reconquista which ended triumphantly with the liberation of Granada in 1492, the same
year when Columbus sailed for America.
These national events were closely linked to economic trends. The Spanish economy
flourished during the fifteenth century. Its increasing stability supported the new political
trends and was in turn reinforced by them. The result was the creation of the strongest nation-
state in the Western world—one that was destined to dominate Europe and America through the
sixteenth century.
At the opposite end of the Mediterranean, another empire was created in a different way.
The greatness of the Ottoman Empire rose not from the imposition of cultural unity on a single
nation, but from the reconciliation of cultural diversity within an imperial frame. In company
with their Christian neighbors, the Ottoman Turks had suffered many vicissitudes during the
fourteenth century. After 1413 a new trend appeared. Turkish armies captured Byzantium,
ravaged the Balkans, and conquered the Crimea. They battered Greek cities into submission
with marble cannonballs made from ancient monuments. The Ottoman empire was formed by
conquest during the three reigns of Mehmed I (1413–21), Murad II (1421–51) and especially
Mehmed II the Conqueror (1451–81).
The new Ottoman Empire was a mixture of light and shadow. It was created by slaughter
and maintained by terror. Sultan Mehmed II alone was thought to have been responsible for the
murder of more than 800,000 people. But brutal as the Turks may have been, they were
humanitarians by contrast with some of the despots whom they destroyed. One of their enemies
was the sadistic Vlad Dracul of Wallachia—the original Dracula who ordered mass murders
merely for amusement, and once impaled and crucified 20,000 captives in a single orgy of
violence. The Turks drove Dracula from power.
Once created by violent acts, the Ottoman Empire was tolerant of ethnic and religious
minorities—more so than Christian states. In its prime, the Ottoman state was remarkable for
administrative enlightenment, rational economic policies and ethnic pluralism. Throughout the
eastern Mediterranean it forcibly imposed a pax ottomanica that lasted many centuries.18
At the same time, the most remarkable achievements occurred in the center of the
Mediterranean basin, mainly among the Italian cities of Florence, Siena, Genoa, Modena,
Lucca, Milan, Padua and Venice. Here there was no single nation-state or despotic dominion,
but something very different in structure and spirit. The sovereign cities of northern Italy, in
rivalry with one another, invented a new institution which they named lo stato. We know it as
the modern secular state. They also created the idea of a modern state system in which a
political equilibrium was maintained by a balance of power, by spheres of influence, by the
exercise of diplomacy and by the sway of international law.
Some of these Italian city states also developed complex internal systems of republican
liberty and self-government. Political stability was achieved in the stronger cities, and linked
to a material equilibrium that prevailed throughout northern Italy in the fifteenth century.
A leading example was the history of Venice in the quattrocento. From 1405 to 1484, this
maritime republic annexed much of northern Italy: Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Treviso, Bergamo,
and Brescia. Even to this day in many small Italian villages throughout these regions, the lion
columns that symbolized Venetian sovereignty still stand in the town squares.19
Venetian ships controlled the inland waterways of Italy, as far as the Lago di Garda.
Venetian settlers occupied many Mediterranean islands that had belonged to the Byzantine
Greeks and the Crusader States. They added Corfu in 1386, Saloniki in 1423, and Cyprus in
1489 to their medieval possessions of Crete in the Mediterranean and Negroponte in the
Aegean Sea.
These acquisitions made Venice into a great seaborne empire which dominated trade
between West and East. Within the city of Venice itself, the arsenale became the largest
industrial complex in Europe and the basis of the city’s naval power. Here the Venetians
developed assembly lines and standardized parts, from which an entire galley could be
manufactured in a single day. So secret was the arsenale that anyone who entered without
permission could be blinded or put to death. Its great walls, bearing the date 1460, still stand
today.
After 1450, the Turks began to make inroads on the eastern fringes of Venetian empire, but
the economy of Venice remained prosperous throughout the fifteenth century and prices were
highly stable. Historian Frederic Lane finds an indicator of this new stability in the price of
pepper, which had long been an exceptionally volatile commodity in medieval markets. After
1415, the price of pepper stabilized and fluctuated remarkably little until 1499—the result of
Venetian commercial hegemony and of more fixed and regular trading conditions between East
and West.20
By the late fifteenth century, the Venetians were extracting from their territories a public
revenue of a million gold ducats a year, and much private wealth as well. The immense
prosperity of Venice appeared in its 200 opulent churches, in its Ducal palace that was rebuilt
on a magnificent scale in the fifteenth century, and in the private palazzi that still line the Grand
Canal. Venice became the golden city of the west. Its purse-proud merchants looked with envy
upon the palazzo ca d’oro, a palace covered entirely with gold. They prayed in the Cathedral
of San Marco before the pala d’oro, a screen of gold. They dreamed of gold, lived for gold,
and at St. Mark’s they even appeared to worship gold.
Very different in spirit was the city of Florence, which also became a great center of
commerce, industry and finance during this period. The Medici Bank, with branches in London,
Geneva, Bruges and Avignon, became highly profitable. The city’s silk and woolen industry
also flourished in the fifteenth century. Prosperity came to great families such as the Medici
themselves, and also to the popolo minuto of most social ranks and occupations.21
Prices in Florence remained stable through much of the fifteenth century, and wages were
relatively high. Historian Richard Goldthwaite observes that “the stability of wages was the
result of a general equilibrium” in this period. Prices also fluctuated within a fixed range from
1380 to 1470. Politics and social relations were comparatively orderly. In those years,
Florence experienced nothing like the great revolt of the Ciompi in 1378.22
After many centuries of strife, the political and social institutions of Florence became
more stable in the fifteenth century. The central figure was Cosimo de Medici. Without holding
high office himself, Cosimo dominated his city from 1434 until his death in 1464. He gave
Florence an enlightened and humane government, a more progressive system of taxation, a long
period of prosperity at home, and a successful policy of peace abroad, which was maintained
by complex diplomatic alliances. He also began a dynasty that continued under the leadership
of his son Piero and his grandson Lorenzo de Medici.
The strength and confidence of Florence during the fifteenth century was captured by its
culture. The soaring spirit of the quattrocento simultaneously appeared in the exquisite beauty
of Donatello’s sculpture, in the symmetry and grace of Brunelleschi’s great Duomo (1420–
24)above the cathedral, in the austere grandeur of the Medici Palace, in the quiet serenity of
San Marco’s convent cells, and especially in the beautiful frescos that were painted there by
Fra Angelico (1439–45). The striking contrast between the celebrations of St. Mark in
Florence and Venice could scarcely have been more complete. In very different ways, both
cities captured the general mood of confidence and certainty that flourished in the north of Italy
during the fifteenth century.
 Throughout that region, a remarkable transformation occurred in the life of the mind
during the quattrocento. “Ever since the humanists’ own days,” writes historian Hans Baron,
“the transition from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century has been recognized as a time of big
and decisive changes.” During the early decades of the fifteenth century, Florentine humanists
such as Leonardo Bruni, Coluccio Salutati and Poggio Bracciolini produced a literature which
celebrated republican virtue, the rule of law, and the power of reason.
This intellectual movement culminated in the rhetorical extravagance of Pico della
Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), which argued that the greatness of man
consisted in his freedom from material constraints. In Pico’s oration, the following words are
addressed by God to Adam:

You may have and possess whatever abode, form and functions that you might desire. The
nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of law prescribed
by us. But you, constrained by no limits, in accordance with your own free will, in whose
hand we have placed you, shall ordain for yourself the limits of your nature.23

Pico’s idea of human life without external limit was one aspect of the Renaissance. Others
included a new spirit of civic humanism, a new idea of republican virtue, a new classicism, a
new conception of Platonic idealism, and most of all a new dream of symmetry and order,
which Hans Baron has described as the “geometric spirit.”
The physical expression of this new spirit was the architecture of the Renaissance palaces
that multiplied in Florence—the Medici palace north of the Duomo; the Pitti palace south of the
river Arno, and the vast Strozzi palace to the west. These buildings, with their massive walls,
rusticated masonry, heavy cornices, exposed windows, and careful symmetries all
communicated a confident sense of order, strength and equilibrium.
Whether one thinks of the neoclassical proportions of Renaissance architecture, or the
rules of perspective in Renaissance painting, or the idea of balance in Renaissance statecraft,
or the Platonic system-building of Renaissance philosophy, these expressions shared an
assumption that the world was a place of harmony, symmetry, proportion and balance. They
expressed a mood of cosmic optimism that arose during an era of comparative stability in the
material culture of the West—an era that might well be remembered as the equilibrium of the
Renaissance.24
THE SECOND WAVE
The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century

I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only lingers and
lingers it out, but the disease is incurable.
—Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff
Henry IV, Part 2, 1.2.216 (1597)

FLORENCE, June 24, 1491, the festival of San Giovanni. On this happy summer day, the
citizens of a great and prosperous city honored their patron saint, John the Baptist. Every year
the Florentines spent months in preparation for an event which they believed to be
“unparalleled in the world.”
The festival of St. John was a joyous holiday for people of every rank. Servants received
new livery, and a day of freedom. Masters and mistresses appeared in extravagant new
costumes and jewels. The magnati of the city, who in years past had met in mortal combat at
the city’s piazza, now competed for honor in contests of material display. The morning was
marked by tournaments, by fights between wild animals, and by demonstrations of martial arts
called armeggerie. Great crowds gathered to watch the palio, a wild and dangerous horse race
through the streets of the city. There was a lively parade of the gonfalonieri, marching proudly
with their billowing flags. The evening of the festival was a traditional time for weddings,
which had been postponed for weeks to honor the occasion. The grand climax was a solemn
religious procession of colorful floats called trionfi, which celebrated scenes from the life of
Christ and St. John.
Those things had been done for as many years as anyone could remember. But this year a
change was made. In place of the religious floats, the first citizen of Florence Lorenzo de’
Medici ordered the construction of fifteen trionfi on a classical rather than a Christian theme.
The new floats celebrated the triumph of Roman consul Lucius Aemilius Paulus Macedonicus,
whose victories had brought so much treasure to Rome that its citizens were freed from some
of their taxes for forty years.1
These new Florentine trionfi were drawn through the streets by 100 oxen, and escorted by
five squadrons of war horses from the Laurentian stables. An historian at the time observed
that this display “was considered the worthiest thing ever done on the day of San Giovanni.” A
parallel was pointedly drawn between the largesse of Paulus Macedonicus and the generosity
of Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose family had spent more than a million florins in acts of
philanthropy. In the process, an old religious procession was turned into a secular event that
celebrated the prosperity of the city, the stability of its institutions, the generosity of the Medici
family, and the glory of their young leader who was called Lorenzo il Magnifico.2
In 1491, the city of Florence had much to celebrate. “The city enjoyed perfect peace,” its
historian Guicciardini wrote, “the citizens in power were united and close, and their regime
was so powerful that no one dared oppose it. Every day, the people were treated to shows,
feasts, and novelties; provisions abounded in the city, and all the trades prospered. Genius and
ability flourished, for all men of arts, letters, and ability were welcomed and honored. At
home, the city enjoyed complete order and quiet; and abroad, the highest glory and
reputation.”3
The city was at the very pinnacle of its power. It had enlarged its domain in Tuscany, and
had so strengthened its alliances that it appeared to be “the fulcrum of all Italy.“4 Money
flowed into its coffers at such a rate that only three days before the Feast of St. John, the
commune announced that citizens would be allowed to pay their public obligations at only a
fraction of the usual rate. A month before the festival, the mint-masters issued a new Florentine
coin that “was thought [to] work miracles with the economy.” Throughout the city, the great
Renaissance palaces and especially Brunelleschi’s majestic duomo above the cathedral
symbolized an era of prosperity and stability.5
So it seemed in 1491, when the people of Florence celebrated the day of their patron
saint. But beneath the surface, things were not as they appeared. Once again, at the very
moment when it was least expected, a deep change was silently stirring in Florence itself and
throughout the Western world. After nearly a century of equilibrium, new trends were
beginning to develop in Italy and other parts of Europe.
An early sign was the movement of prices. During the last quarter of the fifteenth century,
the cost of living had begun to rise in Italy and Germany. The magnitude of its increase was not
very great, but in retrospect we are able to recognize the silent beginning of a new change-
regime that was destined to continue for many generations.
The people of Tuscany sensed the new trend long before they saw it clearly. Within nine
months of the Feast of St. John, the cultural mood began to change in Florence. It started with
an omen of a sort that Florentines took very seriously. On the fifth of April, in the year 1492,
the sky suddenly turned black above the city. A brilliant bolt of lightning streaked down from
the heavens and struck Brunelleschi’s soaring duomo with a mighty crash.6
As if on cue, a sinister friar named Girolamo Savonarola emerged from his cell at the
convent of San Marco and delivered a dark prophecy to the people of Florence. “Tell Lorenzo
to do penance for his sins,” Savonarola warned, “for God will punish him.” Before a vast
crowd, the friar prophesied the death of il Magnifico himself and an ordeal of suffering for his
city.7
Within months, both prophecies came true. In 1492, the magnificent young Lorenzo died
suddenly of a strange illness. The coup de grace may have been administered by his own
physicians, who ordered this great sybarite to drink a potion of powdered pearls as a last
desperate remedy for his mysterious affliction. He was barely 43 years old.
After Lorenzo’s death, the peace and prosperity of Florence collapsed. His carefully
crafted foreign policy was destroyed by his reckless son and heir, Piero di Lorenzo de’
Medici. As the Italian states resumed their ancient quarrels a French army seized the moment,
crossed the Alps and occupied Florence. An angry mob sacked the Medici palace, and Piero di
Lorenzo was banished from the city. After a brief revival of republican liberty, Florence
passed under the sway of Friar Savonarola, who ruled the city from 1494 to 1498.
Savonarola tirelessly lectured the people on their sins, and blamed their troubles on
spiritual corruption and love of luxury. He persuaded them to do penance for their prosperity.
In an orgy of remorse they built a huge bonfire of their beloved Renaissance paintings, books,
furniture and musical instruments in the Piazza de Signori. Just before the pile was set alight,
an incredulous Venetian merchant offered to remove the offending vanities for 20,000 gold
ducats. His reward was to have his own portrait instantly painted, and thrown into the flames.8
The burning of the vanities in Florence on February 7, 1497, became one of the best
remembered scenes of the Italian Renaissance. Not so well known, even to professional
historians, was its close conjunction with economic events. Prices surged very high in the
1490s, and the economy began to fail. On February 19, 1497, only twelve days after the
burning of the vanities, there was a riot in the old Piazzo del Grano, the site of the city’s public
granary. The starving poor, driven to desperation by rising food prices, gathered before the
granary in such numbers that some were crushed and others were suffocated. The surging
crowd broke down the doors and attacked the granary, crying “Palle, palle,” the nickname of
the Medici who had so often helped them in the past.9
Hungry peasants crowded into the city from the hills of Tuscany. The streets and hospitals
were filled with dying people. Famine was followed by epidemic disease, and Florence found
itself once again in the grip of the plague. Savonarola wrote his brother, “Every day we see
nothing in Florence but crosses and corpses.” The city itself was described as “a living
corpse.” What remained of it was consumed by foreign war and domestic disorder until self-
government was destroyed.10
In 1498, the people of Florence began to blame Savonarola himself for their misfortunes,
and turned savagely against their spiritual leader. On the eve of Ascension Day they burned
him at the stake while the mob jeered, “Prophet, now is the time for a miracle.”11
These events were a pivot-point in Italian history. After the death of Savonarola, Italy
became a bloody cockpit for the great powers. Foreign armies laid waste to Tuscany. Venice
was despoiled of her empire by the French in the west and by the Turks to the east. Rome itself
was brutally sacked in 1527. In 1530 the proud republic of Florence became a dark and
wretched despotism, which called itself the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. These happenings ended
the equilibrium of the Renaissance. They marked the beginning of a new material process
which economic historians call the price-revolution of the sixteenth century.12
Figure 2.01 shows the main lines of this price revolution from its beginning in the late fifteenth
century to its climax in the mid-seventeenth century. Annual indices of consumable prices in
England, and commodity prices in Germany and Spain, are converted to a common base (1521-
30=100). The sources are Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages
and Prices (London, 1981), 28–31, 94–98; Moritz J. Elsas, Umriss eine Geschichte der
Preise und Lôhne in Deutschland (2 vols., Leiden, 1936–40); Earl J. Hamilton, Money,
Prices, and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre, 1351–1500 (Cambridge, 1936); idem,
American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, 1934), 191,
200, 216.
The Price Revolution Begins, circa 1470–80
The first signs appeared in the north of Italy and southern Germany. The price of grain in
Florence began to rise about the year 1472. In the south German cities of Wurzburg, Munich
and Augsburg, the new trend started about the same time. Throughout France and England, the
inflection-point came a little later, approximately 1480. In Spain and Portugal, the price-
revolution did not appear until after 1490. Parts of eastern Europe were not affected until
1500.13
Once begun, the new trend continued for a very long time. Historians call it the price-
revolution of the sixteenth century—a name that is not precisely accurate. This very long wave
began as early as 1470, and continued as late as 1650. Altogether, it had a run of 180 years—
the longest price-revolution in modern history.14
Through that long period, the annual rate of inflation was very moderate by the measure of
our own time. From 1490 to 1650, price increases averaged only about 1 percent each year.
The speed of their advance seems very slow by modern standards, but it was twice as fast as
the medieval wave and it was compounded for a very long time. An historian observes that
“the most remarkable feature of the Price Revolution was not the pace at which prices rose, but
the fact that a rising trend was sustained for so long.”15
The underlying rate of change was remarkable for its stability. A striking pattern appears
in that respect. When the price of grain in the Italian city of Modena is plotted on a semilog
scale (which represents a constant rate of change as astraight line), the central trend was
perfectly straight from the late fifteenth century to the seventeenth.
There was much movement around that central trend. From year to year, the price of grain
in Modena fluctuated sharply, mainly because of changes in the size of harvests. But these
gyrations also showed stability in their rhythm and scale. Trendlines drawn through the peaks
and valleys of annual price-fluctuations make two more straight lines. Here was another set of
constants in the paramenters of change, and a classic example of a change-regime that
combined dynamism with stability in high degree.
The experience of Modena was not representative of the price-revolution as a whole.
Patterns varied in detail from one city to another. But in general, the price-revolution of the
sixteenth century showed a similar tendency in much of the Western world.16
What set this change-regime in motion? There are many answers in the literature:
monetarist, Malthusian, Marxist, and more. As the evidence continues to grow, many historians
(including this one) have come to believe that prime mover of the price-revolution was a
revival of population growth, which placed heavy pressure on material resources.
Figure 2.02 examines components of change in this price revolution: increasing magnitudes,
expanding amplitudes, and stability in the underlying rate of change. The source is Gian Luigi
Basini’s elegant monograph Sui mercato di Modena tra cinque e seicento: Prèzzi e salari
(Milan, 1974). Trend lines are fitted with an Excel 5.0 program.

This demographic tendency began during the late fifteenth century, when parallel
tendencies appeared in England, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, the Low Countries,
Switzerland, Scandinavia and eastern Europe. Most nations experienced the same sequence of
change: catastrophe in the mid-fourteenth century, continuing decline of population to the end of
the fourteenth century; stagnation and slow growth in the early and mid-fifteenth century;
acceleration after 1460 or 1470.
England was a case in point. That country had approximately two million inhabitants in
1430, and not many more in 1470. Thereafter, the population of England began to grow more
rapidly. It reached 2.8 millions by 1541, and more than four millions by the end of the sixteenth
century. Historian Michael Postan found evidence that this demographic trend began circa
1470, and continued through the sixteenth century.17

Figure 2.03 compares quinquennial estimates of English population with a 25-year moving
average of the Phelps-Brown Index of English consumable prices. The source is E. A. Wrigley
and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871; A Reconstruction
(Cambridge, 1981), 403.

The cause of population growth after about 1460 is not difficult to discover. The
prolonged period of economic equilibrium in the fifteenth century had been a time of increasing
real wages, and a revolutionary rise in expectations. Many years after the catastrophe of the
fourteenth century, the world at last seemed to be a better place in which to raise a family. This
change of attitude was broadly cultural rather than narrowly material. In the period from 1460
to 1510, millions of men and women throughout Europe freely decided for their own purposes
to marry earlier and have more children. The general trend emerged from a web of individual
choices.18
The consequences were much the same as in the thirteenth century. German writer
Sebastian Franck remarked in his Deutschen Chronik (1538) that “there are so many people
everywhere, no one can move.” In Italy, England, and France there were complaints of
overcrowding in cities and the countryside. Similar observations were repeated throughout
Europe.19
The effect of population growth was to undercut the cultural expectations that set it in
motion. But this was not precisely a Malthusian process. Neither Malthus nor Marx can explain
what happened in the sixteenth century. Long before population outstripped the means of its
subsistence in a Malthusian manner, complex imbalances of other kinds began to develop.
As the demand for food increased, people began to bring marginal lands into cultivation,
with large labor and small return. French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie described that
process at work in Languedoc. That region had a thin and stony scrubland called the garrigue
which had been abandoned since the Black Death. Now it began to be plowed and planted
once again. This process began in the mid-sixteenth century. “By 1576,” Le Roy Ladurie
writes, “the rape of the garrigue was well underway. . . . Demographic pressure, the rise in
demand, and the increase in prices had made their combined effect felt. One had to resign
oneself to the working of poor, rocky soils.”20
Many years before Malthusian “positive checks” came into operation, these more subtle
mechanisms came into play. The growth of population caused the price of food to rise, faster
and farther than that of other commodities. Industrial products and wages lagged behind. In
Spain, economic historian Earl Hamilton found that “throughout the first three-quarters of the
sixteenth century, agricultural prices rose faster than non-agricultural.” Similar patterns
appeared in England, France, Germany. This pattern of price-relatives was much the same as
in the long wave of the thirteenth century.21
Once food prices began to rise, the cost of energy also started to climb at a rapid rate. In
the early years of the price-revolution, energy prices increased slowly, then began to
accelerate. In an environment that was rapidly losing its forest cover, the rising price of
firewood and charcoal soon outstripped even the cost of food. After 1530 or thereabouts, the
price of wood in all its forms (including charcoal) increased more rapidly than that of grain or
meat or any other commodity.22 Wood prices rose sharply in England, France, Germany and
Poland. Energy prices were among the most volatile in the long inflation of the sixteenth
century.23
The movement of price-relatives revealed differences not merely of magnitude but also of
timing. The secular rise in farm prices began before the increase in the cost of manufactured
goods. In England, the price of grain began to rise as early as 1470–89, forty years before most
industrial products, which started to climb circa 1510–39. In Poland, the price of Torún rye
was rising from about 1495, and Cracow oats from 1505; Polish manufactures began to go up
later.24

Figure 2.04 shows that price relatives of food and raw materials rose most rapidly. Industrial
prices and farm wages lagged far behind. This pattern appeared in every price revolution.
Sources include D. C. Coleman, The Economy of England, 1450–1750 (Oxford, 1977), 23;
and P. Bowden, “Statistical Appendix,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England
and Wales (Cambridge, 1967) IV, appendix.

The price of manufactures also rose at a slower pace than those of food and fuel.
Throughout Europe, the slowest rates of increase were for industrial goods which could be
produced most easily in larger quantity. In England, the price of food and fuel rose by a factor
of six or eight, while industrial prices merely trebled. That pattern of price relatives has
appeared in every great wave.
The timing and magnitude of these changes in price-relatives is an important clue to the
cause of the price-revolution. The earliest and most rapid increases appeared in the cost of
life’s necessities such as food and fuel and shelter, which were most in demand when
population was accelerating, and least elastic in supply. Here was strong evidence of a
demand-driven demographic determinant at work. A monetary cause alone should have been
more even-handed in its effect.25

The Second Stage: Discovery and Cultural Response

In the early and middle years of the sixteenth century, the price-revolution entered another
phase. It did so when the long inflation broke through the boundaries of the old price system
that had prevailed in the mid-fifteenth century. As it rose beyond the range of fluctuations in the
preceding equilibrium, it became visible as a new trend. Individuals and governments began
observe that prices were rising in a secular way. Their responses added another dynamic
which carried the price-revolution to a different stage.
When the price-revolution became visible, people sought explanations. Many looked for
someone to blame. In England, members of Parliament attributed rising prices to “covetous and
insatiable persons seeking their only lucre and gain.” Others blamed the price-revolution on
export merchants, who were thought to have sent so many goods abroad that “corn, victual and
wood are grown unto a wonderful dearth and extreme prices.” In 1555, Parliament forbade
exports of food and wood when prices rose above a fixed level.26
These laws had less effect than did the individual actions of ordinary people. Their
responses to inflation caused more inflation. The daily choices that people made in the face of
rising prices, tended to drive prices even higher. This happened in many ways—some highly
rational, others not. One response was the hoarding of goods. Another was speculation. A third
was panic buying. A fourth was the degradation of commodities.
Figure 2.05 shows another feature of most price revolutions: in late stages, sharp surges in the
cost of energy. In these Spanish data, forest products include ashes, firewood, charcoal, resin
and pitch. General prices are a weighted commodity index, averaged among four regions of
Valencia, Andalusia, Old Castille and New Castille. Prices of forest products rose higher in
Andalusia than in Valencia but lower than in Old Castille or New Castille. The source is Earl
J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge,
1954), 224.

Farmers kept grain from the market in fear of famine in their own households. Millers
hoarded flour in hope of profits to come. Communities and entire states blocked the movement
of grain beyond their boundaries. Merchants cornered local markets. Bakers added sawdust
(and worse things) to their bread, and defied the market-assizes by selling smaller loaves for
larger prices. These responses caused prices to climb higher, and also increased their
volatility.

Social Imbalances
Some people, more than others, were able to respond to rising prices. As a consequence,
social imbalances began to develop. At the beginning of the price-revolution, wages had risen
more or less together with the cost of food and shelter. While they did so, there was a heady
sense of high prosperity. In later stages of the price-revolution that pattern changed. Money-
wages lagged behind the rising cost of living, and real wages fell sharply. By 1570 real wages
were less than half of what they had been before the price-revolution began.27
This decline of real wages, once begun, continued into the early seventeenth century. Most
vulnerable were workers who had few skills and no capital of their own. “The real victims of
economic forces in this age,” writes Peter Ramsay, “were the evicted agrarian smallholder and
the landless laborer of both town and country.”28
By comparison, landlords and capitalists tended to do better. Returns to capital kept pace
with commodity prices and even leaped ahead in some decades of the sixteenth century.
Overall, rates of interest rose during the sixteenth century despite a proliferation of usury laws
and condemnations by Catholic and Protestant moralists. The Hapsburgs were forced to pay
their bankers annual interest as high as 52 percent. These were exceptionally high rates, but in
the developing money markets of early modern Europe, rates of interest rose during the
sixteenth century.29
Returns to landowners also increased during the price-revolution. A landlord who was
secure in the possession of his property held many private remedies for rising prices firmly in
his own hands. Manorial customs provided landlords with a broad range of opportunities for
increasing their own income in rents, fees, fines, forfeitures and obligatory services. There
was more than one way for a feudal lord to increase his income from tenants. Most of all, he
could raise the rent. During part of the sixteenth century, rents and land prices rose even more
rapidly than food and fuel. One study finds that English rents increased ninefold from 1510 to
1640, while grain went up by a factor of four and wages barely doubled. In Belgium, land
prices increased elevenfold; in Holstein, they multiplied by a factor of fourteen during the
same period.30
Contemporary observers counted the movement of rent itself as a leading cause of rising
prices. A husbandman in Hales’s Discourse of the Common Weal was made to say to
landowners, “I think it is long of you gentlemen that this dearth is, by reason you enhance your
lands to such a height, as men that live thereon must need sell dear again, or else they were not
able to make the rent.”31
Increases in rent caused much rural unrest. In England, a leading demand in Kett’s
Rebellion (1549) was that copyhold rents should be rolled back to rates that had prevailed 65
years earlier, during the first year of Henry VII (1485). Similar complaints were heard
throughout western Europe.32

Figure 2.06 shows that real wages (deflated by consumable prices) fell throughout Europe
from the late fifteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. The data are eleven-year moving
averages for Southern England and Alsace, and twenty-five-year fixed averages for France.
The source is Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices, 62.
Figure 2.07 compares rents per acre on landed estates with an index of consumable prices in
England. The source is Eric Kerridge, “The Movement of Rent, 1540–1640,” Economic
History Review 2d ser., 6 (1953–54) 16–34.

As always, some of the worst exploitation occurred in the east, where serfdom and forced
labor had persisted. “In Poland,” writes historian Stanislas Hoszowski, “landowners
benefitted most, while the disadvantages fell on the peasants. . . . The rise in cereal and food
prices encouraged landowners to change feudal cash payments into labor rents. They created
new demesnes, forcing their peasants to work on them unpaid. Minimum production costs and
the large profits to be derived from the system encouraged the nobility to extend the estates at
the expense of peasant farms and to exploit peasants on an ever increasing scale.” Hoszowski
concludes that the price-revolution actually strengthened the feudal system in eastern Europe.
Everywhere, it made the dominant elites richer and stronger than they had been before.33
The growing gap between returns to labor and rewards to capital was one of the most
important social consequences of inflation in the sixteenth century. These trends caused
inequality to grow, in a society that was grossly unequal before they began.
Great wealth and grievous poverty increased in the mid-sixteenth century. In England, the
numbers of beggars and vagabonds and homeless people were observed to rise rapidly during
the price-revolution. The growth of inequality created a set of social imbalances that grew
increasingly dangerous throughout the western world.34
Figure 2.08 finds evidence in fragmentary data that interest rates nearly doubled in the mid-
sixteenth century, outpacing the rise of prices in the same period. The source is Homer, A
History of Interest Rates, 121,137,140.

Monetary Imbalances
Another imbalance developed in the monetary system. Once again, as in the medieval price-
revolution, individuals and institutions responded to inflation by taking actions which
expanded the supply of money. In western Europe, historian Georg Wiebe estimated that the
supply of silver increased from approximately 10,000 tons in 1550, to more than 23,000 tons
by 1600, and above 34,000 tons in 1660. Subsequent research challenged these numbers in
detail, but confirmed the general trend.35
The largest part of this increase was American silver and gold, which flowed abundantly
into Europe after 1500. The cause of the price-revolution of the sixteenth century has often
been attributed to this single factor: large imports of American metal, which increased the
quantity of money in circulation, and reduced its purchasing power by expanding its supply.
In light of much historical research, this monetarist explanation must be revised, without
being rejected. American treasure could not have been the first cause of a price-revolution.
Prices began to go up as early as 1480, many years before American silver and gold arrived in
Europe. In England and Germany, prices nearly doubled during the half century before
American silver could have had a significant effect on their economies.36
Further, major fluctuations in the flow of treasure from America did not correlate with
variations in price-movements, in time or space. In Spain, where the impact of American
treasure was comparatively large, the pace of inflation actually lagged behind other parts of
Europe. Moreover, the largest proportionate increases in Spanish prices occurred during the
first half of the sixteenth century—not the second half, when American treasure had its greatest
impact.37
Similar disparities also appeared in northwestern Europe, where one of the largest
inflationary surges occurred during the period from 1552 to 1560, when imports of gold and
silver were comparatively small. From 1570 to 1590, on the other hand, silver imports from
America rose at a rapid rate while prices actually fell a little.38
Yet another difficulty for a monistic monetary model appears in recent collaborative
research by chemists and historians on the diffusion of American silver in Europe. The largest
trove of American treasure was found in the fabulous silver mountain at Potosí, which became
a monument to earthly abundance, cruelty, and greed. Spanish conquerors discovered the silver
of Potosí in 1545, and forced Indians to mine a vast quantity of precious metal, at terrible cost
in human suffering. Nearly half of all the silver produced in America from 1521 to 1610 came
from Potosí alone.
The silver of Potosí was highly distinctive in its chemical composition, which allows a
metallurgical test of its diffusion. The results are instructive for students of this event. Silver
from Potosí appeared in the coinage of Spain, Genoa, Milan, and Venice, but not until after the
mid-sixteenth century. It was found on the Atlantic coast of France, but not in large quantity
until the 1590s, more than a century after the price-revolution began. None was discovered in
Belgium, England, the Netherlands or most other parts of France. The inventors of this test
concluded, perhaps prematurely, that South American silver had little impact on the coinage of
northern Europe in the sixteenth century. It would be more accurate to say that its impact was
not felt until the later stages of the price-revolution.39
Figure 2.09 compares Spanish prices with the arrival of precious metals from the New World.
The evidence shows that American treasure contributed in a major way to the momentum of the
price revolution, but did not set it in motion, or sustain it to the end. The data are from
Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 35, 228.

In short, the price-revolution came first; American treasure followed later. The test of
timing is decisive here. One of the few clear and simple laws of historical causality is that the
effect cannot precede the cause. The old idea that American treasure was the first cause of the
price-revolution in Europe during the sixteenth century will not do.
 Nevertheless, the monetary model retains its relevance in other forms. It does so in ways
that are more complex and also more interesting than a simple monetarist idea. The gold and
silver of America did not set the price-revolution in motion, but powerfully reinforced its
momentum. The effect of vast new supplies of gold and silver was to support an existing
economic trend and to intensify its effect.40
Further, one may observe in the timing of this complex relationship an historical pattern
that monetarism alone is powerless to explain. Monetary theory explains why an increase in
the supply of money drives up prices. It cannot explain why the money-supply increases in the
first place, except by introducing the monetarist’s favorite diabolus ex machina in the form of
corrupt and incompetent politicians who are believed to be too stupid or weak to understand
the monetarist’s favorite remedies.
To approach the price-revolution in broadly historical terms is to discover a more mature
explanation. In every price-revolution, one finds evidence of frantic efforts to expand the
supply of money, after people have discovered that prices are rising in a secular way. The
price-revolution of the sixteenth century caused the rulers of Spain (who were hard-pressed to
keep up with inflation) to redouble their efforts to extract gold and silver from their American
dominions. Two
Figure 2.10 compares prices and coinage in France. It finds more evidence that expansion of
the money supply contributed strongly to price-inflation in the middle and late years of the
sixteenth century, but was not as important in early stages of the price-revolution. Fluctuations
in coinage also caused movements around the central trend, but had less effect on the central
tendency. The source is Frank Spooner, The International Economy and Monetary
Movements in France, 1493–1725 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 273.

tendencies powerfully reinforced each other. Together they created a dynamic of high
importance in the history of that troubled age.
 The same processes worked in other ways. Another monetary factor (small by the
measure of American treasure but still important) was the mining of precious metals within
Europe, which also expanded during the sixteenth century. The great inflation created a
voracious hunger for a larger circulating medium. Old mines were reopened at heavy expense.
Once again, most of this activity came after the price-revolution had begun.41
In Russia, the Tsars made major efforts to encourage production of gold and silver. In
1567, Ivan IV actively recruited mining experts abroad. Thirty years later, Tsar Fedor
Ivanovich asked his ambassador in Italy to pay any price for miners. There was an air of
desperation in these acts. Increased supplies of European and Russian silver also contributed
to rising prices.42
It is important to observe that the correlation between the rise of prices and the minting of
money in western Europe was itself variable through time— another vital clue. The
association was comparatively weak in the early sixteenth century. It became stronger in the
period from 1550 to 1610. This finding strongly suggests that monetarist factors operated as
historical variables. They were more powerful in the second stage of the price-revolution than
in the first.43
After the mid-sixteenth century, intelligent observers began to discover that a relationship
existed between prices and the size of the money supply. The quantity theory of money was
invented during the second stage of this price-revolution. In 1556, Spanish scholar Martin de
Azpilcueta proposed the thesis that “money is worth more when and where it is scarce than
when it is abundant.” Further, he perceived that “in Spain, in times when money was scarcer,
saleable goods and labor were given for very much less than after the discovery of the Indies,
which flooded the country with gold and silver.” Twelve years later, French writer Jean Bodin
developed the same idea. Other monetarist models were invented by the Polish scientist
Nicolaus Copernicus, by the Florentine Davanzatti, by many English observers, and by other
writers throughout Europe during the middle decades of the sixteenth century. These
discoveries were made at a particular moment in the price-revolution.44
At the same time that these monetarist theories appeared in the mid-sixteenth century,
other observers came to a different conclusion that the primary cause of rising prices was the
growth of population. An example was England’s Alderman Box, who wrote to Lord Burghley
in 1576, “Now the time is altered . . . for the people are increased and ground for plows doth
want, corn and all other victual is scant, [and] many strangers [are] suffered here, which make
corn and victual deare.” He recommended that “waste grounds” should be given to
husbandmen—a remedy that found little favor among the possessing classes.45
A few people argued a third proposition that the cause of rising prices was an increase in
both population and money. Thus George Hakewill wrote, “The plenty of coin and multitude of
men . . . either of which asunder, but much more both together, must needs be a means of raising
prices of all things.” This was the most accurate explanation, but also the most complex. It had
less appeal than simple monetary or demographic models.46

Fiscal Imbalances
The response of governments to rising prices created a third sort of imbalance, fiscal in its
nature. By the mid-sixteenth century, large deficits were growing in the public accounts of
European states. The problem was compounded by regressive taxation, and by the persistent
tendency of the rich to shift the weight of taxes to poor and middling people.
By and large, the heaviest tax burdens fell upon the peasantry. In many parts of Europe the
nobility were exempt from the most onerous forms of taxation. In Spain, for example, the
privileged class called hidalgos were released from some taxes, though they were still
compelled to pay a sales tax. During the sixteenth century, the hidalgos preserved and even
expanded their special privileges at a time when the poor were groaning under their heavy
burden and the government was unable to pay its bills.
As the price-revolution continued, the revenues of European states fell far behind
expenditures. In desperation, governments borrowed heavily. The Spanish government kept
going by mortgaging its annual treasure fleet before the ships arrived, to foreign bankers at
ruinous rates of interest. Spain also issued annuities called juros, pledging an income to
private lenders for many years into the future. By 1543, a large part of Spanish revenue went to
pay the interest on a public debt that was soaring out of control. The effect was to weaken the
spring of government itself.47
These many responses to rising prices—social, demographic, economic, monetary, fiscal
—interacted in combinations of increasing power. For example, the price-revolution caused
falling real wages and rising returns to land and capital, which caused the growth of inequality,
which increased the political power of the rich, which led to regressive taxation, which
reduced government revenues, which encouraged currency debasements, which drove prices
higher. This was merely one of the more simple linkages in a causal web of high complexity.
As the web thickened, the price-revolution came to be elaborately embedded in entire
economic systems, and social conflicts began to grow. The Protestant Reformation and
Catholic Counter-Reformation shattered the most important unifying institution in the Western
world—the Christian church. Religious conflicts of great violence broke out, and continued
through a period that corresponded almost exactly to the years of the price-revolution. These
two movements— Reformation and price-revolution—were connected. In Germany, many
historians have found evidence that the rapid spread of the Protestant Reformation and also the
Peasants’ War were closely linked to increasing economic stress, caused by population growth
and price inflation.48
Figure 2.11 shows that in the period from 1544 to 1627 a growing proportion of English
tenants became landless (or held less than two acres) in three villages of Cambridgeshire:
Chippenham on chalk soil in East Cambridgeshire, Orwell on clay soil in West
Cambridgeshire, and Willingham in the fens near the Isle of Ely. All percentages are computed
from Margaret Spufford’s tabulations of survey data except Chippenham in 1636, which is
estimated from a survey of landowning in that year and evidence of total population. The
source is Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), 73, 100, 149.
 These linkages appeared in Belgium and the Netherlands during the 1560s, when
Calvinism suddenly spread from one city to the next in the so-called Iconoclast disorders.
Mobs of newly converted Calvinists attacked Catholic churches, smashing the sacred artifacts
that were hated symbols of the old religion.49 Historians have concluded that the Iconoclast
movement was directly linked to economic instabilities, and particularly to a sudden surge in
grain prices in the Netherlands from 1564 to 1566.50 Similar connections between religious
conflicts and economic fluctuations were also observed in England, France, Switzerland and
Scandinavia from 1558 to 1640.51
The causal connection between economic and religious movements was highly complex.
In some instances, price disturbances operated as a direct determinant of religious events—as
with the Dutch and Belgian Iconoclasts. In others, religious disturbances led to price
fluctuations during the major wars of the Protestant Reformation. In general, it might be said
that both the Reformation and Counter Reformation on the one hand, and the price-revolution
on the other, were parallel expressions of deep imbalances in European society.

From Imbalances to Instability

In the late sixteenth century, dangerous instabilities began to develop in European society.
Prices surged and declined in broad swings of increasing amplitude. A case in point was the
price of grain in England, which rose very sharply in great surges during the 1540s, 1570s,
1590s and 1620s. Intervening decades were marked by periods of sudden price-decline, which
were sometimes equally disruptive. Similar patterns appeared in the prices of many
commodities throughout Europe. The effect on social and economic relationships was
profoundly unsettling.
Historian Y. S. Brenner observes that “while grain prices continued to rise gradually as
the sixteenth century progressed, their yearly fluctuations became more severe.” He concludes
that this pattern was “consistent with the price behavior which is to be expected if a market’s
equilibrium between supply and demand is upset.”52
The price of grain rose and fell sharply from one harvest to the next, in a manner that was
similar to price movements in the thirteenth century. As early as 1529, a major famine occurred
throughout Europe. Its effects were especially severe in northern Italy. The city of Venice, with
its huge granaries, was overrun by hungry peasants from the countryside. A Venetian wrote,
“Give alms to two hundred and as many again appear. You cannot walk down a street or stop
in a square or church without multitudes surrounding you to beg for charity: you see hunger
written in their faces, their eyes like gemless rings, the wretchedness of their bodies with skins
shaped only by bones. . . . many villages in the direction of the Alps have become completely
uninhabited.”53
Conditions worsened toward the end of the century. The greatest suffering occurred in the
period from 1594 to 1597, when four harvests failed in a row. Much of Europe experienced a
cruel famine which was long remembered as “the great dearth.”
With famine came epidemic disease. Rates of mortality fluctuated through the long period
of the price-revolution. When death rates fell several years running, prices increased and
wages declined. On the other hand, when death rates rose, prices declined and wages
increased. This happened in England during the 1550s, when epidemics took an exceptionally
heavy toll— killing as many as 20 percent of the population in a five year period.54
Some were quick to profit from these misfortunes by speculation and the hoarding of
scarce commodities. A dramatic example occurred in the cities of Ghent, Antwerp, and Lille
during the years 1565 and 1566, when the Danish sound was closed to grain ships, and a major
famine occurred in the Low Countries. One of Antwerp’s richest merchants, Pauwels van Dale,
bought large quantities of grain and kept it off the market to drive its price still higher. In
September, 1565, while the poor were literally starving in the streets of Antwerp, the
warehouse of Pauwels van Dale was so packed with grain that the building collapsed. A wild
riot broke out and spread through the city.
Similar events occurred elsewhere. At Malines, the houses of grain speculators were
marked with blood. Riots occurred in Ghent, Lille and other towns—an expression of popular
rage against speculators and monopoleurs who not only profited from price fluctuations, but
also made them worse.55
Hoarding and speculation spread widely through Europe in time of scarcity. They were
done not only by merchants, but also by noble families and even monarchs. In Russia, historian
Jerome Blum writes, “the price rise of this period was aggravated by the engrossing of goods
by wealthy men, including the Tsar, who sought to benefit financially from the shortage.”56
Figure 2.12 compares wheat prices with major famines and plagues in England. The sources
are the Bowden series of wheat prices in England, in W. G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder
(London, 1976), 87, 246–47; and Andrew Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England
(Stanford, 1978), 95–154.

Monetary factors became yet another source of instability. European states and sovereigns
tinkered endlessly with their coinage during the sixteenth century, sometimes inflating the value
of their coins, sometimes deflating them again. In England, an inflationary “great debasement”
from 1541 to 1551 drove prices higher. This was followed by a “great recoinage” in 1561,
which had the opposite effect. By and large, debasements became more common than
recoinages. The monetary policies of the European monarchs added momentum to the price-
revolution, and increased its instability. A dangerous cyclical relationship developed. High
prices forced governments to debase their currency; debasement in turn drove prices higher.
The wheel kept spinning round and round.
Moralists preached against these practices. Merchants protested angrily. Even satirists
added their mite. When the weight of silver in English testons was reduced by a third, the coins
were ordered to be “blanched” or washed with a wafer-thin coat of silver so that the portrait
of Henry VIII would remain bright and shiny. As they passed from hand to hand, the copper
core quickly showed through, and gave the king a distinctly ruddy complexion. A poet wrote:
These testons look red, how like you the same?
’Tis a token of grace; they blush for shame.57
Figure 2.13 compares debasements of English money with the Phelps-Brown-Hopkins index of
consumable prices in southern England (1451-75=100). The evidence indicates that
debasements caused inflationary surges but did not drive the underlying trend. Sources include
G. D. Gould, The Great Debasement (Oxford, 1970); C. E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage
(Manchester, 1978); and Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages
and Prices (New York, 1981).

A related source of instability arose from international flows of specie. Europe in the late
sixteenth century was awash with money, which sloshed back and forth from one sovereignty to
another. Many contemporaries attributed the movement of prices primarily to international
trade and the balance of payments. Sir Francis Drake’s raids had a similar effect by different
means. They removed from the Spanish economy between one and two million pounds (of
which £600,000 were silver and gold bullion) and brought it to England between 1577 and
1580.58
Economic imbalances engendered political instabilities. Spain in the reigns of Charles V
(1516–1556) and Philip II (1556–1598) was the strongest state in Europe. Like many other
great powers, even to our own time, it fell into the fatal habit of deficit spending, and was
finally reduced to a fiscal condition that historian J. H. Elliott describes as “chronic
bankruptcy.” At least six times between 1557 and 1647, the Spanish government went
bankrupt, and found itself unable to meet its obligations or to borrow further. These fiscal
crises occurred every twenty years with remarkable regularity—1557, 1575, 1596, 1607,
1627, 1647. Spanish historian Vicens Vives writes, “the vicious cycle was complete: the
larger the state’s debts became, the harder it was to meet them.”59 Other states were caught in
the same cycle. Deficit financing was not invented in the twentieth century. In England, France
and Germany, rulers became chronic debtors.60
These instabilities were deepened by the effect of war. The two steepest surges of
inflation in the 1540s and 1590s were periods of heavy military spending. Here was yet
another vicious circle between economic imbalances, political instability, and war.61

The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

During the decade of the 1590s, the price-revolution entered a new stage—a prolonged and
very painful period that historians call the “general crisis of the seventeenth century.” They use
that name with good reason. This was the darkest era in European history after the catastrophe
of the fourteenth century.1
The first signs were similar to those of the medieval crisis. During the last quarter of the
sixteenth century, the economy of Europe was afflicted by the same cruel combination of rising
prices and falling opportunities that neoclassical economists would call “stagflation” in the
late twentieth century. The economy of England was a case in point. Historian Barry Supple
writes, “the last years of Elizabeth’s reign can no longer be considered as a prosperous era of
economic expansion.” He finds evidence of a deep economic depression in the 1580s and
1590s. At the same time, prices of consumables rose even more rapidly than before.2
Conditions differed in detail throughout Europe, but the general trends were much the
same. Real wages and industrial prices were depressed, while the cost of food and fuel
climbed higher, and also became highly unstable—rising and falling in sharp surges of
increasing amplitude. The real wages of artisans and laborers fell farther behind the cost of
living, while returns to land and capital continued to advance. Wealth became increasingly
concentrated in a few hands. That tendency engendered Francis Bacon’s epigram: “Money is
like muck, not good except it be spread around.” But the wealth of Europe was not spread
around in the late sixteenth century. The rich grew richer, while increasing numbers of the poor
were driven very near the edge of starvation.3
Figure 2.14 shows that harvest prices became more dangerously volatile as the price
revolution approached its climax. It compares average annual prices of wheat, barley and oats
with a 31-year moving average. The source is C. J. Harrison, “Grain Price Analysis and
Harvest Qualities, 1465–1634,” Agricultural History Review 19 (1971) 135–55, building on
W. G. Hoskins, “Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic History, 1480–1619,” ibid., 12
(1964) 28–46; and “Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic History, 1620-1759,” ibid.,
16 (1968) 15-31; and P. Bowden, “Statistical Appendix,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian
History of England and Wales, IV, 814-70.
 As these very dangerous trends continued, the western world experienced a major
disaster. In 1591, the weather turned wet and cold. European peasants watched helplessly as
their wheat and rye were beaten down in the fields, and their hay crops rotted in the meadows.
The same thing happened the next year, and the year after that, and altogether seven years
running. In France, the wine harvest was late and small from 1591 to 1597. Grain crops fared
even worse. English historian W. G. Hoskins observed, “the 1594 harvest was bad; 1595 was
even worse; 1596 was a disaster; 1597 was bad too.”
This was more than merely a short spell of bad weather. It was a shift in the climate—one
of several sharp downturns in the early modern era that have been called collectively the “little
ice age.” The decade of the 1590s was so cold that Alpine glaciers began to send rivers of ice
through inhabited valleys. In 1595 the Giétroz glacier buried the villages of Martigny and
killed seventy people. Disasters of the same sort happened at Grindelwald and Chamonix and
the Val d’Aosta.4
Similar events had happened before, but in the 1590s they came at a time when the
economy was dangerously overstrained. Families had little in reserve. Food riots broke out in
many parts of Europe. As the troubles continued, people began to starve. A season of scarcity
grew into a massive famine that was called the “great dearth.” There were terrible scenes of
suffering in many parts of Europe. A Swede wrote in 1597:

People ground and chopped many unsuitable things into bread such as mash, chaff, bark,
buds, nettles, hay, straw, peat moss, nutshells, peastalks, etc. This made people so weak
and their bodies so swollen that innumerable people died.

Many widows, too, were found dead on the ground with red hummock grass, seeds
which grew in the fields, and other kinds of grass in their mouths.

People were found dead in the houses, under barns, in the ovens of bath houses and
wherever they had been able to squeeze in, so that, God knows, there was enough to do
getting them to the graveyard, though the dogs ate many of the corpses.

Children starved to death at their mothers’ breast, for they had nothing to give them
suck.5

Similar scenes were described in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Hungary,
Russia and Spain.
The great dearth fell cruelly upon the poor, while the rich remained secure in their plenty.
In London’s affluent central neighborhoods, the number of burials increased very little during
these years; but outlying parishes inhabited by the poor suffered severely. The effect of scarcity
was to deepen the material inequalities that were already very great in European culture, and
to contribute to growing social instability.6
Another consequence of scarcity was an increase in crime. The pattern was much the
same as in the fourteenth century. When the price of food surged, crime increased sharply.
When prices fell, criminal acts declined. This correlation was very strong in the later stages of
every price-revolution from the Middle Ages to our own time.
These troubles were compounded by the growth of disease. During the great dearth many
parts of Europe reported much trouble with the “bloody flux.” This was perhaps not dysentery
as many have surmised; similar symptoms are caused by malnutrition. Soon other epidemic
diseases spread swiftly through a weakened population. The plague returned to Europe,
ravaging its cities and many parts of the countryside. One of the worst outbreaks was the
Cantabrian Plague, which killed half a million people in Iberia from 1597 to 1602, then spread
to England and other parts of Europe.

Figure 2.15 compares annual indictments for crimes against property in the English county of
Essex, with an index of mean annual wheat prices in England (1470-79=100). Indictments are
missing for the years 1568, 1575, 1577, 1583, 1596, and 1598-99, and have been added by
linear interpolation. The source for indictments is J. S. Cockburn, “The Nature and Incidence
of Crime in England, 1559-1625,” in idem, ed., Crime in England, 1550–1800 (Princeton,
1977), 68. Wheat prices are from Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and
Wales, IV, 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1967), statistical appendix, 865.

As in the fourteenth century, plague did not strike a single blow. It returned again and
again, with shattering effect. The region of Angers was an example. In the diocese of Murienne,
it was introduced by soldiers returning from a military campaign (a common means of
infection). Repeated epidemics followed in 1583–84, 1598, 1626, 1631 and 1639. Of 62
parishes in the diocese, 56 were severely infected. Two parishes (Modane and Aiguebelle)
lost more than 40 percent of their inhabitants. In the diocese as a whole, the death rate rose to
80 per thousand—much below the toll of the Black Death in 1348, but twice the normal level.
This was merely one of many epidemic diseases that spread through Europe, which
suffered much from visitations of smallpox, diptheria, typhus and other nameless infections.
One historian writes that “no century since the fourteenth has a worse record for epidemic
disease.”7
At the same time that mortality increased, rates of fertility declined. From northern
Germany to southern Spain, the number of inhabitants fell sharply after a long period of
growth. In the cathedral of Toledo a clergyman named Sancho de Moncado studied his
baptismal registers and found that the number of births dropped from the mid-sixteenth century
to 1617 by 50 percent. Moncado observed that this decline happened not because of pestilence
or migration, but “because the people cannot support themselves,” as a consequence of scarcity
and the soaring cost of food.8
The combined effect of rising mortality and falling fertility caused a reversal of
demographic growth in the seventeenth century. This was the only period after the Black Death
when the population of Europe actually declined.
As if these sufferings were not enough, a major economic collapse occurred in the period
from 1610 to 1622. This was more than merely a cyclical downturn. It was a major break in
the secular trend. Historian Ruggiero Romano observed its effects almost everywhere in
Europe. In the Baltic, the number of ships passing through the Danish Sound reached its peak
near the year 1600, and then after a period of fluctuation declined steadily for more than fifty
years. In the Spanish port of Seville, a major entrepot for American trade, the monumental
research of Huguette and Pierre Chaunu yielded evidence that total tonnage entering and
leaving Seville harbor rose steadily through most of the sixteenth century to a peak in the year
1610; then it fell sharply, and kept on falling for many decades. In Venice, Ragusa, Leghorn and
Marseilles, customs duties and anchorage taxes peaked in the early seventeenth century, then
declined catastrophically after 1618. In Danzig, the grain trade collapsed after 1619. In
England, Italy and Spain, the sale of wool and textiles peaked in the decade 1610–20, then
entered a deep depression that continued for half a century. Even the prosperous Low
Countries—an exception to many seventeenth-century trends—were caught in this economic
collapse. Industrial production began to decline in Amsterdam and Rotterdam after about
1620.9

Figure 2.16 shows a decline in population during the general crisis of the seventeenth century,
the only period after the fourteenth century when the population of Europe declined. Sources
include Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (New York,
1978); Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population (Cambridge and Oxford,
1992); J. Nadal, La población Española (Barcelona, 1984).

Famine, pestilence, and economic depression were accompanied by war. During the
entire century from 1551 to 1650, peace prevailed throughout the continent only in a single
year (1610)—a record unmatched since the fourteenth century. These conflicts were
remarkable not only for their frequency but also their ferocity. By far the most destructive was
a cluster of religious and political conflicts that historians call the Thirty Years War (1618–
48). This great conflict was a catastrophe for central Europe. Historian Gunther Franz
estimates that the population of Germany declined by 40 percent from 1618 to 1648— a larger
proportion than were killed by the Black Death. Other scholars think that losses was not so
high, but all agree that the human cost of the Thirty Years War was very great. Large sections of
middle Europe were laid waste. There was also a brutalization of the spirit in the Thirty Years
War; appalling atrocities routinely occurred.10
Germany was not alone in her suffering. Broad areas of France, England, Scotland,
Ireland and the Low Countries were also ravaged by war in this period. Flanders became once
again the charnal house of Europe.
A few regions escaped the general carnage. Switzerland managed to keep war at bay.
Many of its young men went off to fight and never came home again, but the Swiss republics
themselves remained secure in their Alpine redoubts. They were so much the exception that a
German visitor in Switzerland wrote, “The country appeared to me so strange . . . as if I had
come to Brazil or China. There I saw a people going about their business in peace. . . . Nobody
stood in fear of the foe; nobody dreaded pillage, nobody was afraid of losing his property, his
limbs or his life.”11
During the early seventeenth century, the armies of Europe reached their largest size since
the Roman era. Their upkeep imposed heavy costs at the same time that public revenues were
reduced by the combined effect of famine, pestilence, war, depression, regressive taxation and
monetary inflation. They also were put to frequent use in most of Europe. War became highly
destructive of life and wealth and happiness during this period. Historian John Nef writes,
“For suspicion and hatred, devastation and hardship, there was to be nothing quite like it again
until the twentieth century.”12
Needy governments resorted to all the usual forms of fiscal folly. Some tried deficit
financing on a large scale. Others systematically debased their coinage. Many tried to wring
more taxes from sullen and resentful populations. As governments desperately attempted to
increase their revenues, the suffering people of Europe were goaded to acts of violent
resistance.
The result was an age of revolutions in virtually all European states. Most of these
overturnings were caused by fiscal problems. In Iberia, major revolutions broke out in
Catalonia and Portugal (1640) when Spanish ministers tried to raise large revenues. In
England, an ill-fated attempt by Charles I to obtain more money from his subjects led to full-
scale civil war, which ended in the execution of the king himself. In France, a series of
rebellions called the Frondes developed from 1648 to 1654, primarily as a result of fiscal
disputes between the Parlement of Paris and the Crown. In Naples, the revolt of the fisherman
Masaniello occurred after the kingdom had been drained of its wealth by the Spanish
government (1647). In Sicily a revolution began at Palermo (1647); its rallying cry was “Long
live the King and down with taxes.”13 Denmark experienced a revolution from the right that
created an absolutist monarchy in 1660, as a direct consequence of a fiscal crisis.
 Even in Switzerland, there was a Peasants’ Revolt (1654), which happened after the
government ordered a major depreciation of its currency. The Ukraine had its “Great Ukrainian
Revolution” from 1648 to 1654. In Hungary, there was the Durucz movement. The Netherlands
experienced a bloodless coup d’état which broke the power of its ruling Stadtholders (1650).
Sweden went through a constitutional crisis (1650). The people of Scotland and Ireland
suffered a series of bloody rebellions and repressions from 1638 to 1660.
Smaller peasant risings also occurred throughout Europe in exceptionally large numbers.
In the south of France alone, one historian has counted no fewer than 264 insurrections
between 1596 and 1660—a larger number than in any other period of that region’s history.
Most were protests against intolerable economic conditions.14
The general crisis of the seventeenth century left its mark upon the culture of an age. The
greatest works of literature, painting, philosophy and theology in this era commonly expressed
a mood of increasing pessimism and despair. After 1601, Shakespeare turned from his
Elizabethan comedies and histories to his great tragedies— Hamlet (1600–01), Othello
(1604), Macbeth (1605–06), King Lear (1605–06). These works were dark visions of a
disordered world that seemed to conspire against human hope and happiness. At the same time,
Cervantes produced perhaps the greatest masterpiece of Spanish literature, Don Quixote
(1605, 1615), which for all its mordant humor was a sad and bitter description of a world that
had dissolved into social chaos.
The great painting of the period captured the same themes in different ways—in the
demonic fantasies of Pieter Brueghel (1564–1638), the spiritual suffering of El Greco (1548?
-1614?), the brooding melancholy of Rembrandt (1606–69), the sensual violence of Rubens
(1577–1640), and the bizarre grotesqueries of the Italian mannerists.
The philosophy of the period was similar in tone. The leading example was the work of
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), with its organizing assumption that the natural condition of man
was “poor and solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Another dark vision of the world flowed
from the pen of Oxford clergyman Robert Burton (1577–1640), in his treatise on sadness and
disappointment called The Anatomy of Melancholy. There were always a few hopeful voices
who cried out against despair. This was also the age of Descartes (1596–1650), and his
affirmation of enduring values in an unstable world. But Descartes described his intellectual
journey as that of “a man who walks alone in the darkness.”15
In theology this was the era of neo-Calvinism—the narrowest, darkest, bleakest, and most
pessimistic form of Christianity that has ever been invented, more so even than the theology of
Calvin himself. As formally defined by the Synod of Dort (1618–19), the “five points” of neo-
Calvinism asserted that most people and all infants were irretrievably sunk in a state of total
depravity and inexorably condemned to eternal damnation; that Christ died not for everyone but
only for a chosen few; that human beings were utterly without power to achieve their own
salvation. Here was yet another cultural expression of an era in which people felt that the
world was entirely beyond their power to control. In a later and happier age neo-Calvinism
would make no sense at all, but in the early seventeenth century it seemed to fit the facts of the
human condition.
The crisis of the seventeenth century was marked by a revival of religious strife.
Protestants and Catholics became increasingly militant and uncompromising; the result was
angry and bloody conflict in virtually all European states. In England, the Puritans combined
religious and political ideas in a single movement that overturned the government. In Poland,
Catholic nobles destroyed most of the Protestant churches in that nation. In the Ukraine, the
revolt of the Cossacks was in part a religious movement.
Throughout central and eastern Europe, the people of Russia, Poland, and Germany
expressed their unhappiness in the customary way, by slaughtering the Jews. Chmielnicki’s
rebellion in Poland was wildly antisemitic. From 1648 to 1658, more than 700 Jewish
settlements were destroyed; perhaps 100,000 Jews were killed.16
 The suffering of Europe in the general crisis of the seventeenth century was comparable to
that of the fourteenth century. But this time Europe suffered in a different way. The seventeenth
century was a period of falling population, but the magnitude of its decline was much smaller
than in the fourteenth century. The scale of misery did not approach the demographic disaster
that had been caused by the epic famines and Black Death of 1348.
The economic collapse was also not as severe as before. The pace of price-inflation was
greater this time, but the magnitude of price fluctuations was less extreme than in the medieval
price-revolution. The variance of prices fell by half from one of these great waves to another.
Periods of scarcity were less severe in their impact upon prices, and they occurred less
frequently. Even the worst years of this period were not nearly comparable with the famines of
the fourteenth century.
Beyond doubt, a long-term improvement had taken place during the intervening years in
productivity, production and per capita income. Markets had become larger and more tightly
integrated. Even the worst miseries of this dark era were measures of material progress.
During the crisis of the fourteenth century, high medieval civilization had collapsed. In the
crisis of the seventeenth century, the civilization of early modern Europe was shaken to its
deepest foundations. But it survived.

The Equilibrium of the Enlightenment, 1660–1730

In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the great crisis came to an end. After a period
of transition, a new equilibrium appeared throughout Europe. It established itself, more or less
at the same time, in France, England, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and Scandinavia, and also
in European colonies throughout the world.1
Figure 2.18 follows the price of grain in Paris, London and Berlin. In all three cities it fell
sharply after 1661, then fluctuated on fixed level from 1670 to 1730. The source is Wilhelm
Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur: eine Geschichte der Land und
Ernahrungswirtschaft Mitteleuropas seit dem hohen Mittelalter (1935, Hamburg and Berlin,
1966).

This new change-regime might be called the equilibrium of the Enlightenment. Its
historical dynamics were similar in many ways to the equilibrium of the Renaissance. This
was not a system at rest. It was a complex structure of countervailing movements, much like the
counterpoint of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), or the baroque harmony of George
Frederick Handel (1685–1759), whose lives and music perfectly captured the cultural spirit of
an age.
The material components of this equilibrium may be summarized in a few sentences. The
price of grain ceased rising, fell sharply, and then began to find a level. Food and energy came
down, manufactures went up, and the general price level began to fluctuate on a fixed and level
plane. Wages rose. Rents and interest fell. The distribution of wealth and income became a
little more equal. Population, production, and productivity grew slowly. There were many
local variations—price-inflation in Chile, wage-declines in Germany—but the major trends
were strong and consistent.
Figure 2.19 follows the price of Maryland tobacco (pence sterling per pound), and Barbadian
sugar (shillings per hundredweight). Their movements were broadly similar to those of wheat
prices in Europe during this period. The sources are Russell Menard, “Farm Prices of
Maryland Tobacco, 1659–1710,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 68 (1973) 80–85; Carville
Earle, The Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement: All Hallow’s Parish, Maryland, 1650–1783
(Chicago, 1975), 16; Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the
British West Indies, 1623–1775 (St. Lawrence, Barbados, 1974), 496–97.

Figure 2.20 finds that money wages and real wages were rising in the period from 1650 to
1740, while rents and rates of interest were falling. The source is Peter J. Bowden,
“Statistics,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 5.2, 879.

Some historians of agriculture have perceived this period as a time of rural depression.
So it was at the start. Reports from the European countryside told a story of falling farm prices
and growing poverty among landowners. In 1685, the intendant of Rouen wrote, “The poverty
is such that a farmer who bought a woollen garment had to do without a linen one. The peasant
women, who used to love wearing red and blue petticoats, seldom have them now. They are
very poorly dressed and mostly make do with white linen.”2
But throughout the period from 1650 to 1730, returns to labor slowly increased. In
England and France, nominal wages went up for manual laborers and skilled artisans alike.
Real wages increased even more rapidly, nearly doubling for laborers and building craftsmen
in the south of England from 1650 to 1740. Continental workers did not fare as well as their
English counterparts; wages fell in parts of Germany. But throughout western Europe, farm
laborers and artisans tended to improve their material condition.3
At the same time that wages rose, rents came down. France’s pioneering price historian
the Vicomte d’ Avenel calculated that the rent of one hectare of farmland fell from the
equivalent of 12.8 francs in 1651–75 to 7.5 francs by 1701–25. Subsequent research by
academic specialists has confirmed his general findings in France, England, Italy, Germany and
most parts of Europe.4 Interest rates also declined in this period. The maximum lawful rate of
interest in England fell from 10 to 6 percent in the seventeenth century. Further, economic
historian H. J. Habakkuk discovered that interest actually charged by moneylenders declined
even more sharply than the legal maximum. During the general crisis of the seventeenth century,
English creditors had tended to charge the highest allowable rate. By the century’s end, actual
rates had fallen below the statutory limit.5 French rentes declined from 10 to 4 percent. In
England by the year 1735, the yield on long annuities sank as low of 3 percent. Dutch
commercial loans drifted downward to 2 percent or even less in this period.6
Figure 2.21 finds evidence of a long decline in rural rents, from a peak in the 1660s to a trough
in the 1730s. Similar trends appeared throughout Europe. The source is Abel, Agrarkrisen und
Agrarkonjunktur.

While interest rates were falling and wages were rising, commodity prices tended to
fluctuate within a fixed range from 1650 to 1735. The price of grain fell in nearly all European
countries, but other prices rose a little. Overall, the general price level remained
approximately the same—a pattern typical of price movements in every period of equilibrium.
Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila Hopkins observed of their own price series in this period
there was “constancy in the general level, and this surprising stability, as it seems to us, was
maintained through fluctuations of two or three years’ span, due no doubt mostly to the harvest,
whose violence seems no less extraordinary.”7

Figure 2.22 shows that interest rates declined in western Europe in the period 1600–50 to
1700–40. The source is Homer, History of Interest Rates, 156–58, 161–65, 172–78.

Both scholars were startled by the strength and resilience of these persistent patterns,
which often were violently disrupted by extraneous events, and yet always recovered their
equilibrium through a period of seventy years. “What was the secret of this stability,” they
asked, “and how was it held through such vibration?”
The violence of vibration was sometimes very great. Changes in the weather continued to
cause sharp and sudden fluctuations in harvest prices. The people of France suffered severely
when shortages drove grain prices very high in the grand disettes of the mid—1670s, and
again in 1694–99, 1708–09, and 1713.
The worst crisis occurred in the years from 1694 to 1700. The weather turned wet and
very cold. Once again, the glaciers advanced through alpine valleys. Arctic icefields expanded
so far to the south that Eskimos in their kayaks appeared in Scotland. A major famine occurred
in Finland, and northern parishes in Scotland lost a third of their population. The south of
England was less severely affected, but everywhere in the English-speaking world these cruel
years were remembered as “King William’s Dearth” and “the barren years.”8 In Languedoc,
food was so desperately short in 1694 that the poor were reduced to eating grass—a thin bread
made of couch-weed and sheep entrails. In Narbonne, a priest wrote that the people looked
like “skeletons or spectres” (des équelletes ou d’espectres), as they wandered far from their
parishes, in searching of some way to “prolong their listless lives.”9
Climatic stresses were much the same as in the crisis of the 1590s, but this time the
cultural and economic consequences were very different. Grain prices briefly surged to record
levels in the 1690s, but when the weather improved price levels fell as rapidly as they had
risen, and equilibrium was restored. After 1700, scarcities came less often and were less
severe, but they kept on coming in the early eighteenth century without ending the material
equilibrium. Altogether, the economics of the ancien regime resembled the movements of an
eighteenth-century carriage on a rough country road. The vehicle jolted violently from rut to
rut. The irritable passengers were thrown painfully against one another. The carriage itself
swayed dangerously with every strain—but it continued to advance.10
Figure 2.23 shows the consequences of the long fall in returns to capital and the rise in real
wages during this period. Wealth inequality declined. One study finds that the wealth-shares of
the richest 1 percent in England shrank 20 percent in the years 1700–30. The source: Peter H.
Lindert, “Toward a Comparative History of Income and Wealth Inequality,” in Y. S. Brenner,
Hartmut Kaelbe, and Mark Thomas, eds., Income Distribution in Historical Perspective
(Cambridge, 1991) 212–31, 220.

The passengers themselves perceived their economic situation in different ways,

according to their station. The possessing classes described this era as one of prolonged
depression. So it was for propertied elites, who were caught in a web of falling rents, rising
labor costs and low prices. But for ordinary people, the times were more favorable. Wages
increased at the same time that the cost of grain and shelter actually declined, and prices in
general remained on the same level. A period that seemed a depression to manorial lords and
rural proprietors (as well as to historians who read their letters and shared their perspective)
was an age of improvement for artisans and laborers and the great majority of Europe’s
population. Wealth and income were more broadly distributed. Inequality diminished.
Still, the question posed by Phelps-Brown and Hopkins demands an answer. What was
the “secret of stability” in this age of equilibrium? A simple monetarist model, that seeks an
explanation of price movements primarily in terms of the quantity of money in circulation,
works no better for this period than for any other. New research by Michel Morineau finds
evidence that American treasure flowed abundantly into Europe during the period 1660–1730,
in quantities almost (but not quite) equal to the price-revolution that preceded it. But this time
there was no long-term inflation.11
In France, a large increase occurred in the supply of silver and gold in circulation during
this period. Voltaire estimated that the quantity of silver money increased from five hundred
million livres in 1683 to twelve hundred millions in 1730. Modern economic and social
historians generally agree that the quantity of gold and silver doubled or trebled in France
during this period. But the cost of living did not go up.12
Further, the French monetary system in particular also suffered many debasements
between 1660 and 1730. One scholar writes that “recoinage after recoinage so altered the
value of the real money of France that it caused serious economic difficulties at home and
abroad. . . . Only with the great monetary reform and consolidations of 1726 did this era end.”
But prices did not rise.13
Other monetary systems were more stable than that of France. Dutch guilders and
rixdollars remained perfectly stable from 1691 to the nineteenth century. British guineas,
Venetian ducats and Portuguese crusados also preserved their value. In Europe as a whole,
however, price stability in this period was achieved not because of monetary factors but in
spite of them.14
A better explanation for the price equilibrium of this period may be found in the pattern of
population growth, which was modest in the period 1650–1730. In England, for example, the
number of inhabitants had increased more rapidly before this era—from 2.8 millions in 1541
to 5.3 millions in 1657. In the mid-seventeenth century, that trend broke. Population ceased
rising and began to fall unsteadily for thirty years, reaching its nadir in the year 1686, at
approximately 4.9 millions. Thereafter, it began to fluctuate, rising a little but remaining on the
same plane. Not until after 1730 did it resume a pattern of rapid and sustained increase. This
trend matched a thirty-year moving average in consumer prices with uncanny precision. The
correlation was very close, with price movements lagging a few years behind demographic
trends through most of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.15
Population movements were marked by many fluctuations. A slow rolling rhythm in
fertility and sudden surges in mortality caused by outbreaks of epidemic disease. But the
secular movements of prices and population were closely linked. This was the basis of the
equilibrium in that period.16
In economic terms, that equilibrium should be understood as a period not of stasis but of
stable growth. Production and productivity increased. Commerce flourished throughout
Europe. Handsome neoclassical exchanges were constructed throughout the Western world.
They symbolized improvements that were made in many sorts of markets. Labor markets,
capital markets, land markets, commodity markets all were made to work more efficiently.
Banks multiplied rapidly: the Bank of England (1694), the Royal Bank of Scotland
(1727), and many others.17 Every European country improved its roads, enlarged its ports and
constructed canals and bridges. The growth of colonies also increased the wealth of Europe
and improved its productivity. Marginal returns to capital and labor tended to be higher in the
staple industries of colonial economies than in the mother-country.18
The great cities, as always the barometers a civilization’s health, prospered throughout
Europe in this period. London was rebuilt to the taste of Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones, and
took on the neoclassical character that it preserves to this day. Paris became the metropolis of
Europe—its beautiful squares and broad boulevards began to be laid out in this period. Berlin
as late as 1654 had been a small river settlement of about 5,000 inhabitants; by 1740 it had
become a stately city with nearly 100,000 people. Vienna was transformed from a grim
medieval fortress town into an imperial capital of great beauty. The Schönbrunn palace was
begun in 1695 and the Belvedere in 1717. The city’s great baroque churches and state
buildings date from this period.
At the opposite end of Europe, the people of Edinburgh constructed their “new city” in
this era. In the words of David Daiches, the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century
philosophers was realized in Scottish stone. As the cities were rebuilt, urban architecture
flourished everywhere in Europe, from the baroque glory of Dresden to the Georgian grace of
Dublin. The handsome colonial cities of Philadelphia, Calcutta and Batavia arose on the banks
of the Delaware, the Hooghly and the Tjiliwong.
Social life became more orderly in this period. By the evidence of arrests and
prosecutions, rates of violent crime diminished from the late seventeenth century well into the
eighteenth century.
The equilibrium of this era also expressed itself in politics. The turbulence of the early
and mid-seventeenth centuries came to an end in many European states during the period from
1660 to 1740. English historian J. H. Plumb observes that “political stability, when it comes,
often happens to a society . . . as suddenly as water becomes ice.” That metaphor—a “change
of phase” in the language of chemistry— perfectly describes a transition that happened in the
politics of England, France, Germany, and Russia during the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. These four nations achieved stability in different ways, but all
experienced a change of phase in this age of equilibrium.
Figure 2.24 shows the same sustained decline in crime that occurred in every period of price
equilibrium, after a sharp rise during the late stages of every price revolution. The downward
trend that appears here in Kent’s homicide rates has also been found in many other English
counties during the same period. The source is J. S. Cockburn, “Patterns of Violence in English
Society: Homicides in Kent, 1560–1985,” Past and Present 130 (1991) 70–106.

Particularly striking was the growth of political stability in England. “The contrast
between political society in eighteenth and seventeenth century England is vivid and dramatic,”
Professor Plumb writes. “In the seventeenth century men killed, tortured and executed each
other for political beliefs; they sacked towns and brutalized the countryside. They were
subjected to conspiracy, plot and invasion. This uncertain political world lasted until 1715,
and then rapidly began to vanish. By comparison, the political structure of eighteenth century
England possesses adamantine strength and profound inertia.”
Plumb was wrong about inertia. In politics, as in economics, the equilibrium of the
Enlightenment was a dynamic process, with many moving parts. But he was right about its
stability and strength.19
Political stability was also achieved in France during the long reigns of Louis XIV
(1643–1715) and Louis XV (1715—1774). Its form was very different from that of the
English-speaking nations. While England moved toward toleration and parliamentary
government, France traveled in the opposite direction. Religious dissent was savagely
repressed, the Etats généraux were ignored, the Parlements were reduced to judicial and
administrative bodies, and the fetters of royal absolutism were riveted upon the body politic of
a great nation.
Prussia created a stable polity in yet a third form. This was a militarist monarchy that
derived its power from the Prussian army, and developed steadily under Frederick the Great
Elector of Brandenberg (1688–1713), and his successors Frederick Wilhelm I (1713–1740),
and Frederick the Great (1740–1786).
In Russia, Peter the Great (1682–1725) founded a fourth type of European state. It has
been well-described as an autocracy “enserfed from top to bottom . . . in which all strata of the
population without exception were required to perform service and pay dues to the ruler.”20
Many rulers were called “great” in this era: Louis Le Grand, Frederick the Great Elector,
Frederick the Great, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great. These leaders were no more able
than many of the failed monarchs who preceded them in the seventeenth century. The
enlightened despots of Europe were consumed by vanity and greed. They quarreled incessantly
with other princes, and squandered both the wealth of their nations and lives of their subjects
on petty and destructive rivalries. But an age of equilibrium is kind to reigning kings. A
reputation for greatness in a monarch often owes more to circumstance than to character.
The equilibrium of this era expressed itself not only in economics and politics, but also in
a philosophical system that was called Die Aufklarung in Germany, Illuminismo in Italy, and
the Enlightenment in England. Ironically, the only people of Europe who did not have a single
word for this movement were the French, who did more than any others to create it. The
Enlightenment is remembered in France not as an idea, but as an era and a set of individuals—
the siècle des lumières.
The man who personified this era better than any other was Francois Marie Arouet
(1694–1778), better known by his pen name, Voltaire. He thought of his own generation as the
epigoni of an age that he called the siècle de Louis XIV. This epoch he defined as the time
when “human reason in general was brought to perfection.” The young Voltaire recognized that
this era was not “exempt from crimes and misfortunes.” He fought against evil all his life, and
suffered many defeats. Nevertheless, his history of this era was suffused with a sense of
satisfaction in the events of the recent past, and a feeling of confidence for the future.21
 Voltaire’s way of thinking about history was different from our own. He did not think in
modern terms of “material base” and “cultural superstructure.” If anything he tended to reverse
that causal relationship, but he had no doubt of a close connection between economic and
cultural processes. His history of this era was a paean to progress in both realms. He
celebrated the era of Louis XIV not so much as the apotheosis of a great king, but as a time
when “the middle classes enriched themselves by industry,” and the condition of peasants and
laborers became much improved. In his mind these material events were connected to the great
intellectual achievements of his age—to the science of Newton (1642–1727) and Halley
(1656–1742), the literature of Racine (1639–99) and Molière (1622–73), the philosophy of
Locke (1632–1704), Bayle (1647–1706) and Leibniz (1646–1716).
The work of these men had a fundamentally different texture from those who had preceded
them by only a generation. They believed that the universe was a place of order and symmetry;
that the world was within man’s power to understand and even to control.
These attitudes came to be shared by many people in the early eighteenth century. The
great historian Edward Gibbon wrote complacently in his autobiography, “My lot might have
been that of a slave, a savage, or a peasant, nor can I reflect without pleasure on the bounty of
Nature, which cast my birth in a free and civilized country, in an age of science and
philosophy.”22
The same spirit was expressed in many different ways by English literati such as Pope
(1688–1744), by the German composers Bach (1685–1750) and Handel (1685–1759), by
French social philosophers Montesquieu (1689–1755) and Quesnay (1694–1774), by scientists
such as the Swedish Linnaeus (1707–1778) and the American Franklin (1706–1790), and by
theologians such as Edwards (1703–1758) and Zinzendorf (1700–1760).
These men of the Enlightenment were keenly aware of evil in the world. But even as they
struggled against injustice, and suffered from its effects, the world appeared to them as a place
of order, harmony, equilibrium and balance. Their mechanical metaphors represented the union
of dynamism and stability, a belief in the possibility of progress and order.s
 The Enlightenment was an era with major social problems, but it was also a time when
people believed that problems could be solved. The savants of this age disagreed in their
solutions, but they shared a stubborn optimism that set them squarely apart from earlier
generations. That attitude was a zeitgeist in the strict sense, a spirit grounded in the historical
conditions of the age.23
The philosophical gentlemen of the enlightenment invented many of our modern social
sciences—including the science of economics. Their economic ideas commonly took two
countervailing forms. One would later be called mercantilism. It encouraged the active
intervention of the state in economic processes, and was given its classical expression by the
ministers of Louis XIV, notably Jean Baptiste Colbert. The other economic ideology would
later be called laisserfaire. It was developed in this period by the French physiocrats, and in
particular by Francois Quesnay. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a conversation
between Quesnay and the Dauphin:
“What would you do if you were King?” the Dauphin asked.
“Nothing,” said Quesnay.
“Then who would govern?”
“The law,” Quesnay replied.24

Many enlightened thinkers shifted back and forth from one of these economic ideas to the other.
One historian has remarked upon their “characteristic oscillation between mercantilist and
laisser faire thought.”25 Others became fierce partisans of a single ideology. But even as they
differed with one another, the philosophes of the enlightenment shared a common cosmology.
The central assumption in this cosmology was an idea that Jean Ehrard calls la nature-
horloge, the world as a piece of clockwork. Some believed that the machinery needed constant
tinkering. Others thought that the machine would go of itself. But the major premise was the
same: un univers-horloge, un Dieu horloger.26
These assumptions came to be widely shared in the early eighteenth century because they
seemed to fit the empirical facts. The prevailing ideas of balance and equilibrium in the
enlightenment were not merely a philosopher’s dream. They represented the world as it
actually was—for a time.
THE THIRD WAVE
The Price Revolution of the Eighteenth Century

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment or diversion, but the
conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise
prices.
—Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

PARIS, September 3, 1729, the grand festival of the Dauphin’s birth. At Versailles, a little past
three o’clock in the morning, the Queen was delivered of a healthy son, who became at birth
heir-apparent to the throne of France. A royal messenger was ordered to carry the happy news
to Paris. He spurred his horse forward, galloping toward the first light of dawn in the eastern
sky. The sleeping city lay open before him.
In the year 1729, Paris was the capital not merely of a country but of a civilization. It was
a city of dramatic contrasts. Some of its narrow and crooked streets had changed little since the
thirteenth century. In other neighborhoods a great rebuilding was underway. The ancient city
walls had been pulled down, and in their place royal engineers had laid out the first tree-lined
boulevards. The old fortified gates had been replaced by open arcs de triomph. The Champs
d’Elysses had been extended from the Tuileries as far as the Place d’Etoile. The Place des
Victoires and Place Vendôme had been created, and those noble spaces were already
surrounded by huge private hotels of the aristocracy and nouveau riche.1
Paris had many nouveaux riches in 1729. The city had become a great center of trade and
finance. Only a few years earlier its hated usuriers had been confined behind heavy iron
grilles in the serpentine passages of the rue Quincampoix. Now the richest usuriers were
called financiers, and their mansions were scattered through the city. A great banque had
recently been founded, and a new bourse had opened for the exchange of securities. Our
modern language of finance was invented in the early eighteenth century. Much of it is French.
Paris had grown rich, but many Parisians remained desperately poor. Extravagant wealth
and grotesque poverty lived side by side. Beggars died of hunger in the streets, while the rich
rode past in gilded chairs on the shoulders of other human beings. The suffering poor crowded
miserably into a maze of medieval tenements. Many lived like animals on close-built bridges
above the river Seine, while the great families of France resided in magnificent mansions only
a few streets away.
The cultural contrasts were equally dramatic. Paris in 1729 was the city of light, the seat
of the Enlightenment, the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers. Its great
libraries in the Bibliothèque Royal, the Bibliothèque Mazarin and the Bibliothèque Ste.
Geneviève were the among the best in the world. Its elegant salons set the intellectual fashion
for enlightened people everywhere.
At the same time Paris was also a capital of despotic darkness. It was the controlling
center of an absolutism that ruled by terror, cunning, and brutal force. High above the city’s
fabled rooftops rose the walls of the Bastille, where state prisoners were held for life without
the slightest shadow of legality. Next to the river Seine stood the dark and silent mass of the
Châtelet, the prison where ordinary Parisians were confined without warrant and punished
without trial. In the center of the city was the Place Greve, where huge crowds gathered every
week before the City Hall to watch obscene tortures inflicted upon shrieking victims.
Paris in 1729 was a city divided against itself. Its restless population was kept in order
by a garrison of Swiss mercenaries and by large numbers of informers, spies, detectives and
agents provocateurs. Our modern language of espionage and surveillance is French, and much
of it was invented in this era. A regime of great and terrible cruelty dominated its people by
methods that were profoundly hostile to the ethics of Christianity and the dreams of the
Enlightenment.
But on the day of the Dauphin’s birth, September 3, 1729, all this was forgotten. The
people of Paris put aside their differences and joined freely in a festival of joy. When news of
the infant’s arrival reached the city, the tocsin was sounded and cannon were fired. Every
house was ordered to be illuminated for three nights, and every shop was commanded to be
closed for three days, while preparations began for a grand celebration. Each evening bonfires
burned in the open squares. Casks of wine were opened to all who wished to drink. The poor
were given free sausages and small loaves of bread, baked specially for the occasion.
On September 7, at exactly 5:30 in the afternoon, the royal father of the newborn child
proudly entered the city. Louis XV was a handsome youth, barely nineteen years old. He
proceeded in high pomp to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, escorted by two companies of
Musketeers and the Royal Company of Falconers, with birds of prey perched on their gloved
fists. The princes of the blood and the great nobility followed in a long line of gilded
carriages.
When the King reached the Cathedral, the great guns of the royal artillery fired a salute in
his honor. The infantry discharged three volleys of a feu de joie. Flashes of flame and clouds
of smoke rippled down their long ranks from the Tuileries to Notre Dame. Inside the crowded
cathedral three Cardinals led the singing of a Te Deum. Afterwards, the King traveled in great
state to the city hall for dinner and a display of fireworks. His meal was served by the prévôt
des marchands JacquesEtienne Turgot himself, as obsequious as the lowest lackey. At 11:30
the King rose from his table and made a tour of the city. The houses were ablaze with light.
Each neighborhood competed for the honor of the best display. The Place Vendôme was judged
the winner: its buildings were illuminated with perfect symmetry, and its street lamps were
replaced by glittering chandeliers.
The celebration of the Dauphin’s birth continued for a week. It spread to every city of
France, and to many other nations. By all reports, people of every rank joined wholeheartedly
in these events. What they celebrated was not merely the arrival of the little Dauphin himself,
but the promise of order, prosperity, peace and continuity. The people of France still keenly
remembered the cruel disorders of the last century. They recalled the terrible uncertainties of a
time, not very long ago, when the last king in his grave and the next was in his cradle, and
nobody knew what the future might bring.
 The people of Europe welcomed the birth of the Dauphin as a sign that order, stability and
equilibrium would continue for many years to come. In 1729, France was at peace with all the
great states of Europe. Her harvests were good, her commerce was flourishing, and her arts
were the envy of every nation. The people of this great kingdom looked forward to a future of
prosperity and peace with increasing confidence.2
But it was not to be. In the very hour of the Dauphin’s birth, a deep change was silently
occurring in the dynamics of European history. Once again, an important indicator was the
movement of prices. At Paris in approximately the year 1729, the price-equilibrium of the
Enlightenment quietly approached its end. A new movement began, which might be called the
price-revolution of the eighteenth century.

The Price Revolution Begins

The new trend started slowly and silently, in much the same manner as the great waves that had
preceded it. Its epicenter was Paris. In the grain markets of the French capital, the price of
wheat began to rise about the year 1729.3 Other cities followed close behind. Grain prices
began to climb at Winchester in 1731–32; Amsterdam, 1732–33; Bruges, 1733–34; Cologne,
1735–36; Philadelphia, 1738–39.4 In the eighteenth century, urban markets had become more
closely linked throughout the Atlantic world.
The countryside lagged behind the cities. In England and Wales, one very broad index of
farm prices found that the advance did not begin until the early 1740s. Another English price-
series showed no increase until after 1750. But by the early 1740s, agricultural prices were
rising throughout most of Europe. Similar patterns appeared for the price of wheat in Belgium,
France and Italy; and for rye in Germany, Austria, and Poland.5
Once begun, the new trend spread swiftly from Europe to the New World. American
historian Winifred Rothenberg made the startling discovery that farm prices in remote parts of
rural Massachusetts synchronized with market fluctuations in London and Paris during the
eighteenth century. This linkage was all the more remarkable in that very little gold and silver
circulated in New England. The small farmers of Massachusetts did business without hard
money, maintaining among themselves a system of mutual charge-accounts that has been called
bookkeeping barter. Even so, the changing values in their account books closely matched the
vibration of prices throughout the Atlantic world.6
Figure 3.01 shows the profile of the eighteenth century price revolution in three nations.
Sources include for England, the Schumpeter-Gilboy price index of 32 commodities, in B. R.
Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 719–20; for U. S. A., the Bezanson index of prices of
140 commodities in the Philadelphia market, Historical Statistics of the U.S., series E111; for
France, an unweighted index of agricultural prices in Ernest Labrousse et al., Histoire
économique et sociale de la France, II, 386–87. All series are converted to a common base of
1770=100.

Similar movements also appeared in French Canada, but in Latin America, the trends
were more complex. Agricultural prices in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies fell or
remained on the same level until 1750, and kept on falling in some places (such as Salvador
and ironically Potosí) as late as the 1780s. But in Mexico, Chile, and other parts of Latin
America, prices were generally rising from the 1760s. By the late 1780s, the price-revolution
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.”7
The same pattern also appeared in Asia and the Middle East. The movement of Chinese
grain prices during the eighteenth century was similar in trend, but smaller in magnitude. The
Ottoman Empire also experienced a long wave of rising prices. The price-revolution of the
eighteenth century was truly a world event.8
At first, the new trend advanced slowly and unsteadily. For a time, contemporaries took it
to be merely another market-flutter. In retrospect, however, the profile of a price-revolution
was clearly evident from the start, especially in the distinctive pattern of price-relatives which
were much the same as in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Figure 3.02 finds evidence in French grain prices that the 18th century price-revolution was an
exponential process, dynamic in its expanding magnitudes and amplitudes, but stable in its
underlying rate of change. The data are from C. E. Labrousse, Ruggiero Romano and F. G.
Dreyfus, Le prix du froment en France au temps de la monnaie stable (1726–1913) (Paris,
1970), xiv. Trendlines are fitted with an Excel 5.0 program.

Once again, the most rapid movements occurred in the price of energy and food. Of nine
basic commodities in France, the largest increase occurred in the cost of firewood and
charcoal.9 Close behind the soaring cost of energy came the price of food. Foodstuffs in
general rose rapidly during the eighteenth century, as in every other price-revolution. The
largest increases appeared in staple commodities that were the staff of life among the poor—
the cheaper grains and beans. Rates of inflation were more moderate for meat and wine. The
smallest gains were in the price of manufactured products, which lagged behind as they had
done in every other great wave.10
The prime mover of this price-revolution was the increasing pressure of aggregate
demand, caused by an acceleration in the growth of population. In England, demographic
historians Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schofield discovered that the rhythm of price-
movements correlated closely with rates of population-increase in the eighteenth century. After
a long pause from 1660 to 1720, the population of England began to grow more rapidly during
the late 1720s, at precisely the same moment when the price-revolution also started. The
correlation could not have been more exact.11
Figure 3.03 finds that the movement of price relatives in the eighteenth century was similar to
those in other price revolutions. In France, the cost of energy went highest, closely followed by
food and raw materials. Processed products, manufactures, and wages lagged far behind. The
data are from Ernest Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au
XVIIIe siècle (2 vols., Paris, 1933), II, 98.
Figure 3.04 shows a recurrent pattern in price revolutions: surging energy prices in late stages
of the long wave. This was the case in Europe and even in America during the late eighteenth
century. The source is George F. Warren and Frank A. Pearson, Prices (New York, 1933), 11-
27; reprinted in part in the Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
(Washington, 1976), series E52–57.

A similar association between rising prices and increasing population also appeared in
other European states. In eastern Europe, the number of inhabitants who lived within the old
boundaries of Brandenberg-Prussia rose from less than 1.6 million people at the death of
Frederick William the Great Elector (1688) to nearly four million by the death of Frederick the
Great (1786). Large increases occurred in most parts of Europe, with a few exceptions such as
the Netherlands. The trend of prices matched this upward curve of population-growth.12
Why did population grow in the eighteenth century? In demographic terms, it happened
mainly because of a decline in age at marriage and a small rise in rates of intramarital fertility.
In many parts of rural Europe, the average age at first marriage for women fell from 27 in the
mid-seventeenth century to 24 or even 23 in the mid-eighteenth. Once married, women tended
to reduce intervals between births, and began to bear children more frequently. The average
age of a woman at the birth of her last child also rose a little—evidence of a deliberate
decision not to limit the size of families as narrowly as had been done in the mid-seventeenth
century.
There was also a modest improvement in life expectancy for infants and women during
the eighteenth century, and a moderate stabilization of death-rates. But the primary cause of
population growth in this period was a rise in fertility, not a fall in mortality.13
Why did men and women choose to marry earlier and have more children? An
improvement in material conditions was part of the answer, but not the whole of it. Husbands
and wives decided to have more children because the world appeared to have become a better
place in which to raise a family. Always that sort of judgment has been made in terms that are
broadly cultural rather than narrowly material.
Figure 3.05 compares quinquennial estimates of English population with a 25-year moving
average of the Phelps-Brown-Hopkins index of consumable prices in the south of England. The
source is E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–
1871; A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), 403

The growth of population in the eighteenth century created inflationary pressures in

several ways. Most important was a demand inflation that developed from increasing need for
life’s necessities—food, fuel, shelter and land. The supply of these commodities did not
expand as freely as demand; in consequence, prices went up. Industrial products, on the other
hand, could be turned out more easily in ever larger quantities. As a result, prices of
manufactured goods tended to be more stable than those of farm crops and raw materials. This
demand-induced inflation was not the only economic consequence of population growth. The
increase of rural population also caused what in the twentieth century would be called “cost-
push” inflation, especially in farm prices. In the agrarian economies of Europe and America,
increases in food supplies were obtained in part by bringing marginal lands into cultivation.
Production increased, but productivity diminished. Farmers worked harder to extract a smaller
crop from stubborn fields of poor fertility. The same sad story was played out on the stony
hillsides of New England, the bleak moors of Devon, the chill Schnee Eifel of Germany, and
the barren lands of Bourbonnais where hamlets bore such names as Tout-y-fait (All’s
Wanting), Pain-perdu (Lost Bread) and Petit-gain (Small Reward).
English economist David Ricardo (1772–1823) was one of the first to observe and
describe this mechanism from his own experience. It was clearly at work during the eighteenth
century, as it had been in every previous price-revolution. The classic Ricardian processes of
rising population and falling productivity served as an important source of price-inflation.14
Some people responded to these problems by introducing new methods of farm
management that have been called the agricultural revolution. In the process, farming tended to
become more intensive, but it did not at first become more productive. Economist Esther
Boserup has taught us that levels of productivity tend to fall in the early stages of agricultural
revolutions during the twentieth century. Similar patterns also appeared in the eighteenth
century.15

Discovery and Cultural Response

The rise of prices was felt keenly throughout Europe, but it was not perceived as a new secular
tendency for many years. As long as the magnitude of price increases remained within the
range of previous fluctuations, the new trend was invisible to contemporaries. There was no
“inflationary psychology” in the period from 1725 to 1755. Price stability was assumed to be
natural and normal in the world. As so often in history, perception was contemporary with the
event, but understanding lagged behind. The intellectual climate remained largely unchanged
even as the material order was beginning to be transformed in a new way.
The second stage began during the middle years of the eighteenth century when prices
rose above the range of fluctuations in the equilibrium of 1650–1720. As they did so,
contemporary observers could at last recognize the great wave for what it was: a sustained and
powerful long-term tendency that profoundly changed the conditions of ordinary life.
Governments and individuals responded to this discovery much as they had done in
earlier waves. As prices rose, pressures mounted for monetary expansion. In this relationship,
the quantity of money (and the velocity of its circulation) was not an independent variable. In
the face of rising prices, deliberate efforts were made to expand money in circulation. The
supply of gold and silver in the Western world may have doubled or trebled during this
period.16
A large expansion also occurred in commercial paper, which served increasingly as a
circulating medium in the eighteenth century. Private notes and bills of exchange (a sort of
eighteenth century M-3) became widely used as money in many Western cities, and passed
from hand to hand in multilateral transactions.17
At the same time, paper currency began to appear in Scandinavia and North America,
where shortages of specie were severe. The Swedish Wexelbank had issued paper notes as
early as the 1660s, primarily as a carrying convenience. Swedish money was made of copper.
The largest coin weighed forty-three pounds, and must have had a sluggish circulation. The
American colonies issued paper money for the opposite reason: not because their metal coins
were too heavy to carry around, but because they took wing and flew out of the country. New
France adopted paper money in the 1680s; New England, in 1690. During the eighteenth
century many other colonies issued paper currency.18
These tendencies increased the quantity of money in circulation and added to inflationary
pressures, especially in the second stage of the price-revolution. The inflationary effect of
monetary expansion was felt most powerfully during the last four decades of the eighteenth
century. Once again, monetary factors reinforced the momentum of the great wave, but did not
set it in motion.
Figure 3.06 shows the movement of American treasure from 1503 to 1805. It reinforced the
momentum of the price revolution in the eighteenth century, as it had done in the sixteenth
century, but the largest increases occurred during the price equilibrium of 1660–1730. The
source is Michel Morineau, Incroyables gazettes et fabuleaux métaux: les retours des trésors
américains d’après les gazettes hollandaises (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1985), 482, 562.

Governments responded to the price-revolution with various fiscal expedients that were
also inflationary. As public spending tended to exceed income, the gap was filled with
borrowing on a heroic scale. The government of France resorted to perpetual annuities called
rentes. So large was the French national debt in the eighteenth century that it spawned a
capitalist class called rentiers. Major European wars were financed by these securities in
large volume, and by unfunded borrowing as well.
Similar trends also occurred in Britain, where the government met its obligations by
issuing “consolidated annuities,” or “consols” for short. These securities paid a nominal 3
percent, but in most years they traded below par and the yield rose in that proportion. The
marketvalue of British consols fell sharply during periods of war, when large quantities were
issued and public confidence declined. In 1745, after the effect of rebellion in Scotland was
added to a general European war, London’s security market suffered its first “Black Friday.”
The price of Consols dropped below 75. A similar crisis occurred during the Seven Years War
(1754–63), when Britain’s national debt rose to the then unimaginable level of 100 million
pounds, and consols fell below 80. The worst of these fiscal crises developed during the
American Revolution, when Britain’s national debt rapidly expanded and consols plummeted
as low as 54 before recovering after the peace of 1783. Whenever they did so, interest rates
surged.19
Figure 3.07 estimates the flow of gold and silver to Europe from all sources during three
centuries. The increase in the price revolution (1730–1800) was smaller than in the preceding
price equilibrium (1660–1730). Overall the rhythm in both periods was much the same. The
source is Michel Morineau, Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux métaux: les retours des trésors
américains d’après les gazettes hollandaises (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1985), 578.

Returns to commercial capital also increased rapidly in this period. A good barometer
was the rate of interest. In the Netherlands, market-rates for short-term loans on the capital-rich
Amsterdam Exchange had fallen as low as 1¾ percent during the period from 1700 to 1725.
From this nadir, interest rates rose steadily during the eighteenth century. By 1738, the British
Parliament was informed that interestrates in the Low Countries were normally 2 to 3 percent.
They climbed to 3 or 4 percent during the War of American Independence (1775–83), and 4 to
6 percent by the early 1790s.
Dutch interest rates tended to be the lowest in Europe, but similar trends appeared in
every financial center. These movements were highly volatile, fluttering up and down in
Europe’s still very small capital markets. Heavy wartime borrowing sent interest rates soaring;
periods of peace brought them crashing down again. These fluctuations occurred on the curve
of a rising secular trend. Through the eighteenth century, interest rates climbed higher and
higher.20
As the price-revolution continued, the rich and powerful generally did well for
themselves. The mid-eighteenth century was a golden age for country gentry and landowning
elites. The English agricultural reformer Arthur Young observed that rents increased sharply
during the Seven Years War, and kept on increasing thereafter. In France, farm rents doubled
during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Land prices increased even more rapidly;
the cost of real estate quadrupled in many parts of Europe during the eighteenth century. Here
was another process that David Ricardo studied at first hand. Ricardian theories of rent and
wages should be read not as timeless economic truths, but as highly perceptive historical
descriptions of the eighteenth century price-revolution, in its middle and later stages.21
Figure 3.08 follows the rise in market rates of interest on British public securities. The
evidence shows a pattern of surges during major wars, and a long upward trend that matched
the price revolution. Dutch interest rates rose from a range of 1.75 to 2 percent (1700–25) to a
range of 8 to 10 percent (1798). In France, yields on rentes were highly volatile, rising from 2
percent in 1720 to 34 percent in 1798. Source: Sidney Homer, History of Interest Rates (1963,
2d ed., 1977, New Brunswick, N.J.), 161–62.
Figure 3.09 finds that rent and real estate rose more rapidly than consumer prices. Values for
England are in silver shillings per acre (1725–49=100); and for Europe in silver equivalents
of local coinage (1731–40=100). Sources: Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur; and R. C.
Allen, “Freehold Land and Interest Rates” Economic History Review 2d ser. 41 (1988) 33–50.

While rent and interest kept up with inflation, wages fell behind. Money wages tended to
increase a little, but did not keep pace with commodity prices. In consequence, real wages fell
from as early as the 1730s to the nineteenth century. This trend appeared in England, France,
Germany, Austria, Poland, and Denmark during the eighteenth century. It was the case both for
free laborers in western Europe and serfs in eastern Europe. The same cause_increasing
population—that drove up commodity prices also depressed real wages by expanding the size
of the work force. Wilhelm Abel concluded from thirty years’ study of this subject that “with
few exceptions, western and central European wages between 1740 and 1800 were left far
behind by the rising price of cereals.”22
The result of this decline in real wages in the eighteenth century was different from earlier
price-revolutions. It caused much suffering among the poor, but no epidemic famines as in the
fourteenth century and no decline of population as in the seventeenth. Here is a striking
paradox in the history of price-revolutions. As one of these great waves followed another,
rates of inflation increased but human suffering diminished. How could this have been the
case?
One important factor, beloved of classical economists, was the expansion and integration
of world markets. Another was the improvement of income per capita, which meant that fewer
people were living near the edge. A third was the growth of welfare which, however limited,
helped to prevent starvation. The price of all these improvements was acceleration in rates of
inflation, and diminution of its cruelest consequences.
A case in point was the history of welfare. The great Hungarian scholar Karl Polanyi
identified an important event in this long process. In 1795, the justices of Britain’s County of
Berkshire met at the Pelikan Inn in Speenhamland, and agreed to make a change in their system
of poor-relief. They ordered that “subsidies in aid of wages would be granted in accordance
with a scale dependent upon the price of bread, so that a minimum income should be assured to
the poor irrespective of their earnings.”
This “Speenhamland system” spread rapidly across England, and was practiced during
the next three decades, until abolished in 1834. It contributed to rising prices, even while
controlling their effects. All of these events were part of the response to the price-revolution,
after it was discovered as a secular trend.
Figure 3.10 finds evidence of a long decline in real wages. It began as early as 1740 and
continued through the full span of the price revolution, accelerating after 1775 in Italy, after
1780 in Germany, and after 1800 in England. Sources include E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila
Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage
Rates,” Economica 23 (1956) 296–315); Ruggiero Romano, Prezzi e salari e servizi a Napoli
nei Secolo XVIII (1734–1806) (Milan, 1965); and Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur.

Cultural Responses
Soon after the price-revolution became clearly visible in the middle years of the eighteenth
century, a change began to occur in the cultural mood. Intellectual historians have long noted
this event without being able to explain it in a satisfactory way. In 1756, a massive earthquake
destroyed a large part of the city of Lisbon. This disaster inspired an outpouring of literature
throughout Europe, which expressed a new spirit of scepticism, confusion, pessimism and even
cultural despair. The optimism of the young Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV suddenly gave way to
the darkness of his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756) and the bitter satire of Candide
(1759). Intellectual historians have suggested that the cause of this transformation was the
Lisbon earthquake itself. This is an error. Natural catastrophes of that sort had occurred in
every era. What was new was the response. In the mid-eighteenth century events began to be
perceived in a different way.
Another intellectual event in this era was a religious movement that overspread the
Protestant world during the mid-eighteenth century. In English-speaking America it was named
the Great Awakening, and began with the preaching of Jonathan Edwards in 1734. In Britain it
was known as the evangelical movement and dated from the conversion experiences of John
and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield in 1738. A similar movement developed in
Scandinavia and Germany, where it was called pietismus. There were many names in different
nations, but they referred to a great international movement that revived the “religion of the
heart,” and rejected the optimism of the Enlightenment. Pietism in this sense flourished
throughout Protestant Europe during the 1740s and 1750s, and continued to the end of the
century.
These intellectual trends were not mechanical reflexes of material processes. Their
dynamics were more complex. One might hypothesize that cultural and material trends
simultaneously expressed underlying imbalances in the Western world during the mid-
eighteenth century.

“A Scrambling among Ourselves:” Growing Instability

Continuing imbalances created instabilities. Throughout Europe, commodity prices began to
surge and decline, climbing sharply in the years 1739–41, 1755—58 and 1776–81, and falling
rapidly in between. These movements coincided with major European wars, a series of
dynastic rivalries which expanded into world wars and people’s wars during the eighteenth
century.23
In 1739, a bizarre conflict called the War of Jenkins’ Ear began between Britain and
Spain. This was a commercial dispute that grew into one of the first Jingo-wars in modern
history. It started after Spanish officials mutilated an English interloper named Captain Robert
Jenkins by cutting off his ear. Captain Jenkins presented the severed ear to Parliament in a
handsome mahogany box. It became a cause of war between two great powers.24
The affair of the unfortunate Captain Jenkins was followed by the War of the Austrian
Succession (1740–1748), a dynastic conflict between the larger states of Europe. Fighting
continued for a nearly decade in Europe and America, and prices rose sharply as a
consequence of heavy military spending.
 An interval of peace followed that conflict, but the powers of Europe were soon at war
again, in a larger struggle that German historians misnamed the Seven Years War. It actually
lasted nine years from 1754 to 1763, and began in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania,
when an obscure young Virginia officer named George Washington got into a fight with a
French party, and was defeated. This small event led to a great world war, with heavy fighting
in America, Asia, and central Europe. One of its many consequences was a surge in world
prices. The price of grain rose sharply in London, Paris and Boston, and remained very high
until the war ended.25
The peace of Paris in 1763 was followed by a short but painful period of price deflation
and economic depression. Twelve years later, the great powers went to war again, in a still
larger world conflict that started on Lexington Green in Massachusetts, and drew in many
nations. Great armies and fleets were set in motion around the world. The cost of war caused
another sharp surge of inflation.
As individuals and governments tried to cope in various ways, cultural stresses of high
intensity began to develop in western society. The pattern was similar to that which had
occurred in the great waves of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Instabilities of many sorts
developed. One of the most dangerous was the growth of inequality. This trend appeared in
both Europe and America, where wealth became more concentrated in a few hands during the
period from 1750 to 1790. Similar tendencies appeared in Britain and France, Scandinavia
and Germany, Massachusetts and Virginia.26
For the rich this was the best of times, an age when the lives of the privileged few were
marked by what Talleyrand called the douceur de vie. In the twilight of the old regime, many
European states experienced what has been called an aristocratic resurgence during the third
and fourth quarters of the eighteenth century. In France, the nobility arrogated to itself an
increasing share of what economists call “positional goods,” that is, goods that are limited in
supply by their very nature: the top jobs, the most powerful offices, the highest honors. Major
offices were increasingly restricted to the noblesse. After 1781, new army officers were
required to have at least four “quarterings” of nobility in their ancestry. The effect of this rule
was to expand opportunity for a narrow elite, and to restrict it for others. In the 1780s, all
French bishops (135 in all) were of the nobility. Nearly all royal ministers were nobles. In
retrospect, we know that this aristocratic resurgence was what German historian Martin
Göhring calls a triumph der ständischen Idee, a triumph for the moment only. But within that
moment the nobility seemed to carry everything before them. In a time of widespread suffering,
they awakened intense resentment against themselves.27
At the bottom of French society, the poor sank deeper in misery and degradation. Between
a third and half of the people of France lived near the margin of subsistence, spending as much
as 80 percent of their income on food alone. In the late eighteenth century, the numbers of the
poor multiplied. Homelessness increased. Public roads were thronged with aged beggars,
abandoned children, broken families, and able-bodied men without work.
The disruption of families also increased. Through the period from 1730 to 1810, many
studies have found a rapid rise in the proportion of children conceived and born outside of
marriage. The same pattern appeared in European rates of illegitimacy and American rates of
prenuptial pregnancy. Historians have struggled to explain these trends in various ways. None
appear to have noticed that they correlated closely with rising prices, and with the social
disruption that the price-revolution caused.
Contemporary observers in the late eighteenth century were keenly aware of these trends.
They remarked on the growth of social tensions and class conflict during the 1780s. In France,
the American diplomat Thomas Jefferson observed that every man seemed to be either a
hammer or an anvil, either a sheep or a wolf. He was describing a period as well as a place.

Figure 3.11 compares ratios of births outside of marriage to all births by decade in 98 English
parishes, with the Abel index of decennial wheat prices in England (grams of silver per 100
kilograms of wheat); and also illegitimacy ratios for France with the Abel series of French
wheat prices. Sources are Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, appendix; Yves Blayo,
“Mouvement naturel de la population française de 1740 à 1829,” Population 25 (1970) 15–
64; Peter Laslett, Karla Osterveen and Richard M. Smith, eds., Bastardy and Its Comparative
History (Cambridge, 1980) 14–15.

The growth of class conflict was attributed to “scarcity” and soaring prices. An
anonymous English pamphleteer wrote in 1766:

People not perceiving a scarcity, are apt to be jealous of one another; each suspecting
another’s inequality of gain to rob him of his share, every one will be employing his skill
and power, the best he can, to procure to himself the same plenty as formerly. This is but
scrambling amongst ourselves, and helps us no more against our want, then the struggling
for a short coverlet, by those who lie together, till it is pulled to pieces, will preserve
them from the cold.

The laborer’s share being seldom more than a bare subsistence, never allows
that body of men time or opportunity to raise their thought above that, or to contest with
the richer for their’s;—unless when some uncommon and great distress, uniting them in
one universal ferment, makes them forget respect, and emboldens them to serve their
wants with armed force; and then sometimes they break in upon the rich, and sweep all
like a deluge. But this rarely happens, but in the MALADMINISTRATION OF
NEGLECTED AND MISMANAGED GOVERNMENT.28
The growth of inequality was an international trend in the late eighteenth century. It
appeared in Europe, Great Britain and even in the new United States, where many studies have
found a rapid increase in the concentration of wealth during the period from 1760 to 1830.
The effect of growing inequality was to disrupt the moral economy of the western society,
and to destabilize its material order. The humanitarian ethics of Christianity, which the
Enlightenment had done much to reinforce, compelled the nations of western Europe to spend
larger sums on social welfare than ever before. In France during the 1780s the poor received
more than 20 million livres in government assistance alone, plus larger sums from the church
and private individuals. This vast effort prevented the famines that had occurred in the
fourteenth century, but intensified social tensions. In place of starvation there was hunger.
Instead of despair there was rage—an emotion far more dangerous to the standing order.
Inequality also created material strains within western society. As poor families devoted
more of their income to bread, less remained for other things. The result was shrinkage of
demand, which caused sharp contractions in markets for industrial goods. The economies of
western Europe in the 1780s experienced the same combination of inflation and stagnation that
marked the penultimate stage of every other price-revolution.
Governments, caught in a spiral of increasing instability, struggled to maintain their
solvency by raising taxes, as Britain did throughout its empire in 1763–75, and France
attempted to do in 1783–88. Entrenched elites were able to shift these burdens away from
themselves. The new taxes, like the old ones, fell heavily on those who were least able to bear
them. In England, the resistance of the country gentry to a trivial tax on cider in 1763
compelled the government to try the dangerous expedient of taxing America, with disastrous
results for the empire.
In France, the crown had long conciliated the nobility and haut bourgeoisie by exempting
them from various taxes. The Marquis de Lafayette inherited an estate that paid him 140,000
livres a year, but he was exempt from the taille which took a large part of a peasant’s small
surplus. Many rich bourgeois were also released from the taille. By and large it was paid by
the people of middling estates, and by the working poor. There were other taxes, such as the
capitation (a cross between a poll tax and an income tax) and vingtieme (“the twentieth”).
Both were nominally paid by everyone, but the rich and strong could reduce these obligations
by payment of a lump sum, which was much diminished by inflation. Indirect taxes such as
customs duties, excise taxes and the hated salt tax were paid by all, but tended to be passed on
to the consumer. Again, it was the poor and middling who bore the weight. Other taxes in kind,
notably the corvée and the transport militaire, fell heavily upon the peasantry. This system of
regressive taxation simultaneously increased social resentments, diminished the moral
authority of the standing order, and shrank the government’s income.29
Figure 3.12 is one of many studies that find growing inequality in the period 1750–1830. It
surveys the distribution of taxable wealth in real estate (current dollars), for the town of
Concord, Massachusetts, twenty miles west of Boston. The data are taken from town valuations
in 1770 and 1826, and from the federal direct tax assessment in 1798. The source is D. H.
Fischer, ed., Concord: The Social History of a New England Town, 1750–1850 (Waltham,
1983) 91, 222. Similar trends, with higher levels of inequality, appear for personal wealth,
total wealth, and the distribution of real estate by acres.

As public revenue lagged behind expenditures, public debt began to grow rapidly,
trebling in fifteen years from 1773 to 1788. In France by 1789, nearly half of national spending
went for interest payments on the national debt. Europe’s greatest power, with its massive
military spending, became a heavy debtor. But it was not the heaviest. In relative terms, other
countries such as the Netherlands had an even larger national debt than France during the late
eighteenth century.30
Britain’s national debt also grew at a formidable rate, rising during the Seven Years War,
falling in the peace that followed, then rising again during the American War of Independence.
These fluctuations gave rise to heavy speculation in public securities. There were many angry
complaints against speculators, whose operations added to fiscal instability. But one of this
group responded, “There is only one way to get rid of us; pay off the national debt.”
This, Britain was unable to do. Stock speculation, originally conducted furtively in alleys
and coffee houses, institutionalized itself. By the year 1773, a favorite meeting place called
New Jonathan’s Coffee House posted a sign saying “The Stock Exchange” above its entrance,
and admitted only those who paid for the privilege.
Speculators found opportunities in the growing economic instabilities of this era, and
created further instability in their turn. A case in point was Sir George Colebrooke, scion of a
prominent English banking family and “a great adventurer in . . . articles of speculation.”
Colebrooke attempted to corner the English market in hemp, a strategic commodity for the
Royal Navy. One of his rivals unkindly observed that his purpose was “so that if he should be
ordered to be hanged, no one will have hemp enough to find him a halter.”
When his national hemp corner failed, Colebrooke tried in 1771–72 to make a world
corner on alum, a substance used in the dying of textiles. He actually succeeded in buying up
the output of most major suppliers, but drove the price so high that new producers suddenly
appeared. The market for alum was glutted and Colebrooke was ruined, dragging down other
speculators with him. His fall contributed to a massive credit crisis throughout Europe.31
There were many financial collapses in the second half of the eighteenth century. One of
them began in the Netherlands with the failure of the Dutch firm of de Neufville (1763), and
spread quickly to Germany, France, Britain and America. Another panic started in Scotland
with the failure of a Scottish banker and speculator named Alexander Fordyce, who had taken
a short position in East India stock and was ruined by a sudden rise in the market. He fled to
Europe, leaving a disaster in his wake. The reverberations spread throughout the Atlantic
world.32
There were also growing political tensions, which in the 1760s and 1770s began to
develop into armed insurrections. The Swiss city of Geneva experienced a bourgeois
revolution in 1768 and a counterrevolution in 1782. A close student of these events concludes
that they rose partly from the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and partly from price
movements in Switzerland.33
In Russia, a great rebellion was led by Cossack private Emilian Pugachev, who killed
members of the gentry and captured many towns. Pugachev’s Rebellion grew in large part from
economic grievances that had been exacerbated by rising prices. Other rebellions broke out in
the Netherlands, Corsica, and Ireland.
 The largest of these insurgencies developed in England’s American colonies, in response
to repeated attempts by the British government to raise taxes in the Revenue Act of 1764, the
Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773.
The American rising was not unique. The regiments of British infantry that were sent to
restore order in Boston after the Tea Party had been employed on many similar missions
throughout the British Empire. The history of their service was a record of the rising spirit of
rebellion throughout the western world. The 23rd Foot (Royal Welch Fusiliers) had been used
to “restore order” throughout Devon and Cornwall. The 18th Foot (Royal Irish) had been
putting down riots against press gangs in Whitehaven. The 43rd and eight other regiments had
been assigned to suppress agrarian risings through twelve counties of the South Midlands and
East Anglia in 1766. The 4th Foot had been suppressing smugglers along the Channel coast,
and the British Marines had been dispatched on the same mission into Romney Marsh. Many
regiments had served in Ireland, which was in a state of insurrection in 1771 and 1772. In
England itself there were at least 159 major riots between 1740 and 1775, and minor ones
beyond counting.34
At the same time, the nobility from Poland to France demanded more advantages for
themselves. Statesmen struggled to hold the system together, while short-sighted elites
destroyed the props of their own privilege. By 1783, the long inflation was turning class
against class. The old regime was on the edge of disaster.

The Revolutionary Crisis, 1789–1820

After 1783, the great wave approached its climax, in a crisis that overswept the western
world. In some ways this event was remarkably similar to the troubles of the fourteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In others, it was entirely new.
The crisis began during the decade of the 1780s. It was triggered by change in the
weather. During the late eighteenth century, the climate of western Europe became highly
variable. The years from 1778 to 1781 were exceptionally warm, with long hot summers and
unusually mild winters. Then the pattern reversed. From 1782 to 1787, Europe and America
suffered hard winters, wet summers and short harvests. In 1788, the weather was even worse.
Throughout western Europe, crops rotted in the fields. In France that year the final blow was a
fantastic hailstorm that dropped stones as heavy as eight pounds, killing animals and ruining
what remained of the ripening grain. The harvest was very short, and food prices soared during
the winter of 1788–89. Shortages became more severe in 1789. Farmers had yet another
dismal crop year, and a very poor harvest.1
These events were not unique. Prolonged spells of bad weather had happened many times
in Europe during the eighteenth century: 1711–17, 1739–52 and 1769–77. But the hard years of
the 1780s were different. They came after half a century of rising prices, falling wages and
growing instability. In the countryside, a long run of short harvests meant less work for country
laborers and a surge in rural unemployment. In the cities, small crops caused grain prices to
surge. Even in good times, the wages of working class families went mostly for food. In the
period from 1726 to 1791, an average wage-earner in France spent 50 percent of his income to
feed his family. In 1789, that proportion rose to 88 percent.2
In France, these troubles coincided with a fiscal crisis. By 1787, Europe’s most powerful
government was on the edge of bankruptcy. Annual expenditures of 300 million livres and
revenues of merely 140 millions left a deficit of 160 million livres—more than half of total
national public spending.

Figure 3.13 represents annual harvest prices in England as a percentage of a 25-year moving
average. It shows an increase in the severity of harvest shortages, peaking circa 1799–1816.
Thereafter, the trend reversed. The source is Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A
Perspective of Wages and Prices (London, 1981), 59.
 Ministers tried desperately to balance their books. Economies were enacted. The king
himself, Louis XVI, set an example by reducing his household expenses from 22 million livres
to 17 million, largely by consolidating the royal stables. But this was merely 3 percent of the
deficit. Much of the budget went for irreducible military and social spending. Half of it was
needed for service on the debt.
The financial ministers of Louis XVI pleaded desperately for more revenue, and were
refused. The possessing classes refused to accept new taxes. Many demanded more privileges
and exemptions. This combination of public need and private greed was fatal to the old regime.
In scenes reminiscent of fourteenth century England, sixteenth century Spain, and twentieth
century America, the national credit of the most powerful nation in the world was
systematically wrecked by the selfishness of its affluent citizens.3
The effect of fiscal crisis in France was compounded by a world depression in commerce
and industry. From 1782 to 1789, the output of the French textile industry fell by 50 percent.
Employers ruthlessly laid off workers. In the town of Troyes alone, it was reported that 10,000
people lost their jobs. Conditions were much the same throughout western Europe and North
America during the 1780s. Unemployment rapidly increased among silkworkers in Italy,
shipbuilders in Massachusetts, and miners in Germany. Those who kept their jobs lost much of
their income, as real wages declined.4
Benjamin Franklin toured a textile factory in Norwich and observed a cruel and bitter
irony. He was amazed to see that the English clothmakers were themselves “half-naked or in
tatters.” The factory owner pointed proudly to his inventory and said, “those cloths are for
Italy, those for Germany, the ones over here for the American islands, and those for the
continent.” Franklin replied, “Have you none for the factory workers of Norwich?”5
When wages fell and the price of food surged throughout the western world, crime
increased sharply—especially crimes against property. The poor in desperation took what they
could get no other way. The long downward trend in crime reversed during the later stages of
the price-revolution, as it had done in every other great wave. Crimes against property surged
to high levels.
Local and national governments made a major effort to provide relief on an
unprecedented scale, and succeeded in doing so. The French minister Necker suspended grain
exports in 1788, bought heavily abroad, and compelled merchants to sell their stocks. In
consequence, there was nothing like the epidemic famines of the fourteenth century, nor even a
demographic contraction as in the seventeenth century. Few people starved in the 1780s, but
many were hungry, and more were angry.
The politics of hunger were very different from those of starvation. In the early fourteenth
century, starving peasants had been too weak to rebel. In the late eighteenth century, hungry
peasants were outraged against feudal lords and seigneurial dues. They were infuriated by the
prosperity of bourgeois speculators with their bulging granaries. They felt oppressed by
bullying tax-gatherers and corrupt officials.
Figure 3.14 compares prosecutions for theft in the Staffordshire Assizes with the Schumpeter-
Gilboy price index, and with periods of war and depression. It shows that crime increased in
periods of inflation and depression. Wars caused crime rates to fall in their early years, then to
rise in later years and to rise higher in immediate post-bellum periods. The greatest increases
in crime occurred when these conditions coincided in post-bellum periods of stagflation. The
source for the data shown here is Douglas Hay, “War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth
Century: The Record of English Courts,” Past & Present 95 (1982) 125, which offers a
different interpretation. The Schumpeter-Gilboy index is in Mitchell and Deane, Abstract of
British Historical Statistics, 468–69.
 Few people in France blamed their amiable King Louis XVI, but many hated his Austrian
Queen, Marie Antoinette. While hunger stalked the countryside she amused herself in an
endless whirl of fashion. She made a game of peasant life, building a play-cottage of the finest
materials and tending miniature fields and flocks with silver tools that seemed to mock the
misery of her suffering subjects.
Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake,” but similar expressions were heard from
high officials. When a royal officer in Touraine was told in 1788 that the peasants had no grain,
he did actually say, “Let them eat grass.” An officer employed by the Duc de Deux Ponts
observed contemptuously of the local peasantry in 1786, “It is our interest to feed them, but it
would be dangerous to fatten them.” An old Alderman of Orleans was arrested after the
Revolution began for allegedly saying, “If all the little girls died, there would be plenty of
bread.”6
A sense of outrage against the arrogance and imbecility of ruling elites developed rapidly
throughout Europe. That emotion was specially strong in France. The most powerful nation in
Europe was in some respects the most vulnerable. It had no social safety-valve comparable to
the virgin land of Russia and America, and no outlet such as the heavy emigration from Britain
and Germany. In France during the late 1780s, anger and frustration overflowed into acts of
violence.
First came individual acts of rage—the burning of a speculator’s house in Paris, the
beating of a bailiff in Languedoc, the stoning of a bishop in Manosque, the theft of grain
everywhere. By 1788, gangs of desperate men were roaming the countryside, stealing what
food they could find and assaulting tax collectors. In the Spring of 1789, food riots broke out in
the cities and towns, and the spirit of resistance spread swiftly through the countryside. The
authorities made the worst possible response—sporadic acts of symbolic violence that were
just harsh enough to stimulate resistance, but not sufficient to repress it. From time to time,
beggars and petty thieves were rounded up in large numbers, but there were not jails and
galleys enough to hold them. Increasingly, soldiers whose families were themselves suffering
refused to act against the people. As food prices surged in 1789, these various insurrections
suddenly exploded into revolution.7
There were no fewer than four French Revolutions in 1789: a continuing aristocratic
revolt against royal ministers; a bourgeois revolution against the aristocracy, a rising of urban
workers against the high bourgeoisie, and a peasant insurrection against all of their oppressors.
Each of these movements was set in motion by rising prices. All were responses to the fiscal
and economic crisis of the 1780s.
In Paris, urban workers began their revolution by attacking the barrières where internal
customs were levied on food coming to the city. They went on to ransack the monastery of St.
Lazere, not in an orgy of anti-clericalism but in search of something to eat. A vast hoard of
food was found in the cellars. Then they turned their wrath against that hated symbol of
injustice, the Bastille. Historians Ernest Labrousse and Georges Lefebvre discovered that the
Bastille was attacked on precisely the same day when grain prices reached their cyclical high
in Paris. The men who assaulted the Bastille were not the canaille of the city. The great
majority were artisans, masters, journeymen, and shopkeepers who were driven to desperate
acts by the high cost of living, and by their rage against a government that had turned away
from the people.8
At the same time, the peasants’ revolution broke out in the countryside. Complaints
centered on feudal dues, seigneurial ovens, high rents, the hated hunting parties, cruel
moneylenders, the loss of collective rights and the imposition of individual exactions.
Specially resented were unequal taxes that fell heavily upon the poor and rose in proportion to
soaring prices—the taille, champart, gabelle, picquet de farine, and taxes on wine and beer.
Throughout France many vestiges of privilege were attacked, sometimes with great
violence. Chateaux were burned, convents attacked, mills pulled down, warehouses looted.
Archives became a common target. Rent rolls and debt books were systematically destroyed.
The streets of provincial capitals were strewn with official papers.
Figure 3.15 shows the association between prices and revolution in Paris. The sources are
George Rudé, “Prices, Wages and Popular Movements in Paris during the French Revolution,”
Economic History Review 2d ser., 6 (1953–54) 246–67; and Georges Lefebvre, “Le
mouvement des prix et les origines de la Revolution française,” Annales Historiques de la
Revolution Française 14 (1937) 289–329.

A third bourgeois revolution, which claimed to be “The Revolution,” was a syncretist

movement dominated by the middle class who attempted to give France a system of
constitutional and representative government under a new National Assembly. The leaders of
this body at first pursued two economic ideas: free trade and the sanctity of private property.
The new regime did not repudiate the national debt, which was held by many bourgeois
rentiers. Instead, it tried to solve the nation’s fiscal problems by other means—partly by
seizing the assets of the church and selling them to private buyers. It extinguished monopolies
and guilds, and abolished collective rights that had been cherished by the peasantry.
For two years from 1789 to 1791, the prospects were encouraging for this bourgeois
revolution. The weather improved in Europe. Business revived throughout the western world,
and the price of provisions fell sharply. This was the moment when it seemed that France might
succeed in creating a stable constitutional monarchy for itself.
But it was not to be. The problem, once again, was the cost of living. From 1791 to 1793
there was another economic crisis. Food prices surged again, in a volatile movement that was
typical of the last stage in every price-revolution. Food riots once more became common in
Paris. The result was a second and more radical French Revolution. The king was deposed and
later executed; the Jacobins seized power and the Terror began.
Robespierre’s Jacobin regime tried to deal with the problem of price surges by imposing
a maximum. This measure briefly halted inflation by a highly effective system of price
controls, but it was accompanied by food-rationing and wage-restraints which proved to be
intensely unpopular. When Robespierre fell from power, he was brought down by a riot against
wage-controls.9
Then came the counter-revolution called “Thermidor” which took its name from the month
in the revolutionary calendar when the wage riots occurred. A new and highly corrupt regime
called the Directory gained control of the government and relaxed the system of wage and
price controls. The result was yet another period of soaring prices, falling wages, extreme
suffering for the poor, and high prosperity for speculators. More riots occurred, and were met
this time by harsh repression, which ended in the fall of the Directory.
From 1789 to 1799, every twist and turn of fortune in the French Revolution was closely
tied to the movement of prices. Market fluctuations and political events were linked together.10
Meanwhile, the revolutionary spirit spread rapidly to other nations. Everywhere in
Europe and America, prices had risen and real wages had declined. The concentration of
wealth increased. Elites became more assertive of their privileges, and social tensions grew
more intense. These were international events, and so also was the response. The
revolutionary rallying cry of liberty, equality and fraternity was invented not in France but in
the Netherlands. Those powerful ideas were not disembodied abstractions, but concrete
solutions to urgent problems. The result was a wave of revolutions, unprecedented in breadth
and violence.
In rapid succession, revolutions broke out in what is now Belgium (1789), Switzerland
(1792), the Netherlands (1794), Poland (1794) and Ireland (1798). Revolutionary French
armies toppled the old oligarchies of Genoa (1797), Venice (1797), Berne (1798), and many
other Italian cities and Swiss cantons. Assassination was the fate of Sweden’s King Gustavus
III (1792), and Russia’s Czar Paul I (1801). England’s prime minister Spencer Perceval (1812)
was murdered by a bankrupt broker, John Bellingham. In the new republic of the United States,
a peaceable revolution occurred when the Jeffersonian movement transformed a whiggish
Federalist oligarchy into a representative democracy. Revolutions broke out in French and
Spanish colonies of America. Others spread to every corner of the world. On the Comoro
Islands in the Mozambique Channel, the African inhabitants marched against their Arab
masters with banners that read “America is free! Cannot we be?”11
Defenders of the old regime reacted by organizing counterrevolutionary movements that
were more violent than the revolutions themselves. During the 1790s, the worst scenes of
social violence in the western world were the work of conservative mobs in Spain who sought
to purge that country of radical elements.12
By the winter of 1792–93, Prussia, Austria, Britain, Spain, and Holland were at war
against the revolutionary government of France. To pay its heavy military costs, the French
government printed large quantities of unsecured money called Assignats which lost as much
as eighty per cent of their face value in five years—a classic hyperinflation.13 Conservative
regimes were also hard pressed. After war began, the Bank of England ceased to redeem its
banknotes in specie. For atime Britain went off the gold standard, with a consequent decline in
the purchasing value of its currency.14
 Prices soared in many nations. From 1790 to 1815, rates of increase were greater than in
any previous price-revolution. Every European nation and monetary system was caught up in it,
and the Americas as well. From Boston to Buenos Aires, the price of consumables trebled
between 1794 and 1814. Grain prices rose sharply in Canada, the United States and Mexico
during the same period. Between 1767 and 1839 the Middle East, the Balkans and Turkey
experienced what has been called “the most inflationary period in Ottoman history.” The timing
varied in detail, but the trends were almost everywhere the same.15
This surge drove the overall rate of inflation above earlier long waves. The average
annual increase had been one half of one per cent in the medieval price-revolution, and a little
more than one per cent in the sixteenth century. The great wave of the eighteenth century
averaged about 1.7 percent in England, mainly because of sharp increases in the period from
1793 and 1815.16

Figure 3.17 shows the hyperinflations that were caused by the monetary policies of
revolutionary regimes in France and the United States. The price trend in a more stable hard
currency appears in the change in purchasing power of British sterling. Sources for
Continentals are E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public
Finance, 1776–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1961); for Assignats, A. Bailleul, Tableau complet de
valeur des Assignats (Paris, 1797); for British Pounds Sterling, B. R. Mitchell, British
Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988).

Those years were a period of war—not the dynastic quarrels of the mid-eighteenth
century, but social upheavals that combined abstract appeals to high principle with savage
violence such as the western world had not experienced since the crisis of the seventeenth
century. Entire populations went to war with one another. In Russia, Canada and the United
States, national capitals were looted and burned. In Spain, atrocities beyond imagining became
commonplace during the Napoleonic Wars. Goya’s drawings captured the horror of war more
powerfully than any western artist had done since Collot in the general crisis of the seventeenth
century.
The effect of war was to deepen the revolutionary crisis. Every age of glory in military
history is an agony for ordinary people. So it was in the time of Napoleon and Nelson. The
worst suffering came during the decade from 1805 to 1815, when after a brief interlude of
peace the great powers went to war once again. Britain’s Royal Navy won mastery of the sea
at Cape Trafalgar (1805), and the imperial army of France gained a hegemony on the European
mainland in the battles of Austerlitz (1805) and Jena (1806).
Thereafter the struggle changed. Two rival nations, each secure in its own sphere, turned
to economic warfare. Britain imposed a vast blockade on Napoleonic Europe, while France
closed the ports of the continent to British commerce. As the great wave approached its
catastrophic climax, the two strongest nations in the western world went systematically about
the business of wrecking each other’s economy. In this consummate act of human folly, markets
were deliberately disrupted throughout western Europe. The price of food in Britain and
France rose to unprecedented heights. Real wages plummeted, and poverty increased so
rapidly that by 1812 more than half of all English families were dependent on some sort of
poor relief.17
The cost of economic warfare was a heavy burden even for noncombatants. The United
States had flourished as a neutral trader from 1793 to 1805. Now its ships were seized by both
Britain and France. The carrying trade of New England was destroyed, the staple commerce of
the southern states was disrupted, and the United States was drawn inexorably into the vortex
of war. Its economy slipped into a deep depression and yet prices soared, reaching their peak
in the 1814 when commerce was at its lowest ebb. Massive surges occurred in the price of
food and energy.18
But the worst suffering was in the old world. In 1812 Napoleon recruited a huge army
from his European dominions and sent it headlong to destruction in Russia. At the same time,
the Peninsular War between Britain and France reached its climax of barbaric violence. Yet
another war broke between the United States and Britain. Institutions everywhere were
strained to the snapping point. The British government came the edge of insolvency in 1812;
the American republic came close to disintegration in 1814. Finally it was the Napoleonic
Empire that collapsed in bloody ruins.
This general crisis, like those that had preceded it, was also an intellectual event. The
certainties of the Enlightenment were destroyed by the disorders that overtook the Western
world. Confidence in reason and progress was lost. Their apostles became martyrs.
 A case in point was the career of the Marquis de Condorcet, a kind, gentle, and highly
principled gentleman-philosopher who embraced the Enlightenment, welcomed the Revolution,
and became an early convert to its humanitarian ideals. He voted against the execution of Louis
XVI and opposed the arrest of the Girondins. For those acts of humanity he was denounced as a
traitor and driven into hiding, where as a fugitive he wrote an astonishing book called A
History of the Progress of the Human Spirit. Pursued by the Jacobins, he lived like an animal
in woods and abandoned quarries. Finally, he was caught by the peasants whose cause he had
championed. Thrown into prison, abandoned by his friends, bleeding and in rags, this great
apostle of progress took his own life on April 8, 1794.
The melancholy fate of Condorcet was shared by the Enlightenment that he personified.
The Revolution devoured not only its children but also its intellectual parents. During the
period from 1790 to 1815, the dream of reason evaporated in the fires of war, and another
mood began to dominate the intellectual life of the West. Its vehicle was the complex cultural
ideology called romanticism, which had long been gestating in eighteenth century Europe.
During the period from 1800 to 1815, romanticism rapidly gained strength and power, and
became the dominant aesthetic movement in the western world.
Romanticism was most of all a new epistemology. It valued feeling above reason,
intuition above empiricism, and ambiguity above clarity. It tended to look backward to the past
rather than forward to the future. It had little faith in reason or hope for human progress. In
Europe it often expressed a mood of melancholy, drifting even to despair. Romanticism was
Goethe’s sorrowful Young Werther, and the literature of Sturm und Drang. It was Stendhal’s
tragic vision of society, and Wordsworth’s great escape into the company of clouds and
daffodils. In America it was Poe’s tale of Gothic horror, Hawthorne’s scarlet letter, and
Melville’s Captain Ahab. In England it was Byron’s Manfred and Childe Harold, hero-
symbols of alienation from society and even from one’s self. The general crisis became a
cultural revolution that transformed the values of the western world.
The great wave reached its crest and broke with shattering violence during the
Napoleonic Wars (1796–1815). With uncanny precision, prices reached their peak in each
nation during the moment of its greatest military peril—Germany in 1808, Russia in 1812,
Britain in 1812–13, the United States in 1814. The battles of Leipzig and Waterloo, Baltimore
and New Orleans proved to be pivotal for the history of prices, as they were for politics and
war.
Thereafter, the secular trend suddenly broke and prices began to fall. This transition was
not a clean and simple break. The new trend had barely begun when its progress was suddenly
interrupted by one of the most severe moments of climate-stress in modern history. The years
from 1814 to 1818 were marked by extremely harsh winters and cold wet summers. The worst
came in 1816. In Europe, the summer of that year was cold, dark, wet and gloomy. A party of
literati spent their ruined Swiss vacation indoors, writing horror fantasies that captured the
prevailing mood. Mary Shelley invented Frankenstein and Lord Byron’s physician Dr.
Polidori created The Vampyre. In the northern United States, 1816 was the “year without a
summer.” Killing frosts occurred in every month, and crops were widely ruined. In Ohio
folklore 1816 was called “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to death.” New England remembered it
as the Mackerel Year.
Crop shortages were more severe in 1816–17 than in 1788, and food prices surged to
high levels. But the cultural consequences were different than before. Grain poured into
western Europe—Ukrainian grain from the new port of Odessa, American grain from
Baltimore, Egyptian grain from Alexandria, Turkish grain from Constantinople. The growing
integration of a global food market saved Europe from starvation.
Governments had become more efficient in providing social welfare. As a consequence
the poor did not starve in a period of scarcity. Mortality increased very little. In New England,
the death rate actually declined during the coldest years.
The new nation-states had also learned from hard experience how to control social
violence before it reached the flashpoint of revolution. Standing armies, national guards, and
new professional police forces throughout the western world prevented popular insurrections
and food riots from overturning governments. The crisis of 1816 passed without major
unrest.19
After 1816 the weather improved, but the western world suffered yet another heavy blow.
In the United States, a commercial panic began in 1819, and grew into a full-scale depression.
Prices plummeted, pauperism increased, and unemployment became a more serious social
problem than it ever been before. Once again, the new charitable organizations prevented
starvation, and professional peacekeepers preserved order.
Full economic recovery did not occur until the 1820s, a decade after Waterloo and half a
century after revolutions had shattered the old regimes of many western nations. Only then did
the crisis come to an end. A new equilibrium at last emerged.

The Victorian Equilibrium, circa 1820–1896

This new change-regime might be called the price equilibrium of the Victorian era. It
coincided almost exactly with the life of Queen Victoria herself (1819–1901), and was closely
linked to the cultural values that she represented. Its character was most clearly evident in
Great Britain. Prices in that nation fell sharply from 1813 to the early 1820s, then fluctuated
within a fixed range for more than fifty years. They fell again during the depression of 1873,
and stabilized once more until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. There was no sustained
inflation in Britain from 1820 to 1896.l
Similar patterns also appeared in other nations, with variations that reflected their
different histories. In Germany, prices came down rapidly during the period from 1815 to
1830. Thereafter, the general price level fluctuated on a flat plane for the rest of the nineteenth
century. Here again, the equilibrium was not static. Every major political event in German
history left its mark upon price movements. None changed the underlying pattern in a
fundamental way, and some reinforced it.
A case in point was the creation of the Zollverein, the customs union that began with a
treaty between Prussia and Schwarzburg-Sondershausen (1819), and gradually expanded to
include most of Germany by 1844. This economic union removed barriers to internal
commerce, and created a more free and open national market. Between 1819 and 1844, prices
in Germany became more stable than before, and more orderly even than in Britain.
During the late 1840s, a period of bad weather and widespread crop failures briefly
disrupted that stability, and caused a surge in prices through Germany and central Europe.
These disturbances were partly responsible for the revolutions of 1848, which were set in
motion by short crops and surging costs. After 1849, equilibrium rapidly returned.2
Another period of price-volatility in Germany was caused by three wars of national
unification: the Danish War (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian
War (1870). Prices rose sharply during these events. After 1871 they reverted to the general
trend.3
In the United States, the Civil War (1861–65) caused a burst of inflation that disrupted the
underlying equilibrium, and departed from economic trends in Europe. In the northern states,
the combined impact of the Civil War on supply and demand, marketing and manufactures,
fiscal policy and the monetary system all combined to drive prices to higher.4
An even greater disruption occurred in the southern Confederacy, which experienced
extreme hyperinflation during the Civil War. So primitive was the economy of the slave states
in 1861 that they lacked artisans with sufficient skills to engrave notes and bills. Lacking other
resources, the Confederacy paid for the war by issuing unsecured paper currency: at first in
small amounts and large denominations, later in many millions of little bills. Confederate
dollars were so crudely lithographed that counterfeit money was detected by its superior
quality. For a time, the value of this money was sustained by southern patriotism, and by high
hopes of victory to come. As late as the spring of 1863, Confederate currency still held much
of its value: the normal rate of exchange was two southern dollars to one Yankee greenback.
After the Battle of Gettysburg, however, the exchange rate fell abruptly to four for one. Still,
southern patriots continued to accept Confederate money at face value as late as 1865. The
Confederacy never declared its notes to be legal tender; their value was a function of the
loyalty of the people who accepted them. Nearly a billion dollars were issued during the
conflict.5
The Civil War and its painful aftermath were followed by rapid price deflation. By 1880
the effect of the war on American price levels had entirely disappeared. Thereafter, price
trends in the United States rejoined the general equilibrium in the Western world. By the early
1890s, wholesale price indices in Britain, Germany and the United States moved almost as
one.
Figure 3.18 traces the movement of consumable prices in England from 1812 to 1914. A
period of falling prices (1812–22) came after the crisis of the previous price-revolution. This
deflation was followed by fluctuations on a fixed plane (1822–73), then by a second sharp
deflation (1873–82), and yet another period of stability. The source is E. H. Phelps-Brown and
Sheila Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Price of Consumables,” Economica 23 (1956) 740–
41.

The equilibrium of the Victorian era was highly complex in its dynamics. Its underlying
stability increased the visibility of many cyclical rhythms. There were harvest cycles in farm
prices, inventory cycles in manufactures, and commercial cycles of many different lengths.
There were diurnal cycles, weekly cycles, seasonal cycles, annual cycles, generational cycles
and perhaps a fifty-year cycle. Many of these vibrations were highly regular in their complex
cadence. As the equilibrium continued, the amplitudes of short-cycle movements (harvest
fluctuations in particular) tended to diminish through time. This dampening process was typical
of price equilibria in general, and very different from the expanding amplitudes that developed
in price-revolutions.6
Prices of specific commodities varied through space as well as time, but here again the
variance tended to be highly stable and regular in its patterns. The price of grain was
comparatively high in the urban-industrial heartland of western Europe and also in the more
densely settled parts of the eastern United States. It was lower in central Europe and American
midlands, and lowest in eastern Russia and the American West. This classic ring-pattern
persisted through the nineteenth century, but differences between core and peripheral prices
tended to diminish as world grain markets became more integrated.7
Figure 3.19 surveys wholesale prices in Germany (1913=100), France (1901–10=100), and
the U.S.A. (1910–14=100). The pattern was similar in all three nations: stable or declining
prices from 1820 to 1896, punctuated by short surges of inflation (mostly war-related) that
disrupted the prevailing equilibrium only for a few years. The sources are A. Jacobs and H.
Richter, Die Grosshandelpreise in Deutschland von 1792 bis 1934 (Berlin, 1935); A.
Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des prix et des revenus en France de 1798 à 1820 (Paris,
1945); Historical Statistics of the United States (1976) series E40, 52.

Other complex patterns appeared in the relative movement of prices, wages, rent and
interest. While prices fluctuated on the same plane or even declined, real wages rose buoyantly
—as in other periods of equilibrium. By one measure (an index constructed by Henry Phelps-
Brown and Sheila Hopkins), the real wages of English building craftsmen increased more than
400 percent from 1801 to 1899. That comparison overstated the magnitude of change: 1801
was an exceptionally hard year; 1899 was a time of high prosperity. Other benchmarks showed
smaller magnitudes of increase—a doubling of real wages rather than quadrupling. But always
the same upward trend appeared. Both money wages and real wages increased in Britain,
France, Germany, Sweden and every other European nation where data has come to hand. In
this respect the equilibrium of the Victorian era was similar to those of the twelfth century, the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment.8
Figure 3.20 reports evidence of a sustained rise in real wages, which for British builders
trebled during the nineteenth century. The source is E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila Hopkins,
“Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates,”
Economica 23 (1956) 296–315.

Wages also rose in the United States, but the American pattern was less stable than that in
Britain. Real earnings of workers fell sharply during the Civil War, reaching their nineteenth
century nadir in 1866, largely as a consequence of the price inflation in that period. Panics and
depressions in 1873 and 1893 also drove wages down, but these dark intervals were the
exceptions. Long-term improvement was the rule for both highly skilled artisans and farm
laborers.9
These generalizations, it must be emphasized, refer to the income of workers only during
periods of employment. “The great difficulty,” writes Stephan Thernstrom, “lies not in
estimating the daily wage, but in judging how many days each year the laborer was likely to
find work.” He estimated that unskilled laborers in Massachusetts were unemployed two or
three months in every year during the mid-nineteenth century. Whether this proportion
increased or diminished during the course of the nineteenth century we are unable to discover.
Thernstrom believes that it changed little from mid-century to the 1870s, but even a small
alteration would have made a major difference in real income, as distinct from real wages.10
Figure 3.21 finds a long, slow decline in sale prices of English and Welsh real estate from
1812 to 1864, followed by a brief rise from 1864 to 1877. The secular trend in rent was stable
through the nineteenth century. The source is E. M. Carus-Wilson, “A Century of Land Values:
England and Wales,” Essays in Economic History, III, 128–31.

Further, a rise in the cost of labor was not always a return to laborers themselves. An
example was the slave economy of the American South before the Civil War, with its
combination of a free market and unfree labor. The price of slaves in the southern states moved
in parallel with real wages in Europe and the northern States, as it had done in earlier periods.
During the late eighteenth century slave prices had fallen sharply in America, at the same time
that real wages for free workers had been declining rapidly in western Europe. That trend
reversed during the 1790s. Slave prices began to rise from $300 (or less) in 1795 to $1200 in
Virginia and $1800 in New Orleans on the eve of the Civil War.
The increase in slave prices was greater in its magnitude than the rise of real wages for
free labor. Nevertheless, the direction of change was similar in both labor systems. The long
secular rise of slave prices from 1815 to 1860 was not unique to the “peculiar institution” of
the American South, nor was it driven primarily by the economics of slavery itself, as
historians have mistakenly believed. The trend in slave prices was part of a much larger
movement throughout the Western world.11
The Victorian equilibrium was not a golden era of prosperity for everyone. All felt the
bite of hard times some of the time; some suffered all of the time. Grain farmers were in deep
trouble throughout the world after the panic of 1873, with political consequences that included
the Populist movement in the United States, the “revolt of the field” in Britain, and rural unrest
in Europe. But in general real wages rose for most workers.
At the same time that real wages were rising, returns to capital (as measured by rates of
interest) fell steadily during the nineteenth century, as they had done in other periods of price
equilibrium. This trend clearly appeared in the city of London, the epicenter of international
capitalism in the nineteenth century, where bonds were called “stocks,” and stocks were
“shares,” and public securities were “funds.” Their annual performance was carefully
monitored in a publication called Fenn on the Funds, a Victorian equivalent of Moody’s
Manual which showed a striking pattern of stable change for nearly a century.
The most important funds were the “consols” that the United Kingdom had long issued for
its national borrowing. In 1812, when Britain was simultaneously fighting separate wars
against France and the United States, the average yield of Consols rose to 5.08 percent.
Thereafter, the rate of return declined for 85 years, reaching bottom at 2.25 percent in 1897.
This downward trend was not perfectly constant. The Crimean War drove up interest rates and
commercial depressions brought them down again, but through these many fluctuations the
pattern of secular change was stable for a century.12
The same tendency also appeared in the public securities of other western nations. Yields
on French rentes, Dutch perpetuals, Prussian bonds and New England municipals all showed
similar patterns of secular decline. There were a few exceptions. The government of France
had to pay more for its money after its revolutions in 1830, 1848 and 1871. But these fiscal
disturbances were remarkably shallow and short-lived. Even the French government, despite a
persistent reputation for political disorder, was able to meet its public obligations with 3
percent securities during the late nineteenth century.13
Interest rates in private transactions were higher, and also more variable, than those for
public funds. The Bank of England charged its individual customers different rates, after
ranking them on a scale that was more moral than material, from “dealers in greatest
respectability and opulence” to “persons in low estimation.” Each borrower was offered a
discount to match the measure of his depravity. Private debtors of high eminence but dubious
reputation were compelled to pay interest that would shock even a twentieth-century
sensibility. In 1840, Britain’s future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli was charged annual
interest of 40 percent for a loan to cover a “pressing liability.” In general, however, interest
rates tended to decline in private lending as well as public finance during the Victorian
equilibrium. The trend was consistently downward throughout the long equilibrium of
Victorian era.14

Figure 3.22 summarizes evidence of a long decline in rates of interest throughout the western
world from 1820 to 1896. The source is Homer, History of Interest Rates, 196–209.

Returns to land—both rent and real estate prices—also fell, then stabilized and fell again
in the early nineteenth century. A history of land in Saxony-Anhalt showed a very close
correlation between real estate values and the price of rye from 1820 to 1895. Land prices and
rents also moved together in Prussia, England and the United States.15
These trends were full of trouble for rural estate-owners, and in time their tribulations
would be visited upon the world. The landowning classes faced falling rents, rising wages and
depressed agricultural prices all at the same time. England’s county families, Prussian Junkers
and southern planters in the United States all shared that same predicament. These landholders
traced their descent (in spiritual terms at least) from Europe’s old feudal elites, and raised
their sons to a warrior ethic. As the pax victoriana wore on, more than a few of these
energetic young men were bankrupt, bored, and bloody-minded—a dangerous combination.
Some sought adventure overseas in “splendid little wars” and distant conquests; the British
Empire has been called a system of outdoor relief for the upper classes. Others pursued
politics and diplomacy as an equivalent of war, which was still more menacing to world peace
—all the more so when the horrors of the last great European slaughter were forgotten, or half-
remembered in a haze of glory. In the sunny afternoon of the Victorian era, the dark clouds
began to gather on the distant horizon.
Altogether, the relative returns to land, labor, and capital were much the same in the
Victorian equilibrium as they had been during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. They were
also similar in their social results. In the middle and later stages of every price equilibrium
(but not in the early stages), the distribution of wealth tended to stabilize, or even to become a
little more equal. There was a lag-effect here. In the early nineteenth century, inequality
continued to increase, as it had done during the later stages of the price-revolution of the
eighteenth century. But after 1850 wealth and income tended to become more equal in their
distribution or to remain on the same plane of inequality. This tendency appeared in the later
stages of all other equilibria, and the lag pattern was always the same.
Figure 3.23 shows stability in wealth and income distribution during the nineteenth century in
Britain and the United States. This was the net effect of stable rents, falling returns to capital
and rising real wages. Sources include Lee Soltow, “Long-Run Changes in British Income
Inequality,” Economic History Review, 21 (1968) 17–29; Peter Lindert and Jeffrey
Williamson, “Revising England’s Social Tables,” EEH, 19 (1982) 385–408; Charles
Feinstein, “The Rise and Fall of the Williamson Curve,” Journal of Economic History, 48
(1988) 699–729; R. V. Jackson, “Inequality of Incomes and Lifespans in England since 1688,”
Economic History Review, 47 (1994) 508–24; Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth in the United
States, 1850–1870 (New Haven, 1975); idem, Patterns of Wealthholding in Wisconsin since
1850 (Madison, 1971); Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom (Cambridge,
1977); Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton
Rouge, 1978).

In other respects, however, the Victorian era was unique. It was more dynamic in its
structure than any comparable period. During the equilibria of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment, population had increased very little. A balance was achieved between low
rates of economic development and a lower pace of demographic growth. This was not the
case in the Victorian era. In Europe, America, and throughout the world, population grew at an
exponential rate through the nineteenth century. Rapid population rises had often occurred
before— always with the same inflationary effect upon price levels. As Labrousse wrote, an
inflation des hommes had been accompanied by inflation d’argent and inflation des prix as
well.
In the nineteenth century something else happened. Population went on increasing, and
prices fluctuated on the same plateau. English historians Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schofield
write, “If there was a notable uniformity in the behavior of the two series relative to each other
until the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, there was a remarkably clean break with
the past thereafter. . . . The historic link between population growth and price rise was broken;
an economic revolution had taken place.”16
Wrigley and Schofield were right in one way, but wrong in another. It is true that a simple,
surface correlation between prices and population disappeared, just as they said. But the link
was not broken altogether. A deeper association persisted in the second derivative of change.
The rhythm of change in rates of population increase during the nineteenth century continued to
correlate very closely with price movements. The Victorian equilibrium was indeed something
new in the world—a dynamic balance between rates of change in rates of change.
The Victorian equilibrium also derived its stability from magnitudes of change in
economic growth. Real output (per capita) of the American economy, for example, had grown
only about 0.6 percent each year before 1790. After 1825, it grew at a rate of approximately
1.6 percent a year—enough to double national product per capita every forty-three years. This
rate was maintained throughout the nineteenth century. Similar trends (with differences of
timing) occurred in European nations.17
Figure 3.24 compares price movements with rates of population growth in Britain. Both series
are decennial means of annual data. Sources include E. A. Wrigley and Roger S. Schofield et
al., The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981),
table A3, column 3 (estimated values of compound annual growth rates); and Henry Phelps-
Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices (New York, 1981).
Figure 3.25 makes a different comparison between price levels and absolute magnitudes of
population size. Wrigley and Schofield found that between 1811 and 1871 English population
doubled while prices fell. They concluded that “the historic link between population growth
and price rise was broken; an economic revolution had taken place” (pp. 403–4). This
statement is correct in its own terms, but if one compares rates of growth rather than
magnitudes of change, a strong link between the dynamics of demographic and economic
change continued through the 19th century. An economic revolution had indeed taken place, but
the association between population growth and price movements remained very important.
 Equilibrium at higher levels of economic growth was achieved in many ways. A
revolution in transportation created broader markets, which allowed larger units of production.
An agricultural revolution released many workers from the soil and allowed them to shift to
other sectors where their labor was more productive. An industrial revolution increased the
productivity of labor and capital. A commercial revolution radically improved the efficiency
of exchange.
Other factors included the emigration of Europeans in large numbers to other parts of the
world where the marginal return on their labor and capital was higher than at home. Also
important was the economic development of new regions which produced commodities in
unprecedented quantity: Mississippi cotton, Argentine beef, Australian wheat, New Zealand
mutton, African ore and Canadian timber. Perhaps the most important factor was the integration
of a world market through the nineteenth century, which created vast economies of scale.
The Victorian equilibrium was a great whirring machine with many moving parts. It did
not always run smoothly. The economy of the western world moved through alternating periods
of prosperity and depression, but even these disturbances were remarkable for their regularity.
In the United States, major panics and depressions tended to recur at twenty-year intervals:
1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893. The rhythm of these economic fluctuations remained
remarkably stable for nearly a century.
Far from disturbing the Victorian equilibrium in any fundamental way, this pattern was
part of the process by which the balance was maintained. In an era of equilibrium, the market
operated as a self-correcting mechanism—a process that prompted contemporary observers
such as John Stuart Mill (1806–73) and Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) to develop the timeless
axioms of classical economics.
But the conditions that inspired them were not eternal. They did not operate in the same
way before 1815 or after 1896, or in any other period of modern history. The dynamic stability
of the Victorian equilibrium was unique. It was maintained by an unprecedented set of balances
between rapid population growth and even more rapid economic growth, between industrial
transformation and agricultural revolution, between massive international migration and still
more massive domestic movements, between overseas development and commercial
integration of a world economy.18
A few economists have attempted to explain the Victorian equilibrium primarily in
monetarist terms. Monetary factors did indeed have an impact on prices throughout the period,
but they did not create the equilibrium itself. In the United States, for example, annual
fluctuations in price levels and the money supply (that is, specie, banknotes and bank deposits)
tended to correlate closely, and were much the same in timing. But magnitudes and secular
trends were very different. Large changes in the supply of money caused price movements that
were comparatively small, by the measure of other periods. Money supply in the United States
increased enormously during the 1820s and 1830s, more than trebling in a period of fifteen
years, according to estimates by Peter Temin. But price levels remained remarkably stable,
rising and falling only about 15 percent in that same period. A similar pattern also appeared
during the 1840s and 1850s, when large swings in the supply of money coincided with very
small movements in price levels. Clearly a close relationship existed between the quantity of
money and the level of prices in the American economy. All things being equal, that
relationship was strong and intimate, but ceteris non paribus is the iron law of economic
history.19
In this age of equilibrium, monetary and demographic factors might be understood as
strong centrifugal forces, acting to pull prices off their stable base. Those elements were
balanced by equally strong centripetal forces of expanding production and exchange, which
drew them in again. The dynamic equilibrium of the nineteenth century might be envisioned as
a Tenniel engraving of a tug-of-war between two teams of muscular Victorian athletes, each of
approximately equal strength. On one side were the wiry Centrifugals, with currency symbols
embroidered on their old school caps. On the other side were the brawny Centripetals,
straining mightily in the opposite direction. With much tumult and shouting, the rope moved
slightly one way and then the other, but the white rag remained in the middle until 1896, when
the exhausted Centripetals collapsed in a heap.
The dynamic equilibrium of the Victorian era was not entirely self-generating. It found
support from exogenous factors of various kinds—in particular from favorable climatic
conditions. After a period of very nasty weather which historians call the “little ice age,” the
climate of western Europe and North America grew warmer through much of the nineteenth
century. English meteorologist H. H. Lamb observes that “the price rise around 1800 could be
attributable largely to the interference of the Napoleonic wars with supplies and with trade, but
the time does coincide with the latest of the great periods of advance of the glaciers and the
Arctic Sea ice about Iceland.” There were no major climatic anomalies in the next century of
remotely comparable magnitude. The amelioration of climate may have made a difference in
price levels, but it was not a major factor. Long changes in climate do not correlate with long
waves in the history of prices.20
Figure 3.26 compares monetary estimates from Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New
York, 1969), 71, 159; and price indices from Historical Statistics of the U. S., E52, E135.
Figure 3.27 surveys world stocks of gold and silver, which rapidly increased during the
nineteenth century, while prices remained stable or declined. The source is Pierre Vilar, A
History of Gold and Money, 1450–1520 (London, 1984), 352.

Whatever the cause of the Victorian equilibrium may have been, its consequences were
abundantly clear. A period of comparative poitical stability developed in Europe. The century
from 1815 to 1914 was one of the few periods in that continent’s long and bloody history when
there was no general war. The only exception was the Crimean War, which was kept securely
in bounds. The nineteenth century was an era of many smaller wars, some of which were very
costly in life and treasure. There were wars of national integration such as the Prussian wars
against Denmark, Austria and France, the American Civil War, and the conflicts of the Italian
Risorgimento. Small imperialist wars were also very numerous. In the reign of Queen Victoria,
the British army fought six Ashanti wars, five Basuto wars, three Afghan wars, three Burmese
wars, two Maori wars, two Matabele wars, two Boer Wars, two Sikh wars, two Sudanese
wars, and altogether 230 colonial wars, punitive expeditions, and insurrections.21

Figure 3.28 finds falling arrest rates in Chicago, falling crime rates in Stockholm, and falling
conviction rates in London (five-year moving average of convictions in Middlesex County,
1834 58, and the Metropolitan Police District, 1869–1900). Sources include Ted Robert Gurr,
Rogues, Rebels, and Reformers: A Political History of Urban Crime and Conflict (Beverly
Hills and London, 1976), 38–40, 63; Wesley G. Skogan, Chicago since 1840: A Time-Series
Data Handbook (Urbana, 1975); Theodore N. Ferdinand, “The Criminal Patterns of Boston
since 1849 ,” American Journal of Sociology 73 (1967) 688–98, and Gurr, 39–46.

Figure 3.29 shows that rates of illegitimacy declined in close association with the price of
wheat during the nineteenth century. This long trend followed an earlier rise in bastardy during
the price revolution of the eighteenth century, and preceded another sustained increase in the
price revolution of the twentieth century. Plotted here are decennial ratios of illegitimate births
per 100 live births in England and Wales (civil registration), compared with the Abel index of
English wheat prices (decennial averages in grams of pure silver per 100 kilograms of grain).
Sources include Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and Richard M. Smith, eds., Bastardy and Its
Comparative History (Cambridge, 1980), 17; and Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und
Agrarkonjunktur, appendix.

Figure 3.30 shows the sustained decline of alcohol consumption in the United States during the
nineteenth century. Estimates include spirits, wine, and beer, converted to ethanol equivalents.
Beer includes hard cider, the leading alcoholic beverage in early America. The source is
Merton M. Hyman, et al., Drink, Drinking, and Alcohol Related Mortality . . .(New
Brunswick, 1980) Many other studies have replicated these findings.
 The economic effect of these conflicts was to integrate an ever larger proportion of the
world’s population into national and even global markets, and monetary systems. Many
scholars have written about the effect of European contact on primitive monetary systems that
Europeans called “pseudo-money.” French historian Fernand Braudel observes, “The fate of
this pseudo-money after the European impact (whether cowries in Bengal, wampum after 1670
or the Congo zimbos) proves identical in every case where it can be investigated— monstrous
and catastrophic inflation, caused by an increase in reserves, an accelerated and even hectic
circulation, and a concomitant devaluation in relation to the dominant European money.”22
But economic chaos was merely the first effect. The second result was economic order.
Local markets were incorporated in a larger system, where price movements became
progressively more stable. The price equilibrium of the Victorian era promoted political
stabilization and integration, which further increased price equilibrium, which in turn brought
more stability and integration.
The effect of price equilibrium upon society was also to promote another sort of social
integration. This was a period when crime declined throughout the western world, after a
period of sharp increase in the crisis of the eighteenth century. In London, Bombay, and even in
Chicago life became more orderly during the Victorian era. Indicators of social deviance and
family disruption also declined: alcohol consumption fell sharply; so also did rates of
prenuptial pregnancy and sexual deviance. All had risen during the eighteenth century.
The most important cultural correlate of the Victorian equilibrium was what Walter
Houghton calls the Victorian frame of mind. Houghton (not the best guide on this question, for
he went to excessive lengths to stress similarities between the Victorians and ourselves)
defined the Victorian mind-frame in terms of optimism, anxiety, the will to believe, dogmatism,
rigidity, the commercial spirit, earnestness, enthusiasm, hero worship, love and hypocrisy.
Different words appear in other lists—liberalism, improvement, confidence, strength, faith and
certainty.
Historian G. M. Young approached the subject in a different way. He organized the
Victorian era into a chronology of thinkers, arranged by the year in which they reached the age
of 35. This list of “floruits” began in the year 1830 with Arnold and Carlyle. It ended in 1901–
2 with Wells, Galsworthy, and Stanley Baldwin. It is a list of high complexity, and cannot be
encompassed by unitary generalizations. But in the phrase of one eminent Victorian, F. W.
Maitland, there is in every era a “common thought of common things.” On this level, which the
Victorians themselves called their zeitgeist, we may find elements of cultural unity.23
In the Victorian era, as in the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, creative thinkers in
many fields drew their conceptual models from their historical condition. Similar textures of
thought appeared in the biology of Darwin (1809–82), the geology of Charles Lyell (1797–
1875), the historiography of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the economics of Karl Marx
(1818–83), the politics of William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98) and the statecraft of Abraham
Lincoln (1809–65).
However different their ideologies may have been, these Victorians all thought of the
world in dynamic terms as a process rather than a static state. All of them understood that
world-process as a sequence of conflicts which were progressive, coherent, self-regulating
and self-sustaining. The Darwinian principle of natural selection, the Rankean idea of
historicism, the Marxian model of dialectical materialism, the Lyellian concept of geologic
stratiology, the Lincolnian creed of liberal conservatism and the Gladstonian ideology of
conservative liberalism shared those qualities in common.
These large ideas resembled the Victorian equilibrium itself, which was a dynamic,
progressive, self-balancing and self-sustaining structure of countervailing forces. Most of these
thinkers (with a few exceptions such as Lincoln) also shared a spirit that H. G. Wells called
“optimistic fatalism.” This, too, was an expression of the Victorian equilbrium, and an
instrument by which it was maintained.
THE FOURTH WAVE
The Price Revolution of the Twentieth Century

Wages chase prices, prices chase wages, and both

chase their past history.

—Clyde Farnsworth, 1977

LONDON, June 22, 1897, Diamond Jubilee Day. The rain-washed streets of this proud
imperial city sparkled in the summer sun, as the people of Britain prepared to celebrate the
sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne. At precisely eleven o’clock in
the morning, the Queen repaired to her Royal Message Room in Buckingham Palace and sent a
telegram of congratulations to her subjects throughout the world—370 million of them. Then
she put on an ostrich-feathered bonnet, unfurled a small parasol of white silk, and traveled in
an open carriage to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Her escort included 50,000 troops in brilliant uniform
from every part of the Empire. Above the rooftops of the city, thousands of Union Jacks flew in
the summer breeze. In the narrow streets happy crowds doffed caps, waved white
handkerchiefs, and cheered their aged Queen.

In many ways, the London that Queen Victoria looked upon that morning still seems remarkably
the same today. Buckingham Palace and the great Cathedral of St. Paul are outwardly the same,
despite the depredations of the Luftwaffe and the London smog. The red coats of the Queen’s
Brigade of Guards, and the scarlet tunics of their officers, are still the same—and so are the
class-distinctions that those subtle shadings represent. The Household Cavalry in their
gleaming cuirasses and high flowing plumes still look and sound the same as they clatter down
the Mall on jet-black horses. The Royal Horse Artillery still dress in the same dark blue shell
jackets and red busby bags on state occasions, as when they saluted their Queen-Empress on
her anniversary a century ago.

But these superficial resemblances are apt to be deceiving. The city of London today is far
removed in time and mood and social circumstance from the metropolis that celebrated Queen
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee on June 22, 1897. The most profound differences are not to be
found in the many material transformations: not in the swarms of small cars that choke the
narrow streets of the City, or the hideous modern buildings that sprout like concrete weeds in
Mayfair, or the shoals of tourists in shorts and tee-shirts at Piccadilly, or the muffled Arab
women in Rolls Royces, parked three deep outside the shops of Knightsbridge.

London is more profoundly different in less tangible ways—most of all, in its memories of the
past and its expectations for the future. In 1897, nearly all of its inhabitants had lived their
entire lives in an era of stability and comparative peace. No general war had marred the peace
of Europe since 1815, except the brief unpleasantness in the Crimea. Every ten or twenty years
the British economy had drifted into a commercial depression, but prosperity had rapidly
returned. Real wages had risen for nearly a century, and prices had remained remarkably stable
for many years. The purchasing power of the pound sterling was actually greater on Diamond
Jubilee Day than it had been in 1819, when the old Queen was born. In 1897, a gilt-edged
government security paid a steady 2 percent, which was thought to be an entirely reasonable
return on capital. Inflation was regarded as a distant horror that was visited upon less
deserving nations as divine punishment for their economic sins.

On Diamond Jubilee Day in 1897, eminent Victorians contemplated the future with the same
confidence that marked their memories of the past. Peace, progress, and stability were thought
to be natural and normal in the world. They were firmly expected to continue.

But it was not to be. The Victorian certainties that London celebrated on Diamond Jubilee Day
had already begun to be left behind by events. When we look back on the economic indicators
for the year 1897, they reveal to us in retrospect a pattern that was still mercifully invisible to
those whose lives it would transform. Beneath the surface of events, the equilibrium of the
Victorian era had come quietly to an end. On the day that the Queen and her subjects
commemorated sixty years of stability and peace, a deep change was silently occurring in the
structure of change itself. That sunny June morning in 1897, the Western world was entering a
new era, which would be filled with horrors that the Victorians could scarcely have imagined,
much less foretold. This new epoch has continued to our own time. One of its many material
manifestations was a long movement that might be called the price-revolution of the twentieth
century.

Slow Beginnings, 1896–1914

In the year 1896, wholesale commodity prices in Britain and the United States reached their
lowest level in more than a century. Then, during the year of the Diamond Jubilee, they began
to rise a little—not very much, not enough for anyone to notice. The increase was only about 1
percent that year, smaller than the range of annual fluctuations. But we may observe a large
significance in that small advance. It marked the beginning of a price-revolution that would
continue for more than a century.1

Students of American history will observe an irony in the timing of this event. It began
immediately after the presidential election of 1896. The major issues in that campaign were
low prices and scarce money. The cost of living in the United States had shown no long-term
secular increase since 1814. Commodity prices had actually fallen after 1870. It is not easy for
us, the children of a long inflation, to understand that our ancestors in the 1890s felt as deeply
threatened by falling prices as we have been by rising ones.

The American presidential election of 1896 centered on that economic problem. Democratic
candidate William Jennings Bryan terrified the possessing classes by proposing a bimetallic
monetary standard, and “free and unlimited” coinage of silver, mainly to encourage higher farm
prices and wages. Republican nominee William McKinley defended the gold standard,
maintained a moderate position on silver, and pledged to protect the sanctity of property.
McKinley won the election, and the possessing classes breathed a collective sigh of
deliverance.2

Ironically, they did so at the moment when prices began to creep upward. The same inflection-
point simultaneously appeared in the price records of many Western nations: Austria-Hungary
(1896–97), Belgium (1895–96), Britain (1896–97), Germany (1896–97), Italy (1897–98),
Norway (1897–98), Spain (1896–97), Sweden (1895–96) and the United States (1896–97).
Each of these countries had its own monetary system. All of them began to experience the
price-revolution at the same time.3
Figure 4.01 surveys annual price movements in the United States. Sources include Historical
Statistics of the United States (1976), series E23, E135; Statistical Abstract of the United
States (1988), table 735; Statistical Abstract of the United States (1993), tables 756, 764.

Once begun, the new inflation continued at a moderate pace from 1896 to 1914, averaging
between 1 and 2 percent each year. The rate of gain was variable: comparatively small in
Britain and the United States; larger in Spain and Germany. But almost everywhere, the same
upward tendency appeared.

Rising prices were at first welcomed as a timely correction of a recent deflation that had
caused many social problems. During the depression year of 1894, the wholesale price of
wheat in the United States had fallen to fifty-six cents a bushel, the lowest since the eighteenth
century. Rising prices promised relief for farmers, merchants, and manufacturers alike. The
authoritative Financial Review commented, “A retrospect of 1897 is much more pleasing than
was a similar retrospect of 1896. The year was marked by a decisive recovery of business . . .
and at the year’s close we find the outlook more hopeful than for many years past.”4

Figure 4.02 finds that the structure of change in the twentieth century was similar to other price
revolutions, but not entirely the same. As before, magnitudes increased exponentially and the
underlying rate of change remained stable. But this great wave showed less annual variability,
and little expansion of amplitudes. Sources include Historical Statistics of the United States
(1976), series E135; Statistical Abstract of the United States (1988–94). Trend lines are
fitted with an Excel 5.0 program.

The decade that followed, from 1897 to 1907, was marked by the same sense of sustained
prosperity. A few short downturns did not disrupt the prevailing optimism. In the United States,
a “rich man’s panic” in 1903 caused stock prices to drop sharply after the U.S. Steel
Corporation missed a dividend and a merger plan collapsed in the American shipbuilding
industry. But that disturbance was largely limited to Wall Street, and the speed of the recovery
encouraged the general mood of confidence.

A larger panic in 1907 caused a short but very sharp contraction. In the United States,
unemployment surged from 2 to 8 percent in 1908. Producer prices fell a little in America,
Britain, France, and Germany that year. But within a few months prosperity returned. By 1909,
everything was moving up again. Wages were up. Profits were up. Employment was up. Farm
income reached record levels.

At first, the great wave of the twentieth century remained invisible to contemporary observers,
much as every other price-revolution had been. But as early as 1904, the continuing rise of
prices began to be recognized as a secular trend. A few alert contemporaries searched for an
explanation.

Some attributed the increase in price levels to an expansion in the supply of gold and silver. In
1886, the fabulous gold mines of Johannesburg had been discovered, entirely by accident. In
1890, gold was found on Cripple Creek in Colorado; the lucky finder, William Stratton, made a
fortune of $125 million within a few years. Canadian gold began to flow from the Klondike in
1896. The Alaskan gold rush began in 1898. But these events were part of a long continuum of
gold discoveries that had happened through the nineteenth century without raising prices. The
rate of growth in gold production throughout the world was roughly the same before and after
1896. Moreover, the pace of secular increase in silver production actually declined during the
1890s.5

After the fact, another monetarist explanation has been suggested by American economists who
believe that the rise of prices after 1896 was caused by acceleration in the growth of the
money supply within the United States—from 6 percent in the period 1879–97, to 7.5 percent
in the years 1897–1914. That idea is mistaken. Another economist, Arthur Lewis, has
demonstrated that the estimates on which it rests are an artifact of periodization—that is, on the
choice of years that frame the temporal generalization. Annual fluctuations were large enough
to make a major difference in that respect. Lewis finds that the growth of money (and national
product) in the United States occurred at virtually the same pace, before and after 1896.
Further, an expansion in the American money supply alone could not have set the price-
revolution in motion. This was an international event. Prices began to rise simultaneously in
most currencies and monetary systems throughout the world.6
Figure 4.03 surveys wholesale prices in nine nations from 1890 to 1914. Most show similar
trends: stasis or decline in the last years of the Victorian equilibrium, a turning point circa
1896, and sustained increase (circa 1896–1914). These common trends marked the beginning
of the price revolution of the twentieth century. The data are from B. R. Mitchell, European
Historical Statistics (2d rev. ed., New York, 1981), 772–75. All are converted to a common
base (1890=100).
Figure 4.04 compares wholesale prices (1910–14=100) with the supply of currency held by
the public (in billions of dollars) in the United States. It shows strong similarities in the timing
of short-term fluctuations: prices and currency all rose in the boom of the 1880s and declined
in the panic and depression of 1893. But differences appeared in the direction of secular
trends. Patterns of growth in the money supply were similar before and after the depression of
1893, while price movements were fundamentally transformed from a deflationary to an
inflationary trend. The source is Historical Statistics of the United States (1976), E40, E52,
E410, X417.

Monetary factors would play a major role in the price-revolution of the twentieth century, but
the great wave itself grew mainly from a different root. It was primarily (not exclusively) the
result of excess demand, generated by accelerating growth of the world’s population, by rising
standards of living, and by limits on the supply of resources, all within an increasingly
integrated global economy.

The accelerating growth of world population was a driving force in the price-revolution of the
twentieth century. After 1890, death rates began to decline rapidly, with the conquest of major
epidemic diseases such as tuberculosis, typhoid, typhus, diphtheria and malaria. These events
derived from the discoveries of German bacteriologist Robert Koch between 1876 and 1890,
and from a “public health revolution,” that spread swiftly throughout the world.

Fertility declined in western Europe and North America, but rose higher in most other parts of
the world. As a result, the growth of global population began to accelerate. Its annual rate of
increase in the early twentieth century (1900–1950) was nearly double what it had been in the
late nineteenth century (1850–1900).7

Economic production and productivity also rose after 1896, but so did living standards and
cultural expectations. The major European nations were rapidly becoming industrial
democracies. Men of all classes received the right to vote in unprecedented numbers. Women
began to be enfranchised, first on the national level in New Zealand (1893), then in other
nations. These new electors demanded that governments serve the interest of the many, not
merely the few. National legislatures enacted far-reaching systems of social welfare, health
care, old age security, mass education, and unemployment insurance. The effect of these
innovations was to increase aggregate demand.

Through the twentieth century, there was also a continuing revolution in material expectations
among people of every social class—a cultural event that added to the growing pressure of
demand on limited resources. The Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “Even
in the United States there is now a persistent feeling . . . that the poor should have access to a
doctor. . . . The economic effect of this release of consumption from occupational and class
restraint is to put a strong, even relentless, pressure on the supply of both private and public
goods and services.”8
Figure 4.05 compares consumer prices in the United States with the growth of world
population. Sources include McEvedy and Jones, Atlas of World Population History, 343;
Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (1993), table 1372; United Nations Demographic Yearbook
(1993); A. M. Carr-Saunders, World Population (Oxford, 1936); consumer prices (1967=100)
are from Historical Statistics of the United States (1976) ser. E135; Statistical Abstract of
the U.S. (1993), table 756.

At the same time that demographic and social pressures of that sort were building throughout
the world, the supply of what Frederick Jackson Turner called “free land” was beginning to be
exhausted. In 1890, after a survey of population was completed in the United States, the
superintendent of the census reported that the American frontier was closed.

In the 1890s, frontiers were closing in many parts of the world. The expansion of Europe was
beginning to meet its natural limits. Russia had largely completed the conquest of its built-in
Asian empire. India and its border states to the north and east had been brought under the
British Raj. The island-spoils of Oceania had been divided among the great powers. The
European “scramble” for Africa was largely completed by 1896. The Australian outback, New
Zealand sheep runs, Argentine pampas and North American prairies all had been converted to
the production of meat and grain for the world market. The continuing incorporation of these
areas into the Western economy had been the dynamic basis of the Victorian equilibrium. By
the late 1890s, that great process was largely completed, and world population was
multiplying more rapidly than ever.

Late in the nineteenth century, the nations of the world were also becoming integrated in a
single economy at a rapid and accelerating rate. That process had begun as early as the
fifteenth century, but a quantum leap occurred in the late nineteenth century, when, as Geoffrey
Barraclough has demonstrated, the flow of goods from one nation to another suddenly and
greatly expanded. The first effect of this integration had been to stimulate supply; the second
was to increase aggregate demand.9

The price-revolution of the twentieth century was not peculiar to any national economy or
monetary system. It was a global event. Like every great wave that preceded it, this great
movement began primarily because the acceleration of demand outstripped the increase of
supply.

In other ways, however, the price-revolution of the twentieth century was different from its
predecessors. In its early and middle stages real wages increased, and kept on increasing until
the late 1960s. This pattern was differed from other price-revolutions. In the twentieth century,
the role of trade unions, democratic politics, and welfare states had a major impact on returns
to labor.

At the same time, the distribution of income and wealth tended in general to become a little
more equal, especially in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s. This equalizing tendency had
also appeared in the first stages of other price-revolutions. In the twentieth century, however, it
continued for a longer period than before.
Figure 4.06 summarizes nine studies of the distribution of wealth and income in the United
States. Most show mixed trends from 1890 to 1929, then growing equality from 1929 to 1968,
and growing inequality thereafter (see figure 4.23). Sources: Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth in
the United States, 1850–1870 (New Haven, 1975); Robert E. Lipsey and Helen Stone Tice,
eds., The Measurement of Saving, Investment, and Wealth (Chicago, 1989), 765–844; Lee
Soltow, “Distribution of Income and Wealth,” in Glenn Porter, ed., Encyclopedia of American
Economic History (3 vols., New York, 1980) I, 1116; Historical Statistics of the United
States (1976), series G319–36; Statistical Abstract of the United States (1976–1993); Jeffrey
G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality (New York, 1980).
Figure 4.07 follows the upward movement of money wages and real wages from 1900 to 1960.
In this respect, the price revolution of the twentieth century differed from its predecessors–for
a time. These estimates by Stanley Lebergott include mean annual earnings of all employees in
the United States except members of the armed forces. To correct for unemployment Lebergott
added another series which reduced money wages and real wages by 11 percent in 1900 and
by 7 percent in 1960. The source is Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth: The
American Record since 1800 (New York, 1964).

Price Surges and Declines, 1914–45

From 1896 to 1914, prices continued their slow, steady rise. Then suddenly a new trend
appeared. The outbreak of war in 1914 shattered not only the peace of Europe but also its
economic stability. A symptom and cause of that disruption was a massive surge of inflation in
every western nation. From 1914 to 1919, wholesale prices doubled in the United States,
trebled in Britain, quadrupled in Germany, and sextupled in Italy.

The great powers were unprepared to bear the heavy cost of war, or to manage its economic
consequences. Each nation responded in its own way. The British government dealt at first
with rising prices and shortages in a traditional Anglo-Saxon way. It asked the clergy to read
proclamations from church pulpits, urging voluntary limits on consumption. Slowly and
reluctantly, Prime Minister David Lloyd George improvised a system of piecemeal price
controls and rationing. He added fiscal and monetary measures that restrained inflation more
effectively than in any other combatant nation.10

In Germany, things were done differently. Effective control of the war economy passed to
military officers under the old Prussian Law of Siege. The entire nation was divided into
“army corps districts.” In each district Deputy Commanding Generals imposed rationing,
allocated goods, and controlled prices. They did so with a heavy hand, and ultimately with
disastrous consequences for their nation. Low farm prices discouraged production. Germany’s
inability to feed itself became a fundamental cause of its defeat. Further, the war was paid for
by huge loans and taxes on the middle and lower classes. The rich were protected from income
and profits taxes.11

In Russia, the economy collapsed totally under the strain of the war. The distribution of food
was so disrupted by 1917 that the army was forced to live off the land, even within its own
country. Major shortages developed in the cities. Prices of food soared. On March 8, 1917,
when hungry mobs attacked bakeries throughout the capital and were fired on by police, the
Russian Revolution began. Like the French Revolution in 1789, the immediate cause was a
combination of high prices and extreme scarcity, which also occurred in many parts of Europe
during World War I.

Even after the fighting ended in 1918, the economic troubles continued. Britain, for example,
imposed milk rationing for the first time in 1919—a step that it had been able to avoid during
the war. In France and many other nations the most rapid inflation occurred not during the war
itself, but in the first years of peace. Germany was reduced to economic chaos after the
armistice. Russia moved from revolution to a bloody civil war. Major outbreaks of epidemic
disease, notably the so-called influenza epidemic of 1918 (probably a polydemic of several
diseases), caused heavy mortality in Europe, America, and especially Asia. High prices and
scarcities persisted.

In 1920, these trend lines broke. A severe economic depression occurred throughout the world.
Prices plummeted in a great deflation that was as disruptive as the previous rise had been.
Commodity markets were glutted. In Britain, wholesale prices fell by half in two years from
1920 to 1922. Wages also came down, and unemployment rose rapidly. Broadly similar
tendencies appeared in the United States and western Europe. Price and wage deflation were
reinforced by the economic policies of conservative governments, and by rigid adherence to
the gold standard. This was a period of deep suffering among the poor, but business conditions
slowly improved, and stock markets began to boom.12

Figure 4.08 shows the impact of World War I on prices. Rates of inflation were highest in the
Central Powers (400–600 percent), and lower in most Allied powers and neutral nations
(200–350 percent). Data are from B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics (2d rev. ed.,
New York, 1981) pp. 774–75. All are wholesale prices, except Austria and Greece which are
consumer prices. Each is converted to a common base (1914=100).

In central Europe, more dangerous trends developed. Germany’s new and very shaky Weimar
Republic inherited a vast burden of debt and the crushing weight of heavy war reparations to
France. When a heroic attempt at tax reform by Matthias Erzberger failed, public credit was
exhausted. The German government felt compelled to pay its debts by printing money. It did so
at first with some restraint in 1921–22, but soon lost control of its currency. The result was one
of the most extreme hyperinflations in history. An American dollar was worth 40 marks in July
1920, 493 marks in July 1922, 4 million marks in the summer of 1923, 4.2 trillion on
November 15, 1923. This became the classic monetary hyperinflation, caused by a vast
expansion in the quantity of currency in circulation. By late 1923, the German government
required 1,783 printing presses, running round the clock, to print money.

Germany was not alone in its travail. Monetary hyperinflation also occurred in Austria (1921–
22), Russia (1921–22), Poland (1923–24), and Hungary (1923–24). Similar causes operated
through much of central and eastern Europe.

These monetary crises were severe, but very short-lived. German inflation was brought to a
sudden end in 1924, and prices were generally stable thereafter. But the experience of
hyperinflation had a shattering effect on an entire German generation. The Weimar Republic
received much of the blame for problems it had inherited, and none of the credit for solving
them. Confidence in open, democratic institutions was weakened fatally in central Europe.

These economic events in the postwar era created profound instabilities. Concentration of
wealth remained very high. In Britain, two-thirds of the national wealth in the 1920s was
owned by 1 percent of the population. One-third was owned by 0.1 per cent. The twenties
were a decade of high prosperity for the rich, and an Indian summer of the old regime. They
were also a time of desperate poverty in Scotland, Appalachia, rural Europe, and urban slums
throughout the world.

Inequality put narrow limits on consumption. In the United States during the late 1920s, major
industries began to suffer from excess capacity and insufficient demand. By 1927, purchases of
houses, cars, and consumer durables were in decline. Commodity prices turned downward.
Industrial production began to fall. In October 1929, the American stock market crashed, and
the world slipped into the Great Depression.

Once again, as in the early 1920s, suffering was deepened by fiscal and monetary policies of
conservative governments. After the Crash, American secretary of the treasury Andrew Mellon
proposed to “liquidate labor, liquidate stock, liquidate the farmers.” Congress gave relief to
the rich by cutting income taxes, but offered little assistance to the poor. The Federal Reserve
Board pursued a policy of tight money that made things worse. The ultimate folly was
President Herbert Hoover’s proposal for a large increase in taxes in 1932. As wages fell and
unemployment surged, wholesale prices fell by a quarter in Britain, by a third in the United
States and Germany, and by half in France.
Figure 4.09 represents on a logarithmic scale the hyperinflations that followed the First World
War in central Europe. Sources include B. R. Mitchell, ed., International Historical
Statistics; Europe, 1750–1988 3rd ed. (New York, 1992), 837–51; Thomas J. Sargent, “The
Ends of Four Big Inflations,” in Robert E. Hall, ed., Inflation: Causes and Effects (Chicago,
1982), 99–110; Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder (New York, 1993). Prices are in
German marks, Polish zlotys, Hungarian krone, Russian rubles, and Austrian krone.

The Western nations responded to the Great Depression in very different ways. The
international gold standard was abandoned by Britain in 1931 and by the United States in
1934. Protectionist walls were raised around national and imperial economies by the
American Smoot-Hawley tariff (1930) and the British Ottawa Agreements (1932).

In the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal launched the American republic
on a sea of economic experiments, which included “pump priming” of the private economy by
public spending, tighter regulation of business, and an attempt to diminish material inequalities.
The results were mixed. Production, wages, and prices began to rise after 1933, only to be
driven down again by another sharp recession in 1937–38.

Britain followed a more conservative course with no better success—retrenchment, a balanced

budget, subsidies to business, and economic nationalism. These policies were pursued by
Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald (1931–35), who carried retrenchment to the point of
reducing the dole in the depth of the Depression, and was expelled from his own Labour party.
They were adopted also by Conservative Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin (1935–37) and
Neville Chamberlain (1937–40). By 1937, British prices and wages had nearly returned to
1929 levels, but then they fell again in the second recession of 1938. Throughout the Western
world, recovery came very slowly, and at a terrible price.

In France, forty governments held office between 1918 and 1939, five in 1933 alone. Politics
were reduced to a chaos of competing factions. In the mid-1930s, French industrial production
fell to its lowest level since 1913. Unemployment surged to painfully high levels. The money
supply was expanded and prices surged, doubling in merely four years from 1935 to 1939.

Italy and Germany took the dark road to fascism, which in economic terms was an unstable
combination of private ownership and public control, feudal fiefdoms and bureaucratic
regulation, national autarchy and international conquest. Fascist economies were stimulated by
public works and military spending, but German prices remained depressed throughout the
1930s. Old economic problems persisted and new ones were added. The economics of
European fascism and Japanese militarism, as well as their ideologies, drove their leaders to
embark upon ever more desperate adventures.

In 1937, Japan went to war against China, mainly to secure markets and resources on the Asian
mainland. Historian R. A. C. Parker observes that “Japanese civilian authorities in Tokyo were
more belligerent than the army.” This was a war of economic ambition; it continued in Asia for
eighteen years. In 1939, Germany attacked Poland, mostly in search of Lebensraum, living
space, which meant land for German farmers and raw materials for German factories.13

From 1939 to 1941, military victory went to armed forces of Germany and Japan, but the
balance of economic power moved in another direction. The beginning of the Second World
War at last brought the great depression to an end. Prices, wages, employment and production
surged throughout the world. The economies of Germany and Japan experienced growth
without development—a vast expansion of resources by conquest and of workers by
enslavement. Their swollen economies became in some ways more primitive than before.
Figure 4.10 shows price movements in eight nations from 1920 to 1945. After the inflation that
followed World War I, prices tended to fall from the early 1920s to the early 1930s. The nadir
was reached in most nations circa 1934. Thereafter, prices resumed their upward climb,
accelerating during World War II (1939–45). Hyperinflation developed in Italy after 1943, and
in many European nations after 1945 (see figure 4.12); but controls were successful in Britain
and the United States. Sources are B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics (2d rev. ed.,
New York, 1981), 778–83; Historical Statistics of the United States (1976), E135.

In the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt assembled a team of exceptionally able
managers who made the American economy into the decisive weapon of the war. Productivity
soared. National product per capita (in constant dollars) nearly doubled in the United States
from 1938 to 1944, the strongest surge of economic growth in modern American history.14

In the United States, a regulatory system that included rationing and price controls worked
remarkably well to stabilize the booming economy. A black market developed for scarce
goods, but most Americans willingly accepted a more highly regulated economy as part of the
war effort. Economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith, who worked for the Office of Price
Administration during the war, always remained more supportive of price controls than
colleagues who had not shared that experience. The contribution of economic regulation in
World War II was both material and moral. It fostered a sense of fairness and justice, and
sustained collective effort in a nation that was united as never before.

Britain also used price controls with high success during World War II. The cost of living in
the United Kingdom rose only about 20 percent from 1939 to 1945, and increased scarcely at
all from 1940 to 1947. The record of the Axis nations was more mixed. In Nazi Germany,
prices were kept very stable, increasing 9 percent from 1939 to 1944. This was done in part by
requiring citizens and corporations to freeze their liquid assets in compulsory savings
accounts, which in turn were confiscated by the state. This plundering of private assets
effectively reduced demand and diminished inflation, but it also contributed to the total
destruction of the German economy. Fascist Italy cheerfully resorted to the printing press, and
suffered severely from an inflation that continued at a rapid rate from 1934 to 1948. Through
much of occupied Europe, prices rose sharply during the war. The Soviet Union also had very
high inflation during World War II; official estimates put the increase of prices at 325 percent.
The true number was probably higher.15
Figure 4.11 shows the impact of price controls in the United States during World War II.
Industrial prices were controlled in 1942; farm prices, in 1943. Controls were removed in
1946. The source is Historical Statistics of the United States (1976) E23–25.

After the war, many European nations suffered severe hyperinflations, similar to the aftermath
of World War I. The worst problems were in eastern and southern Europe, during the years
from 1947 to 1949.

In the United States, price controls were removed in 1945. What followed was similar in some
respects to the period after World War I. In the immediate postwar years, inflation increased to
double-digit levels—high by the measure of the American experience, but low by comparison
with contemporary trends in Europe. Wholesale commodity prices rose 14 per cent in 1946,
and 23 per cent in 1947.

Then the American economy slipped into a short recession. National income declined, rates of
unemployment increased, and in 1949 consumer prices actually fell. The decline was small
and shortlived: less than 1 percent, in little more than one year. Underlying inflationary
pressures were strong. By early 1950, prices were climbing again.

Figure 4.12 shows levels reached by hyperinflations in Europe during 1947–49. The sources
are consumer price indices (1929=100) in B. R. Mitchell, ed., International Historical
Statistics: Europe, 1750–1988 (New York, 1992), 848–49.

Figure 4.13 shows the effect of price controls in controlling inflation in the United States
during the Korean War. When the war began in 1950, wholesale prices and consumer prices
surged to double-digit levels. Controls were imposed in 1951–53. Prices immediately
stabilized and did not increase when controls were lifted. The source is Historical Statistics
of the United States (1976) E23, E135.

Inflationary pressures mounted in the United States during the summer of 1950, when a
Communist regime in North Korea suddenly attacked its southern neighbor, and yet another
major war began. By 1951, most of the world’s great powers had men in combat on the Korean
peninsula. Military forces rapidly expanded throughout the world. More Americans were in
uniform during the Korean War (1950–53) than during World War I.

In its economic impact of the Korean War was similar to the world wars that had preceded it.
Once again inflationary pressures surged throughout the world. In 1950, wholesale prices
jumped 12 percent in the United States, 18 percent in Germany, 21 percent in Britain, 28
percent in France, 32 percent in Sweden.

In the United States, President Harry Truman acted decisively, and revived price controls with
high success. As a short-run emergency war measure, the regulation of the American market
during the Korean conflict proved to be highly effective, more so even than in World War II.
After controls were imposed in 1951, prices and wages became remarkably stable. There was
no inflationary surge from 1951 to 1954, and no explosion of repressed demand when controls
were removed. Price-regulation kept inflation within narrow bounds. It also diminished the
dangerous social instabilities that often accompany price-surges. The side effects of short-term
price controls in 1942–45 and 1950–53 were much less destructive to the social fabric than
neoclassical anti-inflationary policies of 1980s and 1990s. Those who believe that “price
controls don’t work,” even in the short run, will find strong evidence to the contrary in the
history of the American economy during World War II and the Korean War.

The Discovery of Inflation, 1938–63

Through all of these turbulent events, global prices continued to rise in peace as well as war.
Even as price surges were restrained in some nations by strict controls, the secular trend
moved inexorably upward. In the United States from 1938 to 1963, consumer prices rose every
year but two. During the span of an entire generation, inflation was the rule in twenty-three
years out of twenty-five. One result was a growth of what Americans called an “inflationary
psychology.” The existence of inflation as a secular trend began to be discovered by
individuals, corporations, and governments throughout the world.16

American historian Eric Goldman lived through this period in the United States. “Inflation
jabbed people wherever they turned,” he remembered. “Trolleys and subways went up two
cents, then a nickel. The ten-cent Sunday newspaper was disappearing in America. Still more
irritating were things that were hard to buy at any price. A public with billions of dollars
stored up in war bonds and savings accounts . . . found itself queuing up in long nerve-jangling
lines. Women had trouble getting furniture, nylons, a new electric iron; men found clothing,
even a razor blade that would shave clean, in short supply. . . . As the summer of 1946 closed,
the food shortages were reaching their climax. First came a meteoric rise in prices. . . .
Gradually the store shelves began to fill; within months of the election of 1946, steaks and
roasts were no longer drawing crowds. . . . Prices kept on climbing. Even the kids of Cape
Cod resort towns, who for years had dived to retrieve pennies thrown in the water by
vacationers, now refused to budge except for nickels. But the public was learning to live with
inflation.”17

In the years after World War II, this underlying inflationary psychology firmly established itself
in North America and western Europe. People tried to make light of the problem. American
humorist Max Kauffman observed, “Among the things that money can’t buy is everything it used
to.” Vaudeville comedian Henny Youngman remarked, “Americans are getting stronger. Twenty
years ago, it took two people to carry ten dollars’ worth of groceries. Today, a five-year-old
can do it.”

The inflation jokes of the 1950s expressed a growing mood of fatalism about price movements.
That attitude encouraged pessimism about the possibility of restraining inflation and caused
people to seek other remedies. These new responses caused more inflation and increased its
momentum. They also institutionalized its dynamics within entire cultural systems.

This had happened in every other price-revolution, but during the twentieth century, the
institutional machinery of modern society had grown stronger and more complex than before.
Institutional responses to rising prices reinforced inflation more powerfully than in earlier
waves.

Industrial democracies began to create elaborate systems of institutional price-inflators, which

economist Robert Heilbroner described as regulatory “floors without ceilings.” Price floors
were constructed in many sectors of the American economy. In some industries, “administered
prices” became commonplace. In others, prices were formally fixed by regulatory agencies,
and by “fair trade” statutes that forbade merchants to sell below the manufacturer’s “suggested
retail price.”

The dynamic American responses to price floors were not price ceilings, but wage floors. In
1938, the Congress enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the first national minimum
wage. It also briefly considered a maximum wage, but that idea was quickly forgotten.
Thereafter, the minimum wage was frequently raised, and extended more broadly through the
economy. Similar laws were enacted in other nations. This legislation helps to explain one of
the distinctive features of the price-revolution in the twentieth century—its exceptionally high
rate of advance.18

In the period from 1938 to 1968, many inflationary floors were built into the American
economy: floors under wages, pensions, and compensation for the unemployed; floors beneath
farm prices, steel prices, liquor prices, and milk prices; floors for airline fares, trucking
charges, doctors’ bills, and lawyers’ fees. Not all of these floors were erected by public
authorities. Many were imposed by corporations, labor unions and professional associations.
The creation of regulatory floors without ceilings accelerated a dynamic process called the
wage-price spiral by conservatives, and the price-wage spiral by liberals.

The institutionalization of inflation in the twentieth century was not limited to price and wage
regulation itself. Systemic restraints were placed also upon supply. Many nations imposed
limits on production: farm products in the United States, oil in Saudi Arabia, coffee in
Colombia, gold in South Africa, and many other commodities throughout the world.
International cartels pursued the same policy where they were able to do so. The classic
example was the price of diamonds, which the De Beers syndicate inflated to many times their
market value by restrictions on supply and other methods. From a functional perspective, it
mattered not at all whether these policies were imposed by a national government, or an
international cartel, or a corporate manager. The impact on prices was the same. Wherever
supply was held down, prices tended to rise. The integrated international economy of the
twentieth century created many opportunities, and put them in the hands of small groups who
profited by their application.

Other new structural causes of inflation began to operate in the mid-twentieth century. One of
them was invented by American businessmen. Economist David Slawson called it
“competitive inflation.” Two rival sellers of the same commodity, instead of competing in the
classical manner by seeking to offer a better product at a lower price, learned in the twentieth
century to operate in other ways. They discovered that they could increase profits and expand
market-share by degrading their product, advertising relentlessly, packaging it in a different
form, and raising its unit price.

As a case in point, Slawson studied the price history of American candy bars. During the late
1950s, the going price of a candy bar was five cents. By 1983, it had risen to thirty-five cents.
The price was deliberately raised in a series of small five-cent increments by manufacturers.
Slawson found that “each increase was disguised by making the bar larger at the same time—
the size of the bar having been gradually decreased since the time of the last price rise. People
generally choose candy bars on the basis of taste and size, neither of which encourages them to
make close distinctions on the basis of price. Moreover, the manufacturers, one assumes
deliberately, make size difficult to assess by making the wrappers larger than the bars inside,
and by using a wide variety of shapes.”19

The laws of neo-classical economics are unable to explain the price history of the American
candy bar in the twentieth century. Market competition remained strong among candy-makers—
in some respects, stronger than ever before. But it was no longer primarily price competition,
and its effect on prices was the reverse of what neoclassical economic theory would lead us to
expect. The more competitive the candy market became in America during the twentieth
century, the more prices rose.20

Economist Slawson argued that there was little difference in pricing strategies used for candy
bars, automobiles, airline tickets, and other goods and services. He developed a model of a
new “competitive inflation” to describe a world of growing complexity in pricing decisions by
corporate sellers, and of increasing uncertainties for the individual buyer. Those trends in turn
represented a shift in the distribution of knowledge and power in the marketplace. Sellers
operated increasingly at an advantage over buyers. When that happened, prices went up.
In all of these ways, the great inflation of the twentieth century differed from every price-
revolution that had preceded it. Its velocity, mass, and momentum were greater than those that
came before.

The Troubles of Our Times

In 1962, the price-revolution entered a new stage. After a period of comparatively slow
increase during the late 1950s, inflation began to accelerate. This was a global movement. It
appeared at about the same time in many nations: Austria (1962), Denmark (1962), Ireland
(1962), Norway (1962), Sweden (1962), Belgium (1963), Italy (1963), Switzerland (1963),
the Netherlands (1964), United Kingdom (1964), Yugoslavia (1964), Germany (1965), and the
United States (1965).1

The epicenter of this new movement was in western Europe, which had recovered very rapidly
from the catastrophe of the second World War. After a recession in 1957–59, most European
economies were flourishing. Unemployment fell to record lows in 1961: below 4 percent in
Denmark and Italy; 3 percent in Austria and Norway; 2 percent in Britain and Spain; barely 1
percent in Germany and Switzerland.2

This economic prosperity had a strong political effect. Many western nations took a turn to the
left. The results included the presidencies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the United
States (1961), the “Opening to the Left” in Italy (1961), the election of a Labour government in
Britain (1964), and the emergence of the “Great Coalition” in Germany (1966). European
labor movements became more aggressive and more successful, winning large wage
settlements in these years.3

It was during this halcyon era of high prosperity and full employment that rates of inflation
began to accelerate. Japanese consumer prices, for example, had increased less than one
percent a year from 1955 to 1959. In the 1960s, they began to climb more rapidly, at more than
five percent each year. Producer price increases in Japan were smaller, but still substantial.4

Rates of gain varied from one nation and monetary system to another in the early 1960s. The
pace of inflation was very low in Switzerland (2.3%), West Germany (2.4%) and the United
States (2.5%). It was higher in Sweden (3.6%), Britain (3.6%), France (4.4%) and India
(4.5%). The highest rates were in Latin America, and the Middle East. No nations were
exempt.5

Price rises remained comparatively moderate in the North American economy, which
restrained the world inflation-rate until 1965. Then they also began to accelerate, partly
because President Lyndon Johnson and his advisors made a major miscalculation. The Johnson
administration decided to expand public spending for social welfare in the United States and
simultaneously fight a major war in Southeast Asia, without a large increase in taxes. In the
journalistic jargon of the day, they believed that the booming American economy could supply
both “guns and butter” at the same time.

The result was a large increase in public spending, on top of growing aggregate demand in the
private sector. American prices began to rise more rapidly, especially prices for food and farm
products. The annual rate of inflation in the United States trebled from 1961 to 1966.

Many scholars mistakenly remember the Vietnam War as the pivotal event in the acceleration
of inflation during the 1960s. In fact, the surge began a few years earlier, in another part of the
world. The fiscal policies of the Johnson administration had an impact because they reinforced
an existing trend and increased its momentum.6

The roots of the price-revolution ran deep in the 20th century. As in every other great wave, the
rapid increase of world population and the growth of aggregate demand were the primary
cause of price increases. The world economy was more productive than ever before, and its
rate of growth was the highest in history. But it could not keep up with demand. In the United
States, whenever capacity-utilization rose above 80 percent, the rate of inflation accelerated.
When it fell below that level, as it did from time to time, inflation subsided.

A similar pattern appeared in the association between prices and unemployment. When the
unemployment rate fell below 6 percent, the rate of inflation advanced more rapidly. When
unemployment rose above that level, inflation retreated. Clearly, the price-revolution of the
twentieth century was embedded in demographic trends and economic structures.

As early as 1966, American leaders began to show concern about rising prices and acted
forcefully to restrain them. The expansion of the money supply (M-I) was brought to a dead
halt in the second quarter of 1966. Interest rates were raised deliberately to their highest levels
in half a century, in what was called the credit crunch of 1966. An economist observes that this
was “the first occasion in the post World War II period that the Fed sharply cut back monetary
growth and caused rapid and, for a time, large increases in interest rates.”7

As these policies took effect, the prosperous American economy skidded into a brief “mini-
recession” in 1967. But inflation did not end. Consumer prices continued to climb, and by
1968 the buoyant American economy began to boom again. As inflationary pressures mounted,
public officials in the Johnson administration and the Federal Reserve Board once again
adopted policies of economic restraint. They tightened credit, applied various fiscal
restrictions, drove interest rates higher, increased taxes by a 10 percent surcharge on incomes,
and curbed monetary growth in early 1969.

These measures were deliberately intended to create what was called a “policy recession.”
They succeeded all too well. In 1969, anti-inflationary measures began to have an effect, but
not precisely the one that was intended. After the long boom of the 1960s, the American
economy went into steep decline, dragging other nations with it. The recession of 1968–71,
writes economist Robert Gordon, combined “the worst of three worlds.” One might say that it
combined the worst of five worlds. National product diminished. Unemployment rose sharply.
The dollar fell against other currencies, and yet the American balance of payments rapidly
deteriorated. Through it all, inflation stubbornly persisted in a new combination with economic
stagnation, which American economist Paul Samuelson may have been the first to call
“stagflation.”8

Neoclassical economists were baffled by stagflation. Some believed it to be an unprecedented

anomaly. In fact, stagflation had happened in the later stages of every price-revolution from the
thirteenth century to our own time.

Figure 4.14 shows the relationship between inflation and the use of manufacturing capacity in
the United States from 1960 to 1993. When capacity-utilization rose above 8 percent, rates of
inflation generally increased. When capacity-utilization fell below 8 percent, inflation tended
to fall. Sources: Historical Statistics of the United States (1976), E135; Statistical Abstract
of the United States (1993) table 757; capacity utilization, ibid., (1976) table 1250; (1988)
table 1250; (1993) table 1261.

When President Richard Nixon came to office, he was forced to deal with an economy in deep
disarray. In response to stagflation, this highly conservative president amazed his friends and
gratified his enemies by suddenly becoming a convert to the interventionist economics of John
Maynard Keynes. “Now I am a Keynesian,” Nixon told an astonished television journalist,
Howard K. Smith. The president’s “new economic policy” combined a strong dose of
Keynesian fiscal stimuli with an unprecedented system of peacetime price and wage controls.

These measures proved immensely popular with most Americans. National polls consistently
showed strong public support for price controls. The economy began to revive, and inflation
rapidly diminished from 5 percent in 1970 to 3 percent in 1972.9

But despite their general popularity, price and wage controls had powerful enemies in the
United States. They were strongly opposed on theoretical grounds by neoclassical economists.
At the same time they were strenuously resisted by leaders of big labor and big business, and
also by their many friends and protectors in both political parties. These small but vocal elites
mounted effective campaigns—insisting over and over again that “price controls don’t work,”
that “regulation is unfair,” and that restraints would be destructive of economic growth.
Figure 4.15 shows that the rate of inflation generally increased when unemployment fell below
6 percent. The rate of inflation commonly declined when unemployment rose above that level.
The sources include: for inflation, Historical Statistics of the United States (1976) E135;
Statistical Abstract of the United States (1993) table 757; for unemployment, ibid., (1976)
table 558; (1988) table 605; (1993) table 652.

All of those arguments were false. Short-term price and wage controls had worked well in
recent applications. They were less unfair than unrestrained inflation, and did far less damage
to economic growth than anti-inflationary tools such as interest-rate manipulation and policy
recessions. But the anti-regulatory arguments were often repeated and widely believed.
Powerful interests lobbied incessantly for an end to price and wage controls, until both
Congress and the Nixon administration gave way. Controls were relaxed prematurely, while
inflationary pressures remained strong.

Once more prices began to advance rapidly. This time, leaders of the administration tried to
restrain them by a policy of moral suasion called “jawboning” in the jargon of the day. The
only discernible effect of jawboning was an inflation of rhetoric that kept pace with rising
prices. The cost of living kept on climbing.

Later in his beleaguered presidency, Nixon wanted to freeze prices again. His neoclassical
economic advisers firmly resisted that idea. Herbert Stein remembers: “I warned him, citing
Heraclitus, that you can’t step in the same river twice.” Nixon replied, “you can if it’s frozen.”
But controls had become politically untenable, whatever their economic merits may have
been.10

Price Volatility: Oil Shocks and Commodity Surges, 1973–80

Then came an entirely unexpected event, of the sort that happens frequently in price history and
yet can never be predicted. In October 1973, the state of Israel was attacked without warning
by its Arab neighbors on the Jewish holiday called Yom Kippur. At the same time, Arab
nations placed an embargo on oil as part of their war effort. A hitherto ineffective cartel called
the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), agreed to raise the benchmark
price of Saudi “marker crude” oil from $3 to $5.11 a barrel. This measure was meant to be a
strategic weapon against Israel and her western allies. It proved to be highly successful—so
much so that in January 1974 OPEC raised prices again, to the dizzy height of $11.65 a barrel.
The Arab cartel also tried to stop the flow of oil altogether to the United States and the
Netherlands as a special punishment for their support of Israel.

These acts were not unprecedented. Twice before the Arab states had tried to use oil as a
strategic weapon. Twice the United States had stabilized prices by drawing on its vast
petroleum reserves. By 1973, however, the American reserves were nearly gone, and the
United States had become a heavy importer of foreign oil. It was powerless to stop OPEC by
anything short of military action, which for a time was seriously considered by the Nixon
administration. Within a few months, oil prices quadrupled.

The American reaction, writes oil expert John M. Blair, “approached pure panic.”
Governments, corporations, and individuals were entirely unprepared for this turn of events.
Many American families and institutions found their budgets strained beyond the breaking
point. In Europe, energy-poor industries collapsed. Unemployment soared. The worst suffering
occurred in the third world, where fragile economies were cruelly shattered by the actions of
the OPEC cartel.11
Figure 4.16 compares the cost of fuel oil with consumer prices in the United States
(1960=100). The source is the Statistical Abstract of the United States (1993), table 756.

The success of OPEC was made possible by fundamental economic forces. By 1973, the world
had become highly vulnerable to commodity cartels. Twenty years of postwar prosperity and
accelerating population growth had created heavy demand for raw materials. Oil was not
unique in that respect. During the decade of the 1970s, the prices of many commodities rose
even more rapidly than petroleum. Some surged to their highest levels in modern history. In
1980, as the price of oil climbed to $40 a barrel, tin reached $8 a pound, silver peaked at $54
an ounce and gold rose to $875 an ounce. Other raw materials such as hides, rubber, cotton,
and grain also rose to high levels.

The velocity of these trends accelerated after 1973. In the United States, the Consumer Price
Index registered an increase of 11 percent in 1974. Producer prices rose even more rapidly, to
18.9 percent in the same year. This “double-digit inflation” as it came to be called, was at that
time the highest peacetime price-surge in American history.12

In 1975, President Gerald Ford convened an urgent “summit meeting” of leading economists to
discuss the problem of inflation. John Kenneth Galbraith was present. “There was full
professional agreement on only one remedy,” Galbraith remembered, “that government
regulations should be reviewed to remove any obvious impediments to market competition.
For practical effect, this was no better than the President’s own prescription, which was the
wearing of buttons inscribed with the insignia WIN, for Whip Inflation Now.”13

Inflation moderated in 1976–77, largely because of the disruption of the world economy and
the decline of demand, but annual price increases continued in the range of 6 percent—an
exceptionally high level by historic standards. The stubborn persistence of inflation, and the
recent failure of so many policies created a painful dilemma for national leaders.

In the United States, the new Carter administration acted on the advice of neo-classical
economists and promoted a new idea called “deregulation,” partly in the hope of removing
regulatory “floors” under price and wages. The effect of “deregulation” did not as a rule
remove the floors themselves. It merely removed control of them from the public to the private
sector. Inflation continued, now in company with growing inequalities of income. During the
late 1970s, consumer prices in the United States accelerated sharply yet again, in another surge
of increasing volatility. Once more the OPEC cartel played a leading role. In 1978–79, it
ruthlessly raised the price of oil to such a height that the United States was paying nearly $100
billions a year to oil-producing nations. The annual rate of inflation in consumer prices
reached 13.5 percent in 1980, a new peacetime record in American history.

American inflation, high as it was by historical standards, remained below the global average.
A survey by the International Monetary Fund in 1979–80 found that consumer prices were
rising in every nation for which data was available. The smallest rates of inflation that year
were in Switzerland, Burma, and Saudi Arabia. The highest rates were in Israel, Turkey and
Latin America. The United States experienced price increases of 12.8 percent, very high by the
measure of its own experience, but below the International Monetary Fund’s estimated “world
inflation rate” of 15.6 percent that year. The price-revolution of the twentieth century was a
global movement, with local variations.14
Figure 4.17. Source: International Financial Statistics 34 (1981) 45.

The tightly controlled Communist economies of eastern Europe were also caught up in the great
wave, but in a different way. Prices and wages were held ruthlessly in check by the instruments
of a totalitarian state, but state planners were not able to restrain the pressures of aggregate
demand. The result was the development of rationing, the Communist alternative to inflation. In
the western world, rising prices were themselves a system of market-rationing which allocated
scarce resources to those who were willing and able to pay higher prices. The Communist
system substituted state-rationing for market-rationing. Throughout eastern Europe the same
scenes were enacted. Long queues, empty shops, and meatless meals became the Marxist
surrogate for price-inflation. State-rationing, continued year after year, engendered problems of
deep corruption in Communist nations. Corrupt regimes that ruled in the name of the people
rapidly lost their moral legitimacy.

Free-market nations tried to protect themselves against inflation by adopting autarchic policies,
with consequences that caused major economic problems throughout the world. The leading
example was Japan, which was highly vulnerable to commodity cartels. To pay its soaring oil
bills, the Japanese flooded the world market with exports. In America alone, the total value of
Japanese goods rose from five billion dollars in 1970 to thirty billions only a decade later. At
the same time, the Japanese actively discouraged imports to their own economy. The result was
the growth of large imbalances in international trade, and the collapse of many American
industries. Unemployment surged in the United States, while inflation continued at high levels.

In 1979–80, the liberal Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter declared inflation to be the
nation’s “number one problem.” On the advice of economists, and in alliance with Chairman
Paul Volcker, a deeply conservative banker who headed the Federal Reserve Board, a southern
Populist president adopted highly repressive economic policies. Interest rates were raised to
record heights. The money supply was restrained. Taxes were allowed to reach the highest
peacetime levels in American history, mainly as a consequence of inflationary “bracket creep,”
which carried most Americans into higher tax brackets. A major effort was made to reduce
American dependence on foreign oil. In the last months of the Carter administration these
policies began to take effect. The American economy faltered and turned sharply downward.
Inflation began to subside. But new problems began to appear.

Major instabilities developed in commodity markets. The United States and other nations had
responded to rising the cost of energy by increasing domestic production of oil, by shifting to
other fuels, and by reducing demand for energy. These measures succeeded beyond
expectations. Their effect was to solve one problem by creating another—the energy glut of the
1980s. Suddenly, the world found itself awash in oil. Energy prices fell sharply, and
petroleum-producing regions such as Texas and Alberta fell into deep depressions.

The oil glut of the 1980s caught governments and corporations by surprise. A symbol of
massive miscalculations by high executives in the major oil corporations and shipping
companies was long rows of idle supertankers, rusting at their moorings in Norwegian fjords
during the early 1980s. These ships had been ordered during the OPEC oil famine. They had
been completed just in time for the glut that followed. Many were among the largest ships ever
constructed. Some were destined never to sail except to the breakers’ yards. The shipbuilding
industry had expanded to meet the demand for these new ships. Now it found itself with excess
capacity, and collapsed with a resounding crash throughout the world.15

Similar reversals also occurred in other sectors of the world economy, notably in agriculture.
During the early 1970s, high food prices had sent production soaring. American farmers
borrowed heavily to increase production. Then, in the 1980s, the world found itself producing
more food than it could consume. American farmers were faced with saturated markets, heavy
debts, and excess capacity. They began to go bankrupt in numbers unprecedented even in the
Great Depression. Meanwhile, politically powerful European farmers, encouraged by price
supports, kept producing a vast surplus which was purchased by the European Economic
Community and stored in “butter mountains” and “wine lakes.” India and other developing
nations, with the aid of new farming methods in the “green revolution,” also began to produce
more food than they consumed, and agricultural markets were glutted round the world.

Market-instability was intensified by the acts of private speculators. The effect of increasing
wealth concentration was to increase the supply of surplus capital, which shifted rapidly from
one investment opportunity to another throughout the world in search of profit. The increasing
liquidity and volatility of markets created opportunities that were aggressively pursued,
sometimes less for profit than for sport. Some of these speculations succeeded; others failed;
all of them together contributed to the growing instability of the world economy.

An example was the silver bubble of the 1970s. In 1973, the Hunt family of Texas, at that time
possibly the richest family in America, decided to buy precious metals as a hedge against
inflation. Gold could not be held by private citizens in the United States at that time, and so the
Hunts began to buy silver in enormous quantity, perhaps even hoping to corner the world silver
market—a wild speculation reminiscent of Colebrook’s alum scheme in the price-revolution of
the eighteenth century. Silver prices surged from $1.94 an ounce in 1973 to $50.35 in 1980.
The corner failed, and the Hunt family fell deep in debt. By 1987, their liabilities had grown to
nearly $2.5 billion, against assets of $1.5 billion. America’s richest family slipped to the edge
of bankruptcy, and the shock waves spread through the economy.16

After 1981, the Reagan administration created new opportunities for speculators and corporate
raiders by relaxing antitrust rules and promoting business deregulation. “Hostile takeovers”
and “leveraged buyouts” multiplied at a rapid rate, often with catastrophic consequences for
corporations, jobs, communities, and individuals. In the economically depressed state of
Maine, for example, what remained of the shoe industry was dealt a heavy blow by takeovers.
In the fragile economy of the American Middle West, small industrial corporations were
destroyed by the same process. Healthy corporations with strong balance sheets, cash reserves,
and an active sense of civic responsibility were specially at risk. Some of the best and most
responsible American companies such as Dayton-Hudson and Phillips Petroleum, outstanding
corporate citizens with strong balance sheets, were compelled assume crushing debt in an
effort to fight off hostile takeovers. The result of this activity was growing instability in the
economic life of the nation.

In the mid-1980s, the new electronic technology of securities markets increased speculative
instabilities of another kind. Chicago’s Mercantile Exchange invented futures-trading in stocks,
with lower margin requirements than the stock exchanges themselves. This created
opportunities for traders to shift their money back and forth from stocks to stock futures, and to
extract large profits from small disparities. The work was done by “programmed trading,” in
which computers sent automatic signals to buy and sell when stocks and stock-futures reached
predetermined levels. Programmed trading increased the volatility of securities markets.
Buffers that had been invented after the Great Depression were unable to restrain this new
technology. Stock values soared in 1987, and Wall Street became a great casino. Millions of
small investors were caught up in the speculative mania.

The day of reckoning came on October 19, 1987. The New York stock market suddenly
crashed. The same processes of programmed trading that had brought the market to dizzy
heights, now sent it tumbling down again in its worst collapse since 1929. Panic-stricken
investors rushed to sell large quantities of stock, often at a heavy loss. The Dow Jones
industrial average plunged 500 points, and billions of dollars vanished in an afternoon.

On the morning after, some experts explained that the collapse was merely a massive
correction of grossly inflated stock-prices. They did not ask how the inflation had happened in
the first place. Others believed that the crash was caused by programmed trading in stock
futures on commodity exchanges where margin requirements were low or nonexistent. Many
small investors concluded that financial markets had become corrupt casinos, in which the
games were rigged by insiders.

After the crash, the confidence of investors collapsed, and the stock market was unable to
serve its primary economic function of mobilizing capital for investment. In 1988, more than
100 major American corporations found themselves unable to issue new stock offerings for
their capital needs. Neither the securities industry nor the Reagan administration were able to
agree on regulatory reforms. In the two years that followed the Crash of 1987, Congress and
the federal government failed to enact a single substantive reform for securities markets.

The Cost of Anti-Inflation:

Price Fears and Policy Recessions, 1980–95

In the 1980s, the battered world economy slipped into another recession. This one was deep—
the deepest since the 1930s. It was marked by excess capacity and plummeting commodity
prices. Producer prices of food and raw materials fell steeply from 1981 to 1986, reaching
their lowest levels since the Great Depression. Oil declined from $40 a barrel to $8 in 1986.
Tin dropped from $8 a pound to $2.50; copper slipped from $1 to 45 cents; silver plummeted
from $54 to less than $5 an ounce. But even in the very depth of this recession, consumer
prices continued their inexorable advance. Inflation slowed, but did not cease.17

When the major industrial economies began to revive, prices of raw materials started to climb
again. In 1987, the price of oil doubled. Cotton and lead trebled. Strong upward trends
appeared in the price of copper, nickel, aluminum, wool, hides and rubber. Overall,
commodity prices rose by nearly one-third in a single year, and further increases followed in
1988.18

A large part of this increase was due to hoarding, in fear of higher prices ahead. Economic
forecasters predicted further price increases, and an inflationary psychology rapidly
strengthened throughout the world. Fear of inflation began to be more disruptive than inflation
itself. The expectation of rising prices caused prices to rise higher.19

By 1989, as producer prices were rising sharply, world leaders openly discussed the need for
driving the economies of the industrial world into a yet another “policy recession.” They did
so at a time when markets and economies were deeply unstable. Governments worked to
“cool” their economies by raising interest rates. In the United States, the Federal Funds Rate
was driven up from 6.7 percent in 1987 to 9.2 percent in 1990. Consumer interest rates
climbed much higher. Other fiscal and monetary measures were also adopted, but now that
price controls were discredited, the remedy for double-digit inflation was double-digit
interest.

This policy of using high interest rates to control high inflation had many economic and social
effects. It increased inequality, discouraged investment, diminished productivity, reduced
demand, and drove up unemployment. Ironically, in some ways it also promoted inflation. The
cost of housing, for example, rose sharply in part because home construction was inflated by
builders’ capital costs, which increased with the rate of interest. Interest-rate manipulation was
a very powerful instrument of economic policy. Its impact was much broader than it was meant
to be.

The result was yet another recession in 1990–91. In that year, the United States had negative
rates of economic growth, falling per capita income, and growing unemployment. The rate of
inflation slowed from 5.4 percent in 1990 to 3 percent in 1992. Economists and politicians
declared that inflation was “under control.” It wasn’t. Even in the midst of the recession,
consumer prices continued to climb. The rate of gain even in this recession remained higher
than the average inflation in any previous price-revolution in world history.

So steep was the recession in 1990–91 that the managers of the American economy, in fear of a
full-blown depression, shifted suddenly from the brake to the accelerator. Interest rates were
driven down to historic lows. The Federal Funds Rate dropped from 9.2 percent in 1989 to 3.5
percent in 1992.

Industrial economies began to revive, first in America (1992), then in Europe (1993); but this
was the halfway prosperity that had happened in the late stages of every price-revolution.
Many workers remained jobless. In May 1994, rates of unemployment were above 6 percent in
the United States, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in Great Britain, II percent in Italy, 12
percent in France, 13 percent in Belgium, 24 percent in Spain, and 50 percent in South Africa.
These were the official rates. The true numbers were higher, and even they did not begin to
measure the social costs. For every worker without a job there were others who had been
unemployed in the recent past, and many more who feared that they might be jobless in the
immediate future.

The social cost of anti-inflationary policies had become more destructive than inflation itself.
Opportunities diminished. Inequalities increased. The principal victims were not a class but a
generation—young people who had no hope for the future and no memory of better times in the
past. The result was a rapid growth of alienation, anomie, confusion, and despair.

Through it all, consumer prices kept on climbing. Economic managers nervously shifted their
weight from accelerators to brakes, then back to accelerators and once more to brakes.
Inflation diminished but did not disappear. In early 1995, prices rose at annual rates of 4
percent in Germany, 6 percent in Britain and Switzerland, 8 percent in Italy and Spain. Lower
rates prevailed in Japan and the United States, where some observers argued that inflation had
been conquered. It was not so. Prices continued to outpace wages. Real income fell, and
families were desperately hard pressed. Institutions of many kinds operated under heavy fiscal
strain, and struggled to balance their budgets at heavy social cost.

Growing Imbalances

These stresses rose directly from the structure of the price-revolution itself. Every great wave
had been much the same that way. In the late stages of these long movements, severe strains
began to develop within social systems. The damage was done not by price-inflation itself, but
by disparities in its operation.

Some prices inflated more rapidly than others. Price-relatives were much the same as in every
long wave since the middle ages. Once again, as thrice before, soaring prices of food and
energy and raw materials had led the inflationary advance. Prices of manufactured products
such as cars, textiles, appliances, toys, leisure goods, and furniture all lagged behind. The
cause was the same as in every other price-revolution. The consequences fell most cruelly
upon the poor, who paid a large proportion of their income for food, fuel and shelter.20

Suffering was compounded by wage-movements after 1975. During the early and middle
decades of the twentieth century, workers had done better than in previous price-revolutions. In
the United States real wages kept rising through most of the period from 1896 to 1975.21 The
cause was to be found in a combination of union activity, minimum wage laws, productivity
gains, and social welfare legislation.22 During the early 1970s, that trend reversed. Real wages
fell sharply after 1973, dropped again from 1978 to 1982, and declined once more from 1984
to 1996. Broadly similar trends were evident in both white collar and blue collar jobs.23
Figure 4.18 shows a pattern of price relatives in the 20th century that was broadly similar to
earlier price revolutions, but different in important details. Once again the cost of energy, raw
materials and farm products led the advance. Once more, wages and manufactures lagged
behind. Two differences separated the 20th century price revolution from its predecessors. The
cost of food increased less rapidly, re, relative to other raw materials; and wages rose a little
more rapidly in relative terms, though still falling behind the cost of living. The source is
Statistical Abstract of the United States (1978) 765.

While real wages fell, returns to capital rose more rapidly than the general price level. This
was most dramatically so for landed capital. The cost of rent and real estate in the United
States multiplied sixfold from 1960 to 1992, while the consumer price index increased
threefold. Prime real estate went up tenfold or more. On Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a
cooperative apartment that had gone for $60,000 in 1968 rose as high as $600,000 twenty
years later. In Boston suburbs with good schools, modest homes that sold for $20,000 in 1965
brought $400,000 in 1986. Similar trends occurred in western Europe and east Asia. In Tokyo,
prime commercial real estate rose so high that it was sold by the square meter, at prices
between $200,000 and $300,000 for an area 40 inches on a side.24

Interest rates also increased more rapidly than prices. During the early years of the twentieth
century, interest had fluctuated more or less in proportion to the cost of living. In the 1960s, a
different pattern appeared. Rates of interest on home mortgages trebled in fifteen years. In New
England, mortgage rates rose from 5 per cent in 1965 to 16 per cent by 1979, a rate of increase
half again higher than consumer prices in the same period. Consumer loans and credit-card
interest went above 20 per cent.
Figure 4.19 shows the long fall in real wages that began circa 1970, and continued with brief
reversals to 1996. The price revolution of the twentieth century had differed from its
predecessors in the rise of real wages before 1970. Thereafter, it conformed to the common
pattern. Returns to labor fell for American workers, both blue collar and white collar, while
returns to capital increased. The result was a growth of inequality that appears in figure 4.22
below. The source is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings (1992);
Statistical Abstract of the United States, (1976), table 590); (1981), table 676; (1993), table
667.
Figure 4.20 shows that real estate values in the United States kept pace with rising prices to
1985, then rose more rapidly. It compares the median sale price of new privately owned one-
family houses in the United States, 1970-92, with consumer prices, indexed to 1982-84=100.
The sources are Statistical Abstract of the United States (1993), tables 756, 1225; U. S. Dept.
of Housing and Urban Development, New One-Family Houses Sold (1994).

In other price-revolutions, rates of interest had risen more rapidly than prices, but this time
another factor was also at work. During the late twentieth century, interest rates were
deliberately driven up as a way of managing the economy and controlling inflation. When
prices accelerated, the central banks raised interest rates to depress demand. In periods of
recession, interest rates were driven down to stimulate economic growth.

That, at least, was the idea. In practice the policy was distorted by a classic example of a
“ratchet-effect,” which allowed rates to move more freely up than down. When the Federal
Reserve Board raised interest rates in the United States, retail bankers instantly passed on the
increase to their borrowers. When the Fed lowered interest, the banks were slower to follow
suit. From 1970 to 1981, for example, the Federal Funds Rate rose from 7.2 to 16.4 percent,
and the cost of a conventional fixed-rate, long-term mortgage went from 8.6 to 16.6 percent.
But when the Federal Reserve reduced its discount rates from 9.2 to 3.5 percent (1989–92),
the cost of fifteen-year fixed mortgages fell very little, from 9.7 to 7.8 percent. This ratcheting
of rates reinforced the upward secular trend.
Figure 4.21 follows the rise of interest rates, which exceeded the pace of price inflation during
the twentieth century. The sources are Homer, History of Interest Rates, 343-63, 416-17, 434-
35, 448-49; Statistical Abstract of the United States, (1981-93); Annuaire Statistique de la
France (1984-93); Great Britain, Annual Abstract of Statistics (1984-93).

When real wages fell and real returns to capital increased, the social consequences were
inexorable. Inequality increased. In the United States this trend began circa 1968.25 Great
fortunes grew steadily greater, and the upper middle class also flourished, while poverty and
homelessness increased. The upper third of the nation gained ground; the lower two thirds fell
behind. The work force was increasingly polarized into two labor markets. The upper market
offered high pay, fringe benefits, and long tenure; the lower market was for jobs with low pay,
no fringes, and frequent layoffs.26

Figure 4.22 shows the growth of equality before 1968, and growing inequality thereafter. The
graph includes annual Gini ratios for the distribution of income. The Gini ratio is a measure of
concentration in which .00 represents perfect equality and .99 is perfect inequality (the upper
percentile owns everything). The table to the right lists income shares for six specific years.

Data are from surveys by the Census Bureau, the oldest and best annual series on income
distribution in the United States. They are useful as trend-indicators, but understate levels of
inequality by omitting unrelated individuals (whose income is less equally distributed), and by
excluding capital gains (which in 1992 raised the top quintile’s share from 44.6 to 50 percent).

Sources are Current Population Reports, series P-60; Historical Statistics of the United
States (1976), series G85-90; Statistical Abstract of the United States (various issues); and
Lynn A. Karoly, “The Trend in Inequality among Families, Individuals, and Workers in the
United States: Twenty-Five Year Perspective,” in Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk, eds.,
Uneven Tides: Rising Inequality in America (New York, 1993), 27.

America in the late twentieth century was becoming two nations. In New York City, the
contrast between wealth and poverty had always been great. Now it became increasingly
visible, and more extreme than ever before. Studies by the author and his students found that
after 1975, Gini ratios of wealth inequality reached their highest levels in four centuries of
American history. Inequality of income also climbed steeply from 1968 to 1996.

On a bitter cold Saturday evening in the winter of 1986, the author remembers seeing crowds
of opulent shoppers strolling on Madison Avenue, while homeless men and women in filthy
rags lay silently on steam grates, next to battered shopping carts that held all their worldly
goods. In 1989, Manhattan boutiques sold mink coats for four-year-old children (“a steal at
$1,200”), while homeless children slept in the streets and subways. Similar sights were to be
seen in other cities.27

Growing imbalances of another kind weakened the powers of governments and private
institutions, when they were needed most. Fiscal and monetary disparities developed in public
and private institutions. In the United States, President Ronald Reagan repeatedly overruled his
advisors and refused to raise taxes, while he increased spending. As a consequence, the
revenue of the federal government lagged far behind its expenditures, and the national debt
increased at an unprecedented rate. In eight years, the Reagan administration increased the
national debt more than all previous presidencies combined.28

The American national debt, large as it may have been, was only a small part of total
indebtedness in the United States. While federal indebtedness soared above $1 trillion, private
individual debt rose beyond $2 trillion, and debts owed by business corporations—the most
profligate borrowers of all—exceeded $3 trillion. By 1987, the United States had become the
world’s leading debtor nation. This mountain of debt created dangerous imbalances in the
American financial system. In Illinois, Texas, California and New York, some of the nation’s
biggest banks failed during the 1980s. Government intervention succeeded in preventing a
general collapse, but by 1989 the American banking system had become the hostage of
economic fortune. Any sort of setback—an international crisis, an economic recession, a rogue
trader, or a run of bad weather—threatened major disaster.

Even more unstable than the banks were savings and loan associations. After deregulation,
these institutions were so badly managed that by 1988 more than 500 were near bankruptcy,
and the price of solvency was a huge taxpayer “bailout” which deepened Federal deficits.
Investigators calculated that half of the losses were caused in part by fraud.

Instabilities also developed in international trade. The economic policies of the leading
western nations differed profoundly in the 1980s. In the United States, the Reagan
administration adopted “supply-side” policies which sought to stimulate the economy by
deregulation, tax cuts and other incentives. Other nations such as Japan and Germany on the
other hand, pursued a policy of slow growth, balanced budgets, strict regulation, and
conservative management. These policies made a difference in rates of economic growth,
which in turn distorted international trade. The American economy imported vast quantities of
foreign goods, but found comparatively static or even shrinking markets abroad. As a
consequence, imbalances increased in American foreign trade.

These trade imbalances contributed to monetary disorders. The Nixon administration had
deregulated the international monetary system, destroying the Bretton Woods agreement in
1971–73, and allowing exchange rates to float. After it did so the international monetary
system became increasingly unstable. The Reagan administration drove down the dollar
relative to other currencies, in hopes of making American products more competitive. The
dollar lost more than half of its value against several major currencies. Exports from the
United States sluggishly revived, but Americans continued to import foreign products in large
quantity, and their cost in devalued dollars was greater than before. The result in 1988 was the
growth of imported inflation—a price surge led by rises in the cost of clothing (much of it
made abroad) and other imported goods. American trade policy thus contributed directly to
inflation and instability.

So also did monetary policy. Many government officials throughout the free world became
monetarists in the 1970s. Major efforts were made by the Federal Reserve Board in the United
States and the Bank of England in the United Kingdom to stabilize their disordered economies
by regulating the money supply. These efforts were not successful, and actually increased
instabilities. Economist Milton Friedman raged against the errors of his own disciples,
repeatedly accusing the governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Bank of England of
grievous incompetence. But John Kenneth Galbraith comments, “An economic policy, it might
be pointed out in response, needs to be within the competence, however limited, of those
available to administer it.” A major problem was the complexity of factors that constrained
monetary decision-making—domestic politics, international conditions, class interests, and
social policy.29

Other sources of instability in the world included the acts of well-meaning economic planners
who tried to stabilize the disordered world economy. Like generals trained to fight the last
war, they tended to think in terms of past crises while new ones developed around them. A
classic example was the Thatcher government in Britain. During the 1970s, that nation had
suffered from chronic slow growth, soaring prices, massive unemployment and industrial
disintegration. In 1986, recovery began at last. The British economy began to grow more
rapidly than it had done for many years, but only a few months into the recovery, the British
government became deeply concerned about the dangers of inflation. As the economy struggled
painfully to its feet after decades of decline, an editorial in the London Times asked, “Is the
economy in danger of overheating?” A few days later, the government deliberately drove up
interest rates to “cool” it. The cause of their concern was the memory of double-digit inflation;
the effect was to retard a fragile recovery and revive unemployment, in a nation where more
than 15 percent of the work force were without a job.30

Economic instability in general, and inflation in particular, took a heavy toll in human
suffering. Crime increased rapidly around the world during the period from 1965 to 1993. In
the United States homicide rates rose in a series of surges that peaked in 1974, 1980, and
1991. These movements correlated very closely with rates of inflation. Similar patterns also
appeared in theft and robbery. It should be understood that the primary cause was not inflation,
but the stress that inflation caused. In the United States, crime had also tended to increase in the
depth of the great depression, when prices were falling, but material stress was also very high.
Nevertheless, in the penultimate stage of every price-revolution, price-surges caused crime-
surges. This pattern appeared in the fourteenth century, the sixteenth century, the eighteenth
century and again in the late twentieth century. Periods of price equilibrium, on the other hand,
were marked by sustained decline in crime rates in the early years of each price-revolution.

Similar patterns appeared in the use of drugs and drink. In the United States, consumption of
alcohol and the use of drugs both tended to rise during the 1960s and 1970s in a series of
surges that correlated with the rate of inflation in consumer prices. Similar tendencies had
occurred in the United States during the price-revolution of the eighteenth century. The
Victorian equilibrium, on the other hand, was marked by a sustained decline in alcohol
consumption, and in the United States by a decline in drug use after 1830.
Figure 4.23 compares rates of inflation in the United States (more precisely, the annual percent
increase in a fixed-weight price index of personal consumption expenditures), with rates of
homicide (annual cases of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter known to the police per
100,000 population), and with annual rates of theft (theft, larceny and burglary known to the
police, per 100,000 population). The sources include Historical Statistics of the United
States (1976) series H972; Statistical Abstract of the United States (1976), table 248;
(1981), table 293; (1988), table 263; (1993), table 300; and Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Uniform Crime Reports (1993–94).
Figure 4.24 compares the annual rate of inflation in the United States with annual consumption
of distilled liquor per capita (population 18 and older); and also with the proportion of young
adults (aged 18-25) who described themselves as “current users” of marihuana. Broadly
similar trends (with variations) also appeared for the use of heroin, cocaine, hallucinogens,
and inhalants; and for beer and wine. The source for liquor consumption is the Economic
Research Service, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture; for drug use, the National Household Survey on
Drug Abuse. Both are reported in Statistical Abstract of the United States (1981), tables 199,
1429; (1981), tables 180, 186; (1993), tables 208, 220. Readers should note that liquor
consumption and drug use peaked when real incomes were falling rapidly, prices were surging
and unemployment was increasing. A comparable surge in drinking (to the highest recorded
levels in American history) occurred in similar circumstances during the climactic years of the
eighteenth century price revolution. A long decline in alcohol consumption coincided with the
Victorian equilibrium. See figure 3.30.

Another linkage appeared between price movements and family disruption. In the United
States, the proportion of children born outside of marriage increased in proportion to the
movement of consumer prices. This trend had also appeared in every earlier price-revolution
for which evidence survives. It was very strong in the eighteenth century, and appeared also in
fragmentary sources for the sixteenth century. Here again periods of price equilibrium were
marked by countertrends. Material instability, and high rates of inflation placed heavy stresses
on families as well as individuals. In short, the three trends that Americans identified as the
most urgent social problems facing the nation—crime, drugs and family disruption—all
correlated with rates of inflation.
Figure 4.25 compares annual illegitimacy ratios (births to unwed women per 1000 total live
births in the United States) with consumer prices (1967=100). Sources include Daniel Scott
Smith, “The Long Cycle in American Illegitimacy and Prenuptial Pregnancy,” in Peter Laslett,
Karla Osterveen, and Richard M. Smith, eds., Bastardy and Its Comparative History
(Cambridge, 1980), 363-66; P. Cutright, “Illegitimacy in the United States, 1920-68,” in R.
Parke Jr., and C. F. Westoff, eds., Demographic and Social Aspects of Population Growth
(Washington, 1972), 383; Statistical Abstract of the Unïted States (1993), tables 101, 102,
756; Historical Statistics of the United States (1976), series E135.
The Crisis of the Late Twentieth Century

In the 1980s and 1990s, material tensions approached the breaking point. Everywhere in the
world, established orders came under heavy strain. Entire systems began to collapse, in a
sequence of events that was similar to the climax of every other price-revolution since the
Middle Ages. The crisis took different forms from one region to another, but every part of the
world was caught up in it.

The people of Africa experienced the crisis in its most catastrophic form. Here the imbalances
had become most extreme. After independence, the growth of population had accelerated
sharply, and economic development had lagged far behind. In 1988, the twenty poorest nations
of sub-Saharan Africa all had negative rates of economic growth. Per capita product fell from
$324 to $270 a year. By 1990, much of Africa was in the grip of a classic Malthusian crisis, on
a scale that Europe had not known since the fourteenth century.31

Sir William Osler observed that “humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine and war.”
All were abroad in Africa. Famine stalked the Sahel. In Somalia, governments collapsed,
order disintegrated; a large part of the nation was reduced to starvation, while warlords
murdered relief workers who came to help. In Uganda and Zaire new epidemic diseases
appeared in forms more terrible even than the plagues of the 14th century. In Rwanda and
Burundi, tribal war led to mass murder of entire populations.

Even in the midst of crisis, there were countervailing tendencies. Nations such as Ghana built
strong institutions and maintained them. The people of South Africa ended their system of
apartheid, and struggled to construct a genuinely multiracial society. But in South Africa, half
the work force was unemployed, and social stresses were very great. By 1996 Africa below
the Sahara was in the grip of a general crisis as severe as any the world had ever seen.32

In eastern Europe, the general crisis caused one of the most dramatic reversals in modern
history. In the 1980s, leaders of communist regimes found themselves under heavy stress in
many ways at once. They felt themselves to be threatened from abroad by an American
government that had become increasingly bellicose, and was spending heavily on armaments—
even what appeared to be first-strike nuclear weapons, designed to “decapitate” command and
control systems in the Soviet Union. At the same time, aging socialist economies were unable
to maintain earlier rates of economic growth, and their citizens were demanding higher
standards of living. The increasing ossification of the Soviet system coincided with the late
stages of a global price-revolution, and with growing scarcities throughout the world. The
result, as we have seen, was price-rationing in capitalist countries and state-rationing in the
communist nations. Price-rationing was cruel in the west, but state-rationing was worse. It
became grossly corrupt, and made a mockery of the ideals on which socialist systems were
founded. The ruling few lived well; the many subsisted miserably. The rapid growth of
corruption and inequality destroyed the moral legitimacy of the socialist states at the same time
that the great wave eroded their material base. Any one of these problems alone was a serious
threat to the standing system. All of them together were fatal.

The result was not reform but revolution. To the amazement of the West, Communist states
suddenly began to fall apart. The first was Poland, where a union of shipyard workers who
called themselves Solidarity founded a movement for national liberation. Their leader, Lech
Walesa, declared in his Nobel speech of 1983, “He who once became aware of the power of
Solidarity and who breathed the air of freedom will not be crushed.”

Then to everyone’s astonishment, the government of one of the world’s two superpowers
collapsed. In 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet system by perestroika, or
restructuring. “The new is knocking at every door,” said Gorbachev. Soon it was coming in
through the windows. His reforms ended in revolution, which destroyed the communist system.
Marxism was discredited, and the Soviet Union disintegrated.33

In eastern Europe every other Marxist system came crashing down. A painful period followed.
Old ethnic rivalries that had been suppressed by Communist regimes exploded into war. A new
and very difficult economic transition from socialism to free market economics caused
negative rates of growth, hyperinflation, disorder, crime, and severe suffering. But open
institutions rapidly began to develop in eastern Europe. The new regimes were very shaky, and
suffered from the same stresses that had brought down their predecessors. Their future
remained in doubt.

In another part of the world, the crisis took a different form. From Afghanistan to Algeria, the
many nations of Islam were in turmoil during the 1980s and 1990s. After World War II, modern
secular elites had ruled them with a mix of Islamic and Western ideas. Rates of economic
growth were high, but the increase of population was higher. With the exception of oil-rich
Arab sheikdoms, Islam experienced the same economic stresses that were felt around the
world. The price-revolution took its toll. The cost of living surged. Real wages fell.
Inequalities increased. The teeming urban slums of this vast region were among the worst in
the world.
Figure 4.26 shows levels of hyperinflation in five former Socialist nations, 1992. Sources
include United Nations, Demographic Yearbook (1993) 336-53; Grzegorz W. Kolodko, Danuta
Gotz-Kozierkiewicz, and Elzbieta Skrzeszewska-Paczek, Hyperinflation and Stabilization in
Postsocialist Economies (Boston and Dordrecht, 1992).

Many in Islam blamed their troubles on western values. Fundamentalist movements began to
sweep the Islamic world. One by one, the secular regimes were attacked, and some were
destroyed. In 1979, Iran’s Pahlevi dynasty fell from power. In 1981, Egypt’s secular leader
Anwar Sadat was assassinated. A secular socialist regime in Afghanistan was destroyed by a
fundamentalist revolution. Islamic insurgencies developed in six of the former Soviet
republics. In 1992, Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front won an election, but was prevented from
taking power. The result was civil war, and the murder of hundreds of secular Algerian
leaders. In 1993, Islamic fundamentalists in Turkey set fire to a hotel where secular leaders
were meeting. Forty died in the flames. The Palestinian people turned to Islamic
fundamentalism. Their aging secular leaders in desperation made peace with Israel, but there
was no peace. In 1996, the general crisis had barely begun in the Middle East. Its outcome was
in doubt.

In Latin America during the Cold War, the superpowers had fostered the growth of client
tyrannies both of the left and right. These predatory regimes made war upon their own people.
The results included civil war in central America, a corrupt Communist dictatorship in Cuba,
revolution from the right in Chile, the “disappearances” in Argentina, and the boat people of
Haiti. The economics of tyranny in Latin America were catastrophic. The results were social
exploitation, political corruption, and some of the worst hyperinflation in the modern world.

In the 1980s, new trends began to appear. As the Cold War ended, the superpowers withdrew
their support of tyranny in Latin America. The people of the region rose against the systems that
had oppressed them. One by one, the tyrannies began to collapse. By 1996, all but one Latin
American nation were living under democracy and the rule of law. The general crisis in this
region destroyed a system of tyranny and oppression. But here again the new and more open
regimes were themselves very fragile, and the outcome was uncertain.

Even the strongest national economies showed signs of severe stress in the 1990s. A case in
point was Japan, which for a generation had been perceived to be the most dynamic and
successful economy in the world. In the early 1990s, signs of trouble began to appear.
Increasing pressure was brought on Japan by competitors in Asia, and trading partners in
America. A crisis of economic confidence developed within Japan itself. Labor costs were
high; productivity gains lagged behind those of other nations. By 1994–95, Japan had negative
rates of economic growth. The Japanese stock market fell sharply, and individual investors
suffered huge losses. By 1995, the economic stress was so severe that the nation as a whole
began to experience extended price deflation.

A growing spirit of cultural alienation began to develop in Japan, similar to that in other
nations throughout the world. Religious cults grew rapidly. A militant Buddhist cult that called
itself Aum Shinrikyo, who believed that the universe would end in 1997, began in their
madness to manufacture a deadly nerve gas called Sarin. In March 1995, they released some of
it in a crowded Japanese subway, killing eleven commuters and injuring hundreds more. The
police struck quickly. Cult leader Shoko Asahara was arrested, but the incident brought home
the vulnerability of modern industrial societies.

Supporters of Aum Shinrikyo included some of Japan’s most highly educated young people
who dedicated their talent and discipline to the destruction of their own nation. This terrible
event could have happened anywhere. That it happened even in Japan demonstrated the depth
and breadth of problems that existed in all industrial societies.
The events of the late twentieth century increasingly resembled price-revolutions in the past.
Once again, world systems were in crisis. This was a crisis not only in the conventional sense
of a time when things hang in the balance.

When these words were written in the Spring of 1996, the outcome was very much in doubt,
but some trends were clear enough. Environing conditions that had set the price-revolution in
motion were changing rapidly. Rates of population-growth were plummeting throughout the
world. Total numbers of people continued to rise, but rates of gain were coming down. By
1996, some nations approached zero-growth. Other nations from the West Indies to eastern
Europe had negative growth.34

As the pace of population-growth diminished, rates of inflation also fell in the 1990s, with a
speed that took experts by surprise. Inflation forecasts were repeatedly revised downward, but
not fast enough to keep pace with the new trends. In 1994, economic forecasters around the
world swallowed hard and predicted that prices would rise only 3.5 percent the next year. In
fact, they rose 2.6 percent. A journalist who studied the accuracy of economic forecasts
observed in 1995, “Over the past couple of years, inflation has been consistently lower than
expected in Britain and America.”35

So strong was the decline of prices by 1996 that several leading economists asserted that the
age of inflation was at an end. American economist Lester Thurow called it an “extinct
volcano.” British economist Roger Bootle wrote thoughtfully about “the death of inflation” and
a coming “zero-era.” Japanese economists and businessmen spoke more ominously of “price
destruction.” These judgments were premature. Prices continued to rise in most nations, though
at a slower pace. Inflation was still institutionalized in economic systems.36

On the other side, central bankers continued to act on the belief that inflation was still the
greatest danger. When economic systems showed signs of reviving, they raised interest rates,
slowed expansion of the money supply, and “cooled” economies in other ways. For many
years, central bankers had functioned as heroic inflation-fighters. Reflexive inflation-fighting
was also institutionalized in economic systems—more so than inflation itself.

The results were the same as before. In 1996, inflation was declining, but far from dead. Anti-
inflationary policies added to the miseries that inflation itself had caused. The consequences
continued in the 1990s: falling real wages, rising inequality, diminished economic growth, and
increasing instability in political and social systems.

All that was happening in the Spring of 1996, when this book went to press. The end of the
story has not been written. It could end in many different ways. So fragile were the major
trends that contingencies of various kinds threatened to disrupt them. A major war in the
Middle East or eastern Europe or some other trouble spot could reignite inflation. A collapse
of overvalued security markets could cause panic, depression and deep deflation.

In a time of crisis, when so many possibilities were hanging in the narrow balance, much
depended on the wisdom of our choices. Wise choices in turn required intelligent leaders and
informed electorates. But intelligence and wisdom and even the information that we needed
most were not much in evidence in national capitals throughout the world.

As the great wave of the twentieth century approached its climax, the condition of many nations
called to mind a Melville novel, or perhaps a Masefield poem. The ship of state raced onward,
through high seas and heavy weather. All sails were set, and her helm was lashed to the course
that she had long been steering. On the quarterdeck, several parties of myopic navigators
squinted dimly at the dark clouds behind them. Somewhere below was their amiable captain,
who wanted mainly to be loved by his sullen crew. The first-class passengers amused
themselves in their opulent cabins, knowing little of the suffering in steerage, and nothing of the
dangers that surrounded them. On deck amidships, a lone bookish traveler turned his collar
against the wind, leaned precariously across the lee rail, and tried to read the signs in the sky.
CONCLUSION
Between Past and Future

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos!

Who can tell how all will end?
Read the wide world’s annals, you,
and take their wisdom for your friend.

Forward then, but still remember how

the course of Time will swerve,
Crook and turn upon itself in many a
backward streaming curve.
—Alfred Tennyson1

WORKS ON THIS subject often end with a book of Revelations, or at least a chapter of
Jeremiah, in which the reader is warned that we are heading for disaster—unless the author’s
ideas are speedily enacted. These dark prophecies find a growing market with modern readers,
who appear to have an insatiable appetite for predictions of their own impending doom.
Even when prophecies fail, they are merely updated and sell briskly once again. They call
to mind the career of the Reverend Samuel Miller, a Baptist minister in nineteenth century New
England, who predicted that the world would end no later than December 31, 1843. When the
fatal day approached, the Prophet discovered an error in his computations. He announced that
the last trump had been rescheduled to March 21, 1844. His followers grew to many hundreds.
They donned special “resurrection robes” and gathered to await the day of judgment. But
Samuel Miller found another mistake in his arithmetic, and postponed the end of the world
once again, this time to October 22, 1844. The faithful were undeterred. Their numbers rose so
high that on the appointed day, business came to a halt in parts of New England. But Samuel
Miller revised his numbers yet again and went on prophesying until his end arrived—without
warning—in 1849.2
Those who believe that the economic future has been revealed to them should remember
the story of Samuel Miller. They might also reflect on the wisdom of John Kenneth Galbraith,
who observes that “the most common qualification of the economic forecaster is not in
knowing, but in not knowing that he does not know. His greatest advantage is that all
predictions, right or wrong, are soon forgotten.”3
Historians have special reasons for caution, for they will recall the fate of earlier
attempts to know the future. They also have problems enough with the past. Further, they
understand that predictions fail not because historical knowledge is limited, but because of the
nature of history itself.
We are not merely the objects of history but also its agents. The future is determined
partly by free choices that people willfully make, often in unexpected ways. These human
choices are not always rational. They flow from hopes and fears, truths and errors, memories
and dreams. They are unpredictable, and sometimes unimaginable, before they are made.
The history of prices offers many examples. No economic forecaster could have predicted
(or even imagined) that a president as conservative as Richard Nixon would become a convert
to Keynesian economics in 1971, or that a president as liberal as Jimmy Carter would adopt
conservative fiscal policies in 1978, or that any president in his right mind would have
embraced the “supply-side” nostrums called Reaganomics in 1981. Each of these individual
choices made a difference in the history of prices. All of them were freely made—sometimes
defiantly against reason, interest and the economic odds. As long as this is so, history will
never be a predictive science.4
Nevertheless, if powers of prophecy are denied to us, there are other important links
between the past and future. The study of history can never tell us with certainty what will
happen next, but it gives us the benefit of much hard-won experience in the past. It also helps
us to know our intentions for the future. To those ends, let us review the patterns that we have
found, and think of the choices before us.

Price Revolutions: Structural Similarities

This inquiry began with a problem of historical description about price movements in the
modern world. Its primary purpose was to describe the main lines of change through the past
eight hundred years. The central finding may be summarized in a sentence. We found evidence
of four price-revolutions since the twelfth century: four very long waves of rising prices,
punctuated by long periods of comparative price-equilibrium. This is not a cyclical pattern.
Price revolutions have no fixed and regular periodicity. Some were as short as eighty years;
others as long as 180 years. They differed in duration, velocity, magnitude, and momentum.
At the same time, these long movements shared several properties in common. All had a
common wave-structure, and started in much the same way. The first stage was one of silent
beginnings and slow advances. Prices rose slowly in a period of prolonged prosperity.
Magnitudes of increase remained within the range of previous fluctuations. At first the long
wave appeared to be merely another short-run event. Only later did it emerge as a new secular
tendency.
The novelty of the new trend consisted not only in the fact of inflation but also in its form.
The pattern of price-relatives was specially revealing. Food and fuel led the upward
movement. Manufactured goods and services lagged behind. These patterns indicated that the
prime mover was excess aggregate demand, generated by an acceleration of population
growth, or by rising living standards, or both.
These trends were the product of individual choices. Men and women deliberately chose
to marry early. They freely decided to have more children, because material conditions were
improving and the world seemed a better place to raise a family. People demanded and at first
received a higher standard of living, because there was an expanding market for their labor.
The first stage of every price-revolution was marked by material progress, cultural confidence,
and optimism for the future.
The second stage was very different. It began when prices broke through the boundaries
of the previous equilibrium. This tended to happen when other events intervened—commonly
wars of ambition that arose from the hubris of the preceding period. Examples included the
rivalry between emperors and popes in the thirteenth century; the state-building conflicts of the
late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the dynastic and imperial struggles of the mid-
eighteenth century; and the world wars of the twentieth century. These events sent prices
surging up and down again, in a pattern that was both a symptom and a cause of instability. The
consequences included political disorder, social disruption, and a growing mood of cultural
anxiety.
The third stage began when people discovered the fact of price inflation as a long-term
trend, and began to think of it as an inexorable condition. They responded to this discovery by
making choices that drove prices still higher. Governments and individuals expanded the
supply of money and increased the velocity of its circulation. In each successive wave, price-
inflation became more elaborately institutionalized.
A fourth stage began as this new institutionalized inflation took hold. Prices went higher,
and became highly unstable. They began to surge and decline in movements of increasing
volatility. Severe price shocks were felt in commodity movements. The money supply was
alternately expanded and contracted. Financial markets became unstable. Government spending
grew faster than revenue, and public debt increased at a rapid rate. In every price-revolution,
the strongest nation-states suffered severely from fiscal stresses: Spain in the sixteenth century,
France in the eighteenth century, and the United States in the twentieth century.
Other imbalances were even more dangerous. Wages, which had at first kept up with
prices, now lagged behind. Returns to labor declined while returns to land and capital
increased. The rich grew richer. People of middling estates lost ground. The poor suffered
terribly. Inequalities of wealth and income increased. So also did hunger, homelessness, crime,
violence, drink, drugs, and family disruption.
These material events had cultural consequences. In literature and the arts, the penultimate
stage of every price-revolution was an era of dark visions and restless dreams. This was a
time of lost faith in institutions. It was also a period of desperate search for spiritual values.
Sects and cults, often very angry and irrational, multiplied rapidly. Intellectuals turned
furiously against their environing societies. Young people, uncertain of both the future and the
past, gave way to alienation and cultural anomie.
Finally, the great wave crested and broke with shattering force, in a cultural crisis that
included demographic contraction, economic collapse, political revolution, international war
and social violence. These events relieved the pressures that had set the price-revolution in
motion. The first result was a rapid fall of prices, rents and interest. This short but very sharp
deflation was followed by an era of equilibrium that persisted for seventy or eighty years.
Long-term inflation ceased. Prices stabilized, then declined further, and stabilized once more.
Real wages began to rise, but returns to capital and land fell.
 The recovery of equilibrium had important social consequences. At first, inequalities
continued to grow, as a lag effect of the preceding price revolution. But as the new dynamics
took hold, inequality began to diminish. Times were better for laborers, artisans, and ordinary
people. Landowners were hard pressed, but economic conditions improved for most people.
Families grew stronger. Crime rates fell. Consumption of drugs and drink diminished. Foreign
wars became less frequent and less violent, but internal wars of unification became more
common and more successful.
Each period of equilibrium had a distinct cultural character. All were marked in their
later stages by the emergence of ideas of order and harmony such as appeared in the
Renaissance of the twelfth century, the Italian Renaissance of the quattrocento, the
Enlightenment of the early eighteenth century, and the Victorian era.
After many years of equilibrium and comparative peace, population began to grow more
rapidly. Standards of living improved. Prices, rents and interest started to rise again. As
aggregate demand mounted, a new wave began. The next price-revolution was not precisely
the same, but it was similar in many ways. As Mark Twain observed, history does not repeat
itself, but it rhymes.

Sequential Differences
Even as all price-revolutions shared a common wave-structure, they differed from one another
in duration, magnitude, and range. These differences were not random variations. They
comprised a coherent process of historical development from one great wave to the next. Since
the twelfth century, price-revolutions have succeeded one another in a continuous sequence of
historical change.
Several sequential patterns of this sort can be identified. The most obvious was a change
in rates of change. From one wave to the next, average annual rates of price-inflation tended to
increase geometrically: 0.5 percent in the price-revolution of the thirteenth century; a little
above I percent in the very long wave of the sixteenth century; nearly 2 percent in the shorter
wave of the eighteenth century; and at least 4 percent in the price-revolution of the twentieth
century. This acceleration was caused by the expansion of markets, and by the
institutionalization of price-increases.5
Second, as rates of change increased, a larger proportion of total price gains became
concentrated in the later stages of each price-revolution. In the medieval price-revolution,
absolute magnitudes of gain were comparatively even in their distribution through time. In the
price-revolution of the twentieth century, more than half of the total increase in prices from
1896 to 1996 happened after 1970. Nine-tenths of it came after 1945. This pattern was caused
by acceleration in rates of price-change from one price-revolution to another.6
Third, the range of annual fluctuations diminished from one wave to the next. In the
medieval price-revolution, these gyrations were very violent and dangerous, mainly as a
consequence of changing harvest conditions. Food prices tended also to be less stable when
people lived closer to the margin of subsistence. In each subsequent price-revolution, those
movements became less extreme, and fluctuations were damped down. The growth of
production created surpluses, which functioned as price-cushions. The expansion of markets
and the improvement of communications also diminished the disruptive effect of local
scarcities and seasonal oscillations.
Fourth, from one wave to another, the final stage of cultural crisis became progressively
less catastrophic. The medieval price-revolution ended in the massive famines and epidemics
of the fourteenth century. The second wave culminated in the general crisis of the seventeenth
century. This was the only period after the Black Death when the population of Europe
declined, but not as much as in the fourteenth century. The third wave had its climax in an age
of world revolutions (1776–1815), a time of many troubles, but population continued to
increase. The price-revolution of the twentieth century has yet to reach its climax.
Fifth, as each successive crisis grew less severe in demographic terms, it became more
sweeping in its social consequences. Every general crisis caused a social revolution, and the
radicalism of these events increased through time. The crisis of the fourteenth century did much
to end villeinage in western Europe, and to transform societies based on conquest and
subjugation into customary systems of orders and estates. The general crisis of the seventeenth
century transformed political systems and expanded the rule of law in Britain, America and
Europe. The revolutionary crisis of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (1776–1815)
made public institutions in America and Europe more responsive to the will of the people, and
more protective of their individual rights. It also transformed systems of social orders into
classes. The great wave of the twentieth century has not yet reached its end, but it has already
caused the collapse of totalitarian systems of the left (eastern Europe) and the right (Latin
America), as well as sweeping social and economic reforms in many nations. Every general
crisis in modern history has improved the condition of ordinary people. It has also enlarged
ideas of human dignity, freedom, and the rule of law. This tendency has become more powerful
in each successive wave.
To summarize, each price-revolution developed through five stages: slow beginnings in a
period of high prosperity; a period of surge and decline; a time of discovery and
institutionalization; an era of growing imbalances and increasing instability; and finally a
general crisis. The climax was followed by a fall of prices, recovery of stability, and a long
period of comparative price equilibrium. The social and cultural impact of these movements
changed from one great wave to another. Velocity increased and variability declined. Each
successive price-revolution became less catastrophic in its demographic consequences, but
more sweeping in its social impact.

Problems of Cause: Seven Models

These descriptive patterns raise many causal problems. What set the price-revolutions in
motion? What processes shaped their distinctive structure? Fernand Braudel, one of the few
historians to consider these questions, pronounced them “impossible” to solve. Certainly it is
true that conventional models of explanation in history and economics do not work well when
applied to this problem.7
Seven causal models are dominant in the historical literature: monetarist, Malthusian,
Marxist, agrarian, neoclassical, environmental, and historicist. All have much to teach us, but
none has solved the problem of explaining the origin and development of price-revolutions in a
rounded way.8
The most simple and straight-forward explanation of price-revolutions is the monetarist
model, which holds that price levels are determined by the quantity and velocity of money in
circulation. This explanation has major strengths, and has made an important contribution to
knowledge. Much research has established beyond doubt that monetary factors make a major
difference in price levels. But when monetarist models are introduced as the first cause of
price-revolutions, difficulties appear. The timing is never quite right. The price-revolution of
the sixteenth century, for example, began as early as 1475, thirty years before the first
American treasure reached Europe, and fifty years before it began to flow in quantity.9
Further, a monetarist model cannot account for many aspects of a price-revolution. It
alone cannot explain the movement of price-relatives, or the disparity between prices and
wage movements, or the difference in returns to labor and capital. It does not help us to
understand why prices and interest rates tend to rise together in long inflations—the Gibson
paradox, which is a major problem for monetarists.
A monetary explanation cannot tell us why people choose to expand the money supply in
the first place, or why they do so in some periods more than others. Increases in the supply of
money are not suddenly visited upon history as Zeus came to Danae, in a shower of gold.
People deliberately decide to change the size of the money supply, for one reason or another. In
the history of these events there is always a prior cause.
Moreover, the monetarist model works better for some periods than others. It does well
for middle and later stages of price revolutions, but badly for early stages, and for periods of
price equilibrium. Its explanatory power increases when it is used as an historical variable
rather than a theoretical constant. In some periods, monetary forces are strong and overriding.
In others they are weak and secondary.
Altogether, Wilhelm Abel observes from long and careful study that “Long-term trends in
the price of grain . . . cannot be explained adequately by fluctuations in the circulation of
money, though that has been attempted since the time of Jean Bodin (1568). Even when
improved forms of the simple quantity theory are summoned to the rescue, the discrepancies of
time apparent in the course of the price movements remain inexplicable.”10
In short, a monetary model is a necessary and important part of any causal explanation of
price-revolutions, but it is not a sufficient explanation. Monetarism alone won’t do.
A second causal explanation is the Malthusian model, which centers on imbalances
between economic and demographic growth. Here again, the approach of Malthus has much to
teach us. Correlations between price-movements and population-growth are strong in most
periods of world history. Many historians (not all of them) believe that a Malthusian model
closely fits the evidence of the medieval price-revolution, and especially the general crisis of
the fourteenth century. Some apply it with equal confidence to the general crisis in Europe
during the seventeenth century, and to Africa in the twentieth century.
But most scholars also agree that for the period after Malthus published his Essays on
Population (1798), his model no longer fits the historical facts in the Western world. From the
late eighteenth century to our own time, European crises tended to develop from structural
imbalances and systemic instabilities long before Malthusian “positive checks” came into play.
This difference suggests that population pressures operated in conjunction with other factors
that a Malthusian model alone does not consider. Malthusian (and neo-Malthusian) approaches
help to make sense of many aspects of the problem. Like monetary models, they are a necessary
part of any explanation of price-revolutions, but insufficient to the general explanatory task at
hand.
Third, Marxist explanations are still favored by many academic historians in America and
Europe, even after the collapse of Marxism as a ruling ideology throughout the world. At first
glance, some parts of the wave-pattern seem to fit a Marxist frame. Changes in systems of
production had a major impact on movements of prices, wages, rents and interest. Also, the
imbalances that developed in each great wave rose in part from class-differences, and
engendered class-conflicts in their turn. These patterns were strong in the late medieval and
early modern eras. Many scholars, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, believe that the climax of
the medieval price-revolution was part of a “crisis of feudalism” and a shift from one stage of
production to another. Others have offered similar interpretations for the price-revolution of
the sixteenth century, and some have tried to make sense of the long wave of the 20th century as
a crisis of capitalism.
On closer scrutiny, however, major difficulties appear in the Marxist model. Tests of
chronology show that the four waves of the modern era do not sit comfortably with the three
systems of production that dominate Marxist analysis. Patterns such as “price scissors” which
Marxist scholars believe to have been caused uniquely by the “crisis of feudalism” also
appeared in every price-revolution. Events in the twentieth century that Marxists called the
crisis of capitalism were a total catastrophe for socialism. Capitalist systems survived them;
socialist systems collapsed.
Further, much of the historic role that Marxists assign to systems of production belongs to
structures of exchange, and other material and cultural relations. Altogether, price revolutions
and price-equilibria do not correlate with Marxist models of change in the organization of the
means of production.
Marxist models remain heuristically useful in many ways. They prompt us to remember
that history is about all humanity, not merely small elites. They remind us that class-relations
are an important part of our problem, and they teach us to think in terms of long processes and
large systems. But in conceptual terms, Marxist models are too narrow. In terms of chronology
and historical fact, they are also mistaken.
A fourth model seeks an explanation for long waves in rhythms of agricultural production.
The leading work is that of Ernest Labrousse, who argued that price fluctuations in the French
economy were driven by the size of harvests, in which short crips sent up the price of grain,
reduced the income of farmers, and caused the poor to spend a larger part of their meager
wages on bread. These factors were thought to have caused the market for industrial goods to
shrink, and to have created a general depression, which continued until better harvests brought
lower prices and recovery. Other agrarian models of high complexity have been developed by
the great German scholar Wilhelm Abel.11
This approach has many strengths. It works best for the time and place where it was
invented: the history of rural Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It helps to
explain the movement of price-relatives, rents and wages in every price-revolution, and adds
to our understanding of that distinctive combination of hard times and high prices which
occurred in every general crisis.
But it does not work for the great wave of the twentieth century, or for North and South
America in the early modern period. Another major weakness is its difficulty in explaining
why harvest variations had very different consequences according to their timing within each
great wave. Scarcities in early stages of a price-revolution, and in periods of price-
equilibrium, did not have results as catastrophic as in periods of general crisis. The short
harvests of the 1690s, though very severe, had nothing like the consequences of scarcity in the
1780s. To account for these disparities, one must move beyond the boundaries of an agrarian
model.12
Yet another explanation might be sought in models of neoclassical economics, and
especially in its laws of supply and demand. This approach is helpful in many ways. The rise
and fall of prices may be understood as commonly the result of changes in levels of aggregate
demand. Monetary models also have a neoclassical foundation, in their organizing idea of
money as a commodity whose value fluctuates inversely with its supply. In these and other
ways, neoclassical models have much to teach us about how a price-system works.
They are less successful in explaining why its workings change from one historical period
to another. They help us to think clearly about price-movements as a function of supply and
demand, but they do not explain why demand changes. They can help to model a great wave,
but they cannot tell us why it begins, or why it develops its distinctive wave-structure, or why
it suddenly comes to an end.
A French scholar observes from long experience that no historical problem of the long
durée can be solved by economics alone. One might equally say that it cannot be solved by
history alone. History and economics must advance together, if either is to advance at all. The
nomothetic methods of economic theory and the idiographic tools of historical inquiry are
complementary.13
Another approach to our problem is broadly ecological. It holds that great waves were set
in motion by changes in environmental conditions. Many scholars through the years have tried
to link changes in the earth’s climate and solar activity to price movements and general crises.
Recently in climate-history, there has been much learned discussion of a cold period in the
fourteenth century, of the Maunder minimum and solar flares during the seventeenth century,
and of the “Little Ice Age” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.14
All of these episodes appear at first sight to correlate with our major periods of crisis in
Europe, and also in Asia, Africa, America and Oceania. Earlier global crises of the same sort
have also been identified by ancient historians and paleontologists. Further research may
reinforce them.
But in the modern period, ecological models run into difficulties when they are studied in
detail. Chronology is the critical problem. The European crisis of the seventeenth century, for
example, overlapped with the period of the Maunder minimum, but began fifty years earlier. In
the late seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the several distinct cold periods that
are collectively called the Little Ice Age show a strong correlation with short-run fluctuations,
but not with secular trends. In 1979, a gathering of meteorologists, paleobotanists, chemists,
physicists and historians at Harvard University generally concluded that changes in climate do
not correlate closely with long-term economic change.15
Beyond doubt, climatic events were precipitants of crisis in 1315, in the 1590s and in the
1780s. They also functioned as powerful catalysts at various points in the wave sequence. But
in light of present knowledge, environmental changes do not appear to have been the prime-
movers of price movements in the modern era. This may change with further research, but at
present ecological models are more useful in explaining fluctuations around the central trend,
than in accounting for the trend itself.
Finally, there are historicist models which seek to explain things in their particulars. They
begin with the idea that each historical event is unique, and seek to explain it in terms of
special circumstances, distinctive details, and inner complexities. When historicists try to put
the pieces together, they use a method of aggregation without generalization. The classic
example was British historian H. A. L. Fisher who asserted that all of history is one great fact,
about which there can be no generalization.
On the subject of price-revolutions, historicists have helped us to understand that each
great wave was a unique event, and that details made a difference. But historicism cannot
explain a general pattern that has recurred many times since the middle ages.
Each of these seven causal strategies helps to explain important aspects of our problem.
None suffices to resolve it. The explanatory task at hand requires another approach which
might combine their strengths and correct their weaknesses. Somehow, such an explanation
should integrate ecological, demographic, social, monetarist and economic factors. It should
do so without dissolving into an indiscriminate pluralism, or degenerating into ad hoc
explanations. It should account for both similarities and differences between price-revolutions.
How might this be done?

Another Causal Model: Autogenous Change

One promising possibility centers on the internal dynamics of price-revolutions themselves. It
begins with an idea of a culture as a complex web of causal relationships which link material
structures, cultural values, and individual actions. It also builds upon an idea of history as a
sequence of contingencies, in the special sense of people making choices, and choices making
a difference. Two vital elements in this approach are ideas of contingency and choice.
Let us begin in the late stages of a price equilibrium, when prices are more or less stable,
real wages are rising, rents and interest rates are falling, social stability is increasing, material
conditions are improving, and cultural expectations are growing brighter. In these periods,
people begin to make major choices in different ways. They decide to marry earlier. They
choose to have more children. They also make economic decisions in a different way,
expanding the scale of their ambition and the scope of their activity. These choices are made
not entirely or even primarily for reasons that can be explained in material terms, but because
of changes in cultural mood and expectation.
The result of these choices is that aggregate demand grows more rapidly than supply. As it
does so, the general price-level begins to rise. Some prices increase faster than others. Food,
energy, and shelter lead the trend, partly because their supply is less elastic, and partly because
demand grows more rapidly for life’s necessities. The prices of industrial products increase
more slowly, because they are more easily produced in greater volume. Price relatives show
their distinctive patterns. Rents and interest rates begin to climb, as demand grows for land and
money. Real wages keep up at first but then begin to lag behind, partly because population
growth has expanded the supply of labor, and partly because the dynamics of change favor
people with positional goods.
For a time these trends develop within the same range of fluctuations as in the preceding
period of equilibrium. When they move beyond that range, and become visible as a new
secular trend, individuals and institutions make another set of decisions. By and large, they
respond to inflation by making individual and collective choices that cause more inflation. The
stock of money is deliberately enlarged to meet growing demand. Capitalists charge higher
rates. Landlords raise the rent. Real wages fall farther behind. The cultural mood begins to
change in a new way; there is a growing sense of material uncertainty and moral confusion.
The combined effect of these tendencies is to create growing imbalances within the
cultural system. As returns to capital rise, and returns to labor fall, inequality increases in the
distribution of wealth and income. These inequalities in turn create a problem of poverty and
homelessness. They put a heavy strain on social relationships and intensify class conflicts.
This leads to another set of choices. Everyone tries to find a measure of protection or to
profit from changing circumstances. People who possess power and wealth are best able to do
so. For example, they demand tax-reductions and often receive them. Taxation becomes more
regressive and public revenues fall behind expenditures. Fiscal imbalances develop. Public
deficits increase, the cost of debt service rises, and governments are reduced to near-
insolvency, and the springs of public action are weakened. The cultural mood changes once
more, with a growing awareness of limits on human effort and a spreading sense of social
pessimism—even social despair. Other imbalances begin to have similar consequences as
people exercise choices in different ways.
These imbalances create instabilities. Prices surge and decline in swings of increasing
amplitude. Markets of many kinds—capital markets, commodity markets, labor markets—
become dangerously unstable. Production and productivity decline or stagnate, while prices
continue to rise; together these trends create stagflation. Political instability increases, and
with it comes social disorder, internal violence and international war. The cultural system
becomes dangerously unstable; internal conflicts of value and identity grow more intense.
Things are specially hard for young people, who find it difficult to get good jobs, or start
a family. They also have choices to make. Some decide to have children anyway, outside of
marriage. The proportion of children born and raised outside marriage increases rapidly. Other
young people turn against social institutions, or merely turn away from them. Crime increases.
The consumption of drugs and drink goes up. People of age and wealth have very different
experiences, and do not understand why their own children are so troubled. But the young and
the poor, especially the working poor, are driven to despair.
Finally, a triggering event that might have caused a minor disturbance in another era
creates a major crisis. The trigger itself might be a change in the weather—the heavy rains of
the early fourteenth century, or the cold years of the eighteenth century, or drought in the
twentieth century. It might be an epidemic or a war. It could be a malevolent monarch, or an
incompetent president, or an irresponsible demagogue, or a dictator who is driven only by his
own malevolence. More often—and most dangerously—it is a combination of disasters.
Whatever they might be, these small events have sweeping consequences. They disrupt a
cultural system that is dangerously unstable.
They tend to do so by straining the social fabric in several different directions at once.
Established social fabrics are very strong and tough, and tenacious of their being. They are
also highly resilient, and commonly deal successfully with stress. The danger comes when they
are stressed in several ways at once. This is what happens in moments of general crisis. The
result is a protracted period of political disorder, social conflict, economic disruption,
demographic contraction and cultural despair.
This general crisis relieves the pressures that set the price revolution in motion.
Afterward, the economic trends run in reverse. Demand falls and price-deflation follows. Real
wages begin to rise. Interest and rent fall. Inequality continues for a time (the lag of effect of
the last change-regime). There are other lag-effects, as people continue for a time to think in
terms of the preceding period. But the new trends quickly take hold. As they do so, equality
increases a little, or at least ceases to grow greater. A period of equilibrium develops, and the
cultural mood becomes more positive. Population increases, and aggregate demand begins to
grow. The pattern begins again.
Each of these stages develops from a sequence of choices that are framed by environing
conditions. The choices are freely made, but they become part of the context for the next set of
decisions. The interaction of individual choices have collective consequences which nobody
intends or desires. This is specially so in the later stages of price revolutions. In a free market,
individual responses to inflation commonly cause more inflation. Individual defenses against
economic instability cause an economy to become more unstable.
This process might be called the irrationality of the market. It is so in the sense that it
converts rational individual choices into collective results that are profoundly irrational. Far
from being a benign or beneficent force, the market when left to itself is an unstable system that
has repeatedly caused the disruption of social and economic systems in the past eight hundred
years.
In important ways, the structure of this contingent process has changed through time. The
balance between individual and institutional choices has tended to shift, and causal patterns
have become more complex. The earliest wave in the thirteenth century was primarily a matter
of population pressing against resources. In the second wave, monetary factors became more
powerful and added strongly to demographic pressures—a tendency that Bodin and others
were quick to notice. The third wave added yet another layer of institutional complexity in
structural determinants such as the Speenhamland system, the banking system and securities
exchanges, and also more complex dynamics of population growth and accelerating economic
growth. The fourth wave contributed other layers of institutional complexity in regulatory
floors without ceilings, administered prices, competitive inflation, wage-price spirals, other
things.
This pattern of growing structural complexity may be understood as a process of
increasing human intervention, with both negative and positive results. One consequence was
that price-revolutions tend to move more rapidly. Another was that their destructive
consequences are much reduced. Magnitudes of demographic disaster diminished from price-
revolution to the next, but the intensity of social conflict increased. The structure of
contingency is an historical variable, but it always operates as a web of expanding individual
choices within a cultural frame.
These complex processes, and the great waves that they set in motion, have had many
consequences. In material terms, they have been a powerful determinant of wealth and income
distribution—not the only factor, but one of the more important. The later stages of every price-
revolution were always a time when inequalities of wealth and income increased, primarily
because of disparities in the movements of prices, wages, rents, interest and production. The
late years of every price-equilibrium were marked by comparative stability in the distribution
of wealth and income, and sometimes by the growth of equality.16
Other social consequences appear in rates of violent crime. In the late stages of every
price-revolution, and especially during general crises, rates of homicide increase sharply in
surges that correlate closely with price movements. The growth of crime in our own time has
commonly been explained in other ways—notably the failure of law-enforcement, and the
decline of moral values. These answers are tautological. The question is, why does
enforcement fail? Why do moral values decline? An answer may be found in material and
cultural conditions, and in processes of contingency and choice. In the latter stages of every
great wave, price movements and crime rates are so intimately linked that they appear to move
as statistical shadows.
Yet another social result appears in indicators of family decay, especially births outside
of marriage. In general these trends rise during price-revolutions, and fall during periods of
price equilibrium. The association is very strong in the twentieth century, and reaches as far
into the past as the evidence runs. It has been observed and measured from the sixteenth century
to the present.
The great waves, and the deeper movements which they represented, also have had a
major impact on the main lines of cultural history. The timing of major trends in intellectual
history coincided closely with the rhythm of price-revolutions. Periods of price-equilibrium
also correlate with the renaissance of the twelfth century, the renaissance of the fifteenth
century, the enlightenment, and the Victorian era. The causal relationship was complex.
Intellectual trends were certainly not mechanical reflexes of price movements. Rather, both the
history of prices and ideas were parallel expressions of cultural conditions in the broadest
sense, and of the individual choices conditioned by those cultures, that set the great waves in
motion and were the instrument of their development.
 This model understands price-revolutions as autogenous, self-generating processes. It is
an historical idea. Each stage contains within itself the seed of the next stage, and the one after
that. The causal sequence is not fixed and rigid in its determinism. It develops as a chain of
individual choices, and as a consequence its structure changes from one great wave to the next.

Retrospect and Prospect

Still the hardest questions remain. Where are we heading? What does the future hold for us?
The study of history does not give us the answers to these questions. It cannot reveal the future.
But it helps us to understand the present and very recent past.
The evidence of this inquiry tells us that we are living in the late stages of a very long
price-revolution, perhaps in the critical stage. It also tells us that these are global processes.
Our destiny is now closely linked to the condition of all humanity. The patterns of the past also
suggest that what will happen in the future depends in no small degree on the choices that we
make. Human beings do not hold everything in our hands, but our collective power to shape
historical processes has grown enormously in the past eight hundred years. We can use this
power wisely or foolishly. Our choices will make a difference for our children and
grandchildren, and for generations yet unborn.
But what should be done? What individual choices should we make? What should we do
collectively? As always, some believe that the best policy is to do nothing and let the market
make its own correction. This argument was made as early as the fourteenth century. When
medieval civilization was collapsing around him, the Canon of Bridlington spoke against an
ordinance on prices. He believed that the “fruitfulness or sterility of all living things are in the
power of God alone, from which it follows that the fertility of the soil and not the will of man
must determine the price.” Much the same attitude is shared today by those who substitute the
theology of the free market for the Canon of Bridlington’s power of God.17
Those who believe in the beneficence of a free market are correct in one tenet of their
faith. It is true that the play of the market will in time correct almost any imaginable price-
distortion. But to put our trust in the market is to ignore some hard historical facts. The free
market restored equilibrium in the fourteenth century, but only after the Black Death. It did so
again in the seventeenth century, but not until a general crisis had destroyed the peace of
Europe. The free market recovered its equilibrium in the Victorian era, but only after the
slaughter of the Napoleonic Wars. In short, the laisser-faire prescription, “let the free market
take its course” has in the past eight hundred years created human suffering on a scale that is
unacceptable. It is also unnecessary.
A second historical fact also tends to be missed by believers in the free market. In
economic history, equilibrium is the exception rather than the rule. A free market restores
equilibrium only to break it down again, and to set in motion a new sequence of imbalances
and instabilities with all the troubles that follow in their train. In the full span of modern
history, most free markets have been in profound disequilibrium most of the time—often
dangerous and destructive disequilibrium.
A third fact is also frequently forgotten. In our complex and highly integrated modern
economies, there are no truly free markets any more. The free market in the twentieth century is
an economic fiction, much like the state of nature in the political theory of the eighteenth
century. Markets today are highly regulated and actively manipulated by both public and
private instruments. The real question is not whether we should interfere with the market, but
what sort of interference we should make, and who will make it, and what its extent will be.
If we must intervene in the operation of the market, the question changes. How and when
and to what ends should we intervene? Should we seek to suppress inflation as our primary
goal? Here again, learned opinion is deeply divided. On the subject of long-term inflation in
particular, many economists believe that rising prices are not necessarily a bad thing. Some
think that they may even be a good thing, or at least better than the alternative. A few are
convinced that fear of inflation has been more destructive than inflation itself, and that policies
designed to restrain rising prices have done major damage to modern economies. Others take
the opposite view, and insist that we have done too little to control a major scourge of modern
society.
To study this problem in historical perspective is to see it in a different light. Long
inflations, or more precisely the social and economic forces that long inflations represent, have
caused profound human suffering on a massive scale. The major problem is not inflation itself.
It is rather the imbalances, instabilities and inequities that have been associated with inflation.
The historical record of the past eight hundred years shows that ordinary people are right
to fear inflation, for they have been its victims—more so then elites. And ordinary people who
live in free societies have a special reason for concern. During the turbulent decade from 1963
to 1973, forty nations suffered from rates of inflation above 15 per cent. A recent study has
shown that thirty-eight of those forty countries abolished or abridged democratic institutions in
one way or another. A society that seeks to make its political decisions by open elections, and
also hopes regulate its economic decisions by the operation of the free market, is specially
vulnerable to the effect of unstable prices.18
Price-revolutions and the long-term inflation that they engendered have caused major
social problems in the past eight centuries. But there is another difficulty. Recent anti-
inflationary policies have also done major damage in other ways, and sometimes even in the
same ways. If both inflation and anti-inflationary policies have caused trouble, what should we
do? Here are five suggestions.

Learning to Think of the Long Run

First, we should learn to think historically about our condition. History is not only about the
past. It is also about change and continuity. Most of all it is about the long run. The two leading
errors of economic planning are to impose short-term thinking on long-term problems, and to
adopt atemporal and anachronistic policies which do not recognize that the world has changed.
It is an axiom of military history that generals are trained to fight the last war. In economic
history, planners and managers are taught to prevent the last crisis from happening again. The
next one is always different.
When we think historically about the problem of price-revolutions in particular, two
important conclusions emerge. First, price-movements are historical processes; their
magnitude, structure, cause and consequences have been highly variable. Second, these
variations are patterned in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Many heads of
government, leaders of corporations, business managers, economic theorists, and private
investors have very little historical understanding of economic processes which they confront.
Ideas and solutions are drawn from one set of historical circumstances (often very recent) and
applied to others where they do not fit. The corrective is not merely historical knowledge. It is
also historical thinking.
To that end we need to educate our leaders in politics, business, journalism, academe and
every sector of society. We should help them to think in larger terms about the long run, and to
expand the horizons of decision-making. This is especially the case in the United States, where
we also need to educate every citizen to think in larger terms about the problems before us.

Expanding Contextual Knowledge

Second, we need more information about long trends and large contexts. Our world is
overwhelmed by information, but it is not the information that we most urgently require. Public
and private agencies churn out immense quantities of economic data, mostly to monitor short-
term movements within national boundaries. The vast statistical inquiries of United States
government center on events of the past week, or month, or quarter. Every month, new sets of
economic indicators are given to the public—producer prices, consumer prices, growth rates,
foreign trade, housing starts, automobile sales, boxcar loadings, pork-belly contracts.
In a world of increasing economic volatility, these reports become front-page stories. We
study them as closely as our ancestors examined their soothsayers’ bones, and with as much
effect. Last month’s indicators have little meaning until they are set within a context that is
broader than the month before. That sort of contextual knowledge is much neglected today. We
need more of it. At present, long-term research on a large scale is left to individual scholars
working alone in a primitive academic cottage industry. This division of labor makes no sense.
Our major institutions should take up the work of information-gathering on a larger scale.
Unhappily, as these words are being written, data-gathering of this sort is being reduced
rather than expanded. In the United States, Congress has cut the research budgets of the
Securities and Exchange Commission, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, and other data-gathering agencies, at a time when information is needed most. The
New York Times observes, “the theory seems to be that if government does not know what it is
doing it will be tempted to meddle less with private industry. . . . More likely, it will still
meddle, only less wisely.”19

Economic Policy
The growth of knowledge might help us to invent better instruments for the management of
modern economies. We have recently made much progress in that respect. During the past half-
century, many new regulatory tools have been put to work with high success.
 Prominent among them are monetary tools. Major gains have been made in the design of
monetary policy, in the development of monetary institutions, and in the monetary education of
electorates and elites. The importance of all this is now very clear. A sound and disciplined
monetary policy, rigorously applied, is fundamental to the health of a modern economy.
Important progress has been made in the use of interest rates as a way of regulating an
economic system. This method was first applied on a large scale by the Federal Reserve
Board as recently as 1966. In three decades it has become an indispensable instrument of
economic policy throughout the world.
We have been less successful in the realm of fiscal policy—that is, the use of public
revenue and public spending as tools of economic planning. Here we were doing better a
generation ago. The fiscal problems today are more nearly intractable, and solutions remain
elusive. In the United States, the nadir of fiscal policy was reached during the Reagan
administration (1981-89), when a Democratic Congress and a Republican presidency
combined to create a larger national debt than did all other presidencies put together. We
learned painfully from that experience; both the Bush and Clinton presidencies have done at
least a little better. But major fiscal problems remain. They are compounded by demagogues of
both the right and left, by irresponsible and cynical journalists, and by millions of Americans
who demand low taxes and high services at the same time. We must urgently put our fiscal
house in order, if we wish to recover the use of an economic instrument that helps in many
ways.
Existing monetary and fiscal tools are all necessary instruments of economic policy—but
they are not sufficient to the task at hand. They are powerful weapons, and yet very blunt and
crude. Sometimes their use has been counterproductive. When inflation threatens, for example,
central bankers seek to “cool” the economy in various ways—commonly, by driving up interest
rates. The side effects of these methods are sometimes worse than the problems they are meant
to solve.
Part of the problem are the central bankers who have tried to control inflation by “cooling
an overheated economy” and even by creating deliberate “policy recessions.” They bring to
mind physicians in the eighteenth century who sought to heal their patients by bleeding,
sweating, blistering, and purging. The remedy was sometimes more destructive than the
disease. In Europe and America, anti-inflationary policies have reduced economic growth,
diminished real wages, and increased inequities of many kinds. We can do better.
An important first step is to study the historical dynamics of a price revolution. To do so
is to discover, for example, that great waves did their worst social and economic damage not
by long, slow inflations but by short, sudden price-surges, which always developed in the late
stages of every price-revolution. Wages commonly fell behind prices mostly in surge periods.
Crime waves developed in the same way. These surge-patterns are an opportunity as well as a
problem. They allow the application of strong but carefully targeted policies and tools for
short periods and specific purposes when surges are developing.
Two such tools come quickly to mind. Price surges of specific commodities could be
diminished by the use of commodity reserves. Stockpiles of major commodities might be
expanded on the model of the American strategic oil reserve, and used to cushion sudden price
shocks. Such an instrument would have little effect on long-term inflation, but it might dampen
destructive surges more effectively than indiscriminate methods of “cooling the economy” or
“policy recessions.” This is not merely hypothetical. During the Gulf War, President Bush used
successfully a small part of the Petroleum Reserve that way. President Clinton did so again on
April 29, 1996, in the face of surging gas prices. The amounts of oil released were small by
the measure of consumption, but the impact was larger than experts expected. We might
organize a new Federal Commodity Board, to deliver our political leaders from temptation in
election years.
Another tool of economic management would be a standby system of price controls,
carefully designed for limited, short-term use in periods of sudden price surge. It is often
repeated that price-controls “don’t work.” This economic dogma is very much mistaken. Twice
in the past half-century, short-term price-controls have worked very well in the United States
to diminish the momentum of dangerous price surges without disrupting economic growth.
With ingenuity and an open mind, economists should be able to refine these instruments
and invent others more appealing to neoclassical tastes. In a world of uncertainty we need
more refined, more controlled, and more flexible methods which in the phrase of historian
Daniel Boorstin are “open to the unexpected.” Their purpose should be to enlarge our capacity
for choice rather than to restrict it; to work with market forces rather than against them. The
important thing is to create better instruments than the crude tools we presently possess.20

Social Policy
Price-revolutions also create major social problems that require attention. Most dangerous are
material inequities that develop in the late stages of every great wave_never more so than in
our own time. From 1968 to 1996, inequality of wealth and income have increased rapidly—as
in every price-revolution since the thirteenth century. The results, then and now, were
disastrous not only for the poor who were the principal victims, but for entire social systems.
This is an urgent problem. If we neglect it, we shall pay a heavy price. The growth of material
inequality diminishes economic growth, disrupts social order, and does grave injury to the
social fabric. Everyone suffers from its effects—poor and rich alike.
All this is within our power to control. The laws and economic policies of every nation
have a strong impact on the distribution of wealth and income. One may observe their effect by
comparing one nation with another. During the mid-1980s, the poorest 20 percent of West
German families received 13 percent of household income. In the United States, the poorest 20
percent received 6 percent of household income.21
In a dynamic economy, a more equitable distribution of income and wealth might be
achieved not by confiscation or direct transfer, but by more subtle and less intrusive means. It
is not necessary to make the rich poorer, so that the poor may grow richer. There are better
ways. Expanded educational investment would help people to acquire more marketable skills
and higher-paying jobs. Enlarged housing programs might help more people own their homes.
Revised health and social security programs might shift our primary reliance from income-
subsidies at the end of life to capital-accumulation early in the life cycle. Enlightened tax
policies might halt the shift toward regressive taxes that are now falling increasingly on the
poor. Inventive employment policies could protect the right to work and promote job security
within a free labor market. With a little imagination, all this can be done by mixed public and
private effort within the frame of capitalist, free-market economics—if we have the political
will to make the effort.
Everything hinges on our political will. That in turn requires a shared sense of collective
responsibility for our economic and social condition. We are all in this together. Our
prevailing ideology stresses individual freedom and a tradition of minimal government. This
way of thinking is central to our culture, and should be, but it represents only one side of our
American heritage. The founders of our republic often wrote of the “liberty of America” and
tried to manage its affairs by collective effort. Their idea of freedom was better balanced than
ours. Our ancestors clearly understood the vital role of collective action in the cause of
freedom. It is time that we remembered too.
APPENDIX A
Price Revolutions in the Ancient World
This inquiry centered on modern Western history from the twelfth century to the present,
primarily because the sources are still very thin for other cultures and earlier periods. Only
scattered data survive from the more distant past. These materials, however limited, clearly
show that price-revolutions occurred repeatedly in ancient and early medieval history.
In the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, price-records survive abundantly from the
civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia. “The vast majority of excavated cuneiform tables deal
with economic activities,” writes historian Howard Farber. These sources supply much
information about prices, wages, and money through a period much longer than the span of
modern history. Farber himself studied Babylonian price movements from 1894 to 1595 B.C.
He found evidence of a price-revolution, circa 1750–1684 B.C., which closely resembled
similar events in the modern world. Price-relatives and price-wage movements were much the
same as in the four great waves that we have studied. The reign of Hammurapi (circa 1793–
1750 B.C.) coincided with the later stages of price-equilibrium, which showed the same
combination of stable or declining prices and rising wages as in the equilibria of the modern
era (Howard Farber, “A Price and Wage Study for Northern Babylonia during the Old
Babylonian Period,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 21 [1978] 1–
51).
Figure 5.01 shows evidence of a price-revolution in Mesopotamia circa 1740-1680 B.C.,
when commodity prices rose sharply and wages lagged behind. This period was preceded by
an era of price-equilibrium (1840-1750 B.C.), when prices were stable or falling and real
wages rose. The last years of this equilibrium coincided with the reign of Hammurapi (1793-
1750 B.C.), with its great cultural and legal achievements. The price-index used here is
composed of prices for slaves, oil, barley, oxen, cattle, land, and house rentals. The wage
index is for wages in silver. Both indices are converted to the common base of 1750-40
B.C.=100. The source is Howard Farber, “A Price and Wage Study in Northern Babylonia
during the Old Babylonian Period,” Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient
21 (1978) 1-51.
 In ancient Egypt, scholars have found evidence of great waves in population movements,
fluctuations of the Nile, the dynastic rhythm of Egyptian history, and the careers of individual
leaders. All of these patterns interlocked. See Angelo Segré, Circolazione monetaria e prèzzi
nel mondo antico ed in particolare Egitto (Rome, 1922); Karl Butzer, Early Hydraulic
Civilization in Egypt (Chicago, 1976).
Other studies have been made of price movements and money in Greece. Here again
historians have found evidence of recurrent price-revolutions, punctuated by periods of price-
decline and comparative price equilibrium. Greek prices appear to have been comparatively
stable during the fifth century before the birth of Christ. The troubled fourth century
experienced a price revolution. (Lydia Spaventa de Novellis, I prèzzi in Grecia e a Roma
nell’ antichità (Rome, 1934), 101–2.
Figure 5.02 reports the results of two studies, both of which find evidence of a price
revolution in the ancient world during the fourth and third centuries before the birth of Christ.
These data for Greece are from Angelo Segré, Circolazione monetaria e prèzzi nel mondo
antico ed in particolare Egitto (Rome, 1922), 164-173; and Lydia Spaventa de Novellis, I
prèzzi in Grècia e a Ròma nell’antichità (Rome, 1934), 49–53

The people of ancient Rome experienced repeated price-revolutions, which closely

coincided with the rhythm of Roman political history. One great wave reached its climax in a
major time of troubles for the early republic, circa 240–210 B.C. Another coincided with the
collapse of the republican institutions. In between, there was an intervening period of
comparative price stability.
The Roman empire experienced a great wave of inflation in the second and third centuries
A.D., when the price of wheat in some parts of the empire rose more than fifty-fold in less than
a century. A study by Richard Duncan-Jones found that maximum wheat prices in Lower Egypt
rose from II drachmas in private transactions before 100 A.D., to 200 drachmas, circa 201-300
A.D. Median prices increased more moderately from 8 to 16 drachmas in the same period. The
rate of increase declined at the end of the third century. It rose again in yet another price
revolution during the fourth century, from Constantine to Julian, circa 324-360 A.D., then fell
and rose once more in the fifth century.
Figure 5.03 summarizes evidence of three price revolutions in Roman history. The first
happened in the Roman Republic, and coincided with similar events in ancient Greece, circa
300 B.C. (see figure 5.02). The second came at the end of the republic. The third occurred in
the Empire during the third century A.D., a time of political and economic collapse. Sources
are Lydia Spaventa de Novellis, I prèzzi in Grècia e a Ròma nell’ antichità (Rome, 1934)
101-102; Jacobs, “Preis,” 464.

Among many studies of Roman price movements is A. H. M. Jones, “Inflation in the

Roman Empire,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 5 (1953) 293-318; revised and corrected
in P. A. Brunt, ed., The Roman Economy: Studies in Ancient Economic and Administrative
History (Oxford, 1974), 187–229. More data are collected in Richard Duncan-Jones, The
Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies (Cambridge, 1974); idem, “The Price of
Wheat in Lower Egypt,” in Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (Cambridge, 1990),
143–56; idem, “The Price of Wheat in Roman Egypt under the Principate,” Chiron 8 (1978)
541–60. Also helpful are F. M. Heichelheim, “New Light on Currency and Inflation in
Hellenistic-Roman Times, from Inscriptions and Papyri,” Economic History 10 (1935) I–II;
Daniel Sperber, Roman Palestine, 200–400: Money and Prices (Ramat-gan, 1974); J. A.
Straus, “Le prix des esclaves dans les papyrus d’époque romaine trouvée dans l’Egypte,” ZPE
11 (1973) 289–95; G. Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1980); S. Bolin,
State and Currency in the Roman Empire up to A.D. 300 (Stockholm, 1958). Much price data
appear in Tenney Frank, ed., An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (Baltimore, 1933–40; J.
Kolendo, “L’arrêt de l’afflux des monnaies romaines dans le ‘Barbaricum’ sous Septime-
Sévère,” Les Dévaluations à Rome (Rome, n.d.) II, 169–72.
After the fall of Rome, price-movements became more difficult to follow Scattered data
show a long wave of rising prices during the tenth century. Livestock prices in Portugal appear
to have doubled from A.D. 940 to 1000, and then to have stabilized in the eleventh century. If
this evidence is reliable, there was an early medieval price-revolution in the tenth century, and
a period of price-equilibrium in the eleventh century. One study finds supporting evidence in
England of the emergence of a market economy during the period between the accession of
King Alfred (871) and the death of Edgar (975). Thereafter, the quantity of silver coinage
increased very rapidly from 975 to 1010.
Figure 5.04 shows evidence that the price revolution in the third century A.D. was felt in
Roman Egypt. Other inquiries have yielded similar results. The source is H.-J. Drexhage,
“Eselpreise im römischen Ägypten: ein Beitrag zum Binnenhandel,” Münsterische Beiträge
zur antiken Handelsgeschichte 5 (1986), 34-48.

See Claudio Sanchez-Albornez, El precio de la vida en el reino Astur-Leones hace mil

años (Buenos Aires, 1945), 40–41; S.R.H. Jones, “Transaction Costs, Institutional Change, and
the Emergence of a Market Economy in Later Anglo-Saxon England,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 46 (1993) 658–78; P. Grierson and M. Blackburn, Medieval European
Coinage (Cambridge, 1986); P. Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages, A Critique of the
Evidence,” Royal Historical Society Transactions 5th ser. 9 (1959) 123–40.
Islamic prices also appear to have moved in great waves from the founding of Islam to the
eleventh century. See Eliyahu Ashtor, Histoire des prix et des salaires dans l’ Orient medieval
(Paris, 1969); M. de Bouard, “Problèmes des subsistence dans un état médiévale; le marché et
les prix descéréales au royaume angevin de Sicile,” Annales E.S.C. 10 (1938) 483; Robert
Latouche, Les origines de l’économie occidentale (Paris, 1956); A. Blanchet, Les trésors de
monnaies romaines et les invasions germaniques (Paris, 1910); Claudio Sanchez-Albornez,
El precio de la vida en el reino Astur-Leones hace mil años (Buenos Aires, 1945); Marc
Bloch, “Le prob-leme de l’or au Moyen Age,” Annales 5 (1933) 1–34.
Figure 5.05 follows the movement of prices through the most obscure period of Western
history. A price list (not a price series) for the early Middle Ages shows evidence of a price
revolution in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. The source is Claudio Sànchez-Albornez,
Elprecio de la vida en el reino Astur-Leone’s hace mil ano (Buenos Aires, 1945), 40-41. A
copy of this rare and charming work is in the New York Public Library. It shows similar trends
in Galicia, Castille, and Asturia.

Definitive conclusions require further study, but it is clear that price revolutions occurred
repeatedly through the past four thousand years. Their timing correlates with population
growth, cultural movements, and dynastic rhythms in ancient and early medieval history.
APPENDIX B
The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century: A World Event?
Was the medieval price-revolution limited to Western civilization, or was it a world
movement? Learned opinion is divided on this problem, and the price-records that might settle
the question are very difficult to find outside Europe for the thirteenth century. But much
empirical evidence is now available for the crisis of the fourteenth century. It suggests that
Europe was not unique in its experiences. Parallel trends with similar timing appeared in many
parts of the world.
In China, the great Sung dynasty collapsed in a prolonged time of troubles during the late
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. From 1279 to 1367, that country was ruled by Mongols
from the steppes of Asia. China had seven emperors in thirty-eight years (1295–33). Most
ruled by terror and died by violence. This time of troubles was merely a prelude to one of the
darkest and most disastrous periods in China’s history (1333–68), when a great empire
collapsed into anarchy.
The population of China fell sharply during the fourteenth century, in a decline that
coincided with the crisis in the medieval West. The leading causes of death in Asia appear to
have been different in detail from those in Europe. China experienced its own distinctive
combination of social violence, economic collapse, political chaos, massive famine, and
catastrophic floods.
Perhaps the leading cause of suffering were the depredations of the Mongols. Their great
leader Genghis Khan once remarked, “The greatest joy is to conquer one’s enemies, to pursue
them, to seize their property, to see their daughters in tears, to ride their horses, to possess their
daughters and wives.” A Mongol minister named Bayan proposed to restore order by killing
all people named Chang, Wang, Liu, Li and Chao—the most common names in China. This
intended holocaust was beyond the capacity even of the Mongols, but large numbers were
slaughtered.
The crisis of this era was a pivot point in the history of China. Historian Mark Elvin calls
it the great “turning point in the fourteenth century.” This was an era of sweeping
transformation in Chinese culture. It was also a moment of deep change that began a long
process of isolation and decline, which continued into the twentieth century. Through that
period, price-movements showed a rhythm of long waves that were similar, though not
identical, to those in the West.
Similar rhythms also appeared in other civilizations. In Africa, the great empire of Mali
collapsed during the late fourteenth century. Its trading center at Sigilmassa was destroyed by
Taureg warriors in 1362, and commerce with Europe was interrupted.
Figure 5.06 finds evidence of great waves in the demographic history of China. Sharp declines
occurred in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. The timing was much the same as in
Europe. Sources include Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953
(Cambridge, 1959).
In India, the Delhi Sultanate of Turko-Afghan rulers had grown from the eleventh century
to its maximum under Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq (1325-51), when it ruled nearly all the
Indian subcontinent except the extreme south. After 1334, it rapidly disintegrated; by 1344, its
revenues had fallen by 90 percent, and the Delhi Sultanate disintegrated.
The fourteenth century was also a period of major discontinuity in American history. In
the Valley of Mexico, the classic Toltec culture collapsed in this period. The Aztecs, who like
the Mongols and the Taureg were violent barbarians from the north, took possession of Lake
Texcoco circa 1345. In South America, the pre-Inca states disintegrated in the fourteenth
century and gave the Incas their opportunity to begin to create their great empire in the late
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
In the Pacific, the fourteenth century was also an important pivot-point for the history of
oceanic cultures. The expansion of Polynesia, which had begun as early as the ninth century,
came to a sudden end in the fourteenth century. The great Polynesian navigators had advanced
as far as New Zealand, but they were unable to go farther, and failed to reach Tasmania and
Australia.
There was no Black Death or Mongol horde in Polynesia. The research of New Zealand
scientist A. T. Wilson yields evidence that the cause may have been a change in climate. His
analysis of isotope ratios in calcium carbonate deposits shows evidence of an onset of an
unusually cold period, with increased Pacific storms of such a magnitude as to deter even
ocean voyagers as skilled as the Polynesians.
These global events tell us that their ætiology was not specific to a single culture, or to a
particular agent such as the Black Death. They must have developed from a larger cause that
affected virtually every part of the inhabited world.
Some historians find evidence of a change in world climate during the fourteenth century.
During the preceding three hundred years—the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries—the
weather had become increasingly warm. The growing season grew longer, crops became
larger, and the carrying capacity of the environment increased. In the later years of the
thirteenth century, these climatic trends reversed. The climate turned unusually cold, wet,
windy and unstable.
The fact that these trends appeared as far apart as northern Europe, eastern Asia, western
Africa and the south Pacific is evidence that the cause is unlikely to have been merely a change
in meteorological circulation patterns, as some have suspected. Others believe that it rose from
a change in the relationship between the earth and the sun—a decline in solar radiation, or
perhaps a thickening of the earth’s atmosphere, or possibly a cloud of cosmic dust that passed
through the galaxy and blocked the passage of energy from the sun to the earth.
Some cultures suffered more than others in this era of crisis and catastrophe. The
Christian West may have suffered worst of all. Here we find evidence that climate-events may
be part of the explanation, but not the whole of it. Other causal factors, perhaps of greater
power, were internal to the western culture, and important to the rhythm of its history.
Further, some cultures emerged stronger from the catastrophe of the fourteenth century
while others were fatally weakened. During the fourteenth century, Islamic world-civilization
entered a long decline from which it did not begin to recover until the twentieth century, nearly
six hundred years later. The West was unique in its response to the crisis of the fourteenth
century, though not in the crisis itself. Its open institutions made it more vulnerable, but also
more resilient. The sources of its vulnerability in the fourteenth century were also the
foundation of its future strength.
For relevant materials in the history of China, see Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population
of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, 1959, 1967); Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese
Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation (Stanford, 1973); R. Hartwell, “A Cycle of
Economic Change in Imperial China: Coal and Iron in North-east China, 750–1350,” Journal
of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 10 (1967); 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; C. P. Fitzgerald, China, A Short Cultural History (New York, 1935,
1972), 432; Ch’uan Han-sheng, “Sung-Ming chien pai-yin kou-mai-li ti pientung chi ch’i yuan-
yin” [“Fluctuations in the purchasing power of silver at their cause from the Sung to the Ming
dynasties”], Hsin-ya-hseuh-pao [New Asian Journal] 8 (1967) 157–86, with a summary in
English; M. Cartier, “Notes sur l’histoire des prix en Chine du XIVe au XVIIe siècle,” [1368-
1644] Annales E.S.C. 24(1969) 1876-89; idem, “Lesimportationsde métaux monetaires en
Chine: Essai sur la conjoncture Chinoise,” ibid., 36 (1981) 454-66; W. S. Atwell, “Notes on
Silver, Foreign Trade, and the Late Ming Economy,” Ch’ing shih wen-ti 3 (1977) 1–33; idem
“International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy, circa 1530–1650,” Past & Present 95
(1982) 68–90; 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; Yeh–chien Wang, “The Secular Trend of Prices during the Ch’ing
Period,” Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong,
5 (1972) 364.
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).
Kuznets cycles or “long swings” of approximately twenty years have been much
discussed by American economists, but this pattern has not been so interesting to European
scholars or so visible in the history of their nations. See Simon Kuznets, Secular Movements
in Production and Prices (Boston, 1930); “Long Swings in the Growth of Population and
Related Economic Variables,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102
(1958) 25–52; Arthur F. Burns, Production Trends in the United States since 1970 (New
York, 1934); Moses Abramowitz, “Resource and Output Trends in the United States since
1870,” American Economic Review 46 (1956) 5–23; Brinley Thomas, Migration and
Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1954); John C. Soper, “Myth and Reality in Economic Time
Series: The Long Swing Revisited,” Southern Economic Journal 41 (1975) 570–79. This
rhythm is sometimes thought to be demographic in its origin, but Friedman and Schwartz argue
in Monetary Trends in the United States and United Kingdom, 599–621, that long swings are
episodic in their origin and monetary in their expression. Many economists agree with them.
The Labrousse cycle (or intercycle) of roughly 10 or 12 years is much favored by
European historians but rarely appears in American scholarship. It has been used in studies of
French history.
Juglar cycles or trade cycles (7 or 8 years) have been found by many scholars—by
Goubert in Beauvais, Parenti in Tuscany, Spooner in Udine, Hauser in Paris. The classic work
is Clément Juglar, Des crises commerciales et leur retour périodiques en France, en
Angleterre, et aux Etats-Unis (1889) rpt. New York, 1967).
Kitchin cycles or business cycles (3.5 years, or forty months) were first observed in the
American economy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also in Europe during our
own time. The classical text is Joseph Kitchin, “Cycles and Trends in Economic Factors,”
Review of Economics and Statistics 5 (1923) 10–16. They are sometimes called “inventory
cycles” and are thought to rise from the structure of modern business enterprise. But several
historians have also reported them in price data as early as the fifteenth century, and Pierre
Chaunu has discovered them in the rhythm of Séville’s transatlantic trade.
For general discussions of business cycles, see Wesley C. Mitchell, Business Cycles
(New York, 1927); Arthur F. Burns and Wesley C. Mitchell, Measuring Business Cycles (New
York, 1946); Joseph A. Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and
Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process (New York, 1939); Geoffrey H. Moore, The
Cyclical Behavior of Prices (Washington, 1971). Historians will find a rapport with E. R.
Dewey and E. F. Dakin, Cycles: The Science of Prediction (New York, 1950), which argues
that these rhythms are themselves variable through time and space—a conclusion that is
certainly correct.
Cyclical patterns are often extracted from the data by “detrending” a time series—that is,
by removing the secular trend so as to expose fluctuations more clearly. The great waves in
this work are not extracted by filtering or detrending the data. They are the secular trends, and
appear on the surface of the evidence. For problems of method, leading works are James D.
Hamilton, Time Series Analysis (Princeton, 1994), and T. W. Anderson, The Statistical
Analysis of Time Series (New York, 1971). Also helpful is Nathaniel J. Mass, Economic
Cycles: An Analysis of Underlying Causes (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
APPENDIX F
Toward a Discrimination of Inflations
The many uses of the word “inflation” make an interesting study in scholarly semantics. The
term has been defined in different ways. Some of the most common meanings incorporate a
particular theory of inflation in such a way as to exclude all other theories. The result is a
family of mutually contradictory theory-driven definitions. Each of them claims a universal
validity. All are more unitary than the phenomenon that they purport to describe.
An amusing example appears in Webster’s New World Dictionary. The second college
edition of this work offers two contradictory theory-centered definitions on the same page. The
term “inflation” itself is defined as “an increase in the amount of money in circulation,
resulting in a relatively sharp and sudden fall in its value and rise in prices.” Just below it is
“inflationary spiral,” which is defined as a “continuous and accelerating rise in the prices of
goods and services, primarily due to the interaction of increases in wages and costs.”
One of these definitions insists that inflation is exclusively a monetary phenomenon,
caused by an expansion in the money supply. The other requires us to subscribe to a “cost-
push” model. These theoretical definitions are narrow and specific. They are also mutually
exclusive. If the “cost-push” model is correct, then inflation is not always caused by an
increase in the amount of money in circulation.
Further, both definitions also include specific historical descriptions of inflation. One of
them demands that we think of inflation as “sharp and sudden.” Another insists that inflationary
spirals are “continuous and accelerating.” These historical models of inflation are not only at
odds with one another. They are also mistaken, both in general historical terms and in their
specific theoretical linkages. Monetary inflations are not necessarily “short and sharp.” Wage-
price inflations are not always “continuous and accelerating.”
These usages often recur in learned discourse. It is very common for American
economists to define the term “inflation” in exclusively monetary terms, and then to use it to
describe an historical process which is not exclusively monetary in its cause.
An example is an assertion by American economist Milton Friedman that inflation is
“always and everywhere primarily a monetary phenomenon” (New York Times, February 19,
1984). Many of his colleagues agree with this statement. There is no necessary error in it. As
long as it is confined within the constraining context of monetarist theory, Friedman’s statement
is not merely true but tautological. Given certain theoretical assumptions, a rise in prices can
always be translated into monetary terms. If the discussion were exclusively theoretical, there
is no error here. The trouble comes when the term is defined in this way, and then used to
describe the operative cause of an actual rise of prices in the real world—where price-
increases sometimes have a monetary cause, but often rise from other roots.
Outside of the learned professions, the word inflation is understood in other ways. In
ordinary speech, it tends to be an omnibus term for any sort of increase in prices generally
(which is not the same as an economist’s idea of the “general price level”).
 Professional usage in the learned disciplines seems to be shifting in this direction.
Increasingly, historians and economists are growing more eclectic in their ideas of inflation.
Two economists, Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, write, “Like illnesses, inflations
occur for many reasons.” They divide inflations into three types, mainly by speed of advance:
“moderate inflation” as in the industrial nations during the late twentieth century (1–10
percent), “galloping inflation” as in Latin America or Israel during the same period (10–1000
percent), and “hyperinflation” as in post-Wilhelmine Germany (1000 percent or more). This
taxonomy brings to mind a mortality bill by an eighteenth-century New England physician who
believed that all forms of disease shared a single etiology, and who classified deaths as
“sudden” or “slow.” This is a primitive idea in medicine and history, but sometimes it has its
uses.
Another and better approach is to make a discrimination of price-inflations not by
velocity but by cause. Historians tend to think of inflations in pluralistic terms, as rising from a
broad variety of causal conditions. At least seven types of inflation might be distinguished by
cause.
One common variety of price inflation is caused by an expansion of the money supply.
This is sometimes a slow creeping movement. It can also become a sudden surge of
hyperinflation, of which the classic example is the German inflation of 1922–23. When the
infant Weimar Republic was unable to meet its obligations by taxes or loans, it deliberately
resorted to the printing press. The number of German marks in circulation rose from 5,807
trillion in January 1922 to 202 trillion-trillion in December 1923, a number so large that it
requires 30 digits: 202,232,341,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 marks. As a consequence, the
wholesale price index in Germany rose from 100 in 1913 to 142 trillion in 1923. German
burghers who suffered through this event told the story of a man who went to a grocery store
with a wheelbarrow full of money to pay for his family’s food. A thief stopped him, threw
away the money, and stole the wheelbarrow. What was still more dramatic about the German
inflation was its sudden end. Monetary stability was restored in 1924 by the issue of a new
currency that was very stable. The German hyperinflation of 1922–23 had many social and
political consequences, but it did not become embedded in the structure of the economy, and
disappeared when the inflated marks were withdrawn from circulation. There have been many
monetary inflations of this sort, and other monetary inflations of a more gradual variety.
A second type of inflation rises from increases in aggregate demand. One common
example is war-inflation. Government spending for military purposes has often stimulated
demand throughout an economy, at the same time that a shift of workers from productive labor
into the armed forces causes a decline in aggregate supply. Other demand-inflations have risen
from population growth, particularly when the general population increases more rapidly than
the work force. In the twentieth century, demand-inflations have also been caused by rising
expectations, and by higher standards of living.
A third form of inflation is caused by contractions in supply—for example, by runs of bad
weather which drive up agricultural prices. This happening was very common in medieval and
early modern Europe, when a large proportion of family income was spent on grain and other
farm products. The supply shock of reduced harvests reverberated through the entire economy.
 A fourth variety is cost-push inflation. It occurs when wages and prices begin to spiral
upward, each driving the other in its turn. This mechanism was clearly operating in the middle
stages of the price-revolution of the twentieth century.
A fifth variety might be called the inflation of administered prices. It has happened in the
United States as a result of collusive price-fixing in oligopolistic industries. Recent examples
include the manipulation of oil prices by OPEC nations during the 1970s. Oil shocks had an
impact on general price levels through the world economy.
A sixth variety might be called bubble-inflation, caused by a surge of speculative activity,
which when it rises rapidly and reaches broadly through an economy, distorts price levels in a
general way. Examples might include the Dutch tulip mania in 1634 and the French Mississippi
Bubble in 1717.
A seventh variety might be called the “inflationary-expectations” model. It occurs when
people begin to raise prices not because of actual changes in supply or demand or costs or the
size of the money supply, but out of fear that some such change might happen.
These different types of inflation often coexist. In actual practice, price-revolutions are
complex phenomena that characteristically include many different types of inflation. Most have
begun as demand-inflations, to which the effects of monetary-inflation, supply-inflation, and
administered-inflation later added, and had the effect of reinforcing the momentum of the price
revolution.
It is interesting to observe that the effect of short-term inflations varies according to their
timing within price-revolutions and price equilibria. For example, the inflation associated with
the Civil War, the Crimean War and the Franco-Prussian Wars in the nineteenth century did not
cause a permanent elevation of price levels. Prices surged during the wars, then rapidly
declined in the peace. In the United States by the 1880s, prices had returned to levels of the
late 1850s. During the major wars of the twentieth century things were a little different.
Inflation surged after America joined the World War I in 1917, then declined after 1919, but
not to prewar levels. After World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, war-inflations were not
followed by a decline at all. Prices continued to climb. What was different here was the
underlying dynamic of the price system.
All of this suggests a need for price theory that incorporates a component of historical
thinking, and also for historical models that include a generous measure of economic theory.
Historical trends and contexts make a major difference. So also do the dynamic relationships
that are modeled in economic theory.
Economics is what Windelband called a nomothetic discipline. It seeks knowledge
through generalization. History is an idiographic discipline. It studies things in their
particulars. The two approaches are different, but also complementary. Together they can help
us understand the many varieties of price-inflation, and also their common characteristics.
APPENDIX G
Money of Exchange and Money of Account
A student of price history must confront a vast diversity of monetary units in the world—not
merely in the variety of coins and paper currency, but also in the structure of monetary systems
themselves. In the early modern era, these systems were in some ways more complex than
those of our own time.
One dimension of that complexity appeared in the difference between two types of
monies: money of exchange and money of account. Alexander Justice wrote in 1707, “Money
in general is divided into two sorts, imaginary and real.” (A General Treatise of Monies and
Exchanges [London, 1707], 1; quoted in John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe
and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook [Chapel Hill, 1978], 3).
Justice’s “real money” is money of exchange. It is issued by virtually all sovereign states
and consists of coins and paper that pass physically from hand to hand. Justice’s “imaginary
money” is called money of account. It exists only as an idea, and is used in bookkeeping and
credit transactions.
The distinction between real and imaginary money seems unnatural and absurd to
Americans today, who use the dollar as both money of exchange and as money of account. But
practices were different in earlier periods. Real money and imaginary money existed side by
side.
A case in point was eighteenth-century England, and English-speaking North America.
Money of exchange consisted primarily of two coins: the silver shilling and the golden guinea,
which was worth twenty-one shillings. There was also a silver crown (worth five shillings),
and various other coins of smaller denominations.
At the same time, the most important money of account was a different unit: the pound
sterling, worth twenty shillings or 240 pence. This was “imaginary money.” Pounds did not
actually exist as coins or paper currency until the nineteenth century, but they were the standard
money of account throughout the English-speaking world for many years. In the United States,
elderly people continued to keep their books in pounds sterling as late as the 1830s, half a
century after independence.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans abandoned this dual system. But even today the
people of Britain still use different money of exchange and money of account. By a curious
irony of monetary history the major units reversed their roles in Britain. The pound sterling
became the leading money of exchange—first in the form of elegant banknotes, then small and
clumsy coins of base metal that make a dreary clunking sound when dropped on a modern
plastic counter. Guineas, on the other hand, have become a money of account. They rarely
circulate but are used to reckon prices of luxury items. As recently as 1990, the author was
billed in guineas by a private physician in Harley Street, but the bill was settled by the passing
of pounds. Rolls Royce automobiles and tickets to opulent Commemoration Balls in Oxford
Colleges are priced in guineas but paid in pounds.
 Dual systems of this sort were widespread in the early modern era. Their complexity was
compounded by multiple moneys of account. The great merchant banks of medieval Italy kept
their books in imaginary money of account, which had a value that was unique to each house.
This “banco money” rose and fell with the reputation of each banking house, even where
monetary units were nominally the same.
The difference in value between one money of account and another was called by Italian
bankers the aggio, or premium. That word entered common usage throughout Western world. It
was often written agio in French, German, Spanish and English, and is still used in Europe.
Money of exchange also had many complexities. It consisted mostly of silver coin in
medieval Europe. During the late medieval and early modern era a bimetallic standard was
widely adopted. Gold and silver coins were minted in great variety, but a few units of value
became common through many monetary systems. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
roughly the same value attached to the French écu, the Spanish peso, the Dutch rijksdaalder, the
German Reichsthaler, and, a little later, the Yankee dollar. All were worth about five English
shillings, or one-quarter of an English pound.
England’s golden guinea (after 1726) was approximately equivalent to the French louis
d’or, which was also called the “French guinea.” Before 1726, the louis d’or and Spanish
pistole were about the same. Dutch and German ducats were roughly equal to Portuguese
escudos, at a little less than half an English pound.
All of these coins passed current in every nation. When a British general fell overboard
near Boston, his baggage was found to contain 694 5/8 joannes, 37 moidores, 300 English
guineas, 8 1/2 pistoles, 1 French guinea, 1 dollar, 1 copper halfpenny, 26 “small heart” bits of
silver, 6 pieces of gold, and 7 small pieces of silver. It was common for raw unminted lumps
of gold and silver to be used as money. Value was determined by weight of gold or silver,
measured in grains and later grams of precious metal. See W. T. Baxter, The House of
Hancock; Business in Boston, 1724–1775 [Cambridge, 1945], 15, 17–21.
In our contemporary world, money of exchange has become predominantly paper
currency. This trend began as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in countries
where gold and silver coins were very rare: New England, New France, Scandinavia and
parts of eastern Europe.
Small farmers in Massachusetts did most of their business without money of exchange.
They maintained a dense web of mutual charge accounts among themselves in a system that has
been called bookkeeping barter. Changing monetary values in their account books closely
matched the movement of money of exchange throughout the Atlantic world. During the price
revolution of the eighteenth century, similar rates of inflation appeared in both “imaginary
money” and “real money.” See 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; and for bookkeeping barter see Baxter, House of Hancock, 17–21.
Excellent works of reference on monetary systems include Peter Spufford (with the
assistance of Wendy Wilkinson and Sarah Tolley), Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London,
1986); and John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A
Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978). Another work on exchange in Europe from the late fifteenth
century is in progress by Frank C. Spooner.
APPENDIX H
Nominal Prices and Silver Equivalents
How should prices be represented? What units should be used? Most scholars measure prices
in standard monetary equivalents. That conventional practice has been followed in this work,
with a few exceptions noted in this appendix. But other social and agricultural historians have
sometimes reckoned prices differently in an effort to remove the effect of monetary
fluctuations, and in particular to control for the effect of monetary debasement.
The silver-content in money of exchange was frequently altered by public authorities and
private individuals. Monarchs and mint–masters changed the amount of precious metal in their
coins: sometimes by debasements which reduced the content of precious metal; other times by
recoinages which increased it. England’s Edward III, for example, repeatedly shrank the silver
content of an English penny: twenty-two grains in 1334, twenty in 1344, eighteen in 1351.
Henry IV reduced it further to fifteen in 1411, and Edward IV took it down to twelve grains in
1464. Other kings went the other way. Henry VII, founder of a new Tudor dynasty, wished to
establish the legitimacy of his reign by improving its coinage in silver content, technical
excellence, and artistic merit. His son Henry VIII reversed that policy. In the words of
historian Charles Oman, he converted “the finest, best executed and most handsome coinage in
Europe” into “the most disreputable money that had been seen since the days of Stephen—the
gold heavily alloyed, the so-called silver ill-struck and turning black and brown as the base
metal came to the surface.” (Charles Oman, Coinage of England [Oxford, 1931, 244]; Glyn
Davies, A History of Money [Cardiff, 1994], 192–93).
Private individuals also debased gold and silver coins that passed through their hands.
The crudest and most common method was to clip, shave, or file away part of the metal and
pass what remained as if it were the intact coin. This ancient practice is the reason why
modern coins are still minted with a distinctive pattern around their edges. A more subtle
method of debasement was to wash or “sweat” a coin, so as to remove some of its gold or
silver by chemical means. The most laborious technique was to cut the coin through its edge
into two narrow discs, remove the center, and rejoin them. A merchant, money-changer or even
small storekeeper in the early modern era had to keep his own scales and use them with great
care.
In early projects of price history, some scholars tried to correct for monetary instability of
this sort by reckoning prices not in monetary units but in grams or grains of pure silver. The
pathbreaking British price historian Thorold Rogers did this. His example was followed by
German agrarian historian Wilhelm Abel, who computed his grain prices in kilograms of pure
silver. Abel was mainly interested in harvest conditions, which he wished to study by a method
that would remove the effect of currency debasements and recoinages.
Other price historians have followed Rogers and Abel, notably Fernand Braudel and
Frank Spooner. But most have not done so. Increasingly, price historians work with nominal
monetary units. One of the most meticulous of medieval price scholars, David L. Farmer,
explains the reason why. “I have not followed J. E. T. Rogers and others in attempting to
express medieval prices in terms of constant weights of silver,” he wrote. “Such exercises
ignore the value of silver relative to the stock in the economy in which it circulates” (“Prices
and Wages, 1350–1500,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, III,
441).
Scholars will continue to disagree on this problem. This book supplies estimates by both
methods for the price-revolutions of the Middle Ages, as well as for the sixteenth century and
the eighteenth century, so that readers may judge the result. They will find that the two methods
of representing prices make little difference for an understanding of long-term secular change.
Farmer himself attempted to measure the effect of debasements and recoinages more
directly, and found that the many English debasements of silver pennies between 1334 and
1464 had little impact on long secular trends in price levels. He concluded that changes in
1344 and 1351 “were followed by livestock prices slightly higher than usual for a year or two
after each devaluation… . But later changes in the weight of silver in the penny seem to have
had little effect on prices” (ibid., 440–41).
Altogether, indicators of the timing, direction, and spatial diffusion of major price-
movements yield broadly similar results, no matter whether one uses the prevailing gold and
silver currencies of the time or their equivalents in pure silver. Patterns of short-term
fluctuation in commodity prices around the secular trend were more apt to show the effect of
debasements; but the trend itself, as well as price relatives, wage-price movements, and the
movement of rent and interest are much the same by the two methods.
APPENDIX I
Returns to Capital: Interest Rates as Historical Indicators
As a measure of changing returns to capital, the empirical indicator used throughout this
inquiry is the annual rate of interest as it has changed through time. Here I have followed the
work of Sidney Homer, an American lawyer and investment counselor who worked in the
securities market for many years, and made it his hobby to study the history of interest rates
throughout the world, which he did with great care. Many scholars and leaders in the American
securities industry lent their expertise to his project. Among them were Henry Kaufman, Arthur
Burns, and Marshall Dunn (Sidney Homer, A History of Interest Rates (1963, 2d. ed., New
Brunswick, N.J., 1977).
From the broad range of materials that Homer collected, I have tried to assemble a set of
indicators that have six qualities in common. First, they are specific to a time and place.
Second, they are high-grade securities, issued either by leading governments, or by established
private institutions. Third, they are securities that are actively bought and sold in financial
markets. Fourth, market yields are preferred to nominal yields. Fifth, a range of securities is
used wherever possible: long and short, public and private. Sixth, where possible they have
been drawn from multiple national economies.
With a few exceptions, data that meet these criteria may be found from the fifteenth
century to the present, but not earlier. I have not been able to make much headway on the
movement of interest in the medieval price revolution. Scattered scraps of evidence suggest
that the patterns were similar to subsequent great waves, but more work needs to be done on
this question.
Other questions of high complexity will come quickly to mind. It would be good to know
more about the relation between price revolutions and capital-formation, capital-accumulation,
and patterns of change in the structure and function of capital markets. All this must be left to
later inquiries and larger books.
APPENDIX J
Returns to Labor: Real Wages and Living Standards
A difficult problem in this inquiry is to find a method of measuring returns to labor through four
price revolutions. The most simple and straightforward way is to compute real wages: that is,
money wages adjusted by an index of consumer prices. The result of this computation is yet
another index, commonly expressed as a ratio of the purchasing power of wages in any given
year to their purchasing power in a single benchmark year. This solution has been standard for
many generations and is employed throughout this work.
Many scholars have criticized the use of real wages for this purpose. They have done so
with good reason. Economists and historians agree that even the most refined indices of real
wages are not in themselves an accurate measure of returns to labor. They are even less
satisfactory as an indicator of changing standards of living. Here are a few of many problems.
First, standard series of money wages tend to have structural distortions in wage coverage
itself. Long-running wage series tend to bias the inquiry toward workers whose employment is
more stable than that of the labor force as a whole. This distortion was specially strong in the
late medieval and early modern historiography. In twentieth century statistics, the same bias is
still present, but not so strong. Its net effect in a study of secular change is to understate long-
term improvement of wages before the twentieth century.
Second, wage series tend to omit unreported earnings in the “gray economy.” As wages
are increasingly taxed in many nations, and employment is subject to regulations of growing
complexity, the gray labor market has grown larger during the twentieth century. Many of these
unreported jobs tend to be more poorly paid than those that are reported. In studies of secular
change, this problem causes an underestimate of growth in aggregate returns to labor, but an
overestimate of average hourly money wages and real wages in the twentieth century.
Third, real wages are commonly computed only from money wages, and take no account
of income in kind. A large part of returns to labor in the medieval and early modern periods
consisted of income in kind. This assumption, to my knowledge, has never been tested
empirically for long periods. The problem can only be solved by the use of personal
documents (diaries, private accounts, etc.), which are limited to literate populations. In any
case, a bias toward money wages understates returns to labor in every period. The magnitude
of this distortion is greatest in earlier periods; the effect is to overstate long-term improvement
in returns to labor by excluding a form of income that was relatively larger in the past.
Fourth, wage series in themselves tell us nothing about the extent of unemployment or
underemployment. Returns to labor should properly include not only hourly or daily earnings
but also the changing proportion of hours and days actually worked. Some twentieth-century
studies have introduced corrections for this problem. Stanley Lebergott compiled a series of
average annual returns of employees in the United States. He adjusted money earnings for
unemployment, then deflated both series by consumer prices. The result was two series: real
wages of workers when employed, and real wages of workers “after deduction for
unemployment.” But his correction did not fully account for underemployment, as distinct from
unemployment. See Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record
since 1800 (New York, 1964). Both unemployment and underemployment were widespread in
the past. Many scholars believe that underemployment in particular was much greater in earlier
periods than it is today. Its forms have changed through time. In eighteenth-century France, for
example, laborers were often not able to work on religious feast days. This problem has not
seemed important to secular scholars, but each year there were 111 feast days in France under
the old regime. See George E. Rudé, “Prices, Wages and Popular Movements in Paris during
the French Revolution,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 6 (1953–54), 248n.
Fifth, feminists rightly complain of a strong gender-bias in wage indices, which
commonly omit the work of women who are not formally in the labor market. How does one
estimate the real wages of housewives? Their inclusion poses difficult problems of
measurement, and their omission leads to heavy overstatement of real wages per worker. The
same problem exists for the unpaid but often very arduous labor of other household members.
As more women enter the work force, and fewer children work within the family, the secular
effect of this bias is to understate the improvement of real wages in the past century.
Sixth, wage series do not tell us enough about actual living conditions and the standard of
living as they have changed through time. There are two problems here. One is conceptual:
how is one to define a standard of living? The second is empirical: how should it be
measured? Two very able Scottish historians sum up: “We should reiterate the point that any
study of the standard of the standard of living is beset with very substantial technical
difficulties for the historian, that the study of wages makes up only part of it, and the study of
male wages a smaller part still. Income is earned in several ways, and by all the household, so
the only fully legitimate way into the problem is through the examination of a total household
economy” (A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780
[Cambridge, 1995], 356).
But this requirement creates other problems. The “examination of a total household
economy” is fraught with difficulty. The evidence itself is much less than total, especially for
medieval households. Problems of inference are abundant. Estimates have often been distorted
by gross ideological biases in the “standard of living” debate that has raged in economic and
social history for many years.
For excellent discussions of the problem see Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in
the Later Middle Ages; Social Change in England, c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989); and D.
Woodward, “Wage Rates and Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England,” Past and Present
91 (1981) 28–45.
For the time being, it is necessary to confine this inquiry to real wages alone, but the
limits of this indicator should be clearly understood. It refers only to the purchasing power of
money wages for a fixed unit of time, without regard to unemployment, underemployment,
unpaid labor, the gray market or the total household economy. It tells us only how the
purchasing power of a fixed unit of labor changed through time in terms of a basket of prices.
Future inquiries will undoubtedly be able to do better, but for the present this is as far as we
can go in a study of long-term secular change in returns to labor.
APPENDIX K
Measures of Wealth and Income Distribution
Many different statistical methods have been used to measure the distribution of income and
wealth. They present complex problems of bias in their construction, and are not easily
compared with one another.
Most common and straight-forward are what might be called “upper quantile” methods.
They estimate the size-shares of the richest I percent or 5 percent or 10 percent, or other top
quantiles of the population. Another common measure of a similar type is the Pareto
distribution, which calculates the slope of the upper tail of wealth or income holders. These
techniques tell us much about patterns of distribution at the top of a wealth-order, but the
coverage of all these approaches is biased toward the most affluent classes in a society.
Another favorite device is the Lorenz curve, which is created by plotting the cumulative
distribution of wealth for an entire population on the x axis, against the cumulative proportion
of the population holding that wealth on the y axis. If wealth is perfectly equal in its
distribution, the result is a straight diagonal line, showing that 25 percent of the population
owns 25 percent of the wealth, 50 percent owns 50 percent, etc. Where inequality exists, the
plot becomes a curve, which moves away from the diagonal line as inequality increases.
Many methods have been invented for summarizing the shape of a Lorenz curve in a single
statistic. Chief among them is the Gini ratio, which measures the area between the line of
equality and the curve of inequality, as a ratio of the total area below the line. Where perfect
equality exists, the line of equality and the curve coincide, and the Gini ratio is zero. Where
perfect inequality exists (that is, the upper unit owns everything), the Gini ratio approaches
1.00. In general, the geometry of a Gini ratio tends to give more representation to middling
groups, and less to the bottom and top.
Another measure of inequality has been invented by British economist A. B. Atkinson to
correct these biases of coverage. It is an index that includes a constant which can be set at
different levels, so as to give more or less weight to upper groups, or lower ones. In common
practice, the constants are arbitrarily set at several different values and multiple results are
given so as to provide different perspectives. Atkinson’s index has become popular among
economists, but it is rarely used by historians because it is not as accessible to general readers.
Other measures include the coefficient of variation, various applications of the standard
deviation, mean/median ratios, and mean deviations. These tools are very crude and lacking in
resolution.
Which measure should one use? A pluralist solution is adopted here, so as to combine
clarity and comprehension. Where possible, this inquiry seeks to combine for any given
distribution a Lorenz curve, a Gini ratio, and an attached table that lists the proportion of
wealth held by each decile of the population. This combination (which can be compressed into
a very small space) supplies easily accessible data for the top, middle and lower strata, and
also gives the most widely used single summary statistic. The presentation also uses both
tabular and graphic representations. The result combines clarity, precision, accessibility and
comprehension for different readers.
Unhappily it cannot be used in every instance because of source limits. In some cases only
Gini ratios, top quantile shares and zero holders are available.
APPENDIX L
Price Revolutions and Inequality
Why are some people rich and others poor? What is the cause of material inequality? How has
inequality changed through time? What, if anything, can or should we do about it? These eternal
questions have given rise to many models of inequality, which differ both as theoretical
propositions and empirical descriptions. Several leading models might be summarized in a
few sentences, and then compared with evidence that we have found in this inquiry.

Uniformity Models:
Pareto’s Law, Lassalle’s Conjecture, and Bowley’s Law
One set of theories are uniformity models. They describe inequality as more or less constant in
history and explain it as the inexorable result of something fixed and fundamental in human
nature or the social condition.
The leading uniformity theory is Pareto’s Law. It takes its name from Vilfredo Pareto
(1848–1923), an Italian scholar who studied income statistics in many nations, and concluded
that the pattern of inequality was a curve of constant shape for all incomes, all countries, and
all periods of history. Pareto’s Law is an equation that may be written in the form of:
logN = logA — alogX

where X is income of a given size, N is the number of people with that income or more, and A
is an empirical constant. When plotted on a double-log graph, the result is a line with a slope
of a.
Pareto believed that the slope of a was always approximately 1.5 for upper income-
holders. He concluded that this statistical regularity was a law of inequality, which derived
mainly from biological differences in the distribution of human ability. It is interesting that
Pareto himself was born to the nobility of Genoa. In later life he embraced many social causes,
but his attitudes remained aristocratic, and his law has found many supporters on the political
right. It has been used to prove that inequality is natural and inexorable.
Another and very different uniformity theory might be called Lassalle’s Conjecture, or the
Monte Carlo model. It comes not from the right but from the left, and takes its name from
Ferdinand Lassalle, a German socialist with a sense of humor, who observed a statistical
similarity between the distribution of wealth in European society and the distribution of
winners at the roulette table in Monte Carlo. He framed a proposition that both results were
ruled by the laws of chance, and would continue to be so until socialism shut down the game.
Lassalle’s idea of inequality was a constant curve of probability.
A third uniformity model is known to economists of advanced years as Bowley’s Law. It
bears the name of Arthur Bowley, a British statistician who constructed some of the earliest
estimates of national income for the United Kingdom. Bowley discovered evidence that income
shares of capital and labor remained approximately constant in Britain through the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This finding was called Bowley’s Law, which John
Maynard Keynes celebrated as “one of the most surprising, yet best established facts in the
whole range of economic statistics.” Bowley also reported evidence that the distribution of
incomes among individual workers in Britain remained stable over a period of nearly a
century. His model was extended to individual income-shares, as well as to factor shares
between labor and capital. See Y. S. Brenner, Hartmut Kaelbe and Mark Thomas, eds., Income
Distribution in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1991), 35; A. L. Bowley, Wages in the
United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1900); idem, Wages and Income in
the United Kingdom since 1860 (Cambridge, 1937).

Continuity Models: Persistent Cultural Values

Most historians reject the idea of uniformity in all periods and places, but some have
developed models of continuity of a sort that can coexist with patterns of change through time,
and with variation from one culture to another. A theory of continuity in regard to inequality
appears in one of my own works, Albion’s Seed (Oxford, 1989). This work reports empirical
evidence that very different patterns of wealth-inequality developed in the various cultural
regions of British America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These relative
differences in wealth-distribution within American regions have persisted for many
generations, and cannot be explained by material or environmental factors. They could only
have arisen from enduring cultural values and institutional processes.

Ecological Models: Environmental Conditions

Other historical models give more attention to ecological and material conditions. An example
is the work of Jackson Turner Main, who studied the distribution of wealth in early America
and concluded that patterns of wealth inequality were “not so much cultural as social and
economic” in their origin. He believed that frontier conditions supported equality during the
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while urbanization and commercialization
caused inequality. See Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America
(Princeton, 1965), 286; idem, Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut (Princeton,
1985), 376.

Population Models: Malthus and Population Growth

Another theory of inequality derives from the work of Thomas Malthus and academic
Malthusians. This is a change-model. It holds that the growth of population promotes the
growth of inequality in a variety of ways. It expands the supply of labor relative to demand,
lowers wages as more people compete for jobs, and drives the poor to the margin of
subsistence. This theory has been widely accepted by economic historians of the medieval and
early modern world. It has also been applied to global trends in the modern era. See Michael
Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (1972, Harmondsworth, 1975), 40, 275).
Dialectical Models: Systems of Production and Exchange
Yet another set of theories holds that inequality has increased or diminished through time as a
consequence of structural changes in economic systems. Among them are Marxist theories,
which assert that inequality of wealth and income is determined principally by ownership of
means of production. Two of Karl Marx’s most creative ideas were his “law of capitalist
accumulation” and his theory of surplus value, which holds that as productivity increases
above subsistence, capitalist owners appropriate to themselves “surplus value” above the
value equal to labor’s subsistence, thereby increasing inequality.
Many Marxist writers have theorized that inequality increases with the growth of
capitalism—that is, with private ownership of the means of production. A related theory is the
argument that inequality has increased with the separation of capital and labor in the industrial
revolution. Many Marxist historians believe that inequality increased rapidly during the
industrial revolution from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
In the United States, non-Marxist historians on the left have developed a related theory of
inequality which attributes its growth not primarily to changes in systems of production but to
processes of exchange and in particular to “market revolutions.” They believe that the effect of
an expanding free market within a capitalist system was thought to cause a growth of
inequality. The precise linkages were apt to be a little fuzzy, but in general it has been argued
that the effect of “commercialization” has been to create larger and more integrated markets in
which the rich became richer, and inequality increased.

Economic Models: Growth-Processes and the Kuznets Curve

A very different theory of inequality has been invented by neo-classical economists. It is called
the Kuznets model, after the work of American economist Simon Kuznets. Like many
econometric historians, Kuznets was interested primarily in the problem of economic growth
and development, and studied changes in inequality primarily in relation to those processes.
The Kuznets model hypothesized that as “traditional” agricultural economies developed into
“modern” industrial systems, inequality at first increased and then declined in a curve that
resembled an inverted U. Kuznets and his colleagues found many mechanisms to explain this
pattern. One of them, which Kuznets himself suggested, was the role of intersectoral shifts. In
early stages of development, some workers moved into more highly paid jobs in sectors of the
economy which had higher productivity. Other workers remained behind, and inequality
increased. In later stages of economic growth, workers who had been left behind also made
that same sectoral transition, and inequality diminished. Another mechanism was demographic:
increasing rates of population growth in early stages; declining rates thereafter. A third factor
was an acceleration in later stages of education and economic skills. See Jeffrey C.
Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality, A Macroeconomic History [New York,
1980]; Jeffrey C. Williamson, Did British Capitalism Breed Inequality? [Boston, 1985])

Cyclical Models: Life Cycle Theories

An interesting theory of inequality centers on individuals rather than economies. One such
approach developed from the work of B. S. Rowntree on poverty in the city of York, England
(Poverty, A Study of Town Life [London, 1899]). He found that distribution of income and
wealth varied through the life cycle. Laborers in York lived through periods of poverty and
comparative affluence, with poverty occurring in childhood, early adulthood and old age, and
affluence in late youth and middle age. Other scholars have found different life-cycle rhythms
of income and wealth for blue-collar and white-collar workers, and have linked this approach
to differences of class, education, job-type, ethnicity, and race. These findings have been
aggregated into macroeconomic theories that changes in age-composition, skill-distribution,
and educational attainment have changed the distribution of wealth and income in entire social
and economic systems.

Institutional Models:
The Welfare State and the Robin Hood Paradox
Historians commonly believe that laws, institutions, reform movements, and conservative
counter-movements have made a major difference in the distribution of wealth and income.
Most liberal textbooks in American history (which is to say, most textbooks) have been written
around the belief that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty
caused an increase in equality, and that the Robber Barons and Republican presidents before
1932 and after 1968 caused inequality to grow. These ideas rest on the idea that laws and
institutions make a difference.
A very different institutional model comes from economic historian Peter Lindert, who
has framed the counterhypothesis called the “Robin Hood Paradox,” which holds that “across
time and jurisdictions, redistribution toward the poor is least given when most needed . . .
Robin Hood shows up least when needed most.” (“Toward a Comparative History of Income
and Wealth Inequality,” in Brenner, Kaelbe and Thomas, eds., Income Distribution in
Historical Perspective,” 226–29

Empirical Evidence
Which of these many theories of inequality is correct? Altogether, evidence now in hand is
strong enough to support several generalizations
First, the uniformity models are mistaken. Pareto’s Law, Lassalle’s Conjecture and
Bowley’s Law all derived from early data, mainly for the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. That era was a period of comparatively little change in wealth and income
distribution and appeared to confirm these models. But subsequent research yielded very
different results. More evidence accumulated from the 1930s to 1968; most of it found growing
of equality in that period. Yet more data is now available from 1968 to 1996, and shows the
opposite trend in that period: a rapid increase in inequality. Projects of historical research
have been completed for earlier periods. By and large they find evidence of growing inequality
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, stability in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, growing equality in the mid-twentieth century, and growing inequality
thereafter. All of this evidence supports a firm conclusion. The history of inequality is the
history of change.
Further, there is strong evidence that wealth and income distribution have varied broadly
one culture to another, and that some of these relative differences have remained highly
persistent through time, even as change has occurred everywhere in levels and trends. Even
within the narrow limits of American history, for example, the range of regional and local
differences in inequality is nearly as broad as the limits of possibility. In terms of Gini ratios
(where .00 equals perfect equality and .99 represents perfect inequality), the first distribution
of lands in Roger Williams’s Rhode Island Plantation briefly approached zero, but the
distribution of land in Adams County, Mississippi, on the eve of the Civil War was above .95.
Relative differences of that sort have persisted between northern and southern regions of the
United States for two centuries. From these findings one may draw a second conclusion.
Elements of cultural persistence have coexisted with patterns of change.
How do these combinations of change and persistence compare with leading theories of
inequality? In general, one may say that most of the leading theorists of inequality have
accurately described inequality-trends in the half-century or century before they wrote. But all
were mistaken in building a universal theory on that narrow historical base. This conclusion
holds for Malthus, Ricardo and Marx; for Lassalle, Pareto and Bowley; for Kuznets,
Williamson and Lindert. All testified truly to their own immediate historical experience, but
erred in over-generalizing to other periods.
It is well known, for example, that the relationship between population and wealth
changed fundamentally just after Malthus published his work; that the relationship between
capitalism and distribution was transformed after Marx. In the same way, the Kuznets-
Williamson-Lindert inverted-U model appears to fit the facts from the mid-nineteenth to the
mid-twentieth century, but not from the 1960s to our own time.
Other theories of inequality have been falsified by historical research. The institutional
models fail the test of chronology. Inequality did not increase in the age of the Robber Barons.
It did not diminish after 1968. Recent theoretical models of a market revolution as the driver of
inequality during the nineteenth century fail every test, both for the timing of market-growth and
inequality. The Robin Hood paradox works in the 1980s, but not in the 1930s. The idea that
capitalism caused inequality is also incorrect in the same way: it works for some periods, but
not for others. In terms of chronology the history of capitalism and the history of inequality do
not coincide. In short, all of the theoretical models listed above are unsupported by historical
evidence.
This evidence suggests the possibility of another theory. Let us look again at the
descriptive patterns. In the past five centuries the predominant change pattern is not precisely
linear or cyclical. Levels of inequality have tended to rise and fall in long wavelike
movements. In what is now the northern United States, patterns appear to have been more or
less as follows: 1630–1670, growing inequality; 1680–1730, growing equality; 1740–1840,
growing inequality; 1850–1932, fluctuations on a fixed plateau; 1932–68, growing equality;
1968–96+, growing inequality.
Figure 5.07 summarizes many studies of wealth-distribution in the northern United States. It
finds three periods of growing inequality which coincide with later stages of price revolutions
and early years of price equilibria: 1630–1670, 1760–1850, and 1968–1996+. It also finds
two periods of stability or increasing equality which coincide with the later phases of price
equilibria and the early stages of price revolutions: 1680–1760, and 1860–1968.
All time series are analyses of estates in probate except Hingham (taxable wealth), and
the U.S.A. (census data and household surveys). All are computed as Gini ratios except
Hingham, which is the size-share of the top ten percent. A Gini ratio is a measure of
distribution, which ranges from .00 (perfect equality) to .99 (perfect inequality, where the top
percentile owns everything).
Sources include Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality; A
Macroeconomic History (Madison, 1964); Lee Soltow, “Distribution of Income and Wealth,”
in Glenn Porter ed., Encyclopedia of American Economic History, III, 1087–1102; idem, Men
and Wealth in the United States, 1850–1870 (New Haven, 1975); idem, Patterns of
Wealthholding in Wisconsin since 1850 (Madison, 1971); W. I. King, Wealth and Income of
the People of the United States (New York, 1915); Daniel Scott Smith, “Population, Family,
and Society in Hingham. . . ” (diss., Univ. of California at Berkeley, 1973); Donald Koch,
“Income Distribution and Political Structure in Seventeenth-Century Salem,” Essex Institute
Historical Collections 105 (1969) 50–71; Jackson Turner Main, Society and Economy in
Colonial Connecticut (Princeton, 1985).
The main lines of change in European data are more obscure. But in England, inequality
increased during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, diminished in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, increased again from the mid-eighteenth century to
the mid-nineteenth century, fluctuated on the same plane circa 1850–1930, declined in the mid-
twentieth century, and have been rising in the late twentieth century. In summary, British trends
are broadly similar to those in the United States.
We find a wave pattern in the wealth-histories of both nations. These waves do not
synchronize exactly with price-revolutions and price-equilibria. But if one lags price-
movements against inequality-trends, then a correlation begins to emerge. In descriptive terms
it might be summarized as follows. The later stages of every price revolution and the early
stages of each equilibrium were periods when inequality increased. On the other hand, the
latter stages of each equilibrium, and the early stages of each price revolution were marked by
stability or decline in levels of inequality. These trends appear to have recurred in every price
revolution since the late middle ages.
This descriptive pattern strongly suggests a theory of inequality. First, changes in relative
returns to capital and labor were caused by the dynamics of price revolutions and price
equilibria as discussed in the main body of this work. Second, changes in the distribution of
income were caused by those prior changes in relative returns to labor and capital, lagged in
time. Third, changes in wealth-distribution were caused by changes in income-distribution,
also lagged in time. All of this would explain a correlation between price revolutions and
inequality, but one that is offset in time, with strong inertial effects. This theory also suggests
many obvious possibilities for the regulation of inequality. Here again, a wave-pattern is an
opportunity for a policy-maker in a free society.
APPENDIX M
Price Revolutions and Family Disintegration
One of the great social questions in the late twentieth century is about the disintegration of the
family. A particular source of concern is the rapid rise of births outside marriage, which in the
United States increased from 3.5 percent in 1940 to 28 percent in 1990. These estimates refer
to the entire American population. Among African Americans, the proportion of births to
unwed mothers was 65 percent in 1990, and climbing. Similar trends (with different
magnitudes) appeared in many nations. By the 1990s, the proportion of babies born outside of
marriage was higher in Britain and some European nations than in America. See U. S. National
Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics of the United States (1995); Statistical Abstract
of the United States (1993), table 101.
By 1990 the problem of family disintegration had reached crisis proportions and became
profoundly destructive of individual lives. Many studies have found that children born to
unwed mothers are more likely to get into serious trouble in later life. By comparison with
children in complete families, children born outside of marriage are less likely to stay in
school or keep out of jail. They are less able to find a good job, or any job, or to be able to
hold a job. They are also less likely to become married themselves, but more likely to have
children of their own outside of wedlock.

The Problem of Cause

Why has this happened? Why have births outside marriage so greatly increased? In the United
States, most answers to these questions have come from politicians, journalists, and social
scientists. They think of the problem as something unique to our own time, and seek an
explanation that is rooted in the twentieth century.
Opinion on the right holds that the modern social welfare system is largely responsible by
paying unmarried women who have babies, and by giving them more attention in motherhood
than they would otherwise receive. Observers on the left believe that the cause is poverty and
exploitation of the poor by the institutions of “late capitalist society.” Others think that the
cause is a general decline in the structure of “family values,” or a disintegration of systems of
social control, or a disruption of processes of socialization, caused by a crisis of western
civilization during the twentieth century. Many believe that the problem is specific to
minorities which British historian Peter Laslett brutally calls “the bastardy-prone sub-society.”
This problem looks very different when it is studied in a broad historical perspective. We
are not the first generation to face the problem of family disintegration on a massive scale.
Much historical research has been done on births outside of marriage in America and Europe,
from the sixteenth century to the present. Many scholars have also studied the history of
prenuptial pregnancy, which yields similar (but not identical) patterns of change. The results
are summarized in Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard Smith, eds., Bastardy and Its
Comparative History: Studies in the History of Illegitimacy and Marital Nonconformism in
Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, North America, Jamaica, and Japan (Cambridge, Mass.,
1980); and in Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America,
1640–1971: An Overview and Interpretation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5 (1975)
537–70.

Patterns of Long Term Change

On the question of long-term change, these studies yield similar results. Three times in the span
of modern history, conceptions outside marriage and births to unwed mothers have surged to
very high levels. The first of these waves occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, and reached its peak circa 1600. The second wave started in the early eighteenth
century (earlier in England), and crested in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The third wave began in the early twentieth century (ca. 1900), and is still in progress as this
work goes to press in 1996.
These three waves alternated with other long periods when illegitimacy and prenuptial
pregnancy declined and stabilized at low levels. One such period occurred in the mid- and late
seventeenth century. Another happened in the nineteenth century, from about 1830 to 1900.
In this long historical pattern of alternating surges and declines, the magnitudes of change
were very large. Studies of illegitimacy in England, for example, find that the proportion of
births outside of marriage rose in peak periods as high as 10 percent (and much higher in some
regions) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the period of decline from
1650 to 1750, they fell below 1 percent.
The range of prenuptial pregnancy rates in the United States was even greater. In some
New England towns as many as 40 percent of brides were pregnant at the end of the eighteenth
century. During the mid-nineteenth century, prenuptial pregnancy in New England fell below 5
percent, as it had also done in the seventeenth century. These findings have been replicated in
many studies. The results vary in detail by region and ethnic group, but secular trends are
broadly similar.
Why? What set these waves in motion? What brought them to an end? Causal theories
favored by social scientists and journalists in the late twentieth century cannot answer these
questions. Our modern system of social welfare might possibly be suspected as the cause of the
third wave, but certainly not of the first or second. Further, an expansion of social welfare
institutions happened in the nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries when rates of
illegitimacy were falling. The “crisis of late capitalism” explanation fails in the same way.
Earlier waves of family disintegration occurred before capitalist systems had fully developed.
The idea of a “bastardy-prone sub-society” does not help to explain historical trends, for in
each wave births outside marriage tended to increase in nearly all social groups.
Figure 5.08 summarizes the results of a research project by the Cambridge Group for the
History of Population and Social Structure on illegitimacy from 1570 to 1975, and civil
registration data on the proportion of births outside marriage to 1993. Illegitimacy ratios are
births to unwed mothers as a percent of all births, here presented as quinquennial means of
annual data. The proportion of births outside marriage in Great Britain was 30.1 percent in
1990. The source is Peter Laslett, Karla Osterveen, and Richard M. Smith, eds., Bastardy and
Its Comparative History (Cambridge, 1980), 14–17; Annual Abstract of Statistics 130 (1994)
series 2.17; (1995) series 2.14.
Family Disintegration and Price Revolutions
To understand the root of this problem, we need to study it in a broader historical context. An
important causal clue may appear in the fact that secular trends in births outside marriage and
in prenuptial pregnancy synchronize closely with the rhythm of long-term price movements.
The three long surges in births outside of marriage all coincided with price revolutions. The
two declines occurred in eras of price equilibrium (see figures 3.11 and 3.29 and 4.25).
This correlation certainly does not prove that price movements themselves were the
proximate cause of family disintegration, but it establishes beyond reasonable doubt an
association of some kind. Skeptics must explain away three broad wave-surges, two wave-
troughs, and a very tight chronology.
Several causal models come quickly to mind. One possibility would be a direct and
simple causal connection between material stress and family stress—that is, between wage-
price disparities, employment uncertainties, etc., and family disintegration. Another possibility
would be a more complex causal sequence from material disequilibria to cultural anomie. Yet
another would be a material disruption of systems of socialization and social control. A fourth
would be a linkage to population-growth, in which price movements and births outside
marriage are both consequences of a common cause.
In any case, three conclusions are clear enough. First, the crisis of family disintegration in
the late twentieth century is not a unique event, and cannot be understood merely by reference
to conditions in our time alone. Second, the strength of correlations between economic and
demographic trends tells us that recurrent waves of family disintegration in the sixteenth,
eighteenth and twentieth centuries were not random variations; neither were the periods of
decline of illegitimacy in the late seventeenth century and again in the nineteenth century. These
movements were part of a larger pattern. Third, the evidence strongly suggests that the rise of
births outside marriage will reverse sometime in the near future.
In the meantime, the historical evidence also suggests that policies for control of the
problem should center on the material and cultural stresses that impinge on young lives in the
penultimate periods of price revolutions: that is, on price-wage differentials, on employment
prospects for young people, and on the strength of socializing institutions such as schools and
families. The welfare system is not the primary problem. Neither is it capitalism in general, or
cultural values as a whole. The root of the problem is not the weakness of family values, but
the difficulty that young people have in realizing them. This is specially so during the late
stages of price revolutions.
It need not happen. Our own children and grandchildren have become the victims of
historical processes that are now increasingly within our power to control by a common effort
—if only we have the collective will and wisdom to do so.
APPENDIX N
Price Revolutions and Personal Violence
During the late twentieth century, when crime was rapidly increasing throughout the Western
world, many scholars turned their attention to its history. Much of the learned literature
centered on the difficulty of drawing any substantive conclusions from historical records of
crime and criminal prosecutions. But for all the deficiencies of the data, substantive patterns
began to emerge. The evidence for some of these findings is very robust (more so with each
new monograph), and several major historical discoveries have been made. Let us confine our
attention mainly to the history of homicide, which presents fewer problems of reporting and
source-bias than other crimes. Some of the leading findings are as follows.

Secular Trends: The Long Decline of Violent Crime

First, studies mainly in England but also in other nations have found that rates of violent crime
were much higher in the Middle Ages than in the modern era—higher by a different order of
magnitude. Ten local studies of homicide in thirteenth-century England yield an average annual
homicide rate of approximately 20 per 100,000 during the thirteenth century. By comparison,
the homicide rate in modern Britain was about I per 100,000 in 1981 and 0.3 per 100,000 in
1951. See T. R. Gurr, “Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the
Evidence,” Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research 3 [1981] 313. Population
estimates are problematic here, but not so much so as to undercut the main conclusion.
Second, many studies of later historical periods have made the concomitant discovery of
a very long secular decline in violent crime through the early modern era. In the English
counties of Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Essex, recorded rates of homicide moved decisively
downward. They were approximately 6 or 7 per 100,000 in the mid-sixteenth century, 2 or 3 in
the mid-eighteenth century, and 1 in the mid-twentieth century. See J. S. Cockburn, “Patterns of
Violence in English Society: Homicides in Kent, 1560–1985,” Past and Present 130 [1991]
70–106; J. M. Beattie, “The Pattern of Crime in England, 1660–1800,” Past and Present 62
(1974) 47–95; A. A. Sharpe, “Domestic Homicide in Early Modern England,” Historical
Journal 24 (1981) 34; Joel Samaha, Law and Order in Historical Perspective: The Case of
Elizabethan Essex (New York, 1974), 20.
This long secular decline in homicide is not an artifact of measurement. It runs counter to
the improvement of recordkeeping, and to the growing intolerance of personal violence. It is
also diametrically opposed to the widespread belief of sociologists and criminologists in the
mid-twentieth century that high crime rates are an artifact of modernity.

Trend Reversals: Four Crime Waves in the Past Millennium

Yet another important pattern has also emerged from the data. This long downward trend in
personal violence was continuous, but not constant. Four times it reversed during the past eight
centuries, in strong and sustained countertendencies that continued for many years. We have
been fated to live through one of these counter-movements. Personal violence ceased falling
and rose sharply to a peak during the early fourteenth century, the early seventeenth century, the
late eighteenth century, and the late twentieth century. See Lawrence Stone, “Interpersonal
Violence in English Society,” Past and Present 101 (1983) 26–31.
In England, the first and greatest of these four crime waves happened during the crisis of
the fourteenth century. In the years from 1310 to 1348, homicide rates rose to the highest levels
in recorded English history, far above the high normal range of the thirteenth century, and
higher than they would ever be again. In the town of Oxford, the annual murder rate rose as
high as 110 per 100,000 during the fourteenth century. This extraordinary peak was not
representative of homicide rates throughout England. Even in our own time, Oxford for all its
dreaming spires and serene college quads is still a rough town on Saturday nights when the
pubs close and crowds of workers, students, and skinheads collide in the ancient streets. Even
so, one study finds that during the dark years of the fourteenth century, medieval Oxford was
approximately a hundred times more dangerous than the modern town. See Carl I. Hammer,
“Patterns of Violence in a Medieval University Town,” Past and Present 78 [1978] 3–23.
After the crisis of the fourteenth century, homicide rates in England began to fall, and they
kept on falling for nearly two centuries (circa 1350–1550). Despite persistent political
instability, personal violence greatly declined in this period.
Then the trend reversed again. From approximately 1550 to 1650, a second great crime
wave occurred in England. Murder rates doubled in Kent, trebled in Essex, and multiplied
very rapidly in other parts of Britain. They reached their peak during the early seventeenth
century.
Rates of personal violence began to fall again in a long decline that continued through the
late seventeenth century to approximately 1730. This downward movement was interrupted
during the 1690s, when homicides and other crimes rose very sharply. This was a short surge
rather than a new secular trend. It soon subsided, and rates of violent crime resumed their long
fall.
Figure 5.09 summarizes many studies of homicide in England. It finds evidence of a long
secular decline in personal violence. This trend was interrupted by strong upward surges in the
fourteenth, sixteenth and twentieth centuries; by a more moderate rise in the eighteenth century;
and by smaller and short-lived increases in other periods of stress (1680s, 1860s, etc.). Little
evidence exists for the period from 1350 to 1530.

The many problems of source-bias in the evidence are discussed in Ted R. Gurr, “Historical
Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence,” Crime and Justice 3 (1981)
295–352, the first attempt to draw this material together. Population estimates are also full of
difficulty, especially for the Middle Ages.

Other general studies reach similar conclusions as to level and trend. All stress the long
decline, and also note (as did Gurr) strong upward surges in the fourteenth, sixteenth and
twentieth centuries. See Lawrence Stone, “Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300–
1983,” Past&Present 102 (1983) 206–215; J. A Sharpe, “The History of Violence in England:
Some Observations,” Past & Present 108 (1985) 216–54.
Specific studies include James B. Given, Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century
England (Stanford, 1977); J. S. Cockburn, “Patterns of Violence in English Society:
Homicides in Kent, 1560–1985,” Past&Present 130 (1991)70–106); Joel Samaha, Law and
Order in Historical Perspective: The Case of Elizabethan Essex (New York, 1974); V. A C.
Gatrell, “The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Gatrell,
et al., Crime and the Law (London, 1980), 342–45.
An excellent survey and bibliography of the very large literature is J. A. Sharpe, “The
History of Crime in England, c. 1300–1914, An Overview of Recent Publications,” British
Journal of Criminology 28 (1988) 254–67.
A third crime wave followed in the eighteenth century. It was not as strong as other
upward movements had been, but it was clearly evident in homicide rates, and more visible in
respect to other crimes. In Staffordshire, indictments for theft increased sixfold from the 1760s
to the 1790s. In Wiltshire, prosecutions for violations of the game laws multiplied by a factor
of seven from the 1760s to the 1790s. See J. S. Cockburn, ed., Crime in England, 1550–1800
(Princeton, 1977), 226; Douglas Hay, “War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The
Record of the English Courts,” Past and Present 95 (1982) 125.
This surge reached its climax in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then
reversed. By 1830, rates of violent crime were falling in England, and in many nations. This
decline, once begun, continued with a few interruptions through the Victorian era and well into
the early twentieth century. It persisted as late as 1930 in Stockholm, 1940 in Sydney and
Chicago, 1950 in London, and 1960 in Calcutta.
In the mid-twentieth century, a fourth crime wave began, and rapidly overswept most
nations throughout the world. Dates varied in detail, but crime rates were rising everywhere by
1960, and surged to very high levels after 1970. The magnitude of this increase was very large.
Homicide rates in some American cities approached the highest levels of the fourteenth
century. In 1991, homicides per 100,000 population were approximately 5 in St. Paul, 8 in
Seattle, 20 in Boston, 30 in New York, 40 in Baltimore, 50 in Atlanta, 60 in Detroit, 70 in New
Orleans, and 80 in Washington. So dangerous were the streets of the nation’s capital that it was
not safe to walk Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol after dark. In
1991, the most powerful nation in the world was unable to keep order within a few hundred
yards of the presidential mansion (Statistical Abstract of the United States [1993] table 303).
Then the pattern of change reversed yet again. In the 1990s crime rates were falling
rapidly in the United States. Some learned observers believed that this decline marked the
beginning of a new secular trend. Others thought that the crime wave of the twentieth century
had yet to run its course.
This evidence comes mostly from Britain and the United States. Did similar patterns
prevail in other nations? The broad answer is yes. Many local variations appeared in levels of
crime, but temporal trends were similar in many nations.

Crime Waves and Price Revolutions

When the history of personal violence is compared with price movements through the past
eight centuries, a striking paradox appears. The secular trends have moved in opposite
directions. Crime rates have come down since the twelfth century; prices have gone up. But
even as these long trends were opposed in their secular tendency, they were similar in timing
and closely interlocked in rhythm and structure of change.
The complexity of this association clearly appears in a comparison of prices and murder
in England. Homicide rates showed a strong downward tendency during periods of price-
equilibrium (1350–1490, 1650–1730, and 1830–1900). Those declines continued into the
early years of each price revolution (1490–1550, 1730–1760, 1900–1940). The downward
trends reversed in later stages of price revolutions. Homicide rates began to increase, then
surged to very high levels in years of crisis (1310–48, 1610–50, 1780–1820, and 1965–95).
The conjunction between these trends was most striking in critical periods, when price
revolution approached its climax. Four times since the twelfth century, a similar sequence of
events occurred. Prices began to surge and returns to capital kept pace with inflation, but
wages lagged behind and inequalities of wealth increased. When all of these things happened,
crime rates also increased sharply. Most major price surges were followed by crime surges, so
closely that the two movements often appeared as statistical shadows. This pattern of
association has been replicated in many different studies by scholars who were unaware of
trends in other periods and places.

Questions of Cause: Four Theories of Crime

This complex association of price movements and crime waves holds important clues for the
cause of crime, for the consequences of price revolutions, and for the structure of historical
change in general.
Four theories of crime tend to dominate the debate. Two of these ideas are favored by
conservative writers. One holds that crime is an act of rational choice, and rises from a
prospect of gain. The remedy is to raise the cost of committing crime and to reduce its benefits
by tougher penalties.
Another conservative theory begins differently but ends in a similar conclusion. It holds
that crime rises mainly from crime-prone subgroups that are not susceptible to reform. The
remedy is repression: capital punishment and long-term imprisonment.
Progressive observers tend to think of crime in two different ways. One theory that is
favored by the left holds that crime is caused by oppression and exploitation. Marxist versions
of this idea (still popular in the universities) argue that crime is a response to capitalist
exploitation in particular. The remedy is social reform. Liberal versions center on the
individual rehabilitation of the criminal.
Another theory much favored on the left is that crime waves are in large part the figments
of overheated conservative imaginations, and are themselves instruments of social control. One
scholar writes, “It is tempting to suggest that the historian should study at least some types of
crime in the past in terms of ‘enforcement waves’ rather than ‘crime waves.’” Another scholar
suggests that we should think in terms of “control waves.” See J. A. Sharpe, Crime in
Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983) 210; and Jason Ditton,
Controlology: Beyond a New Criminology (n.p., 1979).
All of these theories have elements of truth, but none of them encompasses the subject. It
is certainly the case that “enforcement waves” exist, but they cannot explain away the existence
of crime waves. The evidence of homicides, for example, derives not only from the police and
courts, but also from public health records. Each of these empirical sources is problematic in
its own way, but all of them clearly show similar wave-patterns that could not possibly be
artifacts of measurement. Crime is something real in the world; so also are crime-waves and
the long secular decline of criminal violence.
The progressive idea that crime is a reflex of capitalist exploitation works no better. The
history of crime does not correlate with the history of capitalism. In general, as capitalist
institutions developed during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, crime rates
declined. Further, some of the most violent crime waves in the late twentieth century occurred
in socialist societies.
Conservative theories of crime work no better than those of progressives. Much work has
shown that tougher penalties and restraints do deter crime in some degree, but are never the
dominant causal agents that conservatives claim them to be. The stubborn rise of the murder
rate in twentieth century America, even as many states returned to capital punishment, tells us
that other factors were more powerful.
The conservative idea that criminal violence rises from crime-prone subgroups also is
true in one sense but false in another. It is certainly the case that rates of personal violence vary
broadly from one culture to another. This is clearly the case in the United States. Differences in
homicide rates are greater between American regions than between European nations. But
these differences are more evident in levels than trends. When rates of personal violence
increased in late twentieth-century America, they did so in every part of the country. One
striking property of the crime waves in the late stages of each price revolution is that they tend
to appear in every region, city and class. Always the poor and underprivileged were more
likely to be the perpetrators of crime, and also its victims. But crime waves touched all groups,
and regions and nations. The question is why, and what might be done about it.
The search for another explanation might begin with close study of the empirical
evidence, which holds many causal clues. Let us begin by observing that crime waves
correlate with surging prices. It is important to observe that many kinds of crime increase in
these periods of economic stress. When the cost of living soars, theft increases sharply. Some
people steal to survive. Others steal to get ahead in hard times when other avenues are
blocked. The material linkages are very strong.
 At the same time, when prices surge, homicides also increase. Increasingly in the modern
world, the victims tend to be friends, neighbors, lovers and family members. In many of these
acts of personal violence, prospects of material gain are not the primary cause. These are
irrational acts. They are driven by passion, anger, jealousy, and fear. In them we may see
another classic mechanism, long familiar to social science, of frustration and aggression.
Deterrents are powerless to prevent this sort of personal violence, which explodes in periods
of high stress without any rational calculus of material gain.
The remedy for these two tendencies cannot be either a conservative policy of repression
and deterrence alone, or a liberal program of social reform. The control of crime requires a
more complex and subtle policy that combines elements of deterrence for crimes of ambition,
repression for hardened criminals, and another strategy for crimes of frustration and pain. This
other strategy might include broadly conceived but narrowly targeted programs to provide
short-term employment training in periods of stress and similar programs that are meant to
keep hope alive. This can only be done by a combination of public and private effort, in which
governments, educational institutions, and private corporations work together, unconstrained
by ideologies of both the left and right.
One of the major conclusions to emerge from a study of price movements and crime
waves is that surges are a large part of the phenomenon. A surge-pattern offers an opportunity
for targeting a policy in temporal terms. To do so, planners must learn to think more rigorously
and more historically about the problems before us.
APPENDIX O
Economics and History

The reason of a thing is not to be enquired after, till you are sure the thing
itself be so. We commonly are at what’s the reason of it? before we are
sure of the thing.

—John Selden, Table Talk, 1689

A primary purpose of this project is descriptive. One of its organizing assumptions is that a
task of empirical description may be undertaken without an apparatus of theory. This idea
breaks in a fundamental way with an epistemic orthodoxy that has dominated the disciplines of
American social science since the late 1940s. So universal has this orthodoxy become in the
United States that scholars who work within it are unaware that any other mode of thinking is
even possible.
In American universities, a social scientist is free to adopt almost any style of dress,
demeanor, life-style, sexual preference, or political ideology, no matter how bizarre or
preposterous the choice may be. But graduate students are required to embrace the
conventional epistemology of their disciplines, on pain of expulsion from the guild. If they dare
to think about the world in any other way, their work is judged “unsound,” and they are sent
upon their way.
The orthodox epistemology of American social science may be summarized in a sentence.
It holds that every explicit description rests upon implicit theoretical assumptions that create
the criteria for selecting the things to be described. It teaches that nothing can be understood, or
even perceived, without reference to a theory. This epistemology argues not merely that theory-
centered thinking is a valid form of social science. It insists that theory is the only form.
Within this body of belief, the central idea of “theory” varies broadly from one social
science to another. In economics, a theory is commonly understood as an “if . . . then . . . ”
proposition; that is, a statement in the form of’ ‘if x, then y.” In sociology, a theory is
commonly a paradigm model. In history, it sometimes becomes a sequence of narrative
statements. However it is conceived, theory-framing and theory-testing became the consuming
obsession of American social science during the mid-twentieth century.
The emergence of this epistemic orthodoxy in the United States may be dated to the
decade 1945–55, when it appeared simultaneously in manifestos by economists, sociologists,
anthropologists, psychologists and historians. In economics, a leading example was an
important essay called “Measurement without Theory,” published by Tjalling Koopmans in
1947. Koopmans argued that empirical measurement of any phenomenon was “impossible”
without fixed “theoretical preconceptions.” Further, he asserted (inconsistently) that
measurement without theory was trivial and useless, because “conclusions relevant to the
guidance of economic policies cannot be drawn.” Koopmans was not content merely to defend
the importance of theoretical knowledge in economics. He wished to deny the value of
economic knowledge in any other form and to condemn any colleague who sought to attain it in
a different way. See Tjalling C. Koopmans, “Measurement without Theory,” Review of
Economics and Statistics 29 (1947) 161–72.
Similar arguments were simultaneously made in the other social sciences. An example in
sociology was Serge Timasheff’s manifesto called Sociological Theory (1955), which argued
that “without theory directing their interpretation and arrangement, facts are almost
meaningless.” Timasheff’s sociological colleagues argued among themselves about how
theorizing might best be done. Talcott Parsons favored the construction of grand theory. Robert
Merton argued for “theories of the middle range.” But here again, in sociology as well as in
economics, the new orthodoxy insisted that theory was not merely one form of meaningful
thought. It was thought to be the only form. All others were dismissed by Timasheff as “almost
meaningless.”
The practical effect of this new orthodoxy was profound. It radically changed the work
that social scientists actually did. During the 1930s, for example, an earlier generation of
economists had labored at large projects of empirical description such as Koopmans’s review-
essay specifically condemned. An example was the work of the International Committee on
Prices, which compiled comprehensive and very valuable time series on price movements
through the past millennium. After 1950, this work came to an end. Mechanical data-gathering
continued in government agencies, but creative projects of empirical description by leading
scholars passed out of fashion.
In American sociology, something similar happened. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s,
sociologists had produced many powerful works of empirical description. Chief among them
were community studies such as the Lynds’ two Middletown volumes (1929–37), Lloyd
Warner’s Yankee City series, and Sidney Goldstein’s Norristown study. As the new epistemic
orthodoxy took hold, these projects were gradually abandoned, and sociological monographs
became narrow tests of specific “theoretical” propositions. Larger works tended to be
ruminations on theory in general. For a generation, theory-bound inquiry became the central
and even the exclusive business of American social scientists.
The effect of this revolution was both positive and negative. Monographs became more
coherent in their conceptual apparatus, and more rigorous as well. But a price was paid for
these advances. Inquiry became narrowly blinkered by theoretical assumptions, which often
proved to be circular in their structure and increasingly ignorant of the world that they
purported to explain. As a consequence, social science became increasingly remote from
social reality. The theory-centered epistemology of social science began by stimulating
thought; it ended by stultifying it.
During the 1970s and 1980s, a growing chorus of self-criticism began to be heard from
younger social scientists. In economics, for example, Lester Thurow in 1983 complained that
his discipline had become a closed world. “In economics today,” he wrote, “theory has
become an ideology rather than a set of working hypotheses used to understand the behavior of
the economy found in the real world . . . in my mind, mainstream American economics reflect
more an academic need for an internal theoretical consistency and rigor than it reflects
observable measurable realities in the world.”
Similar arguments were also made by sociologists such as Alvin Gouldner. For the most
part, however, these critics did not argue against theory in general. They inveighed against
theories of which they disapproved. Even among the iconoclasts, the epistemic orthodoxy
remained intact. Nevertheless, their critiques were symptoms of a malaise that was deeply felt
during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Ironically, at the same time that this epistemic orthodoxy established itself in social
science, its assumptions were being challenged by epistemologists and cognitive scientists in a
body of scholarship that is potentially revolutionary for social inquiry. One example of this
work is the epistemology of Fred Dretske, who draws a helpful distinction between two
epistemic operations that he calls “seeing” and “knowing.” Dretske argues that there is a
“visual ability” which is “an endowment relatively free from the influence of education, past
experience, linguistic sophistication, and conceptual dexterity.” He offers the example of a
“bewildered savage, transplanted suddenly from his native environment to a Manhattan subway
station, [who] can witness the arrival of the 3:45 express as clearly as the bored commuter.
Ignorance of X does not impair one’s vision of X; if it did, total ignorance would be largely
irreparable.” See Fred I. Dretske, Seeing and Knowing (Chicago, 1969), 8.
Dretske argues that “seeing” in this special sense can take place not only between an
observer and a physical object, but also between an observer and an historical event. “Not
only can books, cats, trees, automobiles, buildings, shadows and people be seen in the way that
I have just depicted,” he writes, “but also such items as battles, departures, signals,
ceremonies, games, accidents, stabbings, performances, escapes and gestures. . . . Events as
well as objects (and things such as shadows) can be seen in this way. . . . Events are
movements and occurrences; they involve a moment or change” (14–15).
This simple act of brute perception is fundamental to our experience of the world. We use
it every day. In purely practical terms, we can scarcely exist without it. But in the formal
inquiries of social science and social history, its operations have been suppressed by a
relativist epistemology which insists that there is no seeing without knowing, no description
without explanation, no observation without prior belief, and no measurement without theory.
Seeing is, indeed, very different from knowing. Its product is information rather than
meaning. Information, Dretske teaches us, is “an objective commodity, something whose
generation, transmission and reception do not require or in any way presuppose interpretative
process,” and it can be attained by a process that is “logically independent of whatever beliefs
we may possess” (17). He is wrong on the first point, but right on the second.
The present work is organized on the assumption that there are at least two very different
forms of cognition: seeing-observing and knowing-believing. American social scientists in the
twentieth century have been taught to do the second and to despise the first. They are trained to
know and believe but not to see and observe. They are told to seek meaning rather than
information. Most of all they are taught that the perception of social phenomena is necessarily
theory-bound and that any other sort of cognition is insignificant or even impossible.
Much important work is done within this theoretical frame, but it does not exhaust the
epistemic possibilities. There are other ways to study the world. American historian John Day,
who has been formally trained in the very different epistemology of the French Annales
School, offers a valuable suggestion in that respect. In a recent “essai d’autohistoire,” Day
distinguishes between two types of historical epistemology: that of what he calls the American
“cliometric school” and that of the French Annalists. American cliometricians, he observes,
begin with a theory—a hypothetico-deductive “if . . . then . . . ”model. French Annalists begin
with a problematique—a set of questions that are more open-ended and carefully set within a
specific cultural and historical context. “Ce marriage de convenance entre pratique et theorie
en histoire [de l’école des cliometricians Americains],” John Day writes, “contraste a mon
sens avec la bonne entente entre pratique et problematique qui characterise les grands
historiens de l’Ecole des Annales.” See John Day, “Terres, marchés et monnaies en Italie et en
Sardaigne du XIIe au XVIIIe siècle,” Histoire, Economie et Société 2 (1983) 187–203.
These problematiques are more than merely problems. They are frames of inquiry that
include a set of empirical questions, together with the epistemic apparatus necessary to answer
them. In short, a problematique is not merely an object of inquiry. It is also a method and even
an epistemology.
How does problematique differ from theory? In terms of grammar, a theory is a
declarative statement. A problematique is an interrogative statement. Theory-bound research
begins with an assertion; if the theory is sound, that assertion is proven to be correct. Problem-
centered research starts with a question; if the problem is sound, then the question can be
answered in many different ways according to the evidence. A problematique always has an
open end. A theory, by the very nature of its entailed proposition, “if x, then y,” always has a
closed end.
There is also another difference between theory and problematique. A theoretical
statement is a universal generalization. It commonly takes the form of an assertion that
whenever x exists, then y must always follow. A problematique, on the other hand, can be
tailored to historical circumstances.
Further, in actual practice, a theory-bound research design commonly commits the fallacy
of many questions. That is, it asks two or more questions but demands a single answer. A
problematique can be more exact, more flexible and also more rigorous. Its rigor is that of
erotetic logic, which is the logic of questions and answers, as distinct from the logic of
statements. See A. and M. Prior, “Erotetic Logic,” Philosophical Review 64 (1955) 43–59;
and Nuel D. Belknap Jr. and Thomas B. Steel Jr., The Logic of Questions and Answers (New
Haven, 1976).
For all of these reasons, the frame of this inquiry has been constructed in terms of a
problem rather than a theory. It is organized around a set of interrogative questions rather than
declarative statements: What has been the pattern of secular change in price levels? How have
price-fluctuations and price-relatives changed through time? How have real wages, rents and
interest rates changed?
To adopt this problem-centered approach is not to deny the possibility of theory-driven
inquiry. It is rather to assert the possibility and value of another kind of seeing and knowing. It
is to suggest that historians and economists should study their Kipling at an impressionable
age, and might be taught to play Kim’s Game. They should not be compelled to choose theory-
bound research as the only acceptable form of inquiry. There are other ways.
NOTES
Preface
1. “De tous les appareils enregistreurs, capables de révéler a 1’historian les mouvements
profonds de l’economie, les phénomènes monétaires sont sans doute le plus sensible. Mais ne
leur reconnaitre que cette valeur de symptôme serait manquer à leur rendre pleine justice; ils
ont eté et sont, à leur tour, des causes; quelque chose comme un sismographe qui, non content
de signaler les tremblements de terre, parfois les provoquerait.” Marc Bloch, “Le problème de
l’or au moyen age,” Annales d’ Histoire Économique et Sociale” 5 (1935) 1.
2. Daniel J. Boorstin, “Enlarging the Historian’s Vocabulary,” in R. W. Fogel and S. L.
Engerman, eds., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York, 1971), xi–
xiv.
3. The author’s favorite price lists for this period appear in Claudio Sanchez-Albornez,
Elprecio de la vide en el reino Astor-Leones hace mil años (Buenos Aires, 1945). A copy of
this rare and happy work, one of the few price compilations that can be read purely for
pleasure, is in the New York Public Library.
4. See bibliography for a survey of these materials.

Introduction
1. “Aufschwung im 13 Jahrhundert . . . Abschwung im Spätmittelalter . . . Aufschwung im
16 Jahrhundert brach im 17 Jahrhundert ab; ein dritter Aufschwung im 18 Jahrhundert . . . Was
bedeuten diese Wellen?” Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur: Eine Geschichte
der Land und Ernährungswirtschaft Mitteleuropas seit dem höhen Mittelalter (Hamburg and
Berlin, 1935, 1956, 1966, 1978), 13–14; an English edition, much revised, has been published
as Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Centuries
(London and New York, 1980).
2. Ernest Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of
Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates,” Economica 23 (1956) 296–314; idem,
“Seven Centuries of Building Wages, ibid., 22 (1955) 195–206; idem, A Perspective of Wages
and Prices (London, 1981). This is a weighted “market-basket” index, which includes grain,
vegetables, meat, fish, butter, cheese, drink, fuel, light, and textiles. The weights are held
constant throughout the series (80 percent for food; the rest for fuel and textiles), but specific
products are changed to match consumption patterns.
3. Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur; François Simiand, Les fluctuations
économiques à longue période et la crise mondiale (Paris, 1932); idem, Recherches
anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement général des prix du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris,
1932); Jenny Griziotti-Kretschmann, ll problema del trend sècolare nelle fluttuazioni dei
prèzzi (Pavia, 1935).
4. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, The
Perspective of the World (New York, 1984), 76–80, 82; for the response of American
reviewers, see, e.g., Charles Kindleberger in the New York Times. I met the same response in
1980, when I first published an essay summarizing the main lines of my work on this subject.
See D. H. Fischer, “Chronic Inflation: The Long View,” Journal of the Institute for
Socioeconomic Studies 5 (1980) 81–103. Attitudes at last are changing.
5. Alan Blinder, New York Times, 19 Feb. 1984.
6. Lester C. Thurow, The Zero Sum Society (New York, 1980), 43.
7. Here again waves and cycles behave differently. Academic interest in economic cycles
tends to be countercyclical, but the study of waves increases as the wave-crest comes near.
8. Many cyclical rhythms have been found in modern history. For a survey of a very large
literature by social scientists on long cycles—mainly fifty-year Kondratieff cycles or multiples
of those units. See Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age
(New Haven, 1988); the literature on this subject is discussed in Appendix E and the
bibliography.
9. See appendix O.
10. Herbert Stein, Presidential Economics (rev. ed. N.Y., 1985), 222.

The Medieval Price Revolution

1. Robert Branner, ed., Chartres Cathedral (New York, 1969), 93.
2. The deans received rents from stalls in the porch of the cathedral; the canons were
given the income from the south cloister. In a charter of May 26, 1224, the canons succeeded in
moving the money-changers from the porch to the south cloister: “Each and every one of us,
personages as well as canons of Chartres, who had assembled to elect a dean, are agreed that
the stalls of the moneychangers, which are customarily in the porch be set up in the cloister to
the south, between the steps of the church and the main tower, so that all the dues from the
stalls and the house in which they have been set up and the moneychangers themselves might
belong to the Chapter, and that they might remain without hindrance, as heretofore, in the
possession of the Chapter, in the place where they have been set up this day. . . . Executed in
the year of the Lord 1224, the month of May, on the octave of the Lord’s ascension.” Ernest de
Lépinois, Cartulaire de Notre Dame de Chartres (n.p., 1862) II, 103; Robert Branner, ed.,
Chartres Cathedral (New York, 1969), 98–99.
3. Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1927);
G. Pare et al., La renaissance du XIIe siècle: Les écoles et l’enseignement (Paris, 1933);
Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth
Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New
Haven, 1953); J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500 (London, 1980), 82–
179.
4. This is the estimate of Carl Richard Brühl, Palatium und Civitas: Studien zur
Profantopographie spätantiker Civitates von 3. bis zum 13. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 1975), I,
19. A more conservative reckoning appears in R. W. Southern, “The Schools of Paris and the
School of Chartres,” in Benson and Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth
Century, 119.
5. In the Romagna, Herlihy found that the most common articles of substitute money were
books. “At Ravenna,” Herlihy writes, “they dominate exchange throughout the eleventh
century.” One wonders what the rate of exchange might have been between authors and fields.
“Treasure Hoards in the Italian Economy, 960–1139,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 10
(1957) 4.
6. Ibid., 5.
7. William Beveridge, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth
Century (London, 1939); also idem, “Wages in Winchester Manors,” Economic History
Review 7 (1936–37) 22–43; and idem, “Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era,” Economic
History Review 2d ser. 8 (1955–56) 18–35.
8. The beginning date of the medieval price revolution is one of the more difficult
empirical problems in this project, for it antedates most major price series. Some historians
believe that prices had been rising as early as the tenth century, after the last of the major
barbarian invasions. But a major discontinuity appears in English price movements during the
period 1181–1200. Evidence from Exchequer Pipe Rolls and Winchester Pipe Rolls shows a
moderate upturn in the price of grain and livestock, followed by a small decline in the period
1190–99, and then a surge in the period 1200–02, which D. L. Farmer describes as a “violent
disturbance in the prices of all commodities.” Thereafter the long inflation was clearly
underway. See D. L. Farmer, “Prices and Wages,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of
England and Wales, vol. 2, 1042–1350 (Cambridge, 1988), 717–19, 787–817; idem, “Some
Price Fluctuations in Angevin England,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 9 (1956–57) 34–
43; idem, “Some Grain Price Movements in Thirteenth-Century England,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 10 (1957–58) 207–20; Norman S. B. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn
Market from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1915), 11–17; and P.
D. A. Harvey, “The English Inflation of 1180,” Past & Present 61 (1973) 3–30.
For France, George Duby finds evidence of “an important qualitative change in the 1180s,
and there to fix one of the main turning-points in European economic history”; The Early
Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth
Century (Ithaca, 1974), 263.
In Italy the pattern is less clear; see David Herlihy, “The Agrarian Revolution in Southern
France and Italy, 801–1150,” Speculum 33 (1958) 23–41; idem, “The History of the Rural
Seignury in Italy, 751–1200,” Agricultural History 33 (1959) 1–14.
9. M. M. Postan, Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the
Middle Ages (London, 1972; Pelican ed., 1975), 257; idem, “Economic Foundations of
Medieval Society,” in Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the
Medieval Economy (Cambridge, 1973), 2–27.
10. Postan, Medieval Economy and Society, chap. 13.
11. Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, 27–41.
12. In medieval Picardy, Fossier found that in families with children, the number of sons
per family increased sharply, circa 1175:
The annual growth rate accelerated from 0.28 percent in the period 1150–75, to 0.72 percent in
1175–1200. Life expectancy at birth was probably in the range of forty to fifty in this
exceptionally healthy era. No reliable record survives of daughters, who were regarded as
“trop aléatoire pour être notée.” Robert Fossier, La terre et les hommes en Picardie, jusqu’a
la fin du XIIIesiècle (2 vols., Paris and Louvain, 1968), I, 282–92.
An English study found a similar pattern: a rate of population growth from 1209 to 1311
of 0.85 percent per year—higher than in eighteenth century England, and nearly as high as in
some developing nations in the twentieth century. See J. Z. Titow, “Some Evidence of
Thirteenth Century Population Increase,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 14 (1961) 220.
 For other research that confirms this pattern, see Duby, Early Growth of the European
Economy, 182; Josiah Russell, The Control of Late Ancient and Medieval Population
(Philadelphia, 1985), 20; idem, “Recent Advances in Medieval Demography,” Speculum 45
(1965) 84–101; idem, “Aspects démographiques des débuts de la féodalité,” Annales 20
(1965) 1118–27.
13. This estimate comes from a comparison of manorial surveys in the period 1260–1315,
with census data from 1801 to 1951, as reported in H. E. Hallam, “Population Density in
Medieval Fenland,” Economic History Review 14 (1961) 71–79; idem, “Some Thirteenth
Century Censuses,” ibid., 10 (1957) 340–61; and idem, Rural England, 1066–1348 (Brighton,
1981), 245–50; similar findings are reported in H. P. R. Finberg, Tavistock Abbey (Cambridge,
1951); W. G. Hoskins and H. P. R. Finberg, Devonshire Studies (London, 1952); H. P. R.
Finberg, Gloucestershire (London, 1955); W. G. Hoskins, Leicestershire (London, 1957);
Edward Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely (Cambridge, 1951); J. B. Harley, “Population
Trends and Agricultural Developments from the Warwickshire Hundred Rolls of 1279,”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 11 (1958) 8–18. For similar trends in other parts of Europe,
see Enrico Fiume, “Sui rapporti economici tra città e contado nell’età communale,” Archivio
Storico Italiano 114 (1956) 18–68; Georges Duby, L’economie rurale et la vie des
campagnes dans l’Occident Médiéval (2 vols., Paris, 1962).
14. For evidence of falling female age at marriage see David Herlihy, “The Medieval
Marriage Market,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976) 3–27; idem, “The Generation
in Medieval History,” Viator 5 (1974) 347–64. Herlihy finds that male age at marriage
increased in this period; but the age of the female is critical for changes in fertility levels.
15. Postan, Medieval Economy and Society; J. Z. Titow, English Rural Society, 1200–
1350 (London, 1969). On the problem of population estimates for England, see G. Ohlin, “No
Safety in Numbers: Some Pitfalls in Historical Statistics,” in H. Rosovsky, ed.,
Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gershenkron (New York,
1966), 70–81. See also M. M. Postan, “Some Economic Evidence of Declining Population in
the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 2 (1950) 221–46; Julian Cornwall,
“English Population in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 23
(1970) 32–44; Clyde George Read, “Price Data and European Economic History: England,
1300–1600” (thesis, University of Washington, 1972); Mavis Mate, “High Prices in Early
Fourteenth-Century England: Causes and Consequences,” Economic History Review 28 (1975)
1–16.
16. These estimates were computed by the author from data in James E. Thorold Rogers,
A History of Agriculture and Prices in England… (7 vols., Oxford, 1866–1902, rpt. Vaduz,
1963), I, 1259–1400.
17. Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages
(New York, 1976), 82–84.
18. Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, chap. 1.
19. Median prices in solidi for body armor in medieval Italy were as follows:
A coif was an iron skullcap or mail hood or both; a hauberk was a long tunic of chain mail; a
cuirass was commonly but not invariably a breastplate, and a panceria was the companion
piece of a cuirass. These data are taken from William N. Bonds, “Some Industrial Price
Movements in Medieval Genoa (1155–1255),” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 7
(1969–70) 123–139; see also Henrietta M. Larson, “The Armor Business in the Middle Ages”
Business History Review 14 (1940) 49–64; and C. F. ffoulkes, “European Arms and Armor,”
in G. Barraclough, ed., Social Life in Early England (London, 1960), 124–38.
20. Postan, Medieval Economy and Society, 253–76; idem, “Some Economic Evidence
of Declining Population in the Later Middle Ages.” An important study is Christopher Dyer,
Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520
(Cambridge, 1989), 101–103.
Historians refer to disparities between agricultural and industrial prices as a pattern of
“price scissors,” which cut one way during the price revolutions, when landlords and money-
lenders gained, and laborers and artisans lost. The scissors cut the other way during periods of
price equilibrium, when landlords and money-lenders lost, and artisans and laborers gained
from the movement of price relatives.
Some Marxist scholars believe the “price scissors” to have been peculiar to a feudal
economy. Others draw similar conclusions about capitalist economies. This was not the case.
The cruelest cuts of all were a variant on price scissors in socialist economies of the twentieth
century, as discussed below.
Further, similar price relatives appeared in the price revolutions of the sixteenth,
eighteenth and twentieth centuries, as we will see. See Guy Bois, Crise dufeodalisme:
économie rurale et démographie en Normandie orientale du début du I4e siècle au milieu du
16e siècle (Paris, 1976), 85–88.
21. Markets of known date were founded as follows in twenty one English counties:

Markets of unknown date are not included. R. H. Britnell, “The Proliferation of Markets in
England, 1200–1349,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 34 (1981) 209–21.
22. E. M. Carus-Wilson, “An Industrial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century,” Economic
History Review 11 (1941) 39–60; Rolf Sprandel, “La production du fer au Moyen Age,”
Annales 24 (1969) 305–21.
23. Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, chap. 1; F. Curschmann, “Hungersnöte in
Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Wirtschaftsgeschichte des 8. bis 13. Jahrhunderts,”
Leipziger Studien aus dem Gebiete der Geschichte 6 (1900) 1.
24. Marc Bloch, “Le probleme de l’or au Moyen Age,” Annales d’Histoire Économique
et Sociale 5 (1933) 1–34; a translation appears in Land and Work in Medieval Europe:
Selected Papers by Marc Bloch (tr. J. E. Anderson; Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), 186–
229. Also important is a companion piece by Bloch, translated by Anderson as “Natural
Economy or Money Economy: A Pseudo-Dilemma,” ibid., 230–41.
25. Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money 1450–1920 (Barcelona, 1969; English tr.
London, 1976), 19.
26. C. C. Patterson, “Silver Stocks and Losses in Ancient and Medieval Times,”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 25 (1972) 205–35; the estimate of three hundred tons is from
D. M. Metcalf, “English Monetary History in the Time of Offa: A Reply,” Numismatic
Circular 71 (1963) 1651.
27. J. R. Strayer, “The Crusades of Louis IX,” in K. M. Setton, ed., A History of the
Crusades (Philadelphia, 1962), II, chap. 14.
28. Robert S. Lopez writes, “Silver had been mined in various European regions
throughout the early Middle Ages; the opening of the Goslar mines had been one of the earliest
signs of the long trend of growth in the tenth century; Freiburg, probably the richest source, had
been developed in the twelfth century. The thirteenth was marked by intensive exploitation of
old mines but not blessed by important new discoveries; and there were symptoms of
increasing difficulties in securing the larger amounts demanded by the growing hunger for
silver. In Italy, the inferior mines of Tuscany and Sardinia were tapped, and water-driven
hammers were introduced to exploit the poorer ores of Trentino; in Germany, Goslar passed its
peak and Freiburg was nearing exhaustion.” Robert S. Lopez, “Back to Gold, 1252,”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 9 (1956) 219–40, 233.
29. Patterson, “Silver Stocks and Losses,” 230.
30. Mate, “High Prices in the Early Fourteenth Century,” 2.
31. Two excellent and very thoughtful essays on this subject are N. J. Mayhew, “Money
and Prices in England from Henry II to Edward III,” Agricultural History Review 35 (1987)
121–32; and A. R. Bridbury, “Thirteenth-Century Prices and the Money Supply,” ibid., 33
(1985) 1–21. Bridbury and Mayhew believe that the expansion of the money supply began
earlier, circa 1280, and that a “sudden late-twelfth century surge has every appearance of
monetary inflation.” (Mayhew, 129).
I read the price-series of Thorold Rogers and David Farmer differently (as did Rogers
and Farmer themselves), as a gradual rise in prices, except for a very violent price-surge
during a period from 1201 to 1205, which was time of extreme bad weather. W. L. Warren
writes of that time, “the rivers froze after Christmas and the Thames could be crossed on foot.
The ground was so hard that no ploughshare could bite into it until March. The winter sowings
were almost ruined by the ferocity of the cold; vegetables and herbage shriveled up. When
spring finally came . . . corn was selling at famine prices. Oats fetched ten times the normal
price, and men were paying half a mark for a few pence worth of peas or beans. A sorry land
was England in 1204–05.” W. L. Warren, King John (London, 1961), 105.
32. On florins and ducats, a good survey appears in Frederic Lane, Venice, a Maritime
Republic (Baltimore, 1973), which summarizes many years of study on this subject; see also
idem, “Le vecchie monete di conto veneziane ed il ritorno all’ore,” Atto dell Instituto Veneto
di Scienze Letre ed Arti; Classe di Scienzi Morali, Letter, ed Arti 117 (1958–59) 49–78; A.
M. Watson, “Back to Gold and Silver,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 20 (1967) 1–34.
 33. Lopez describes a “boom of contracts of exchange and bank transfers between 1248
and 1255.” “Back to Gold,” 232.
34. Carlo M. Cipolla, “Currency Depreciation in Medieval Europe,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 15 (1963) 417.
35. On the fall of real wages, see Postan, “Some Economic Evidence of Declining
Population,” 221–46; Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of
Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates,” 296–314; and Abel, Agrarkrisen und
Agrarkonjunktur, 40–41.
36. Georges d’Avenel, Histoire économique de la proprieté, des salarires des denrées
et de tous les prix en general depuis l’an 1200 jusqu’en l’an 1800 (7 vols., Paris, 1894–
1926), III, 317.
37. The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, ed. H. E. Butler (London, 1949), 59.
38. Carus-Wilson, “Industrial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century,” 54.
39. Carlo M. Cipolla, Money, Prices, and Civilization in the Mediterranean World:
Fifth to Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1956), 63–65; Sidney Homer, A History of Interest
Rates (New Brunswick, 1963) 94–99.
40. Cipolla, Money, Prices, and Civilization, chap. 3.
41. “It is generally agreed that the thirteenth century witnessed an economic crisis that led
to the impoverishment of the population.” Alfred N. May, “An Index of Thirteenth-Century
Peasant Impoverishment? Manor Court Fines,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 26 (1973)
397; Titow, English Rural Society, 64–96.
42. Rohault de Fleury, Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion de N.-S.J.-C. (Paris,
1870), 213, 357.
43. J. Z. Titow, Winchester Yields (Cambridge, 1972); Mate, “High Prices in Early
Fourteenth-Century England,” 8.
44. A running tabulation of disettes appears in M. E. Levasseur, Les prix aperçu de
l’histoire économique de la valeur et du revenu de la terre, en France du commencement du
XIIe siècle à la fin du XVIHe, avec un appendice sur le prix du froment et sur les disettes
depuis l’an 1200 jusqu’a l’an 1891 (Paris, 1893), appendix.
45. D’Avenel, Histoire . . . de tous les prix, III, 183.
46. D. L. Farmer, “Some Livestock Price Movements in Thirteenth-Century England,”
Economic History Review, 2d ser. 22 (1969) 1–16. Postan, in an appended note to Medieval
Economy and Society, 280–81, expresses strong skepticism about the thesis that recoinages
made a difference in price levels. He writes: “The upsurge of prices which Mr. Farmer noted
in the years following some of the recoinages does not occur in the years following other
recoinages. Between 1150 and 1300, recoinages occurred at least six times, from 1156–9,
1181, 1205, 1247, 1279 and 1299, yet some of these do not appear to have had any effect on
prices, especially 1181, 1205 and 1299.” Postan appears to have been mistaken about the
recoinages of 1205 and 1299, but he may have been correct about 1181. On balance, the weight
of Farmer’s evidence is greater than Postan’s skepticism. See also D. L. Farmer, “Some Grain
Price Movements in Thirteenth-Century England, Economic History Review 2d ser. 10 (1957–
58) 207.
47. Mate, “High Prices in Early Fourteenth-Century England,” 5.
48. Ibid.
49. Michael Prestwich, “Early Fourteenth-Century Exchange Rates,” Economic History
Review 32 (1979) 470–82.
50. Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank (Cambridge, 1963;
New York, 1966), 2.
51. Mario Chiaudano, “I Rothschild del Dugento: La Gran Tavola di Orlando
Buonsignori,” Bullettino Sienese di Storia Patria 42 (1935), 103–42; William M. Bowsky,
The Finance of the Commune of Siena, 1287–1355 (Oxford, 1970); idem, A Medieval Italian
Commune: Siena Under the Nine, 1287–1355 (Berkeley, 1981).

The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century

1. A quantitative study appears in Hugues Neveux, “Bonnes et mauvaises récoltes du
XIVe au XIXe siècle: Jalons pour une enquète systématique,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et
Sociale 53 (1975) 177–92. There were many local exceptions. Tuscany appears to have
escaped the ravages of this great famine but was hit severely a few years later.
2. Ian Kershaw, “The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 1315–1322,” Past &
Present 59 (1973) 3–50; Elisabeth Carpentier, “Famines et epidemies dans l’histoire du XIVe
siècle,” Annales 17 (1962) 1062–92; David Herlihy, “Population, Plague, and Social Change
in Rural Pistoia, 1201–1430,” Economic History Review, 2d ser. 18 (1965) 225–44; H. S.
Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315–1317,” Speculum 15 (1930) 343; H. V. Weveke,
“La famine de l’an 1316 en Flandre et dans les regions voisines,” Revue du Nord 41 (1950) 5.
For a quantitative study of the diet of harvest workers by decade, 1250–1430, see
Christopher Dyer, “Changes in Diet in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Harvest Workers,”
Agricultural History Review 36 (1988) 21–37.
3. Lucas, “Great European Famine of 1315–1317,” 61.
4. Ibid., 58.
5. Ibid., 57–58.
6. Ibid., 66.
7. A. R. Bridbury, “Before the Black Death,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 30 (1977)
393–410.
8. J. R. Maddicott, “The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294–1341,”
Past & Present supplement 1 (1975), rpt. in T. H. Aston, ed., Landlords, Peasants and
Politics in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1987), 285–359; E. Miller, “War, Taxation, and the
English Economy of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,” in J. M. Winter, ed.,
War and Economic Development (Cambridge, 1975); J. O. Prestwich, “War and Finance in the
Anglo-Norman State,” Royal Historical Society Transactions 5th ser. 4 (1954) 19–44; K. B.
McFarlane, “War, the Economy, and Social Change,” Past & Present 22 (1962) 3–35.
9. This is the conclusion of Guy Bois, no friend of Malthusian models. He writes, “The
chronology of the fall in the revenues of the landed seignury shows a remarkable
correspondence with the movement of population.” This was specially the case with petty
nobles; great seigneurs did much better. Bois observes: “On the one hand, the privileged
position of the recipients of dues from seigneurial monopolies and tithes is obvious. Their
revenues offered particular resistance to the erosion that threatened from all sides. They even
derived benefit from the price rises of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. On the other hand
stood the mass of small landlords drawing the best part of their incomes from the rent from
their peasant tenures.” See The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern
Normandy c. 1300–1500 (1976; Cambridge, 1984), 221, 236–37.
10. Edouard Perroy, “Les crises du XIVe siècle,” Annales 4 (1949) 167–182; R. H.
Hilton, “Y eut-il une crise générate de feodalité?” Annales 6 (1951) 23–30; Robert
Boutrouche, La crise d’une societé (Paris, 1947). A popular account appears in Barbara
Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York, 1978), a lively
narrative of military and political events centered on a knight of France, Euguerrand de Coucy
VII.
11. Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York, 1969) 35.
12. Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (New York,
1978), 24–25.
13. Guy Bois believes that these “price scissors” were “an original form of price
movements peculiar to the feudal economy.” This interpretation is central to his Marxist
analysis of the “crisis of feudalism.” But similar scissor-like movements also appeared after
the climax of other great waves and are not unique to any one of them. Further, these wave-
movements in crises cannot be made to correlate with Marxist stages of production unless that
taxonomy is changed in fundamental ways. There is an interpretative opportunity here, for a
post-Marxist historian. See Bois, Crise du feodalisme, 92.

The Equilibrium of the Renaissance

1. For contextual essays, see R. S. Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, “The Economic
Depression of the Renaissance,” Economic History Review 2nd ser. 14 (1962) 408–26;
Leopold Genicot, “Crisis: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times,” Cambridge Economic
History of Europe, 1, 678–94.
2. This account is drawn from David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The
Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–1430 (New Haven, 1967); and idem, “Population,
Plague, and Social Change in Rural Pistoia,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 18 (1965)
225–44.
3. Tuchman, Distant Mirror, 166.
4. C. A. Christensen, “Aendringerne i landsbyens oslashkonimiske og sociale strukur i det
14 og 15 århundrede,” Historisk Tidsskrifft 12 (1964) 346.
This is what German scholars call the Wüstungsproblem, the “problem of the deserted
villages,” a major historiographical issue in many European nations. Part of the problem is
about how many villages were deserted by their inhabitants, and precisely when the desertion
took place. See Maurice Beresford and John B. Hurst, Deserted Medieval Villages (London,
1971); A. Holmsen, “Desertion of Farms around Oslo in the late Middle Ages,” Scandinavian
Economic History Review 10 (1962) 165; Wilhelm Abel, Die Wüstungen des ausgehenden
Mittelalters (2d ed., 1955); J. F. Pesez and E. Le Roy Ladurie, “Les villages desertes en
France: Vue d’ensembles,” Annales 20 (1965) 257.
5. A leading authority on this subject is John Day, “The Great Bullion Famine of the
Fifteenth Century,” Past & Present 29 (1978) 3–54; reprinted with many other essays in idem,
The Medieval Market Economy (Oxford, 1987).
6. The price of wheat (in grains of silver) changed as follows in England, according to
evidence drawn from the estates of the Bishops of Winchester:
 7. N. J. Mayhew, “Numismatic Evidence and Falling Prices in the Fourteenth Century,”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 27 (1974) 1–15; H. A. Miskimin, “Monetary Movements
and Market Structure—Forces for Contraction in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,”
Journal of Economic History 2d ser. 24 (1964) 470–490; J. Schreiner, Pest og prisfall i
Senmiddelalderen (Oslo, 1948); H. van Werveke, “Essor et déclin de la Flandre,” in Studi in
onore di Gino Luzzato (Milan, 1950).
8. Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia; Beveridge, “Wages in the Winchester
Manors”; idem, “Westminister Wages in the Manorial Era”; D. Woodward, “Wage Rates and
Living Standards in Pre-Industrial England,” Past & Present 91 (1981) 28–46.
Important new evidence of qualitative change in the labor market after the Black Death
appears in Dyer, Standards of Living, 222–33, and Simon A. C. Penn and Christopher Dyer,
“Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the Labour
Laws,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 43 (1990) 356–76.
9. Samuel Cohn, The Laboring Classes of Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980);
Richard C. Trexler, The Spiritual Power: Republican Florence under the Interdict (Brill,
1974).
10. E. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896).
11. Postan, Medieval Economy and Society, 173; H. L. Gray, “The Commutation in
Villein Services in England before the Black Death,” English Historical Review 29 (1914)
625–56; R. H. Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage in England,” Past & Present 31 (1965) 3–19;
T. W. Page, The End of Villeinage in England (New York, 1900).
12. Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia, 146–47.
13. For many years, the Renaissance was thought to be the product of high prosperity.
That idea was challenged by R. S. Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, who argued that the Renaissance
was actually a time of economic depression. The Lopez-Miskimin model fits the period from
1348 to 1405 in Italy, and also the early fifteenth century in northern Europe. But the Italian
quattrocento is better understood as an era of economic equilibrium with comparatively stable
prices, falling rent and interest, and rising wages. That equilibrium became an important
underpinning of the Renaissance; see Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, “Economic Depression of the
Renaissance”; Carlo M. Cipolla, “Economic Depression of the Renaissance?” with rejoinders
by Lopez and Miskimin, Economic History Review 2d ser. 16 (1964) 519–529; C. Barbagallo,
“La crisi economico-sociale dell’Italia della Renascenza,” Nouva Rivista Storica 34 (1950)
and 35 (1951). For fiscal movements, see Josef Rosen, “Prices and Public Finance in Basel,
1360–1535,” Economic History Review, 2d ser. 25 (1972) 1–17.
14. Bois, Crise du feodalisme, 284–308.
15. M. M. Postan, “The Fifteenth Century,” Economic History Review 9 (1938–39) 160–
67; Perroy, “Les Crises du XIVe siècle”.
16. One study shows that wages in Rouen rose for hand workers from 20 pence in 1399–
1407 to 27 pence in 1469–78; wages of masons rose from two shillings sixpence to four
shillings or four shillings sixpence in the same period. At the same time, the price of grain in
hours of labor fell 40 to 50 percent. See Guy Bois, “La prix du froment à Rouen au XVe
siècle,” Annales 23 (1968) 1262–82; for England, see J. Hatcher, Population and the English
Economy (London, 1977).
17. The Mediterranean moment was made possible by favorable climatological
conditions, which have changed profoundly in this region. The territories of Spain, Italy,
Greece, and Turkey, which today are baked dry by the summer sun, were in the fifteenth century
more moist, because of changing atmospheric circulation systems. Small changes in
precipitation had a large impact upon the carrying capacity of the environment. See J. Vicens
Vives, Manual de historia economica de España (Barcelona, 1959).
18. The estimate of 870,000 deaths was made by Theodoros Spandugino, and is accepted
by Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (Princeton, 1978), 431; a lively
survey is Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries; The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire
(New York, 1977).
19. This process may be said to have begun in 1405, with the acquisition of Padua,
Bessano, Vicenza, and Verona; it reached its limit with the annexation of Rovigo in 1484;
thereafter, the boundaries of Venice changed little until the conquest of the republic by
Napoleon in 1797.
20. Lane, Venice, 289.
21. De Roover, Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank; Richard A. Goldthwaite, The
Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1980), 29–
66; idem, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1968).
22. Goldthwaite, Building of Renaissance Florence, 328–29; idem, “I prèzzi del grano a
Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo,” Quaderni Storici 28 (1975) 5–36.
23. Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oscar
Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago,
1948), 225.
24. Hans Baron argues that the work of Gregorio Dati, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio
Bracciolini all reveal “the attitude of mind from which sprang the ideas of equilibrium and
balance-of-power—just so, the picture of the urbs florentina as the geometric center of the
surrounding countryside is a striking anticipation of the ideal of the ‘perfect city,’ and of what
has been called the ‘geometrical spirit’ of the Renaissance.” See Baron, The Crisis of Early
Italian Renaissance (2d ed., New York, 1966), 202. His discussion of dates begins on xxv.
Other scholars had introduced this interpretation long before Baron; see., e.g., William
Shepherd, The Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool, 1837), 458–461. But Baron developed
it in a rounded way.

The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century

1. Livy, History, 45.40.1ff.
2. The Medici family spent 663,755 florins on buildings, charities and taxes in the period
from 1434 to 1471, not counting household expenses. Rates of spending were also very high
from 1471 to 1491, but Cosimo had been even more generous than Lorenzo. De Roover, Rise
and Decline of the Medici Bank, 371n.
 3. Francesco Guicciardini, The History of Florence (New York, 1970), 68–69. This
work was written in 1508–9 and first published in the nineteenth century.
4. Ibid., 69.
5. Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980), 452; de
Roover, Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 371.
6. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 458.
7. D. Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance
(Princeton, 1970)
8. Roberto Ridolfi, The Life of Girolamo Savonarola (New York, 1959), 184.
9. Ibid., 191.
10. Girolamo Savonarola to Alberto Savonarola, 24 July 1497, in ibid., 207.
11. Pasquali Villari, Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola (London, 1888), 758.
12. Ferdinand Schevill, Medieval and Renaissance Florence (1936, New York, 1965),
456.
13. Ingrid Hammarström, “The ‘Price Revolution’ of the Sixteenth Century: Some
Swedish Evidence,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 5 (1957) 118–54.
14. Georg Wiebe, in Zur Geschichte der Preisrevolution des XVI und XVII Jahrhunderts
(Leipzig, 1895). The historical literature on the “pricerevolution of the sixteenth century” is
very large. That subject was given a strong monetarist cast by the American economist Earl
Hamilton, who argued that the cause of the price-revolution was the influx of large amounts of
American silver and gold into Europe. Hamilton’s research appears in American Treasure and
the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934); and Money, Prices and
Wages in Valencia, Aragon and Navarre, 1651–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1947).
This monetarist model was at first widely accepted by economic and social historians.
Fernand Braudel, in his grand thèse on The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in
the Age of Philip II (1946), wrote enthusiastically (and erroneously, as we shall see) “There is
no possible doubt about the influx of gold and silver from the New World. . . . The coincidence
of the curve of influx of precious metals from America and the curve of prices throughout the
sixteenth century is so clear that there seems to be a physical, mechanical link between the
two.”
After Braudel wrote those words, the preponderant weight of historical opinion shifted
away from this position. One historian even questioned whether there was a price-revolution at
all in the sixteenth century. Carlo Cipolla, in “The So-Called ‘Price Revolution’: Reflections
on the ‘Italian Situation,’” (in Peter Burke, ed., Economy and Society in Early Modern
Europe; Essays from Annales [New York, 1972], pp. 42–46) argued that the inflation of the
sixteenth century was not much greater than that which occurred in what he called the “century
of monetary stability” from 1791 to 1912. That erroneous conclusion rests upon an error of
chronology. Cipolla defined his “century of monetary stability” to include not only the
Victorian equilibrium but also the climax of the great wave of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the great wave of the twentieth. Further, he defined the price revolution of the
sixteenth century in such a way as to rule out one of its most inflationary stages. When these
errors are corrected, Cipolla’s thesis collapses, and the “so-called” price revolution of the
sixteenth century survives his skepticism.
Most recent historians of this subject have accepted the descriptive reality of the price-
revolution, but have challenged Hamilton’s monetarist explanation in varying degrees. This
revisionary literature has been collected in two anthologies by Peter Burke (cited above) and
Peter Ramsay, The Price Revolution in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1971). Specially
useful are essays by C. Verlinden, J. Craeybeckx and E. Scholliers on the price revolution in
Belgium; Stanislas Hoszowski on Austria, Yugoslavia and Poland; Z. P. Bach on Hungary, and
Marian Laowist on economic movements throughout Europe. One of the most helpful
contributions is Ingrid Hammarström’s excellent essay, “The ‘Price Revolution’ of the
Sixteenth Century: Some Swedish Evidence,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 5
(1957) 118–54. Also of value are J. Nadal Oiler, “La revolución de los precios españoles en
el siglo XVI,” Hispania 19 (1959) 503–29; J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–
1650 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 54–78, which is specially perceptive on the question of
contemporary understandings of the price-revolution; and Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers,
1500–1600 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1982), 1, 122–39.
The best overview remains Fernand P. 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, which revises Braudel’s earlier views. Another
major study that qualifies the Hamilton thesis in important ways is Michel Morineau,
Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux métaux; Les retours des trésors américains d’après les
gazettes hollandaises (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Paris and London, 1985); also idem, “Des
métaux précieux américains et de leur influence au XVIIe et XVIII siècle,” Bulletin de la
societé d’histoire moderne et contemporaine XV (1977) 2–95; and idem, “Histoire sans
frontières: prix régionaux, prix nationaux, prix internationaux,” Annales E.S.C. 24 (1969).
15. Deane, “Inflation in History,” 3; J. D. Gould calculates that silver prices in England
trebled from 1540 to 1640—an annual geometric increase of 1.1 percent. Other estimates yield
slightly higher results. See J. D. Gould, “The Price Revolution Reconsidered,” Economic
History Review 2d ser. 17 (1964) 249–66.
16. Readers will find in these data the “pennant pattern” that is often observed in stock
prices. For a discussion of flag and pennant patterns, see John Downes and Jordan Elliot
Goodman, Barron’s Finance and Investment Handbook (Woodbury, N.Y., 1986), 269, 387.
17. Solid quantitative evidence is lacking in English demographic history before the
development of the parish registration system in 1538. But there is general agreement on the
general trends, with continuing dispute as to the inflection points. Postan’s estimate, many
years ago, still appears to be correct. See E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population
History of England, 1541–1871 (Cambridge, 1981), 566; Cornwall, “English Population in
the Early Sixteenth Century,” 32–44; M. M. Postan “Some Economic Evidence of Declining
Population,” 11.
18. Guy Bois estimates that median age at marriage in Normandy during the early and
mid-sixteenth century was in the range of 21 to 22 years, well below levels in France during
the seventeenth century, for both urban and rural populations; the Hajnal thesis requires
qualification in this period; see Bois, Crise du Feodalisme, 330–31.
19. Evidence of rapid population growth appears in Italian city states, where household
size is estimated as follows from a variety of sources:

Sources include David Herlihy, “The Population of Verona in the First Century of Venetian
Rule,” in J.R. Hale, ed., Renaissance Florence (London, 1973), 91–120; for complaints of
overcrowding see Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations, 99.
20. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana, 1974), 56.
21. One of the first scholars to observe this pattern of price relatives in a systematic way
was F. Simiand, in Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement général des prix du
XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1932); this finding has been replicated many times, and is a key to
the structure of the great wave. Some have argued that agricultural products rose swiftly
because “they were coming most rapidly into markets.” But this is not the case by comparison
with industrial products, which were equally subject to market forces. The difference was in
the disparities of demand which developed from demographic trends, and in different supply
elasticities.
22. The only contrary finding that I have seen is in Steve Rappaport’s excellent study of
prices paid by London Livery Companies, which finds that the price of firewood faggots in
London rose slowly in the sixteenth century. He concludes that the cause may have been a shift
from wood to coal in London; imports of coal increased 400 percent in the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I. In other parts of England, wood prices rose three times faster than in London. See
Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London
(Cambridge, 1989), 144–45.
23. Hoszowski, “Central Europe and the Price Revolution,” 91.
24. Hoszowski writes that in Poland, “prices rose without a break from between 1521
and 1530 until 1550, when they had already reached a high level. The reason is that Poland
was the greatest cereal exporter; the rise took place there before the invasion of American
‘treasure’ and the great upheavals that followed it throughout Europe.” (Hoszowski, “Central
Europe and the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Price Revolution,” p. 91).
25. On the problem of relative prices, see especially F. Simiand, Recherches anciennes
et nouvelles sur le mouvement general des prix du XVIe au XIXe siecle (Paris, 1932), pp.
114–138. See also essays by Hammarstrom, Brenner and Gould cited above.
26. “An Act to Restrain the Carrying of Corn, Victuals and Wood over the Sea,” in R. H.
Tawney and Eileen Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents (3 vols., London, 1924) I, 150–
52.
27. In England, one study of prices and wages yields the following result (1550 = 100):

These data are from Y. S. Brenner, “The Inflation of Prices in England, 1551–1650,”
Economic History Review 15 (1962) 266–84; other enquiries have obtained similar results.
28. The pathbreaking work on price-wage differentials was done by German scholars,
particularly M. J. Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Deutschland vom
ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum Beginn des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leiden, 1936–
1949), a series of price studies centered on six German cities. Virtually every other study also
reports a fall of real wages in the sixteenth century; see Ramsay, The Price Revolution in
Sixteenth Century England, 14, 17; Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, pp. 129–131; E.
Scholliers, De Lebensstandaard in de XVe en XVe eeuw to te Anwerpen (Antwerp, 1960); D.
Bartolini, “Prèzzi e salari nel Commune di Portugruaro durante il secolo XVI,” Annali di
Statistica 2d ser., I (1878). A rare exception is Verlinden, Craeybeckx and Scholliers, “Price
and Wage Movements in Belgium,” who argue (78) that wages hovered very near the level of
subsistence throughout the period.
Hoszowski also reports variations in eastern Europe on the timing of wage movements. In
Austria wages rose slowly in the early 16th century, but faster thereafter. In Poland the pattern
was the reverse: comparatively rapid increases before 1550; slower movements after that date.
Hoszowski concludes that in general “workmen’s wages rose much more slowly than the
prices of crops.” See Stanislas Hoszowski, “Central Europe and the Price Revolution,” 92–93.
29. In Antwerp, the market rate for short term commercial loans in the period 1530–50
was 4–13 percent; in the latter part of the century low-interest loans tended to disappear, and
rates were in the range of 7–12 percent. The same pattern also appeared in Lyons. Loans to
penurious princes commonly carried prodigiously high charges. The house of Fugger, for
example, charged the Hapsburgs as much as 52 percent for short term loans.
At the other extreme, usury laws and strict municipal regulation held nominal interest
rates on annuities to very low levels. But these securities traded far below par, much like
deep-discount securities in today’s bond market. See Sidney Homer, History of Interest Rates
(2d. ed., New Brunswick, 1977), 104–32.
30. Eric Kerridge, “The Movement of Rent, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review, 2d
ser., 6 (1953–54) 16–34.
31. Ibid., 16.
32. Ibid.
33. Hoszowski, “Central Europe and the Price Revolution,” 97–98.
34. H. G. Koenigsberger, “Property and the Price Revolution (Hainault, 1474–1573),”
Economic History Review, 2d ser., 9 (1956) 1–15.
35. Wiebe reckoned that silver stocks in Europe were 9,190,000 kilograms in 1544,
21,400,000 in 1600 and 31,270,000 in 1660. At the same dates, the supply of gold was
815,000 kilos, 1,192,000 and 1,580,000 respectively; see G. Wiebe, Zur Geschichte der
Preisrevolution des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1895), 260. Braudel and Spooner
estimated by three different methods that world stocks of precious metal in 1550 were 3,564.5
tons of gold, and 37,427.3 tons of silver (“Prices in Europe,” 444).
36. Many European price series show that the price-revolution began at various dates
between 1470 and 1510, but American treasure did not arrive in Europe until 1503, and did
not begin to expand in a rapid or sustained manner until after 1526. See Hamilton, American
Treasure, 34–35; Y. S. Brenner, “The Inflation of Prices in Early Sixteenth Century England,”
Economic History Review 14 (1961) 225–39; idem, “The Inflation of Prices in England,
1551–1650,” ibid., 15 (1962) 266–84; C. E. Challis, “Spanish Bullion and Monetary Inflation
in England in the Later Sixteenth Century,” Journal of European Economic History 4 (1975)
381–92; R. A. Doughty, “Industrial Prices and Inflation in Southern England, 1401–1640,”
Explorations in Economic History 12 (1975) 177–92; J. Blum, “Prices in Russia in the
Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 16 (1956) 182–99; Hammarström, “The
‘Price Revolution’ of the Sixteenth Century: Some Swedish Evidence,” 118–54.
37. The bulk of American silver arrived in Spain after 1580. Of total imports from 1531
to 1660, only 15 percent (2.6 million kilograms) came in the fifty years from 1531 to 1580;
approximately 67 percent (11.6 million kilos) came in the fifty years from 1581 to 1630; 17
percent (2.9 million kgs.) arrived in the thirty-one years from 1630 to 1660; Vicens Vives, An
Economic History of Spain, 323; see also J. Nadal Oller, “La revolutión de los precios
españoles en el siglo XVI,” Hispania 19 (1959) 503–29.
38. The rhythm of change in price levels and in the money supply in England during the
sixteenth century has been elaborately studied. In the period 1542–51, both gold and silver
coins were debased several times under both Henry VIII and Edward VI; then, from 1551 to
1560, the silver coinage was several times reduced in quantity and raised in content of
precious metal. See J. D. Gould, The Great Debasement (Oxford, 1970).
These episodes have been closely examined in one of the most controlled historical tests
of a monistic monetarist model. The results of that test are conceded to constitute a
“contradiction of the basic hypothesis” even by a monetarist as convinced as Anna Schwartz.
She acknowledges that in sixteenth-century England the movement of prices failed to reflect
“the behavior of money stock per unit of output.” (“Secular Price Change in Historical
Perspective,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 5 (1973) 243–69.
Similar difficulties also appear in other attempts to correlate the movement of prices with
the stock of money. See, for France and Belgium, J. Lejeune, La formation du capitalisme
moderne dans la principauté de Liège au XVIe siècle (Liege, 1939), 196; for Austria, Poland
and Bohemia, Stanislas Hoszowski, “Central Europe and the Sixteenth-Seventeenth Century
Price Revolution,” in Burke, ed., Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe, 94–95. Even
in Spain, Hamilton himself noted that the curves diverge at the beginning of the sixteenth
century; see American Treasure, 511.
An excellent study of high importance by Michel Morineau also finds that the flow of
American treasure continued at high levels in the late seventeenth century, when prices were
falling. See Morineau, Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux métaux, 563.
All of these authors conclude that the rise of prices was linked in important ways to the
quantity of money and specifically to American treasure. They also agree that the quantity of
money was not the only cause. All but Hamilton think that it was not the first cause. Many
believe it was not the most important cause.
39. These tests were developed at the University of Michigan by Adon and Jeanne
Gordus, and extended by a French team at the Centre Ernest Babelon in Orléans. The first tests
were based on analysis of gold content in Potosí silver; later a method of neutron-activation
analysis was used to detect trace elements of indium, which is present in Andean silver.
See Adon A. Gordus, Jeanne P. Gordus, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and D. Richet, “Le
Potosí et la physique nucléaire,” Annales E. S. C. 27 (1972) 1235–56; Adon A. Gordus and
Jeanne P. Gordus, “Identification of Potosí Silver Usage in Sixteenth-Seventeenth Century
European Coinage through Gold-Impurity Content of Coins,” in W. L. Bischoff, ed., The
Coinage of El Perú (New York, 1989) 21–22; idem, “Potosí Silver and Coinage of Early
Modern Europe,” in Hermann Kellenbenz, ed., Precious Metals in the Age of Expansion;
Papers of the XIVth International Congress of the Historical Sciences (Stuttgart, 1981) 225–
242; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie et al., “Sur les traces de árgent du Potosí,” Annales E.S.C. 45
(1990) 483–505; 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.
40. J. D. Gould, “The Price Revolution Reconsidered,” Economic History Review, 2d
ser. 17 (1965) 249–266; Ingrid Hammarström, “The ‘Price Revolution’ of the Sixteenth
Century,” Y. S. Brenner, “The Inflation of Prices in Early Sixteenth Century England,” 225–39;
idem, “The Inflation of Prices in England, 1551–1650,” 266–84.
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 value 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.
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 Quercy, 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
Development 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).
18. Once again, the cost of energy was by far the most inflationary. One set of estimates
for American wholesale prices shows the following increases from 1790 to 1814 (1790 =
100):
These data were computed from Warren and Pearson wholesale price indices in Historical
Statistics of the United States, series E52–63.
19. John P. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore,
1977).

The Victorian Equilibrium

1. Francois Crouzet, L’économie de la Grande Bretagne victorianne, translated by
Anthony Forster as The Victorian Economy (New York, 1982), is a good overview of British
economic history of the nineteenth century. Other major works include R. Floud and D.
McCloskey, The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1981); E. J.
Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire from 1750 to the Present Day (London, 1968); P. Mathias,
The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (London, 1959); P.
Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1956 (2d ed., Cambridge, 1967).
Still instructive is a great masterwork, J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern
Britain (3 vols., Cambridge, 1926–38).
Works comparing English and European economic development in the nineteenth century
include P. K. O’Brien and C. K. Kyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780–1914:
Two Paths to the Twentieth Century (London, 1978); Charles P. Kindleberger, Economic
Growth in France and Britain, 1851–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); Simon Kuznets,
Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven, 1966); and David S.
Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in
Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1970).
2. Namier writes, “There was undoubtedly also an economic and social background to the
revolution [of 1848]. Lean harvests in 1846 and 1847, and the potato disease, were causing
intense misery in most parts of the Continent. Agrarian riots occurred in France, where 1847
was long remembered as lannée du pain cher.’” But most histories give little attention to this
aspect of the revolutionary movement. Lewis Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the
Intellectuals (1946; Garden City, 1964), 3; see also Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848:
A Social History (New York, 1952), 56; Georges Duveau, 1848: The Making of a Revolution
(1965; New York, 1967).
3. On German economic history, see Helmut Böhme, Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht .
. . (Cologne and Berlin, 1966); Wolfram Fischer, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der
Industrialisierung . . . (Gottingen, 1972); Fritz Stern, Bismarck, Bleichroder, and the Building
of the German Empire (New York, 1977); and Franz Schnabel, Deutsche Geschichte im
neunzehnten Jahrhundert (4 vols., Freiberg, 1954).
4. Even the strongest surveys of American economic history in the past generation give
little attention to price movements; see, for example, Lance Davis et al., American Economic
Growth: An Economist’s History of the United States (New York, 1972), 363–65; and
Douglass C. North, Growth and Welfare in the American Past: A New Economic History
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), which defines the American economy as a “price system”
rather than a “planning system” (p. 8) but largely ignores the history of price movements.
5. E. M. Coulter, The Confederate States of America (Baton Rouge, 1950), 155.
6. See above, figures 1.02, 1.18, 2.02, 2.14, 3.02, 3.13.
7. Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, 258.
8. Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables,
Compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates”; for Germany see Abel, Agrarkrisen und
Agrarkonjunktur, 244–64; for Sweden see Lennart Jörberg, A History of Prices in Sweden,
1732–1914, II, 334–49.
9. For real wages in the United States during the nineteenth century, see Historical
Statistics of the United States, average annual and daily earnings of nonfarm employees,
1860–1900, series D735–38; and daily wage rates on the Erie Canal, series D718–21; and
wage rates of artisans, laborers, and agricultural workers in the Philadelphia area, 1785–1830,
series D715–17; also Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Three Centuries of Wealth
Inequality,” Research in Economic History 1 (1976) 69–122.
10. Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century
City (Cambridge, 1964), 20.
11. Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (Baton Rouge, 1966), 371.
12. Homer, History of Interest Rates, 181–215.
13. Ibid., 216–173; J. M. Fachan, Histoire de la rente française (Paris, 1904); Leonidas
J. Loutchitch, Des variations du taux de l’intérêt en France de 1800 a nos jours (Paris,
1930).
14. Homer, History of Interest Rates, 205; Robert Blake, Disraeli (Anchor ed., New
York, 1968), 295, 405, 716, 157, passim.
15. Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjuntur, 237, 283.
16. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, 1541–1871, 402–12. To call
this revolution “economic” betrays a material bias that is stronger in the observer than the
event. The revolution was other things before it became economic, but in other respects the
interpretation is sound.
17. Davis, et al., American Economic Growth, chaps. 1–3; Kuznets, Modern Economic
Growth; N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford,
1985); John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America (Chapel
Hill, 1985).
18. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes; 15, passim.
19. Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New York, 1969). These generalizations are
in some respects at variance with Temin’s conclusions but consistent with his evidence. It is
also interesting to observe that wholesale prices and specie supplies tended to move in unison,
but consumer prices actually fell as the money supply increased sharply.
20. H. H. Lamb, Climate: Present, Past, and Future (2 vols., London, 1977), II, 481.
21. Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (New York, 1972), 364–71.
22. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 (London, 1973), 332.
23. Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1957),
a valuable work, though it makes too much of similarities between Victorian and post-
Victorian thought; G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (New York, 1954).

The Price Revolution of the Twentieth Century

1. For a general cultural history of this transformation, see Jan Romein, The Watershed
between Two Eras: Europe in 1900 (Middletown, 1978), a work of high importance in modern
historiography.
2. An intelligent discussion of the “battle of the standards” appears in Richard
Hofstadter’s introduction to William H. Harvey, Coin’s Financial School (Cambridge, 1963),
1–80.
3.G. L. Bach, The New Inflation; Causes, Effects, Cures (Providence, 1973), 4, 5.
4. Financial Review (1898) 1; Harold U. Faulkner, The Decline of Laissez Faire, 22.
5. Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1920, 328, 352.
6. Many studies have shown that, once the long wave began, changes in the stock of
money correlated roughly (very roughly) with price movements. Price movements and the
money supply were associated as follows from 1890–1978:

See also Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United
States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, 1963), 91; and W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations,
1870–1913 (London, 1978), 91.
7. World population has been estimated at 900 million in 1800, 1.2 billion in 1850, 1.625
billion in 1900, and 2.5 billion in 1950. The rate of increase was approximately the same in
1800–1850 (33 percent) and 1850–1900 (35 percent). From 1900–1950, the rate of gain was
54 percent, despite the horrific cost of two world wars. McEvedy and Jones, Atlas of World
Population History, 342–43.
The important causal linkage was not to population growth alone but to the acceleration of
population growth, relative to the pace of economic growth. The equilibrium of the Victorian
era had also been a time of world population growth but at a slower rate, and in a stable
relationship to economic change.
8. Quoted in W. David Slawson, The New Inflation (Princeton, 1981), 6.
9. Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Baltimore, 1967),
chaps. 3, 4.
10. John Stevenson, British Society, 1914–1945 (Harmondsworth, 1984), 46–102; Arthur
Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (1965).
11. Carl T. Holtfrerich, “Political Factors of the German Inflation, 1914–1923,” in Nathan
Schmukler and Edward Marcus, eds., Inflation Through the Ages: Economic, Social,
Psychological, and Historical Aspects (New York, 1983), 400–16; Gordon Craig, Germany,
1866–1945 (New York, 1978), 342–57.
12. A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), 171.
13. R. A. C. Parker, Struggle for Survival; The History of the Second World War
(Oxford, 1989), 76.
14. Historical Statistics of the U.S. (1976), series F4, 224.
15. Prisoner of war camps created their own internal economies in which cigarettes
commonly functioned as money. Prices tended to fluctuate with the supply of tobacco, in a
classical example of the monetarist model. But changing levels of aggregate demand also
played a role.
16. Historical Statistics of the United States (1976), series E, 135. The two exceptional
years were 1949 and 1955.
17. Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade and After: America, 1945–1960 (New York,
1973), 25–26, 46–47.
18. Structural interpretations of inflation include those of Gardiner Means in
“Simultaneous Inflation and Unemployment,” in Means et al., The Roots of Inflation: The
International Crisis (New York, 1975), 19–27; also the many works of Robert Heilbruner.
19. Slawson, New Inflation, 51.
20. Slawson, New Inflation, also idem, “Price Controls for a Peacetime Economy,”
Harvard Law Review 84 (1971) 1090–1107; and idem, “Fighting Stagflation with the Wrong
Weapons,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 23 Feb. 1983, 33–38. For other “new inflation” theories,
see Robert Lekachman, Economists at Bay (New York, 1976); Dudley Jackson, H. A. Turner,
and Frank Wilkinson, Do Trade Unions Cause Inflation? (Cambridge, 1974); and Bach, New
Inflation.

The Troubles of Our Times

1. B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1975 (2nd rev. ed., New York,
1981), 777.
2. Ibid., series C2, 177–80.
3. Charles S. Maier, “Inflation and Stagnation as Politics and History,” in Leon N.
Lindberg and Charles S. Maier, eds., The Politics of Inflation and Economic Stagnation
(Washington, 1985), 3–24.
4. Kozo Yamamura, “The Cost of Rapid Growth and Capitalist Democracy in Japan,” in
Lindberg and Maier, eds., Politics of Inflation and Economic Stagnation, 467–508.
5. Arthur B. Laffer, “The Phenomenon of Worldwide Inflation: A Study of International
Market Integration,” in Meisselman and Laffer, eds., The Phenomenon of Worldwide Inflation
27–52.
6. In 1979, American economist Lester Thurow advised his colleagues that they could not
hope to understand the inflation that was then surging to high levels in the United States without
entering a distant realm that he quaintly called “the long ago.” By “the long ago” he meant the
year 1965. This observation was part of an argument commonly made by American
economists, that the great inflation of the late twentieth century had its origin in fiscal and
monetary decisions made during the Vietnam War. This was mistaken in at least three ways at
once. The price revolution began seventy years earlier. Even the surge of the 1960s began
before the United States sent large numbers of troops to Vietnam, and in another part of the
world. Lester C. Thurow, The Zero Sum Society (New York, 1980), 43.
7. Rudiger Dornbusch and Stanley Fischer, Macroeconomics (New York, 1978), 316.
8. Robert Aaron Gordon, Economic Instability and Growth: The American Record (New
York, 1974), 170.
9. The Nixon price and wage controls were imposed in three phases: phase I, August-
November, 1971, prices, wages, and rents frozen for ninety days; phase II, November, 1971 to
1973, prices and wages controlled by a Pay Board and Price Commission; phase III; prices
and wages restrained by largely voluntary restraints except in food, health, and construction
industries, where mandatory controls continued until 1974. The impact of these measures may
be seen in the following annual rates of change in price levels and economic indicators.
 10. Stein, Presidential Economics, 186.
11. John M. Blair, The Control of Oil (New York, 1976), 264. Blair points out that the
crisis became more severe because it came on top of an artificial domestic shortage that had
been deliberately created by the Exxon corporation and other major corporations, who were
trying to break the competition of discount dealers in the United States and independent Libyan
suppliers. This conjunction of events, he writes, “set the stage for a virtual explosion of
prices” (254).
12. Statistical Abstract of the United States (1984), tables 801, 810.
13. John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics in Perspective (Boston, 1987), 270.
14. International Financial Statistics 34 (1981) 45.
15. Robert Mabro, ed., The 1986 Oil Price Crisis: Economic Effects and Policy
Responses (Oxford, 1988).
16. John A. Jenkins, “The Hunt Brothers: Battling a Billion Dollar Debt,” New York
Times Magazine, 27 Sept. 1987.
17. New York Times, 15 Sept. 1986.
18. Part of this increase was caused by the fall of the dollar. But a multicurrency index of
commodity prices kept by the Economist in London showed an increase of 16 percent in 1986–
87. New York Times, 15 Sept. 1985.
19. Ibid.
20. Statistical Abstract of the United States (1984), tables 771, 772, 773, 775, 779, 780,
781, 782.
21. Boston Globe Oct. 4, 1987; Statistical Abstract of the United States (1984), 745;
(1993) 1225.
22. Real wages are not an entirely accurate indicator of returns to labor. One must also
add levels of employment to the level of wages. Unemployment became a chronic problem in
western economies, and reduced the real returns to labor, especially in the United States,
where unions and corporations favored comparatively high wages even at the price of high
unemployment. When unemployment is taken into consideration, the movement of real returns
to labor may be more nearly comparable to that in previous price-revolutions. Statistical
Abstract of the United States, (1981), tables 606, 607.
The classic study of the relation between unemployment and inflation and the source of
the Phillips curve is A. W. Phillips, “The Relation between Unemployment and the Rate of
Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–1957,” Economica 25 (1958)
183–299.
23. In the United States, from 1970 to 1992, average hourly and weekly dollars in
constant (1982) dollars declined as follows:

24. Boston Globe, 4 Oct. 1987; Statistical Abstract of the United States (1984), 745;
(1993), 1225.
25. Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic
History (New York, 1980); James D. Smith, Modeling the Distribution and Intergenerational
Transmission of Wealth, National Bureau of Economic Research, Studies in Income and
Wealth, vol. 46 (Chicago, 1980); Gabriel Kolko, Wealth and Power in America (New York,
1962).
26. Frank Levy, Dollars and Dreams: The Changing American Income Distribution
(New York, 1987), 1–22; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Household Wealth and Asset Ownership:
1984, Current Population Reports, Household Economic Studies, P-70, no. 7 (Washington,
1986).
27. New York Times, 6 Jan. 1980.
28. This flowed from a promise that President Reagan incautiously made in the election of
1984, that he would not raise taxes. The American electorate tends to be cynical about
campaign promises, but studies have shown that politicians commonly try very hard to keep
them, even at the cost of rigid adherence to wrongheaded policies that would have been
abandoned if honor were not at stake. The Reagan presidency’s stubborn refusal to increase
taxes in the face of fiscal disaster was a classic case in point.
 29. Galbraith, Economics in Perspective, 272–273.
30. London Times, ca. 23–28 July 1987. Another factor was an obsession with the
Phillips curve, with its trade-offs between unemployment and inflation. The Thatcher
government, with its middle-class constituency, feared the latter more than the former.
31. New York Times 9 June 1988.
32. Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler, vol. 1, chap. 14.
33. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World
(New York, 1987), 85.
34. The work of Maris Vinovskis has been specially important in studying population
decline.
35. “What Happened to Inflation?” Economist, 16–22 Sept. 1995, 85.
36. Lester C. Thurow, The Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape
Tomorrow’s World (New York, 1996), 185–193; Roger Bootle, The Death of Inflation:
Surviving and Thriving in the Zero Era (London, 1996), 3–31.

Conclusion
1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After, Etc.,” in Poems and Plays
of Tennyson (Modern Library ed., New York, 1938), 833–840.
2. Silvester Bliss, Memoir of William Miller (n.p., 1853); Ruth Alden Dean, The Miller
Heresy, Millenialism, and American Culture (Philadelphia, 1987); David Tallmadge Arthur,
Come Out of Babylon: A Study of Millerite Separatism and Denominationalism, 1840–1865
(Rochester, 1970).
3. Galbraith, Economics in Perspective, 4.
4. See Stein, Presidential Economics, on Nixon’s administration as “conservative men
with liberal ideas,” the increasing conservatism of Jimmy Carter, and the absurdity of
Reaganomics.
5. In estimates of average rates of gain, much depends on periodization. These estimates
are calculated from the point of inflection (ca. 1180, 1470, 1730, and 1896), to the maximum.
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 Marc 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.
After World War II, a major discontinuity occurred in the study of price history. With the
spread of historical relativism, the ideal of objectivity faded in many disciplines. At the same
time, an epistemic revolution spread rapidly through the discipline of economics. In 1947,
economist Tjalling Koopmans published a pivotal essay, which strenuously attacked the
compilation of price records for their own sake. Koopmans argued that empirical observation
of any phenomenon is “impossible” without “theoretical preconceptions” and that measurement
without theory is useless because “conclusions relevant to the guidance of economic policies
cannot be drawn.” (Tjalling C. Koopmans, “Measurement without Theory,” Review of
Economics and Statistics 29 [1947] 161–72). Koopman’s argument was mistaken in its
epistemology and fallacious in its logic (see appendix O above), but it captured perfectly a
new academic attitude in economics and the social sciences. This new orthodoxy was widely
accepted in America especially. It caused a radical change in the work that economists actually
did.
In the United States, large open-ended projects of empirical description on price history
came to an end. Prices continued to be studied, but in a very different way, mainly as part of
the process of “testing” specific theories. Open descriptive inquiries on price movements were
banished to the periphery of economic research in the United States (see appendix O).
In Europe, the trend was different. Projects of empirical description in price history
became more important after 1945, not less so. This was so in Britain, where Sir Henry
Phelps-Brown and Sheila Hopkins made a seminal contribution by carefully constructing long
series of English wages and “consumable” prices, which put the entire problem in a new
perspective by bringing home the experience of ordinary people. It is striking to observe that
the Phelps-Brown-Hopkins indices are now very heavily used by American economists who
insist on the uselessness of “measurement without theory.”
Price history also had a central place in the work of the French Annales school, which
devoted much attention to the subject. The major conceptual apparatus of the Annales school,
and in particular its concepts of “longue duree”, “conjuncture,” and “structure,” was drawn
from the history of prices. The epistemology of the Annalists centered on the study of problems
and “problematiques,” not on the theories and “theory-testing” of American economics and
social science. A problematique was not merely the problem itself but also an apparatus of
methods for its study and a critique of previous attempts at its solution. Each of these epistemic
approaches had strengths and weaknesses. Both made major contributions to knowledge.
The profound differences between American and European scholarship in this generation
have been discussed by John Day, an American trained in the methods of the Annales school. In
his “autohistoire,” Day observes that where American economic historians are trained to begin
with a theory, Annalists are taught to start with a problem. “Ce marriage de convenance,” he
writes, “entre pratique et théorie en histoire [de l’école des cliometricians Americains],
contraste a mon sens avec la bonne entente entre pratique et problematique qui characterise les
grands historiens de l’École des Annales.” See John Day, “Terres, marchés et monnaies en
Italie et en Sardaigne du Xllème au XVIIIème siecle,” Histoire Économie et Société II (1983)
187–203.
The major problematiques of the Annales school kept the history of prices at the heart of
its historiography. European monographs in social history gave much attention to price
movements, both as indicators of change and as sources of inferential knowledge about other
subjects. European scholars achieved a new level of sophistication in the construction of
historical price series, a labor that Americans have been encouraged mistakenly to despise as
inferior to “theory-testing.” Leading examples include the work of Ernest Labrousse in France,
Astrid Friis in Denmark, Nicolaas Posthumus in the Netherlands, and especially Lennart
Jörberg’s History of Prices in Sweden, 1732-1914 (2 vols., Lund, 1972), a model work that is
more comprehensive, more rigorous, and also more analytic than previous compilations. Price
history continued to be a progressive science in Europe, while it languished in the theory-
centered social sciences of North America.
These countertendencies in Europe and the United States have had important substantive
consequences for the progress of historical knowledge. French monographs in social history
routinely examine price movements with close attention. American monographs tend to ignore
them. Price history is almost entirely absent from the social history of New England, except for
the excellent work of my able student Winifred Rothenberg noted below. It has appeared only
in works of the Chesapeake school, especially the excellent scholarship of Russell Menard
who gives much attention to the prices of tobacco and slaves.
A comparison of articles in the American Journal of Economic History with leading
European journals shows that American economic historians have recently shown
comparatively little interest in studying price movements for their own sake. The result has
been a lost generation of price historiography in the United States and a failure of institutional
memory about price movements in the past.
This is also the case with historians who work in other fields. Every early American
historian with whom I discussed this work expressed entire ignorance of the fact that prices
were rising in the eighteenth century. All American economists whom I consulted believed that
inflation in the twentieth century began with Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam. Most
scholars in both disciplines were aware of the price-revolution in the sixteenth century, but
nearly all believed that it was a simple reflex of the supply of American treasure in Europe.
None remembered the medieval price revolution. Even medievalists expressed surprise and
even skepticism, until they were invited to examine the data, which was largely unknown to
them.
This state of affairs is beginning to change. We are already seeing a revival of interest in
price history by young American economists and historians, in new scholarship of
unprecedented creativity and refinement. The starting point for the next generation will be the
excellent corpus of scholarship in price history that was so laboriously produced in the past.

Historical Compilations by Place

A large body of published primary sources on the history of prices is available in many
nations. These materials are divisible into two parts: historical compilations and current
surveys. General works and local studies of long duration are listed here by continent and
nation. More specialized studies, limited to a single great wave or equilibrium, will be listed
in later sections of the bibliography. For a general survey of quantitative sources, see Val R.
Lorwin and Jacob M. Price, eds., The Dimensions of the Past: Materials, Problems, and
Opportunities for Quantitative Work in History (New Haven, 1972).

International Historical Compilations

B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1975 (1975, 1980, 2d rev. ed.,
New York, 1980); idem, International Historical Statistics: Africa and Asia (New York,
1982); idem, International Historical Statistics: The Americas and Australasia (London,
1983). New editions of these works (1995) are updated to 1988.
Another compendium, issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, is Consumer Price Indices: Sources and Methods and Historical Statistics
(Paris, 1980).

Continental Compilations: Europe

Most European price history has appeared in national and local studies, but two broad
European works contain much primary material. One of them is Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen
und Agrarkonjunktur in Mittel Europa vom 13 bis zum 19 Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1935; new
eds. 1966, 1978), English translation by Olive Ordish as Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe
(London, 1980); an appendix includes data for prices of wheat and rye in silver for fourteen
German localities from 1341 to 1935, and also price data for six European nations. The
English edition has a forword and a second bibliography of English-language materials by
Joan Thirsk.
Another continental work of high importance is Fernand P. Braudel and Frank Spooner,
“Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750,” The Cambridge Economic History of Europe
(Cambridge, 1967), 4:378–486. This major interpretative essay brings together much European
data, drawn mostly from local studies listed below.

Latin America
In Latin America more than Europe, many publications with primary material are
continental rather than national in scope. A brief but helpful survey is E. Florescano, “La
historia de los precios en la época colonial de Hispanoamérica: Tendencias, métodos de
trabajos y objetivos,” LatinoAmérica: Anuario de Estudios Latinamericanos (1968) 111–29.
 In a class by itself is Ruggiero Romano, “Movimento de los precios y desarrollo
económico: El caso de Sudamérica en el siglo XVIII,” Desarrollo Económico 3 (1963) 31–
43; idem, “Mouvement de prix et développement économique: le cas de l’Amerique du Sud au
XVIIIe siècle,” 2e Conference Internationale d’Histoire Économique, Aix-en-Provence, 1962
(The Hague, 1962) 2:141–53; idem, Historia colonial hispanio-americana e historia de los
precios (Santiago, 1963); 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), 35–72. Romano argues a thesis
that price trends in Latin America were the opposite of those in Europe (see appendix D).
Johnson and Tandeter include twelve essays, most of which take issue with Romano. A
broad perspective also appears in Steven A. Mange, “Commodity Price Movements in the
Andes and La Plata during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” (thesis, Chicago, 1988).

National Compilations: Argentina

Historical price series appear in Lyman L. Johnson, “The Price History of Buenos Aires
during the Viceregal Period,” in Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds., Essays on the
Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, 1990), 137–72; Juan
Alvarez, Temas de historia económica Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1929); Direccion General de
Estadistica, Precios unitarios dearticulos de consuma y servicios, capital federal y
provincia, 1901–1963 (2 vols., Buenos Aires, 1964–65?)

Australia
Prices are included in in Jennifer A. S. Finlayson, Historical Statistics of Australia
(Canberra, 1970). Still useful is Douglas B. Copland, Currency and Prices in Australia
(Adelaide, 1921).

Austria
A. F. Pribram et al., Materielen zur Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Osterreich
(Vienna, 1938) is the leading collection of historical prices for Austria. It is based mainly on
institutional prices. Other studies include Luschin von Ebengreuth, Vorschlage und
Erfordernisse für eine Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Osterreich (Vienna, 1874); K. T.
Inama-Sternegg, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Preise (Vienna, 1873); idem, “Die Quellen der
historischen Preisstatistik,” Statistiche Monatschriften 12 (1886); Alois Gehart, Statistik in
Osterreich, 1918–1938: Eine Bibliographie (Vienna, 1984). Price records for Austria-
Hungary were also published by B. Von Jankovich in Bulletin de l’Institut Internationale de
Statistique 19 (1911).

Belgium: General Studies

H. van Houtte, Documents pour servir à une histoire des prix de 1381 à 1794 (Brussels,
1902) was a pathbreaking effort.
 The inquiries of the second generation yielded M. Peeters, “Les prix et les rendements de
l’agriculture belge de 1791 à 1935,” Bulletin des Sciences Économiques de Louvain (1936)
22–48; F. Michelotte, “L’évolution des prix de détail en Belgique de 1830 à 1913,” Bulletin
de l’nstitute de Recherche Economique (Louvain, 1937); and François Loots, “Les
mouvements fondamentaux des prix en gros en Belgique de 1822 à 1913,” Bulletin de l’nstitut
des Sciences économiques 8 (1936) 23–47.
Postwar studies include P. Schöller, “La transformation économique de la Belgique de
1832 à 1844,” Bulletin de l’nstitute de Recherche Économique (Louvain, 1948) and, for the
price revolution of the sixteenth century, C. Verlinden, J. Craeybeckx, and J. Scholliers,
“Mouvements des prix et salaires en Belgique au XVIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 10 (1955) 173–
98. Cahiers d’histoire des prix (Louvain, published by the Inter-University Center for the
History of Prices and Wages in Belgium, 1956–58) includes bibliographical materials.

Belgium: Local Studies

[Antwerp] E. Scholliers, Loon arbied en Honger de Levensstandaard in de XVe en XVIe
eeuw te Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1960).
[Antwerp] H. Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European
Economy (3 vols., Louvain, 1963); idem, “Prices and Wages as Development Variables: a
Comparison between England and the Southern Netherlands, 1400–1700,” Acta Historiae
Neerlandicae 10 (1978).
[Brabant] C. Verlinden et al., “Dokumenten voor de Geschiedenis van Prijzen en Lonen in
Vlaandaeren en Brabant (XVe-XVIIIe eeuw)” (4 vols. in 5, Bruges, 1959–73); idem,
Documents pour l’histoire des prix et salaires (XIVe-XIXe siècles) (Bruges, 1965).
[Brabant] M.-J. Tits-Dieuaide, La formation des prix céréaliers en Brabant et en
Flandre au XVe siècle (Brussels, 1975).
[Namur] L. Genicot, “Les prix du froment à Namur de 1773 à 1840,” Annales de la
Societé Archéologique de Namur 43 (1938–39) 129.
[Namur, etc.] J. Ruwet et al., Marché des ceréales à Ruremonde, Luxembourg, Namur et
Diest aux XVIIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Louvain, 1966).
J. Ruwet, L’agriculture et les classes rurales au pays Herve sous l’ancien régime
(Liége, 1943).

Bolivia
Enrique Tandeter and Nathan Wachtel, “Prices and Agricultural Production: Potosí and
Charcas in the Eighteenth Century,” in Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds., Essays on
the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, 1995), 201–76.
Brooke Larson, “Rural Rhythms of Class Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Cochabamba,” in
Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century
Latin America (Albuquerque, 1990), 277–308.
José Maria Dalence, Bosquejo estadístico de Bolivia (Chuquisaca, 1851).
 W. L. Schurz, Bolivia: A Commercial and Industrial Handbook (Washington, 1921).
United Nations Economic Commission, El desarrollo económico de Bolivia (Mexico,
1957), includes data from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Cornelius H. Zondag, The Bolivian Economy (New York, 1966) publishes data for the
period 1952–65.

Brazil
Dauril Alden, “Price Movements in Brazil before, during, and after the Gold Boom, with
Special Reference to the Salvador Market [circa 1670–1769],” in Lyman L. Johnson and
Enrique Tandeter, eds., Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America
(Albuquerque, 1990), 335–72.
H. Johnson Jr., “A Preliminary Inquiry into Money, Prices, and Wages in Rio de Janeiro,
1763–1823,” in Dauril Alden, ed., Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil; Papers of the Newberry
Library Conference (Berkeley, 1973), 230–83.
Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso, “Conjoncture et société au Brésil à la fin de XVIIIe siècle.
Prix et salaire à la veille de revolution de alfaiates, Bahia, 1798,” Cahiers des Ameriques
Latines 5 (1970) 3–53.
Mirceu Buescu, 300 anos de inflaçâo (Rio de Janeiro, 1973).
Armin K. Ludwig, Brazil: A Handbook of Historical Statistics (Boston, 1985).

Canada
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,” Études Rurales 7
(1962) 36–57.
H. Michel et al., Statistical Contributions to Canadian Economic History (2 vols.,
Toronto, 1931), includes statistics on banking, foreign trade, and prices.
M. C. Urquhart and Kenneth A. Buckley, Historical Statistics of Canada (Toronto,
1965).
F. H. Leacy, ed., Historical Statistics of Canada (Ottawa, 1983).
Newfoundland Statistics Agency, Historical Statistics of Newfoundland and Labrador
(St. Johns, 1970).

Chile
Ruggiero Romano, “Une économie coloniale: le Chili au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C.
15 (1960) 259–85; idem, “Historia colonial hispanoAmericana e historia de los precios,” in
Tres lecciones inaugurales (Santiago de Chile, 1963).
José Manuel Larraín, “Gross National Product and Prices: The Chilean Case in the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds.,
Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, 1990),
109–136; idem, “Movimento de precios en Santiago de Chile, 1749–1808,” Jahrbuch für
Geschichte von Staatwirtschaft und Gesellschaft Latinamerikas 17 (1980) 199–259.
Armando de Ramón and José Manuel Larraín, Origines de la vida económica chilena,
(Santiago, 1982), includes price series from 1659 to 1808.
Marcello Carmagnani, Les mecanismes de la vie économique dans une societé
coloniale: Le Chile (Paris, 1973), with much statistical data for the period 1680–1830; idem,
El salariado minero en Chile colonial: au desarrollo en una sociedad provincial: el Norte
Chico, 1690–1800 (Santiago de Chile, 1963).
Markos J. Mamalakis, Historical Statistics of Chile (5 vols, to date, Westport, Conn.,
1978–85+), includes prices from 1860 to 1982.

China
Period-specific price histories with primary data from the fourteenth to the twentieth
centuries include:
Ch’uan Han-sheng, “Sung-Ming chien pai-yin kou-mai-li ti pien-tung chi ch’i yuan-yin”
[Fluctuations in the purchasing power of silver and their cause from the Sung to the Ming
dynasties] Hsin-ya-hseuh-pao [New Asian Journal] 8 (1967) 157–86, with a summary in
English.
M. Cartier, “Notes sur l’histoire des prix en Chine du XIVe au XVIIe siècle,” [1368–
1644] Annales E. S. C. 24 (1969) 1876–89; idem, “Les importations de metaux monetaires en
Chine: Essai sur la conjoncture chinoise,” ibid. 36 (1981) 454–66.
W. S. Atwell, “Notes on Silver, Foreign Trade, and the Late Ming Economy,” Ch’ing shih
wen-ti” 3 (1977) 1–33; idem, “International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy, circa
1530–1650,” Past & Present 95 (1982) 68–90.
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.
Yeh-chien Wang, “The Secular Trend of Prices during the Ch’ing Period,” Journal of the
Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong 5 (1972) 364, covers
the period 1644–1912.
Nankai University Committee on Social and Economic Research, Wholesale Prices and
Price Index Numbers in North China, 1913 to 1929 (Tientsin, 1929).
Franklin L. Ho, Index Numbers of the Quantities and Prices of Imports and Exports and
the Barter Terms of Trade in China, 1867–1928 (Tientsin, 1930).
L. L. Chang, “Farm Prices in Wuchin, Kangsu, China,” Chinese Economic Journal 10
(1932) 449–512.
Hsin Ying, Price Problems of Communist China (Kowloon, 1963).

Congo (Democratic Republic)

The leading work is Leon H. Dupriez et al., Diffusion du progres et convergence des
prix; études internationales; le cas Congo-belgique, 1900–1960; la formation du systeme
des prix et salaires dans une economie dualiste (2 vols., Louvain 1966–70).

Cuba
Susan Schroeder, Cuba: A Handbook of Historical Statistics (Boston, 1982), includes
prices.

Czechoslovakia
Stanislas Hoszowski, “L’Europe centrale devant la révolution des prix,” Annales E.S.C.
16 (1961) 441–56, cites studies by J. Janacek, A. Mika, and J. Novotny which I have not seen.

Denmark
A general work of exceptionally high quality is Astrid Friis and Kristof Glamann, A
History of Prices and Wages in Denmark, 1660–1800 (Copenhagen and London, 1958), vol. 1
only published to date. It is based on assizes and price currents in Copenhagen.
Two pioneering projects by Danish economists are William Scharling, Pengenes
synkende Vaerdi (Copenhagen, 1869); and idem and V. FalbeHansen, Danmarks Statistik (6
vols., Copenhagen, 1878–91).
A. Nielsen, “Dänische Preise, 1650–1750,” in Jahrbuch für Nationalökonomie und
Statistik 31 (1906) 289–347.
L. Rumur, “Assessed Average Market Prices and the Prices of Cereal Grains in Denmark,
1600–1850,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 18 (1970) 33–65.
For later periods, see Jorgen Pedersen and O. Strange Petersen, An Analysis of Price
Behaviour during the Period 1855–1913 (Copenhagen and London, 1938); Jorgen Pedersen,
Arbejdsønnen i Danmark under skiftende Konjunkturer, c. 1850–1913 (Copenhagen, 1913), a
history of wages in Denmark; and K. Bjerke and N. Ussing, Studier over Danmarks National
Produkt, 1870–1950 (Copenhagen, 1958).
A methodological work with particular attention to Danish materials is P. Thestrup, The
Standard of Living in Copenhagen, 1730–1800: Some Methods of Measurement
(Copenhagen, 1971).

Finland
“Markegangspris i Finland 1731–1870,” [Market Prices in Finland] Statistika
Oversitkter (1926). I have not been able to find this work in American libraries.

France: General Studies

Vicomte Georges d’Avenel, Histoire économique de la proprieté, des salaires, des
denrées, et tous les prix en général depuis l’ an 1200 jusqu’ en l’ an 1800 (7 vols., Paris,
1894–1926), an immense compilation, much criticized by academic price historians. Jörberg
writes in his great history of Swedish prices, “D’Avenel’s enormous collection of material is
considered today to be almost worthless, since prices are assembled from widely different
sources and widely separated geographical areas.” (p. 4).
Nevertheless, many of d’ Avenel’s descriptive findings have been confirmed by
subsequent work, and he is still worth reading for his interpretative insights, grace, good
humor, ripe learning, and especially for a knowledge of men and the world that is often missing
in works of higher technical proficiency. D’ Avenel also published Les enseignements de l’
histoire des prix (Paris, 1925) and Histoire de la fortune française: la fortune privée à
travers sept siècles (Paris, 1927).
A critique of d’Avenel’s work appears in René Jouanne, Les monographes normandes et
l’ histoire des prix (Caen, 1931). A critique of the critique is Lucien Febvre, “Chiffres faux,
courbes vraies?” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 4 (1932) 585–86, a title that
succinctly summarizes the weaknesses and strengths of d’ Avenel’s work.
Abbott Payson Usher, “The General Course of Wheat Prices in France: 1350–1788,”
Review of Economic Statistics 12 (1930) 159–69; this essay was a statistical supplement to
the same author’s The History of the Grain Trade in France, 1400–1710 (Cambridge, 1913).
François Simiand, Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement général des
prix du XVIe au XIXe siécle (Paris, 1932); other works by Simiand are listed below.
C. E. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe
siècle (2 vols., Paris, 1933); La crise de l’ économie française à la fin de l’ ancien régime et
au début de la Révolution (Paris, 1944), still the indispensable work on the price revolution
of the eighteenth century; idem, Ruggiero Romano, and F.-G. Dreyfus, Leprix dufroment en
France au temps de la monnaie stable (1726–1913) (Paris, 1970), includes data on Belgium,
Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy during periods of French occupation.
Henri Hauser, Recherches et documents sur l’ histoire des prix en France de 1500 à
1800 (Paris, 1936).
A. Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des prix et des revenus en France de 1798 à 1820
(Paris, 1945); idem, Essai sur les mouvements des revenus et l’ activité économique en
France de 1798 à 1820 (Paris, 1949).
Jean Fourastié, Documents pour l’ histoire et la theorie des prix: Series statistiques
réunies et élaborées (Paris, 1958).
J. Marczewski and J. C. Toutain, Histoire quantitative de l’ économie française (2 vols.,
Paris, 1961), covers the period 1700–1958.

France: Local Studies

[Alsace] A. C. Hanauer, Études économiques sur l’Alsace ancienne et modern (2 vols.,
Paris, 1876–78).
[Anjou] Victor Dauphin, Recherche pour servir à l’ histoire des prix des céréales et du
vin en Anjou sous l’ ancien régime (Paris, 1934).
[Berry] F. Gay, “Production, prix et renaitabilité de terre en Berry au XVIIIe siècle,”
Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 36 (1958) 399–411.
[Beziers] Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les Paysans de Languedoc (2 vols., Paris, 1966),
with price series on 2:820–22.
[Châteaudun] A. de Belfort, “Prix moyen des grains vendus sur le marché de Châteaudun
depuis l’année 1583,” Bulletin de la Societé Dunoise 1 (1864–69) 161–70.
[Douai] Monique Mestayer, “Les prix du blé et de l’ avoine à Douai de 1329 à 1793,”
Revue du Nord 45 (1963) 157–76.
[Forèze] Vicomte de Meaux, “Note sur le cours des céréales en Forèze de 1363 à 1698,”
Bulletin de la Societé de la Diana, 11 (1899–1900).
[Gâtinais] Leopold Nottin, Recherches sur les variations des prix dans la Gâtinais du
XVI au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1935).
e

[Marseilles] Ruggiero Romano, Commerce et prix du blé a Marseille au XVIIIe siècle

(Paris, 1956).
[Montdidier] V. de Beauville, Histoire de la ville de Montdidier (3 vols., Paris, 1857).
[Orleans] P. Mantellier, “Mémoire sur la valeur des principales denrées et marchandises
qui se vendaient ou se consommaient en la ville d’Orléans au cours des XIVe, XVe, XVIe,
XVIIe, et XVIIIe siècles,” Mémoires de la Societé Archeologique et Historique de l’Orléans
5 (1862) 103–496.
[Paris] Micheline Baulant, “Le prix des grains à Paris de 1431 à 1789,” Annales E.S.C.
23 (1968) 537–40.
[Paris] Jeanne Singer-Kérel, Le coût de la vie à Paris de 1840 à 1954 (Paris, 1961).
[Picardy] P. Deyon, Contribution à l’ étude des revenus fonciers en Picardie,
lesfermages de l’ Hotel-Dieu d’ Amiens et leurs variations de 1515 à 1789 (Lille, 1967).
[Poitiers] Duffaud, Note sur le prix des grains à Poitiers depuis trois siècles (Paris,
1861)
[Poitou] P. Raveau, Essai sur la situation économique et l’ état social en Poitou, au
e
XVI siècle (Paris, 1931); idem, “La crise des prix au XVIe siècle en Poitou,” Revue
Historique 54 (1929) 1–44, 168–93.
[Provence] René Baehrel, Une croissance: La Basse-Provence rurale (fin XVIe siècle-
1789) (2 vols., Paris, 1961).
[Toulouse] Georges Frêche and Geneviève Frêche, Lex prix des grains, des vins et des
légumes à Toulouse (1486–1868: Extraits des mercuriales suivis d’ une bibliographie d’
histoire des prix (Paris, 1967).
[Valenciennes] G. Sivery, “L’évolution du prix du blé à Valenciennes,” Revue du Nord 17
(1965) 177–94.
Other local studies of prices in France are listed in bibliographies to Frêche and Frêche,
cited for [Toulouse] above; and Labrousse, Esquisse, pp. 5 (note 4), 11-12 (note 17), 650–64.

Germany: General Studies

 L. Keller, “Zur Geschichte der Preisbewegung in Deutschland während der Jahre 1466–
1525,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 34 (1879) 181–207.
Georg Wiebe, Zur Geschichte der Preisrevolution des XVI und XVII Jahrhunderts
(1894, Leipzig, 1895).
J. Hansen, Beiträdge zur Geschichte des Gretreidehandels der Freien und Hansestadt
(Lübeck, 1912).
Moritz J. Elsas, Umriss eine Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Deutschland vom
ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum Beginn des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (2 vols. in 3, Leiden,
1936–49), the standard work.
A. Jacobs and H. Richter, “Die Grosshandelpreise in Deutschland von 1792 bis 1934,”
Sonderhefte des Institute fur Konjunkturforschung, no. 37 (Berlin, 1935).
Gerd Hohorst et al. Materialien zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs, 1870–1914 (Munich,
1975).
G. Bry, Wages in Germany, 1871–1945 (Princeton, 1960).
H. Wiese, “Der Rinderhandel im Nordwesteuropaischen Kustenggebiet vom Beginn des
19 Jahrhunderts” (dissertation, Gottingen, 1963).

Germany: Local Studies

[Alsace] A. C. Hanauer, Études économiques sur l’Alsace ancienne et modern (2 vols.,
Paris, 1876–78).
[Berlin] W. Naude and A. Skalweig, Die Getreidehandelspolitik… Acta Borussica
(Berlin, 1896, 1910).
[Brunswick] An original series from primary data appears in Abel, Agrarkrisen und
Agrarkonjunktur, appendix.
[Chemnitz] Rudolph Strauss, “Löhne und Preise in Deutschland, 1750 bis 1850,”
Jahrbuch fur Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1963) 1:189–219; 2:212–36; 3:257–64; 4:263–80;
(1964) 1:271–80; 4:307–17; (1965) 1:233–49.
[Cologne] Dietrich Ebeling and Franz Irsigler, Getreideumsatz, Getreide-und Brotpreise
in Köln, 1369–1797 (Cologne, 1976); Franz Irsigler, Kölner Wirtschaft im Spätmittelalter,
Zwei Jahrtausende Kölner Wirtschaft (Cologne, 1975).
[Gottingen, etc.] H. Kullak-Ublick, Die Wechsellagen und Entwicklung der
Landwirtschaft im südlichen Niedersachen vom 15 bis 18 Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1953).
[Halle] J. Conrad, “Die Preisentwicklung der gewöhnlichsten Nährungsmittel in Halle a/S
von 1731–1878,” Jahrbücher fur Nationalokonomie und Statistik 34 (1879) 83–180.
[Kaisers werth] C. Bone, “Frucht-, Fleisch- und Brotpreise in der Stadt Kaisers werth,”
Beiträge zur Geschichte die Niederrheins 5 (1890) 154–60.
[Leipzig] O. Dittmann, Die Getreidepreise in der Stadt. Leipzig im 17., 18. und 19.
Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1889); E. E. Koehler, “Haushaltsrechnungen des Georgenhauses zu
Leipzig; Preise, Löhne …” Jahrbuch für Wirtschafts-Geschichte (1967), 4:347–409.
[Mainz] Francois G. Dreyfus, “Beitrag zu den Preisbewegungen im Oberrheingebiet im
18 Jahrhundert,” Vierteljahrshrift für Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 47 (1960) 245–56.
[Mannheim] E. Hofmann, “Die Milchpreis in Mannheim,” Jahrbuch für
Nationalökonomie und Statistik 108 (1917) 639–43; also “Die Eierpreise in Mannheim,”
ibid. 109 (1917) 69–76; and “Die Salzpreise in Mannheim …,” ibid,. 111 (1918) 591–605.
[Meissen] H. E. Pietzsch, Wechsellagen der Landwirtschaft im Amte Meissen während
des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen, 1950).
[Munich] M. J. Elsas, “Price Data from Munich, 1500–1700,” Economic Journal
Supplement 3 (1934–37).
[Ostfriesland] O. Aden, “Entwicklung und Wechsellagen ausgewählter Gewerbe in
Ostfriesland von der Mitte des 18. bis zum Ausgang des 19. Jahrhunderts” (thesis, Gottingen,
1963); partly published in Abhandlungen und Vorträge zur Geschichte Ostfrieslands 40
(1964).
[Prussia] U. Eggert, “Die Bewegung der Holzpreise und Tagelohnsätze in der
preussischen Staats forsten von 1800–1879,” Zeitschrift der Königlich Preussische
Statistiche Bureau 23 (1883).
[Quedlinberg] Willi Schulz, “Löhne und Preise 1750 bis 1850 nach den Akten und
Rechnungsbelegen des Stadtarchivs Quedlinberg,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte
(1967), 4:347–409.
[Saxony] Johannes Falke, “Geschichtliche Statistik der Preise im Königreich Sachsen,”
Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 13 (1869) 364–95; 16 (1871) 1–71.
[Schleswig-Holstein] Emil Waschinski, Währung, Preisentwicklung und Kaufkraft des
Geldes in Schleswig-Holstein von 1226–1864 (2 vols., Neumünster, 1952–59).
Many other local German studies are listed in bibliographies to various editions of Abel,
Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, and in Jacobs, “Preisgeschichte,” cited above.

Hungary
I. N. Kiss, “Money, Prices, Values, and Purchasing Power from the Sixteenth to the
Eightenth Century,” Journal of European Economic History 9 (1980).
R. Horvath, “Monetary Inflation in Hungary during the Napoleonic Wars,” Journal of
European Economic History 5 (1976); idem “The Interdependence of Economic and
Demographic Development in Hungary (from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth
centuries),” in Proceedings of the Fourth International Economic History Conference,
Bloomington, 1968 (Paris, 1973).
L. Katus, “Economic Growth in Hungary during the Age of Dualism, 1867–1918, A
Quantitative Analysis” Studia Historica 62 (1970)
E. Pamlenyi, ed., Social-Economic Researches on the History of East Central Europe
(Budapest, 1980)

India
J. J. Brennig, “Silver in Seventeenth-Century Surat: Money Circulation and the Price
Revolution in Mughal India,” in John F. Richards, ed., Precious Metals in the Later Medieval
and Early Modern World (Durham, 1983), 477–96.
John F. Richards, ed., The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India (Delhi, 1987).
Aziza Hazan, “En Inde aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: Trésors Américains, monnaie d’argent
et prix dans l’empire Mogol,” Annales E.S.C. 24 (1969) 835–859, includes data from 1556 to
1705.
India Department of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics, Index Numbers of Indian
Prices, 1861–1926 (Calcutta, 1928).
Tirthankar Roy, “Price Movements in Early Twentieth-Century India,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 48 (1995) 118–33, includes price series from 1900 to 1933, and 1953 to 1987.
Lakshini Narain, Price Movements in India, 1929–1957 (Meerut, 1957).
David Singh, Inflationary Price Trends in India since 1939 (Bombay, 1957; 2d ed., New
York, 1961).

Ireland
Edward Nevin, The Irish Price Level: A Comparative Study (Dublin, 1962).
C. St. J. Oherlihy, A Statistical Study of Wages, Prices, and Employment in the Irish
Manufacturing Sector (Dublin, 1966).
Wm. E. Vaughan and André J. Fitzpatrick, Irish Historical Statistics, vol. 1, Population
(Dublin, 1978); a subsequent volume is promised on Irish prices.

Italy: General Studies

V. Magaldi and R. Fabris, “Notizie storiche e statistiche sui prèzzi e salari nei secoli
XIII-XVIII nelle cittá di Milano, Venezia, Genova, Firenze, Pisa, Lucca, Mantova e Forli,”
Annali di Statistica 2d ser. 3 (1878) 5–106.
Vittorio Franchini, Contributo alla storia dei prèzzi in Italia. Documenti economici del
secolo XVIII (Roma, 1928); idem, Di talune neglette fonti per la ricostruzione dei valori
delle cose all’inizio delle Signorie in Italia (Milan, 1928).

Italy: Local and Regional Studies

[Bari] Carlo Massa, “Il prèzzo del grano e dell’ orzo in Terra di Bari (1419–1727),” Atti
dell’Accademia Pontaniana 38 (1908); idem, “I salari agricoli in Terra di Bari (1447–
1733),” Atti dell’ Accademia Pontaninana 42 (1912); idem, “I salari di mestiere in Terra di
Bari dal 1449 al 1732,” Giornale degli Economisti 42 (1911) 553–76; idem, “Costo dei
trasporti in Terra di Bari (1542–1722),” Giornale degli economisti 55 (1917) 331–39; idem,
I salari agricoli in Terra di Bari (1447–1733) (n.p., 1911); idem, Il prèzzo e il commercio
degli oli d’ oliva di Gallipoli et Bari (Trani, 1897); idem, “Paghe di professionisti,
d’impiegati e di cambii militari in Terra di Bari dal 1491 al 1715,” Cose di Puglia (Bari,
1911); idem, Bari nel secolo XVII (Bari, 1903); idem, La industria della pesce nella
Provincia di Bari (Trani, 1900).
[Bassano] Gabriele Lombardini, Pane e denaro a Bassano: Prèzzi del grano politica
dell approvigionamento dei cereali tra il 1501 e il 1799 (Venice, 1963).
[Florence] Giuseppi Parenti, Prime ricerche sulla rivoluzione dei prèzzi in Firenze
(Florence, 1949).
[Florence] Richard A. Goldthwaite, “I prèzzi del grano a Firenze dal XIV al XVI
secolo,” Quaderni Storici 10 (1975) 5–36.
[Genoa] Paolo Maria Arcari and Ettore Rossi, “I prèzzi a Genova dal XII al XV secolo,”
La Vita Economica Italiana 2d ser. 8 (1933) 53–87.
[Milan] G. Ferrario, Statistica medica di Milano dal secolo XV fino ai nostri giorni
escluso il militare (Milan, 1840).
[Milan] Amintore Fanfani, “La rivoluzione dei prèzzi a Milano nel XVI e XVII secolo,”
Giornale degli Economisti e Rivista di Statistica 72 (1932) 465–82; idem, Indagini sulla
rivoluzione dei prèzzi (Milan, 1940).
[Milan] Aldo de Maddalena, Prèzzi e as petti di mercato in Milano durante il secolo
XVII (Milan, 1950); idem, Prèzzi e mercedi a Milano dal 1701 al 1860 (2 vols., Milan,
1974).
[Milan] Commune di Milano, I prèzzi dei generi alimentari in Milano dal 1798 al 1918
(Milano, 1919).
[Modena] Gian Luigi Basini, Sul mercato di Modena tra cinque e seicento: Prèzzi e
salari (Milan, 1974); idem, L’uomo e il pane … (Milan, 1970); idem, Zecca e monete a
Modena nei secoli XVI e XVII (Parma, 1967).
[Naples] Giuseppe Coniglio, “La rivoluzione dei prèzzi nella cittá di Napoli nei secoli
XVI e XVII,” Atti della IXa riunione scientifica a Roma 1950 (Rome, 1952).
[Naples] Nunzio Federico Faraglia, Storia dei prèzzi in Napoli dal 1131 al 1860
(Bologna, 1983).
[Naples] Pietro Lonardo, Contributo alla storia dei pèzzi nelle province napoletane
(Santa Maria Capua Vetere, 1904).
[Naples] Ruggiero Romano, Prèzzi e salari e servizi a Napoli nel secolo XVIII [1734–
1806] (Milan, 1965).
[Pavia] Giuseppe Medici, “Tentativo di recostruire un numero indice dei prèzzi dei
prodotti cerealicoli per la zona agraria dell’ Alto Pavese e per il periodo dal 1784 al 1930,”
Annali dell’ Osservatorio di Economia Agraria per la Lombardia 1 (1930).
[Pistoia] Armando Sapori, Per la storia dei prèzzi a Pistoia; il quaderno dei conti un
capitano di Custo[d]ia nel 1339 (Pistoia, 1928; an offprint is in the Baker Library, Harvard
Business School); idem, “Per la storia dei prèzzi a Pistoia,” Bulletino storico pistoiese 29
(1927); 30 (1928).
[Rome] Comte de Tournon, Études statistiques sur Rome (3 vols., Paris, 1831).
[Siena] Giuseppe Parenti, Prezzi e mercato del grano a Siena, 1546–1765 (Florence,
1942).
 [Sicily] Antonio Petino, La questione del commercio del grani in Sicilia nel settecento
(Catania, 1946); idem, I prèzzi del grano, dell’orzo, dell’ olio, del vino, del cacio a Catania
dal 1512 al 1630 (Milan, 1949).
[Venice and Venetia] Dario Bartolini, “Prèzzi di alcuni derrate e salari correnti in Venezia
ed in alcune cittá della Dalmatia a del Levante, durante gli anni 1486 a 1490,” Annali di
Statistica 2d ser. 19 (1881); idem, “Prèzzi e salari nel commune di Portugruaro durante il
secolo XVI,” Annali di Statistica 2d ser. 1 (1878) 194–204; idem, “La metida del frumento,
vino ed oglio dal 1670 al 1685 nel commune di Portugruaro,” Annali di Statistica 2d ser. 7
(1879); idem, “Nota intorno alla ‘metida’ o ‘calamiere’ nel Veneto,” Annali di Statistica 3d
ser. (1882); idem, Contribuzione per una storia dei Prèzzi e salari (Rome, 1881).
[Venice] M. Aymard, Venise, Raguse et le commerce du blé pendant la seconde moitié
du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1966).
Other Italian local studies are listed in the bibliography to Ruggiero Romano, ed., I
Prèzzi in Europa dal XIII secolo a oggi (Turin, 1967), 569–90.

Japan
Kokisha Asakuri and Chiaki Nishiyama, eds., A Monetary Analysis and History of the
Japanese Economy, 1868–1970 (Tokyo, 1974).
Kakujiro Yamasaki, The Effect of the World War upon Commerce and Industry in Japan
(New Haven, 1929), includes prices, ca. 1914–1929.
Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Staple Food Prices in Japan, 1930–1948
(Tokyo, 1949).
Bank of Japan, Statistics Department, Hundred Year Statistics of the Japanese Economy
(Tokyo, 1966).
Kazushi Ohkawa et al., Estimates of Long-Term Economic Statistics of Japan since
1968 (Tokyo, 1965).

Luxembourg
J. Ruwet et al, Marché des ceréales a Ruremonde, Luxembourg, Namur et Diest aux
XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Louvain, 1966).

Madagascar
Frederic L. Pryor, Income Distribution and Economic Development in Madagascar:
Some Historical Statistics (Washington, World Bank, 1988).

Mali
Pascal J. Imperato and Eleanor M. Imperato, Mali: A Handbook of Historical Statistics
(Boston, 1982).
Malawi
Frederic L. Pryor, Income Distribution and Economic Development in Malawi: Some
Historical Statistics (Washington, World Bank, 1988).

Mexico
A large literature includes Woodrow Wilson Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, Price Trends
of Some Basic Commodities in Central Mexico, 1531–1570 (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1958); Enrique Florescano, Precios del maíz y crisis agrícolas en México (1708–1810)
(Mexico City, 1969, 1971); Richard L. Garner, “Price Trends in Eighteenth-Century Mexico,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 65 (1985); and idem, “Prices and Wages in Eighteenth-
Century Mexico,” in Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds., Essays on the Price
History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, 1995), 73–108.

Netherlands: General Studies

Nicolaas W. Posthumus, Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland (2 vols., Leiden,
1946–64). This major work is based largely upon Amsterdam price currents, of which
Posthumus collected more than two thousand, and also upon institutional records.” The most
detailed price history which has hitherto been published,” writes Lennart Jörberg in his
History of Prices in Sweden 1:5.
Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700 (New Haven,
1974), contains original series on rental values; idem, “An Inquiry into the Behavior of Wages
in the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands, 1580–1800,” Acta Historiae
Neerlandicae 10 (1978).
Netherlands Central Bureau voor de Statistiek, 75 Jarr Statistiek van Nederland (The
Hague, 1955), includes prices from 1900 to 1975; headings in Dutch and English.

Netherlands: Local Studies

[Amsterdam] Besides Posthumus see P. J. Middelhoven, “Auctions at Amsterdam of
Northern European Pinewood: A Contribution to the History of Prices in the Netherlands,”
Low Countries Yearbook 13 (1980).
[Arnhem] M. K. Heringa, “Overzicht van Marktprijzen van Granen te Arnhem in de jaren
1544–1901,” Bijdragen tot de Statistiek van Nederland 26 (1903).
[Overjissel] B. H. Slicher van Bath, Een Samenleving on der Spanning: Geschiedenis
van het Platteland in Overjissel (n.p., 1957).
[Utrecht] J. A. Sillem, Tabellen van Marktprijzen van Granen te Utrecht in de Jaren
1393 tot 1644, (Amsterdam, 1901).

New Zealand
James W. McIlraith, The Course of Prices in New Zealand [1861–1910] (Wellington,
1911).
Malcolm Frasier, Prices: An Inquiry into Prices in New Zealand, 1891–1919
(Wellington, 1920).
Gerald I. Bloomfield, New Zealand: A Handbook of Historical Statistics (Boston,
1984).

Ottoman Empire (see also Turkey)

Ömer Lütfi Barkan, “The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: A Turning Point in the
Economic History of the Near East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975)
3–28; “Die ‘Preisrevolution’ im osmanischen Reich wahrend der zweiten Hälfte des 16.
Jahrhunderts,” Sudost-Forschungen 42 (1983) 169–81.
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) 970–75.
Justin McCarthy, ed., The Arab World, Turkey, and the Balkans (1878–1914): A
Handbook of Historical Statistics (Boston, 1982).

Pakistan
Central Statistical Office, Twenty-Five Years of Pakistan in Statistics, 1947–1972
(Karachi, 1972).

Peru
G. Lohmann Villena, Apuntaciónes sobre el cur so de los precios de los articulos de
primer a necesidad en Lima durante el siglo XVI (Lima, 1961).
Luis Miguel Glave and Maria Isabel Remy, Estructura agraria y vida rural en una
region andina: Ollantay-tambo entre los sighs XVI y XIX (Cuzco, 1983).
Pablo Macera and Rosario Jiméniz, “Precios: Lima, 1667–1738” (mimeograph, Lima,
n.d.); Pablo Macera and Rosa Boccolini, “Precios de Iocs Colegios de ka Cia de Jesu’s,
Arequipa, 1627–1767” (mimeograph, Lima, 1975).
Paul Gootenberg, “Carneros y Chuño: Price Levels in Nineteenth-Century Peru”
(unpublished ms., 1988).
Kendall Brown, “Price Movements in Eighteenth-Century Peru: An Overview,” in Lyman
L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds., Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century
Latin America (Albuquerque, 1995), 173–200.

Philippines
Pierre Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques (Paris, 1960).

Poland
 F. Bujak, Badania z dziejow spolecznych i gospodarczych (Recherches sur l’ histoire
sociale et economique (Lwow and Poznan, 1928–49); includes price data in vols 4:13–17,
21–22, 24–25.
[Cracow] J. Pelc, Ceny w Krakowie w latach 1369–1600 (Lwow, 1935); E.
Tomaszewski, Ceny w Krakowie w latach 1601–1795 (Lwow, 1934); Frêche and Frêche
report a French edition, idem, Lesprix à Cracovie de 1601 a 1795 (Lwow, 1934), not seen.
[Gdansk] J. Pelc, Ceny w Gda sku w XVI i XVII wieku (Lwow, 1937); Tadeusz Furtac,
Ceny w Gda sku w latach 1701–1815 (Lwow, 1935).
[Lublin] W. Adamczyk, Ceny w Lublinie od XVI do ko ca XVIII wieku (Lwow, 1935).
[Lvov] Stanislas Hoszowski, Ceny we Lwowie w XVI i XVII wieku (Lwow, 1928),
French tr. Les prix a Lwow (Paris, 1954); Stanislas Hoszowski, Ceny we Lwowie w latach,
1701–1914 (Lwow, 1934).
[Warsaw] W. Adamczyk, Ceny w Warzawie w XVI i XVII wieku (Lwow, 1938); S. Siegel,
Ceny a Warzawie w latch 1701–1815 (Lwow, 1936).

Portugal
V. M. Godinho, Prix et monnaies au Portugal, 1750–1850, (Paris, 1955).
F. Mauro, Le Portugal et l’ Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570–1670) (Paris, 1957).
Joel Serrão, ed., Dicionário de História de Portugal (4 vols., Lisbon, 1971), includes
historical statistics and prices.
R. de Moraes Soares, “Resumo historico dos preços de cereaes e outros generos
alimentares no continento do Reino,” Archivo Rural 2 (1859) 436–40, 462–66.
[Lisbon] A. Silbert, “Contribution a l’étude du mouvement du prix des céréales à
Lisbonne (du milieu du XVIIIe au milieu du XIXe siècle,” Revista de Economia (1953) 65–80.
Frêche and Frêche also cite local studies by Albade de Bacal and F. M. Alves on prices
in Braganza, and by A. d’Ayres Lanca Pereira on the economic history of Beja. I have not seen
these works.

Russia
V. O. Klutchevsky [sic], Le rouble russe des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, et son rapport avec le
rouble actuel: Essais et études (St. Petersburg, 1918).
A. G. Mankov, Le mouvement des prix dans l’ état Russe du XVIe siècle, (Paris, 1957); a
summary of Mankov’s work for English readers is Jerome Blum, “Prices in Russia in the
Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 16 (1956) 182–99.
Boris Mironov, “The ‘Price Revolution’ in Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Soviet Studies in
History 11 (1973) 325–52; idem, “Le mouvement des prix des céréales en Russie du XVIIIe
siècle au début du XXe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 41 (1986) 217–51. In the reign of Peter I,
Russia became the first nation in Europe to collect monthly information on grain prices for all
its provinces. Mironov’s research rests upon these data, which run unbroken from 1707 to
1914. This essay summarizes the author’s thesis at Leningrad and many other monographs. It
also includes a bibliography.
V. N. Jakovchevsky, Kupechesky kapital v feodal’ no-krepostnicheskoi (Moscow, 1959);
partly translated as “I Prèzzi ed il profitto commerciale nella Russia feudal-servile,” in
Romano, ed., I Prèzzi in Europa dall XIII secolo a oggi, 447–80; a study of prices in Russia
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
W. M. Pintner, “Inflation in Russia during the Crimean War Period,” Slavic Review 18
(1959) 81–87.
A. Roger Clarke and J. I. Matko, Soviet Economic Facts, 1917–81 (2d ed., London,
1983).
A. Bergson, “Prices of Basic Industrial Products in the U.S.S.R., 1928–1950,” Journal of
Political Economy 64 (1956); idem, Basic Industrial Prices in the U.S.S.R. 1928–56:
Twenty-five Branch Series and Their Aggregation (Santa Monica, 1956).
I. B. Kravis and J. Mintzes, “Food Prices in the Soviet Union, 1936–1950,” Review of
Economics and Statistics 32 (1950) 164–68.
M. C. Kaser, “Soviet Statistics of Wages and Prices,” Soviet Studies 7 (1955–56).

Scotland: see United Kingdom

Spain: General Studies

Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650
(Cambridge, Mass., 1934); idem, Money, Prices, and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and
Navarre, 1351–1500 (Cambridge, Mass., 1936); idem, War and Prices in Spain, 1651–1800
(Cambridge, Mass., 1947).
Juan Sardá, La politicia monetaria y las fluctuaciones de la Economia Española en el
sigh XIX (Madrid, 1948); idem, “Spanish Prices in the Nineteenth Century,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics 62 (1948) 143–59.
N. Sanchez-Albornoz, “En Espagne au XIXe siècle, géographie des prix,” Melanges
Antony Babel (Geneva, 1963), 2:179–91.
Higinio Paris Equilaz, El movimento de precios en España (Madrid, 1943), prices from
1913 to 1942.

Spain: Local Studies

[Andalusia] Earl J. Hamilton, “American Treasure and Andalusian Prices, 1503–1660
…” Journal of Economic and Business History 1 (1928) 1–35.
[Barcelona] E. Giralt-Raventos, “En torno al precio del trigo en Barcelona durante el
siglo XVI,” Hispania 18 (1958).
[Catalonia] P. Vilar, La catalogne dans l’ Espagne moderne (3 vols., Paris, 1962).
[Seville] Pierre and Hugette Chaunu, Seville et l’ Atlantique, cited above.
Sweden
Lennart Jörberg, A History of Prices in Sweden, 1732–1914 (2 vols., Lund, 1972). a
remarkably comprehensive work, based mainly on market price scales prepared for the
valuation of commodities used to meet tax obligations. From these data, Lennart was able to
compile price series for sixty-three commodities in thirty regions of Sweden. The second
volume adds statistical analysis. No other nation has been so comprehensively studied.
Gunnar Myrdal, The Cost of Living in Sweden, 1830–1930 (London, 1933).
K. Amark, “En Svensk prishistorisk studie,” Ekonomisk Tidskrift 12 (1921); idem, “En
svensk prisindex für aren 1860–1913,” Kommersiella Meddelanden, 3 (1921) 18.
Eli Heckscher, Sveridges ekonomiska Historia fran Gustav Vasa (Stockholm, 1936).
Statistika Centralbyran, Historisk Statistik för Sverige (Stockholm, 1955, 1972).

Sri Lanka
Patrick Peebles, Sri Lanka: A Handbook of Historical Statistics (Boston, 1982).

Switzerland
Vettiger, Die Agrare Preispolitik des Kantons Basel im 18 Jahrhundert (Weinfelden,
1941), not found.
Francois G. Dreyfus, “Beitrag zu den Preisbewegungen im Oberrheingebiet im 18
Jahrhundert,” Vierteljahrshrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 47 (1960) 245–56.
Emil Notz, Die säkulare entwicklung der Kaufkraft des geldes für Basel in den
perioden 1800–1833 und 1892–1923 (Jena, 1925).

Thailand
Constance M. Wilson, Thailand: A Handbook of Historical Statistics (Boston, 1983).

Turkey; see also Ottoman Empire

Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey, 1880–1914 (Chicago, 1980).

United Kingdom: General Studies

B. R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge,
1962); B. R. Mitchell and H. G. Jones, Second Abstract of British Historical Statistics
(Cambridge, 1971).
A. L. Bowley and G. H. Wood, “The Statistics of Wages in the United Kingdom during the
Last Hundred Years,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 61 (1898) 702–22.
Charles H. Feinstein, Key Statistics of the British Economy, 1900–1962 (London, 1965).

United Kingdom: England

 W. Fleetwood, Chronicum Preciosum: or, an Account of English Money, the Price of
corn and other commodities in the last 600 years in a Letter to a Student in the University
of Oxford (London, 1707).
W. F. Lloyd, Prices of Corn in Oxford in the Beginning of the Fourteenth Century; also
from the Year 1583 to the Present Time (Oxford, 1830).
Thomas Tooke and William Newmarch, History of Prices and of the State of the
Circulation from 1792 to 1856 (6 vols., London, 1838–57).
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; rpt. Vaduz, 1963); idem, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (2 vols., London, 1884);
subsequent studies have found errors in this work. Early volumes lumped together data for
different types of purchase and sale, which was especially a problem for livestock. Rogers
was also not as careful about weights and measures as subsequent studies. But Farmer
observes, “Rogers’s price and wage series have been fundamental … and in some respects
they are unlikely ever to be supplanted.” For a critique see 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); much
thoughtful discussion of Thorold Rogers is scattered through the writings of the English
economist Alfred Marshall.
J. Kirkland, Three Centuries of Prices of Wheat, Flour, and Bread (London, 1917).
Abbott Payson Usher, “Price of Wheat and Commodity Price Indexes for England, 1259–
1930,” Review of Economic Statistics 13 (1931) 103–13, includes a continuous series for
wheat prices throughout the period, and two broken commodity indices that generally show the
same pattern as Phelps-Brown and Hopkins.
G. N. Clark, Guide to English Commercial Statistics, 1696–1782 (London, 1938).
William Beveridge, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth
Century (London, 1939), vol. 1 (all published), institutional prices; idem, “A Statistical Crime
of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Economic and Business History 1 (1928–29) 503–33;
idem, “Wages on the Winchester Manors,” Economic History Review 7 (1936) 22–43;
“Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 8 (1955–6) 18–
35; “Wheat Measures in the Winchester Rolls,” Economic Journal, Economic History
Supplement 2 (1930–33); “The Yield and Price of Corn in the Middle Ages,” Economic
Journal, Economic History Supplement 1 (1926–29) 162–66; “Wheat Prices and Rainfall in
Western Europe,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 85 (1922) 418–54; “Weather and
Harvest Cycles,” Economic Journal 31 (1921) 421–53. All this was the product of a team
effort under the auspices of the International Committee on Wages and Prices; its work is very
careful and cautious, but only a small part of its materials have been published. The
manuscripts are in the British Library of Political and Economic Science.
Ernest Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of Building
Wages,” Economica 22 (1955) 195–206; idem, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of
Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage-Rates,” Economica 23 (1956) 196–314;
“Wage-Rates and Prices: Evidence for Population Pressure in the Sixteenth Century,”
Economica 24 (1957) 289–306; idem, “Builders’ Wage-Rates, Prices, and Population: Some
further Evidence,” Economica 26 (1959) 18–38; idem, “Seven Centuries of Wages and Prices:
Some Earlier Estimates,” Economica 28 (1961) 30–36; idem, a Perspective of Wages and
Prices (London, 1981); idem, “The Course of Wage Rates in Five Countries, 1860–1939,”
Oxford Economic Papers (1950) 226–96; E. H. Phelps-Brown and S. A. Ozga, “Economic
Growth and the Price Level,” Economic Journal 65 (1955) 1–18; E. H. Phelps-Brown and M.
H. Browne, A Century of Pay (New York, 1968); a critique appears in Robert A. Doughty,
“Industrial Prices and Inflation in Southern England, 1401–1640,” Explorations in Economic
History 12 (1975) 177–92.
Joan Thirsk et al., eds., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, esp. vol. 2, 1042–
1350 (Cambridge, 1988); vol. 3, 1348–1500 (1991); vol. 4, 1500–1640; vol. 5, 1640–1750
(1985); vol. 6, 1750–1850 (1989); vol. 8, 1914–39 (1978). Each volume includes chapters
and appended data series on prices and wages, and much related material.

United Kingdom: Scotland

J. S. Moore, “Prices and Wages in Scotland, 1450–1860,” an unpublished survey of
sources, issued as a report to the British Social Science Research Council, Report HR 400/1
(1970)
Rosalind Mitchison, “The Movement of Scottish Corn Prices in the seventeenth and
eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 18 (1965) 278–91, an excellent pioneering
study of Scottish price movements.
Elizabeth Gemmill and Nicholas Mayhew, Changing Values in Medieval Scotland
(Cambridge, forthcoming) will survey prices and wages in the medieval and early modern eras
to ca. 1550.
A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food, and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780
(Cambridge, 1995); idem, A. J. S. Gibson, and T. C. Smout, “Regional Prices and Market
Regions: The Evolution of the Early Modern Scottish Grain Market,” Economic History
Review 48 (1995) 258–82.

United States: General Studies

G. F. Warren andF. A. Pearson, Wholesale Prices for 213 Years, 1720–1932 (Ithaca, N.Y.
1932).
Arthur Harrison Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1700–1861
(Cambridge, Mass., 1938), with statistical supplement; Walter B. Smith and Arthur Harrison
Cole, Fluctuations in American Business, 1790–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1935).
United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial
Times to 1970 (1949; 3d ed., Washington, 1976); a collaborative venture of the Census Bureau
and the Social Science Research Council, much in need of root-and-branch revision.
Dorothy S. Brady, “Price Deflators for Final Product Estimates,” in idem, ed., Output,
Employment, and Productivity in the United States after 1800 (Princeton, 1966), 91–115.
Ethel Hoover, “Retail Prices after 1850,” and John W. Kendrick, “Retail Prices after
1850: Comment on Hoover,” in William N. Parker, ed., Trends in the American Economy in
the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1960), 141–86, 186–90.
Paul A. David and Peter Solar, “A Bicentenary Contribution to the Cost of Living in
America,” Research in American Economic History 2 (1977) 1–80.
Donald R. Adams Jr., “Some Evidence on English and American Wage Rates, 1790–
1830,” Journal of Economic History 30 (1970) 499–520.
Albert Rees, Real Wages in Manufacturing, 1890-1914 (Princeton, 1961).

United States: New England

Three generations of price history have been done in New England. The first was
undertaken by a pioneer in historical statistics, Carroll Wright, who published his results in a
work issued by the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics, History of Prices and Wages in
Massachusetts: 175 2–1883 ed. Carroll D. Wright (Boston, 1885).
The second generation worked in the context of the international price history committee.
One major study is Ruth Crandall, ed., “Wholesale Commodity Prices in Boston during the
Eighteenth Century,” Review of Economic Statistics 16 (1934) 117–28, 178–83. Another is
Thurston M. Adams, “Prices Paid by Vermont Farmers for Goods and Services and Received
by Them for Farm Products, 1790–1940; Wages of Vermont Farm Labor, 1790–1940” Vermont
Agricultural Station Bulletin no. 507 (Burlington, 1944). This is a study of “on the farm”
prices from farmers’ account books. A copy is in the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester.
In the third generation, the leading works are by Winifred Rothenberg, “A Price Index for
Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” Journal of Economic History 39 (1979) 975–1001; idem,
“Markets and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750–1855,” ibid. 41 (1981) 283–314; idem, “The
Emergence of Capital Markets in Rural Massachusetts, 1730–1838,” ibid. 45 (1985) 781–808;
idem, “The Emergence of Farm Labor Markets and the Transformation of the Rural Economy:
Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” ibid, 48 (1988) 537–66; idem, From Market-Places to a Market
Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, 1992), a much
revised version of the author’s Brandeis dissertation, with much material on commodity,
capital, and labor markets.

United States: Middle States

The major work was done in the 1930s by a team headed by Anne Bezanson. Its findings
were published as Anne Bezanson et al., Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia,
1935); Anne Bezanson et al., Prices and Inflation during the American Revolution:
Pennsylvania, 1770–1790 (Philadelphia, 1951); Anne Bezanson et al., Wholesale Prices in
Philadelphia, 1784–1861 (Philadelphia, 1936); Anne Bezanson, “Inflation and Controls in
Pennsylvania, 1774–1779,” Tasks of Economic History, 8 (1948). On wage movements there
is Donald R. Adams Jr., “Wage Rates in the Early National Period: Philadelphia, 1785–1830,”
Economic History Review 27 (1968) 404–26.
United States: The South
There is no general work on the history of prices in the American South. Special studies
include Russell R. Menard, “Farm Prices of Maryland Tobacco, 1659–1710,” Maryland
Historical Review 68 (1973) 83–85; idem, “A Note on Chesapeake Tobacco Prices, 1618–
1660,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89 (1976) 401–10; Jacob Price, France
and the Chesapeake (2 vols., Ann Arbor, 1973), which includes tobacco prices before 1791;
Donald R. Adams Jr.,“Trices and Wages in Maryland, 1750–1850,” Journal of Economic
History 46 (1986) 625–47; A. G. Peterson, “Historical Study of Prices Received by Producers
of Farm Products in Virginia, 1801–1927,” Technical Bulletin of the Virginia Polytechnic
Institute (1929); George Rogers Taylor, “Wholesale Commodity Prices at Charleston, South
Carolina, 1732–1791,” Journal of Economic History 4 (1921–22) 356–77; “Wholesale
Commodity Prices at Charleston, South Carolina, 1796–1801,” ibid. 848–67, plus appended
unpaged tables.

United States: The West

The standard compilation is Thomas Senior Berry, Western Prices before 1861: A Study
of the Cincinnati Market (Cambridge, 1943). Specialized compilations include Henry Ellis
White, An Economic Study of Wholesale Prices at Cincinnati, 1844–1914 (Ithaca, 1935);
Howard Houk, A Century of Indiana Farm Prices, 1841 to 1941 (Lafayette, Ind., 1943);
George Rogers Taylor, “Prices in the Mississippi Valley preceding the War of 1812,” Journal
of Economic and Business History 3 (1930) 148–63; Thomas Senior Berry, Early California:
Gold, Prices, and Trade (Richmond, 1984).

Venezuela
Robert J. Ferry, “The Price of Cacao, Its Export, and Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century
Caracas,” in Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds., Essays on the Price History of
Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, 1990), 309–34

Yugoslavia
J. Tadic, Organizacija dubrowaczkog pomortstwa u XVI veku (Belgrade, 1949); idem,
“Les archives économiques de Raguse,” Annales E.S.C. 16 (1961)1168–75.

Serial Publications
During the nineteenth century, many nations began to issue statistical yearbooks which
often included prices and wages. These compendia contain strong biases. Most governments
have used their statistical reports as political instruments, to minimize their problems and
exaggerate their strengths. Communist regimes treated social statistics alternately as state
secrets and ideological weapons. Capitalist nations have tended to suppress statistics of
wealth distribution.
Nevertheless, statistical yearbooks and other serial publications remain historical sources
of high importance. Coverage of prices, wages, GNP deflators, etc., has steadily improved in
these works. So also has the accuracy of the data.
The oldest national statistical yearbook in continuous publication is Britain’s Annual
Abstract of Statistics, which first appeared in 1854, together with a volume summarizing data
from 1840 to 1853. France began to publish annual statistical abstracts in 1876. Italy and the
United States followed in 1878, Germany in 1880, and the Netherlands in 1881. During the
twentieth century these compilations have begun to appear in most nations throughout the
world.
Except in French- and Spanish-speaking nations, most yearbooks now tend to appear in
multilingual or bilingual editions. As recently as 1939, the international language of statistics
was French. After 1945 it rapidly became English, and is increasingly so throughout the world.
Today several non-English-speaking nations publish their statistical yearbooks in English
alone. The leading materials are as follows.

Bibliographical Guides
Jacqueline Wasserman O’Brien and Stephen R. Wasserman, Statistics Sources (2 vols.,
Detroit, 1989 +), annual; a bibliography of current statistical materials, bibliographies, and
online statistical data throughout the world.

International Compilations
United Nations, Statistical Yearbook and Monthly Bulletin of Statistics (1947 +);
Monthly Commodity Price Bulletin (1969 +); Yearbook of Labour Statistics (1950 +) and
Monthly Bulletin of Labor Statistics (1950 +).
International Monetary Fund, International Financial Statistics (1948 +), monthly and
annual.
OECD, Main Economic Indicators (1965+), monthly.

National Compilations: Australia

Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Yearbook of the Commonwealth
of Australia, from 1908 (Canberra, 1908 +), annual. The first volume includes data from 1901
to 1907 and some statistics from 1780.

Austria
Statistische Zentralkommission, Tafeln zur Statistik der Osterreichischen Monarchie,
1842–59 (Vienna, n.d.).
Statistisches Zentralkommission, Statistisches Jahrbuch der Osterreichisches
Monarchie, 1861–80 (Vienna, 1861–81), annual; idem, Osterreichisches Statistisches
Handbuch, 1882–1917 (Vienna, 1882–1917), annual.
Statistiches Zentralamt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für Osterreich, 1919–36 (Vienna, 1919–
36), annual. Publication was suspended after the Anschluss.
Statistiches Zentralamt, Statistisches Handbuch für die Republik Osterreich, 1950 +
(Vienna, 1950 +), mostly annual.

Belgium
Institut National de Statistique, Annuaire statistique de la Belgique, 1870 + (Brussels,
1870 +) mostly annual; title varies: from 1912 to 1959 (vols. 42–80) it was published as
Annuaire statistique de la Belgique et du Congo belge.

Brazil
Conselho Nacional de Estatistica, Anuario estatistico do Brasil, quinquennial from
1908/12 to 1970, annual from 1971 (Rio de Janeiro and Brasilias, 1913 +).

Bulgaria
Glavna Direktsiia na Statistikata, Statisticheski Godishnik na Tsarstvo Bulgari, also
issued in French as Annuaire statistique du Royaume de Bulgarie, 1910–42, mostly annual
(Sofia, 1909–41); idem, Statistickeski Godishnik na Narodnata Republika Bulgariia, annual,
1947/48+ (Sofia, 1948 +), also issued in English as Statistical Yearbook of the People’s
Republic of Bulgaria, irregular, 1962+ (Sofia, 1962 +).

Canada
Census and Statistics Office, Canada Yearbook, 1905+ (Ottawa, 1906+), annual, text in
English and French; idem, Prices and Price Indexes (1918–52) mostly annual, text in English
and French; idem, Prices and Price Indexes, (Ottowa, 1952 +), monthly, text in English and
French.

Chile
Dirección General da Estadistica, Anuario estadistico, mostly annual, 1848/58–1925
(Santiago, 1860+); Estadistica anual, mostly annual, 1928 + (Santiago, 1928 +).

China
China Yearbook, unofficial compilation, annual, 1912–39, (London, New York, and
Tientsin, 1912–39).
Chinese Yearbook, mostly annual, 1935/36–1944/45 (Chungking, 1935–46).
State Statistical Bureau, Statistical Yearbook of China, annual, 1981 + (English language
edition distributed by Oxford University Press, 1982 +); the 1986 edition includes consumer
prices from 1950.
Czechoslovakia
Statni urad statisticky, Manuel Statistique de la Republicque Tchecoslovaque, annual,
(Prague, 1920–32).
Statisticka Rocenka Ceskoslovenske Socialisticke Republiky, annual, 1934–38.
Statistical Handbook of the Czech Republic, 1942 (London, 1942).
Statisticka Prirucka Slovenska, 1947–48.
Statisticka Rocenka Ceskoslovenske Socialisticke Republiky, annual, (Prague, 1953–
89).
Statisticka Rocenka Ceske a Slovenske Federativni Republicky, annual, (Prague, 1990
+)

Denmark
Statistiske Bureau, Statistisk aarbog, annual from 1892 (Copenhagen, 1896 +); text in
Danish and French to 1951, Danish and English thereafter.

Finland
Stattika Centralbyran, Suomen Tilastollinen Vuosikinja, mostly annual, 1879+ (Helsinki,
1883 +); text in Finnish, Swedish, and French 1934–52; Finnish, Swedish, and English 1953 +.

France
Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques, Annuaire statistique de la
France, mostly annual, 1876+ (Paris, 1876).

Germany
Statistiches Reichsamt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsches Reich, annual, 1880–
1940/1 (Berlin, 1880–1941).
Federal Republic of Germany, Statistiches Bundesamt, Statistiches Jahrbuch für die
Bundesrepublik Deutschland, annual, 1952 + (Bonn, 1952 +); an abridged edition, Handbook
of Statistics for the Federal Republic of Germany (Stuttgart, 1961 +), is published triennially
in English.
Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik, Statistiches Jahrbuch der Deutschen
Demokratischen Republik, annual (Berlin, 1955–90); also issued in English as East German
Statistical Yearbook. Absorbed by the Statistiches Jahrbuch from 1991.

Greece
Ethnike Statistike Hyperesia, Statistike epeteristes Hellados [Statistical Yearbook of
Greece], annual from 1930 (Athens, 1931 +), suspended 1940–1953; text in Greek and French
1930–1939, Greek and English 1954 +; issuing agency and title vary.
Hungary
Kozponti Statisztikai Hivatal Magyar Statistikai Evkonyv, annual, 1871–90 (Budapest,
1870–90); idem, Magyar Statistikai Evkonyv Uj Folyam annual, 1893–1942 (Budapest,
1892–1941); idem, Magyar Statistikai Evkonyv, mostly annual, 1949–55 + (Budapest, 1957
+).

Iceland
Tolfraedihandbok, annual (Reykjavik, 1930 +).

India
India Office, Statistical Abstract Relating to British India, irregular, (London, 1840–
1918).
Department of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics, Statistical Abstract for British
India, annual, (Calcutta, 1920–47).
Central Statistical Organization, Statistical Abstract of India, annual, 1949 + (Delhi,
1950 +).

Indonesia
Dutch East Indies, Centraal Kantoor voor de Statistiek, 1922/23–39 (Batavia, 1924–40).
Indonesia Central Office of Statistics, Statistical Abstracts, irregular, 1955/56 (Djakarta,
1956+).

Italy
Istituto Centrale di Statistica, Annuario Statistico Italiano, 1878 + (Rome, 1878 +),
mostly annual.

Japan
Sorifu Tokeikyoku, Resumé statistique de l’Empire du Japon, 1884–1940 (Tokyo, 1887–
1940), mostly annual, published in Japanese and French.
Prime Minister’s Office, Bureau of Statistics, Japan Statistical Yearbook, 1949 +
(Tokyo, 1949 +), published in Japanese and English.
Prime Minister’s Office, Bureau of Statistics, Annual Report on the Retail Price Survey
(1964 +), published in Japanese and English.

Korea
National Bureau of Statistics, Annual Report of the Price Survey (Seoul, 1961 +),
published in Korean and English.
Mexico
Dirección General de Estadistica, Anuario estadistico de los Estados Unidos
Mexicanos, 1893 + (Mexico City, 1894 +), not issued 1908–20, 1931–37.

Netherlands
Central Bureau voor de Statistick, Statisches Jaarboekje (1851–80), mostly annual;
idem, Jaarcijfers voor Nederlanden Statistical Yearbook of the Netherlands, 1881 + (The
Hague, 1882 +), mostly annual; published in Dutch and French 1884–1939, Dutch and German
1940–42, Dutch and English 1943–68; English alone, 1969 +.

New Zealand
Census and Statistics Office, Statistics of the Dominion of New Zealand (1853–1920),
irregular; idem, New Zealand Official Yearbook, 1891 + (Wellington, 1892 +), annual.
Census and Statistics Department, Report on Prices, Wages, and Labour Statistics of
New Zealand for the Year. . . . (Wellington, 1946 +), mostly annual.

Nigeria
Federal Office of Statistics, Annual Abstract of Statistics, 1960 + (Lagos, 1960 +).

Norway
Statistisk Sentralbyra, Statistisk Arbok, 1880 + (Oslo, 1881 +), mostly annual.

Poland
Glowny Urzad Statystyczny, Rocznik Statystyczny, irregularly published since 1920/21
(Warsaw, 1922). From 1920 to 1938 the text was in Polish and French; from 1946 + issued
also in German, Russian, and in English as The Statistical Yearbook of Poland.

Portugal
Instituto Nacional de Estatística, Anuário estatístico de Portugal, 1875 + (Lisbon, 1875
+), annual; text in Portuguese and French.

Romania
Directiunea Statisticei Generale, Buletin Statistic Romaniei, 1892–1911.
Directia Centrala de Statistica, Anuarul Statistic al Romaniei, 1902 + (Bucharest, 1904–
41, 1957 +) annual; includes English translations.

Russia
 Statistika Rossieskoie Imperie (1887–1904).
Annuaire de la Russie (1904–1911).
Narodnoe Khoziaistvo SSSR, Statistikii Sbornik, 1923–90 (Moscow, 1923–90), also
issued in an English edition; idem, Statisticheskii Ezhedgodnik, 1955 + (Moscow, 1956–90).
Narodnoe Khoziaistvo, Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Statisticheskii Ezhedgodnik, 1992 +
(Moscow, 1992 +).

Serbia
Matériaux pur la Statistique du Serbie (1888–1896).
Annuaire Statistique du Royaume de Serbie (1895–1908).

Spain
Instituto Nacional de Estadistica, Anuario Estadistico de España, 1858 + (Madrid,
1859–67, 1911–35, 1942 +), mostly annual.

Sweden
Statistiska Centralbyran, Statistisk Tidskrift: Sveriges Officielle Statistea (Stockholm,
1860–1913), title varies.
Statistika Centralbyran, Statistik arsbok för Sverige, 1914 + (Stockholm, 1914 +) annual;
text in Swedish, French, and English to 1951, Swedish and English thereafter.

Switzerland
Statistisches Jahrbuch der Schweiz: Annuaire Statistique de la Suisse, 1891 + (Bern,
1891–96, 1898 +); mostly annual; some volumes include thirty-year summaries of statistical
data; a statistical atlas of Switzerland was issued in place of the volume for 1897.

United Kingdom
Central Statistical Office, Annual Abstract of Statistics, annual from 1854; the oldest
national statistical yearbook in continuous publication. Most volumes include data for the
preceding fifteen years. The first volume (1854) includes statistical material for the period
1840–53.
Social Trends (London, HMSO) (1970 +).

United States
Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1878 + (Washington,
1878 +), annual.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Producer Prices and Price Indexes (Washington, 1902 +),
monthly and annual, with historical compilations from 1890; idem, Monthly Labor Review and
Handbook of Labor Statistics (Washington, 1904 +), consumer prices and price indexes,
monthly and annual, in various formats from 1904, with historical compilations from 1890.

Yugoslavia
Savezni Zavod za Statistiku i Evidenciju, Statisticki Godisnjak [Statistical Yearbook]
1929–39 (Belgrade, 1929–39), mostly annual, issued in Serbian and French; idem, Godisnjak
Jugoslavije [Yearbook of Yugoslavia], 1954 +; Statiosticki Godisnjak Jugoslavije (Belgrade,
1955 +), issued in Serbo-Croatian, Russian and English.

Analysis of Primary Materials: Historical Metrology

Many learned disciplines contribute to the history of prices. Indispensable is the science
of historical metrology; that is, the study of weights and measures. The literature of this field is
surveyed in Z. Herkov and M. Kurelac, Bibliographia Metrologiae Historiae (2 vols.,
Zagreb, 1971–73).
Standard works include Ronald E. Zupko, A Dictionary of English Weights and
Measures from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Nineteenth Century (Madison, 1968); idem, Italian
Weights and Measures from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Memoirs of the
American Philosophical Society; vol. 145, Philadelphia, 1981); Horace Doursther,
Dictionnaire universel des poids et mesures anciens et modernes, contenant des tables des
monnaies de tous les pays, an older but still useful work (Brussels, 1840; rpt. Amsterdam,
1965); M. Bloch, “Prix et mesures . . .,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 2 (Paris,
1930) 385–86; A. Machabey, Poids et mesures du Languedoc et des provinces voisines
(Toulouse, 1953); A. E. Berriman, Historical Metrology (New York, 1953); John J.
McCusker, “Weights and Measures in the Colonial Sugar Trade . . .,” William and Mary
Quarterly 3d ser. 30 (1973) 599–624; idem, “Les équivalents métriques des poids et mesures
du commerce colonial aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siécles,” Revue française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer
(1974) 349–65; M. H. Sauvaire, “Matériaux pour servir à l’histoire de la numismatique et de
la métrologie musulmanes,” Journal Asiatique 8th ser. 10 (1887).
A large literature has developed on the measurement of prices and the construction of
price series, particularly with regard to questions of quality-change. Leading works include
Zvi Griliches, ed., Price Indexes and Quality Change (Cambridge, 1971); P. A. Armknecht
and D. E. Weyback, “Adjustments for Quality Change in the U.S. Consumer Price Index,”
Journal of Official Statistics 2 (1989) 107–23; Robert J. Gordon, The Measurement of
Durable Goods Prices (Chicago, 1990); various publications of the U.S. Department of Labor,
Bureau of Labor Statistics, including Sarah Gousen, Producer Price Measurement: Concepts
and Methods (Washington, 1986), and BLS Handbook of Methods for Surveys and Studies
(Washington, 1988). An important collection of essays is Murray F. Foss, Marilyn E. Manser,
and Allan H. Young, eds., Price Measurements and Their Uses (Chicago, 1993).

Secondary Sources: General Works

Michel Morineau has described the history of prices as an “histoire sans frontières.”
More than most other other fields of historical scholarship, its major problems have been
studied in a collaborative way by scholars of many nations, in a spirit that transcends
differences of ideology.
Since 1945, however, one nation has dominated the field. Four groups of French
historians have made the most important contributions to price history in the second half of the
twentieth century.
The most active is the Annales school, which takes its name from the journal that has
become one of the most important outlets for research on the history of prices, as well as the
most influential historical journal in the twentieth century. One of its founders, Marc Bloch,
contributed many essays including “Le problème d’histoire des prix: Comment recueillir les
anciens prix?” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 3 (1931) 227–28; idem, “Le salaire
et les fluctuations économiques à longue période,” Revue Historique 173 (1934); idem,
“L’histoire des prix: Remarques critiques,” Annales d’Histoire Sociale 1 (1939) 141–51;
idem, “Prix, monnaies, courbes,” Annales E.S.C. 1 (1946) 355–57; idem, “Deux lettres,”
Annales E.S.C. 2 (1947) 364–66.
The co-founder of Annales, Lucien Febvre, also addressed larger problems of price
history in “Le problème historique des prix,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 2
(1930) 67–80.
Another annalist who has contributed many writings on this subject through the years is
René Baehrel. His essays include “Economie et histoire: À propos des prix,” in Eventail de l’
histoire: Hommage à Lucien Febvre (2 vols., Paris, 1953); idem, “Prix, superficies,
statistique, croissances,” Annales E.S.C. 16 (1961) 699–722; idem, “L’exemple d’un exemple:
Histoire statistique et prix italiens,” Annales E.S.C. 9 (1954) 213–26; idem, “Pitié pour elle et
pour eux,” Annales E.S.C. 10 (1955) 55–62; idem and J. A. Faber, “Prix nominaux, prix
metalliques et formule d’Irving Fisher . . .” Annales E.S.C. 17 (1962) 732–36.
A second school of French historiography, separate from the Annales group but
increasingly overlapping, derives from an older tradition of French Economic history. It is
represented by the work of Henri Hauser, “Statistici storici di fronte alla storia dei prèzzi,”
Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali 45 (1937) 874–882; idem, “L’histoire des prix:
Controverse et methode,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 8 (1936) 163–66.
A scholar of high importance was François Simiand, who did much to link an empirical
method with broad conceptual model-building in the history of prices and wages. One of his
most important works is Le salaire, l’évolution sociale et la monnaie (Paris, 1932).
Another central figure in this tradition is Ernest Labrousse. His two major works are
Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siécle, preface by H.
Sée and R. Picard (2 vols., Paris, 1933; rpt. 1984); and La crise de l’ économie française à la
fin de l’Ancien Régime et au début de la Revolution (Paris, 1944, new edition, 1990). This
was the first volume, the only one published, of a projected multi-volume work subtitled
Aperçus généraux. Labrousse also published many shorter essays, including “Observations
complémentaires sur les sources et la methodologie pratique de l’histoire des prix et salaires
au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 24 (1938) 292–308; idem, “Le
mouvement des prix au XVIIIe siécle: les sources et leur emploi,” Bulletin de la Societé
d’Histoire Moderne (1937). A large part of the influence of Labrousse derived from his role
as teacher. After World War II, he trained an entire generation of French économic historians.
A study of his life and work is Jean-Yves Grenier and Bernard Lepetit, “L’experience
historique, à propos de C.-E. Labrousse,” Annales E.S.C. 44 (1989) 1337–60. Still other
economic approaches are taken by Alfred Marc, L’évolution des prix depuis cent ans (Paris,
1958).
A third group of French historians have come to the subject mainly from numismatics and
the study of money. A prolific scholar in this group is Pierre Vilar, who has given us “Histoire
des prix, histoire géneérale,” Annales E.S.C. 4 (1949) 29–45; “Remarques sur l’histoire des
prix,” Annales E.S.C. 16 (1961) 110–15; and A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1920
(London, 1976); see also Jean Meuvret, “Simple mise au point,” Annales E.S.C. 10 (1955) 48–
54.
A fourth group are French demographic historians, associated with the Institut National
d’Etudes Demographiques. Their leader Louis Henry invented a new method of demographic
history by “family reconstitution,” which has spread widely through the academic world. Many
of their monographs include a chapter on prices, which are prominent in their analysis of
demographic problems.
These various French schools had a great influence in Belgium, Italy, and Spain. Belgian
historians have made many excellent contributions to price history. See Herman Van Der Wee,
“Prix et salaires: Introduction methodologique,” Cahiers d’Histoire des Prix 1 (1956).
Italian scholars also have taken a leading role in this field. Prominent among them are
Luigi Einaudi, “Schemi statistichi e dubbi storici,” Rivista di Storia Economica 5 (1940);
idem, “Dei criteri informatori della storia dei prèzzi; questo devono essere espressi in peso
d’argento ο d’oro o negli idoli usati dagli uomini?” in Ruggiero Romano, ed., I prèzzi in
Europa dal XIII secolo a oggi (Turin, 1967), 505–17; idem, “Storia dei salari e storia dei
prèzzi,” Rivista Storica Italiana 138 (1965) 311–20; and idem, “Introduzione,” to Prèzzi in
Europa. Other Italian price historians of high importance include Amintore Fanfani and
Ruggiero Romano, whose many publications are listed above and below.
Among many contributions by German historians are C. W. Asher, Die Geschichte und
Bestimung der Preise (Dresden, 1858–59); Ernst Wagemann, Konjunkturlehre: eine
Grundlegung zur Lehre vom Rhythmus der Wirtschaft (Berlin, 1928); Moritz L. Elsas, “Zur
Methode des Preisgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte Staatswissenschaft 94 (1933);
Hermann Klauer, Gold produktion und Preisniveau: Versuch einer Kritik der monataren
Theorie der langen Wellen (Berlin, 1941); and Alfred Jacobs, “Preisgeschichte,” in
Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften (Gottingen, 1964), 8: 459–476.
A Marxist perspective from eastern Europe appears in Witold Kula, “Histoire et
économie: la longue durée,” Annales E.S.C. 15 (1960) 48–54.
American historians have contributed less than their European colleagues to the
conceptual literature of price historiography. Exceptions include Earl Hamilton, “The Use and
Misuse of Price History,” Journal of Economic History 4 (1944) supplement, 47–60; Walt
Rostow, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales E.S.C. 14 (1959) 710–14;
Eric E. Lampard, “The Price System and Economic Change: A Commentary on Theory and
History,” Journal of Economic History 20 (1960) 617–37.

Long-Term Secular Trends: French, German, and Italian Models

On the problem of secular trends in price history, the literature in France, Germany, and
Italy is fundamentally different in its descriptive patterns from that in Britain and the United
States.
Two classic works were written by French economist François Simiand in the 1930s. In
Les fluctuations économiques à longue période et la crise mondiale (Paris, 1932) and
especially Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement général des prix du XVIe au
XIXe siècle (Paris, 1932), Simiand described a secular pattern of price movements roughly
similar to the great waves in this book, but not precisely the same. Working from the data of
Thorold Rogers, d’Avenel, and others, he concluded that prices had tended to move in a series
of long surges (“hausse majeure”) and declines (“baisse majeure”), which he called alpha and
beta phases. Simiand guessed that the prime mover was change in the supply of precious metal
but cautioned against a premature monetarist model. For discussions of Simiand’s work, see
M. Levy-Leboyer, “L’Heritage de Simiand: Prix, profit et termes d’échange au XIXe siècles,”
Revue Historique 243 (1970) 77–120; F. Crouzet, “The Economie History of Modem Europe,”
Journal of Economic History 31 (1971) 135–52.
Simiand’s work had a major influence on French price historians C-E. Labrousse and his
student M. A. Chabert, who also found a rhythm of alpha and beta phases but argued that price
fluctuations were regulated mainly by the size of harvests. See C.-E. Labrousse, Esquisse du
mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1932); idem, La crise
de l’économie française à la fin de l’Ancien Régime et au début de la Révolution (Paris,
1944); M. A. Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des prix et des revenus en France de 1798 à
1820 (Paris, 1949).
Simiand’s “alpha-beta” phases and Labrousse’s conception of agrarian rhythms were
combined by German historian Wilhelm Abel into a broad secular pattern of “conjunctures”
and “crises” in which periods of prosperity alternated with long depressions. Abel built a
stronger empirical base than Simiand by constructing indices of grain prices computed in
silver equivalents. In this evidence, Abel found a pattern of “long-term trends” almost identical
in their timing with the great waves in this book, but different in their substance and cause. He
believed that price revolutions were periods of prosperity, and price equilibria were eras of
depression. Further, he concluded that until the nineteenth century, the cause of these secular
trends was change in the “density of population.” Abel observed that “until the mid-nineteenth
century prices and income developed exactly as Malthus had predicted.” See Agrarkrisen und
Agrarkonjunktur: Eine Geschichte der Land und Ernährungswirtschaft Mitteleuropas seit
dem höhen Mittelalter (Hamburg and Berlin, 1935, 1966, 1978). The third edition of this
work, much revised, is translated as Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe from the Thirteenth
to the Twentieth Centuries (London and New York, 1980).
At the same time that Abel produced this work, other European scholars built different
structures of interpretation on Simiand’s base. Three such works were J. Lescure, Hausses et
baisses de prix de longue durée (Paris, 1933, 1935); Robert Marjolin, Prix, monnaie et
production: Essai sur les mouvements économiques de longue durée (Paris, 1941); and
Marie Kerhuel, Les mouvements de longue durée des prix (Rennes, 1935).
Marie Kerhuel in particular developed an approach distinct from Simiand’s monetary
model, Labrousse’s harvest fluctuations, and Abel’s Malthusian-Ricardian approach. She
stressed the cultural correlates of price movements. This subject has been so totally neglected
by American scholars that one of the few copies of Marie Kerhuel’s thesis available in the
United States (in the economics collection of Widener Library, Harvard University) had never
been borrowed or even read in fifty years, until I took it off the shelves for this inquiry. Its
brittle pages were still uncut.
One of the most intelligent and creative analyses of long-term price movements is to be
found in the work of Italian historian Jenny Griziotti-Kretschmann, Il problema del trend
secolare nelle fluttuazioni dei prezzi (Pavia, 1935, Pubblicazioni della R. Université di
Pavia, no. 54), a thesis supported by empirical data published separately in the same author’s
“Ricerche sulle fluttuazioni economiche di lungadurate,” Giornale degli Economisti 73 (1933)
461–508. Griziotti-Kretschmann found that long price movements did not conform to the
Kondratieff pattern, and did not correlate with world production of gold and silver, and were
not caused primarily by population movements, but rose instead from a “structural
transformation in economic and political systems.”
The work of Griziotti-Kretschmann was far ahead of its time. It was highly regarded by
European scholars and heavily used by Fernand Braudel and others, but it is so little known to
American scholars that the copy in Harvard’s Widener Library had not been borrowed for
twenty-two years before it was taken out in the course of this inquiry.
Various elements of Kondratieff’s waves, Simiand’s alpha-beta phases, Labrousse’s
harvest rhythms, Abel’s agrarian konjunktur, Kerhuel’s cultural correlates, and Griziotti-
Kretschmann’s lungadurata caused by “structural transformation in economic and political
systems”—were brought together by Fernand Braudel in three classic works of modern
historiography: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (2
vols., 1949; 2d ed., 1966, New York, 1972); Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 (New
York, 1967) plus Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore, 1977);
and especially Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth-Eighteenth Century (3 vols., New
York, 1982–84).
These books display the great strengths of the Annales school: breadth of comprehension,
depth of insight, maturity of judgment, flair and creativity. English-speaking scholars (e.g.,
Charles Kindleberger in the New York Times, and Bernard Bailyn in the Journal of Economic
History) have fairly complained of vagueness, contradiction, and incoherence, but for most
readers (including this one) the strengths remain predominant.
In the third volume of Civilization and Capitalism Fernand Braudel recognized a secular
trend similar in timing to the great waves of this book, but he jumbled it together with
Kondratieff cycles, Simiand phases, and Labrousse intercycles, made no systematic attempt to
reconcile these movements or to discuss them in detail, and dismissed the problem of analyzing
and explaining the secular trend as an “impossible” task. Despite those deficiencies, these
works are full of insight and deserve their reputation as masterworks of modern scholarship. A
helpful discussion is Samuel Kinser, “Annaliste Paradigm? The Geohistorical Structuralism of
Fernand Braudel,” American Historical Review 86 (1981) 63–105.
Throughout his career, Braudel also contributed many essays and monographs on
problems of price history, including “Monnaies et Civilisations: De l’or du Soudan à l’argent
d’Amérique,” Annales E.S.C. 1 (1946) 9–22; idem, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue
durée,” Annales E.S.C. 4 (1958) 725–53; idem and Frank Spooner, “Prices in Europe from
1450 to 1750,” in M. M. Postan et al., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 4,
(E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson, eds. Cambridge, 1967), 378–486, a work of larger significance
than its title suggests.
Among the most important histories of the “longue durée” have been local or localized
studies—another genre in which the Annales school has led the world. The classical works are
Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730. Contribution à l’histoire sociale
de la France du XVIIe siécle (2 vols., Paris, 1960); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans
de Languedoc (Paris, 1966); Pierre Vilar, La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne:
Recherches sur les fondements économiques des structures nationales (3 vols., Paris, 1962);
Pierre Léon, La naissance de la grande industrie en Dauphinéfin du XVIIe siècle — 1869 (2
vols., Paris, 1954); P. Deyon, Amiens, capitale provinciale . . . (Paris, 1967); and Pierre and
Huguette Chaunu, Seville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650 (8 vols., Paris, 1955–60), the ultimate
grand thèse. These works are familiar to American social historians, but the problématiques
that inspired them are not well understood.

Long-Term Secular Trends: Two Italian Dissenters

One historian has challenged the model of long waves and has even disputed the existence
of the most familiar long wave: the price revolution of the sixteenth century. Carlo Cipolla, in
“The So-Called Price Revolution’: Reflections on the ‘Italian Situation,’” (in Peter Burke, ed.,
Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe: Essays from Annales [New York, 1972], 42–
46) argues that the inflation of the sixteenth century was not much greater than that which
occurred in what he called the “century of monetary stability” from 1791 to 1912.
Cipolla is mistaken. He defined his “century of monetary stability” to include not only the
Victorian equilibrium but also the end of the great wave of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the great wave of the twentieth. Further, he defined the price revolution of the
sixteenth century in such a way as to rule out one of its most inflationary stages. When these
errors are corrected Cipolla’s thesis collapses, and the “so-called” price revolution of the
sixteenth century survives his skepticism.
Another approach is that of Ruggiero Romano, “Movimento de los precios y desarrollo
económico: el caso de Sudamérica en el siglo XVIII,” Desarrollo Económico 3 (1963) 31–43;
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), 35–72. Ruggiero Romano proposed the thesis that the long
waves of Simiand, Abel, etc., occurred in Europe but not in Latin America. He suggested the
existence of a distinctive “American conjuncture” or secular trend, in many ways opposite of
European tendencies.
It was an ingenious theory, but the evidence of American price movements compiled in
Johnson and Tandeter in general does not support it. A few local patterns in Latin America
offer some support for Romano; ironically, price movements in the mining center of Potosí
were closest to his American conjuncture and farthest from the European norm. But most Latin
American series indicated that the price revolutions of the sixteenth and twentieth centuries
were operative in Latin America. So also was the price wave of the eighteenth century in its
later and most inflationary stage. As evidence accumulates throughout the world, great waves
appear increasingly to be global movements, with important regional variations.

Long-Term Secular Trends: A British Contribution

The most important British contribution to price history was made by Henry Phelps-
Brown, a civil servant and scholar who held the chair of economics of labor at the London
School of Economics. In the early 1950s he came upon a copy of H.O. Meredith’s Economic
History of England and discovered two pull-out graphs at the back of the book. One displayed
the wages of a carpenter and a farm worker in England for every decade from 1270 to 1890.
The other graph showed their purchasing power in terms of wheat prices. Meredith concluded
that real wages were higher in the fifteenth century than at any other time until the nineteenth.
“This challenged investigation,” Phelps-Brown recalled. He went to work with Sheila
Hopkins (Mrs. L. S. Presnell), and the results were carefully constructed indices of
“consumable prices” and real wages from 1264 to 1954, in publications cited among primary
sources above.
Phelps-Brown’s work is best known for its price series, which are now beginning to be
reproduced in American economics textbooks such as the most recent edition of Samuelson and
Nordhaus. But the most important finding was the wage series, which gave a new meaning to
the main lines of change. It shifted the perspective on price movements from propertied elites
to the experience of ordinary people. Hamilton, Abel, Fourastié, and Grandamy all had been
aware that a gap had opened between prices and wages during the price revolution of the
sixteenth century. But Braudel remembers that it was due “particularly to the published
research of E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila Hopkins” that scholars became aware of an actual
“drop in real wages.” (The Perspective of the World, III, 87). This discovery revised many
earlier interpretative judgments by Abel, Hamilton and Braudel himself of social and
economic conditions in various stages of price revolutions. It opened the way for the
interpretation that appears in this book.

Long-Term Secular Trends: American and British Writings

English-speaking scholars who have written at length about long-term secular movements
in price history have tended to depart from the conventional models of Continental scholarship.
Many have worked out their own synthetic models in a variety of ways. Four of these syntheses
show something of the range and diversity of the work in Britain and the United States, and
also its distinctive character and limits.
Phyllis Deane, “Inflation in History,” in David F. Heathfield, ed., Perspectives on
Inflation: Models and Policies, (London, 1979), 1–37 is an historical overview of price
movements. Deane, whose scholarship centers on the economic history of Britain, derives a
general synthesis mainly from British materials. She identifies three periods of rising prices:
the price revolution of the sixteenth century, which she dates 1500–1650; the war inflation of
1793–1815 (that is, the crest of the third wave); and the “twentieth-century inflation.” The
author was not aware of the medieval price revolution or of the long rise of prices in the mid-
eighteenth century. She assigned a different cause to each inflation, a classic historicist
conclusion.
Another and very different approach appears in the work of Rondo Cameron, an able and
learned American economic historian who developed an original historical model in “The
Logistic of European Economic History: A Note on Historical Periodization,” Journal of
European Economic History 2 (1973) 145–48; “Europe’s General Logistic,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History 12 (1975) 452–62; “Economic History, Pure and Applied,”
Journal of Economic History 36 (1976) 3–27; and A Concise Economic History of the World
from Paleolithic Times to the Present (1989; 2d ed., New York, 1993), an excellent and very
graceful survey of world history from an economic perspective. Cameron organizes his
understanding of modern European history into a sequence of three “logistics” or logistic
curves of development: the first running from the ninth to the fourteenth century; the second
from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth century; and the third from the mid-eighteenth to the
second quarter of the twentieth. His periodization derives mainly from patterns of population
growth and from his understanding of rhythms of economic growth. Cameron’s model is similar
in timing to our price revolutions in the period from the twelfth century to the mid-seventeenth,
but differs in its reading of the evidence from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century.
A third approach from a business perspective appears in R. G. Lipsey, “Does Money
Always Depreciate?” Lloyd’s Bank Review, October 1960, 1–13. Lipsey asks if inflation
would have been a betting proposition for a businessman from 1275 to 1949. He concludes that
if the businessman had used a fifty-year “time horizon,” an inflationary assumption would have
been “a fairly good bet” throughout that period except in the fourteenth and nineteenth
centuries. If, however, a ten-year horizon is used, then it would have been a bad bet in most
decades during the fourteenth, fifteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. That judgment is
roughly (very roughly) consistent with the rhythm of price revolutions, but its use of fixed
periods of analysis masks the main lines of change.
A fourth attempt to make sense of the subject is Anna J. Schwartz, “Secular Price Change
in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 5 (1973) 243–69.
Schwartz covers a large territory in time and space, mainly in an effort to validate a monetarist
interpretation of price movements. She argues that “episodes of rising prices have alternated
with episodes of declining prices apparently for as long as money has been used.” But her
empirical grasp of price movements was faulty—a mix of long price-waves in the sixteenth
and twentieth centuries and climactic price surges in other waves. Schwartz concluded that
“long-run price changes consistently parallel the monetary changes, with one exception for
England in the sixteenth century,” But the author had very little evidence of long-term change in
the quantity of money before the late nineteenth century except for sixteenth-century England.
She recognized no other pattern in price movements beyond that of the monetary model.
Critiques of her essay have been published by Lance Davis and Paul B. Trescott in the Journal
of Money, Credit, and Banking 5.2 (1973) 269–71. Davis is generally hostile to Schwartz’s
monetary model and offers a series of ad hoc explanations for individual price movements.
Trescott complains of a lack of empirical rigor in the monetarist model and adds an interesting
attempt at correlation between prices and the money supply in the United States from 1870 to
1970. Anna Schwartz in response protests against the poverty of “ad hoc” explanations.
Attempts to generalize primarily from American price movements appear in George F.
Warren and Frank A. Pearson, Prices (New York, 1933), an able and still informative work
which is marred by ignorance of trends outside the United States before the twentieth century.
A critique appears in Charles O. Hardy, The Warren-Pearson Price Theory (Washington,
1935).
Another American study is Walter W. Haines, “The Myth of Continuous Inflation: United
States Experience, 1700-1980,” in Schmukler and Marcus, eds., Inflation through the Ages,
183-204, which also interprets the history of prices as a discontinuous sequence of episodic
movements. This Anglo-American literature is very different from that of French, German, and
Italian scholars, in both its empirical base and its conceptual models.
In the late twentieth century, English-speaking scholars began at last to come to terms with
the European literature. A leader in this effort is sociologist Jack A. Goldstone. In “The Cause
of Long-Waves in Early Modern Economic History,” Research in Economic History 6 (1991)
51–92, Goldstone has the descriptive evidence firmly in hand. He builds beyond European
scholarship by adding data on long waves in Asia and the Middle East. His explanatory model
is unstable and tends to shift from broad ideas of institutional structure to a narrow emphasis
on mortality experiences, which will not bear the weight that he wishes to put on them.
Overall, however, Goldstone’s work is an important contribution, both in its breadth of insight
and in its attempt to link economic tendencies to social and demographic processes. Another
useful work is Don Pearlberg, An Analysis and History of Inflation (Westport, Conn., 1993), a
survey of both long-term price movements and hyperinflations.

Descriptive Patterns: Cycles

On substantive patterns of change in price history, the literature might be divided into two
parts: studies of long-term secular change and discussions of cyclical movements. By far the
largest body of literature is about cycles. The journals called Cycles, Kyklos, Futures, and
Technological Forecasting and Social Change publish many essays that discuss a variety of
cyclical rhythms, including Kondratieff “long waves” (50 years), Kuznets “long swings” (20 to
25 years), Labrousse “intercycles” (10 to 12 years), Juglar trade cycles (7 to 8 years), and
Kitchin business cycles (3 to 4 years).
The largest and most controversial literature is about Kondratieff waves (often called
long waves), which are thought to cause major depressions every half century (ca. 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 Sozial-wissenschaft
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 set forward by
A. Spiethoff in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaft (1923); and 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). Among Marxists, Kondratieff
waves were condemned as heresy and were denounced by Trotsky and many Old Bolsheviks.
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,”
Annales E.S.C. (1993) 359–83.
French and German historians have always been much interested in Kondratieff waves—
more so than their American and British colleagues. Extended discussions include Gaston
Imbert, Des mouvements de longue durée Kondratieff (Aix en Provence, 1959); Ulrich
Weinstock, Das Problem der Kondratieff-Zyklen (Berlin, 1964); and Jean-Louis Escudier,
“Kondratieff et l’histoire économique française,” Annales E.S.C. (1993) 359–83.
In the English-speaking world, 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 that
analyzes thirty-three attempts by various scholars to test the existence of the Kondratieff wave,
mostly with positive results. Goldstein’s excellent bibliography also lists hundreds of works
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 Economics of Europe (Stuttgart, 1983), 175–219; idem., “Long Waves in
Coinage and Grain Price-Series from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” Review 7 (1984)
599–647; Paolo S. Labini, “Le problème des cycles économiques de longue durée,” Economic
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; Klas. 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, 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).
This scholarship on Kondratieff’s long cycles, for all its abundance, has a shallow
empirical base. Many historians and economists continue to doubt the very existence of
Kondratieff waves. 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 fifty- (or sixty-) year Kondratieff pattern as such 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,” which stubbornly refused to come. See, e.g., Jay
W. Forrester, “We’re Headed for Another Depression,” Fortune, 16 Jan. 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 waves 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 here again the empirical evidence is very soft.
My own judgment is that a fifty- or sixty-year cycle 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 substantively stronger than many other cyclical rhythms, and 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 in their timing and intensity from one swing to the next. Much of the energy devoted by
American social scientists to the study of the Kondratieff wave has been misdirected. Their
efforts might be more usefully applied to the examination of secular trends—which have a
more solid foundation in historical fact, though less predictive power.
Shorter cycles of thirty years and fifteen 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 often (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. See, e.g., Stanley Jevons, “The
Solar Period and the Price of Corn,” in Investigations in Currency and Finance (London,
1884).
Kuznets cycles or “long swings” of approximately twenty years have been much
discussed by American economists, but this pattern has not been so interesting to European
scholars or so visible in the history of their nations. See Simon Kuznets, Secular Movements
in Production and Prices (Boston, 1930); idem, “Long Swings in the Growth of Population
and Related Economic Variables,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102
(1958) 25–52; Arthur F. Burns, Production Trends in the United States since 1870 (New
York, 1934); Moses Abramowitz, “Resource and Output Trends in the United States since
1870,” American Economic Review 46 (1956) 5–23; Brinley Thomas, Migration and
Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1954); John C. Soper, “Myth and Reality in Economic Time
Series: The Long Swing Revisited,” Southern Economic Journal 41 (1975) 570–79. This
rhythm is sometimes thought to be demographic in its origin, but Friedman and Schwartz argue
in Monetary Trends in the United States and United Kingdom (599-621) that long swings are
episodic in their origin and monetary in their expression. Many economists agreed with them.
On the other hand, the Labrousse cycle (or intercycle) of roughly ten or twelve years is
much favored by European historians but rarely appears in American scholarship.
Juglar cycles or trade cycles (seven to eight years) have been found by many scholars—
by Goubert in Beauvais, Parenti in Tuscany, Spooner in Udine, Hauser in Paris. The classic
work is Clément Juglar, Des crises commerciales et leur retour périodiques en France, en
Angleterre et aux États-Unis (Paris, 1889); rpt. New York, 1967).
Kitchin cycles or business cycles (3.5 years, or forty months) were first observed in the
American economy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also in Europe during our
own time. The classical text is Joseph Kitchin, “Cycles and Trends in Economic Factors,”
Review of Economics and Statistics 5 (1923) 10–16. They are sometimes called “inventory
cycles” and are thought to rise from the structure of modern business enterprise. Several
historians have also reported them in price data as early as the fifteenth century, and Pierre
Chaunu has discovered them in Seville’s transatlantic trade.
For general discussions of business cycles, see Wesley C. Mitchell, Business Cycles
(New York, 1927); Arthur F. Burns and Wesley C. Mitchell, Measuring Business Cycles (New
York, 1946); Joseph A. Schumpeter, Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and
Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process (New York, 1939); Geoffrey H. Moore, The
Cyclical Behavior of Prices (Washington, 1971). Historians will find a rapport with E. R.
Dewey and E. F. Dakin, Cycles: The Science of Prediction (New York, 1949), which argues
that cyclical rhythms are themselves variable through time and space—a conclusion that is
certainly correct.
 For problems of method, an excellent work is James D. Hamilton, Time Series Analysis
(Princeton, 1994). Also useful are T. W. Anderson, The Statistical Analysis of Time Series
(New York, 1971), and Nathaniel J. Mass, Economic Cycles: An Analysis of Underlying
Causes (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).

Movements of Wages, Rents and Interest

These various cyclical and linear interpretations may also be found in the general
literature on wages, interest, rents, and wealth distribution. The classic works include François
Simiand, Le salaire; L’évolution sociale et la monnaie (3 vols., Paris, 1932); J. R. Hicks, The
Theory of Wages (London, 1932); J. Kuczynski, Die Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter in
Deutschland von 1800 bis in die Gegenwart (Berlin, 3d ed., 1947); idem, Die Geschichte der
Lage der Arbeiter unter dem Kapitalismus (Berlin, 1960–1963); P. Wolff and F. Mauro,
Histoire générale du travail (Paris, 1960). There is no general history of wages in English,
but much information appears in Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth (New
York, 1964). Many specialized studies are listed below.
On the history of interest, the standard work is Sidney Homer, A History of Interest Rates
(2d ed., New Brunswick, 1977). A classic treatise is Knut Wicksell, Interest and Prices
(London, 1936).
For the history of rent, see G. Postel-Vinay, La rente foncière dans le capitalisme
agricole (Paris, 1974); and J. Jacquart, “La rente foncière, indice conjoncturel?” Revue
Historique 253 (1975) 355–76. There is no general history of rent or land prices for Britain or
the United States—a major gap in the literature. Many specialized studies are listed below.
For patterns of wealth and income distribution over the long run in the United States, see
Jeffrey H. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History
(New York, 1980), with a good bibliography; and Lee Soltow, Men and Wealth in the United
States, 1850–1870 (New Haven, 1975).
Studies of Britain include Jeffrey G. Williamson, Did British Capitalism Breed
Inequality? (Boston, 1985), which cites many other studies by the same author; E. H. Phelps-
Brown, The Inequality of Pay (Berkeley, 1977); A. J. Harrison and A. B. Atkinson, The
Distribution of Personal Wealth in Britain (Cambridge, 1978); and A. B. Atkinson, The
Economics of Inequality (Oxford, 1975).
For other nations, Y. S. Brenner, Hartmut Kaelbe, and Mark Thomas, Income Distribution
in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1991) includes essays on Australia, Austria, Belgium,
Germany, and Sweden, with a full list of references. M. Schnitzer, Income Distribution: A
Comparative Study (New York, 1974) looks at the United States, Germany, Sweden, and
Japan. Also helpful are many studies by Harold Lydall, notably A Theory of Income
Distribution (Oxford, 1979); and J. Söderberg, “Trends in Inequality in Sweden, 1700–1914,”
Historical Social Research 21 (1987) 58–78.

Money
On the history of money the literature is even larger than on prices, and of course strongly
monetarist in its interpretation. The leading bibliography is Philip Grierson, Bibliographie
numismatique (2d ed., Brussels, 1979). The standard overviews are Philip Grierson,
Numismatics (Oxford, 1975) and John Porteus, Coins in History (London, 1969). A useful
survey is Glyn Davies, A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff,
1994).
On the history of precious metals, see Adon A. Gordus and Jeanne P. Gordus, “Potosí
Silver and Coinage of Early Modern Europe,” in Hermann Kellenbenz, ed., Precious metals in
the Age of Expansion: Papers of the Fourteenth International Congress of the Historical
Sciences (Stuttgart, 1981) 225–242; and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie et al., “Sur les traces de
‘argent du Potosí,’” Annales E.S.C. (1990) 483–505.
For medieval numismatics, the best beginning is Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in
Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986), and idem, “Coinage and Currency,” in Cambridge
Economic History of Europe, (2d ed., Cambridge, 1987), 2:1788–863, both with appended
tables on medieval money and excellent bibliographies. Peter Spufford, with the assistance of
Wendy Wilkinson and Sarah Tolley, has also compiled a very useful Handbook of Medieval
Exchange (London, 1986), with a full introduction on money and exchange, a listing of
exchange rates by European region, and an excellent bibliography.
For the Renaissance and the modern era, an outstanding work is Frederic C. Lane and
Reinhold C. Mueller, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, vol. I, Coins
and Moneys of Account (Baltimore, 1985), a work broader than its title, with a full
bibliography. Other major studies of high quality include Peter Spufford, Monetary Problems
and Policies in the Burgundian Netherlands, 1433–1496 (Leiden, 1970); Frank C. Spooner,
The International Economy and Monetary Movements in France, 1493–1725 (Cambridge,
1972); John Day, ed., Études d’histoire monétaire XIIe-XIXe siècles (Lille, 1984); Carlo M.
Cipolla, Money, Prices, and Civilization in the Mediterranean World: Fifth to Seventeenth
Century (Princeton, 1956); idem, La moneta a Firenze nel cinquecento (Bologna, 1987); B.
H. Michell, “The Impact of Sudden Accessions of Treasure upon Prices and Real Wages,”
Canadian Journal of Economics and Social Science 12 (1946); J. L. Laughlin, Money, Credit,
and Prices (Chicago, 1951); John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America,
1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978), with bibliographical notes; and many works of
Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz, cited below. A handbook on money and exchange in
Europe during the modern period is coming from Frank Spooner.
On particular currencies, there is R. Sédillot, Le franc: histoire d’une monnaie des
origines à nos jours (Paris, 1953); A. Blanchet and A. Dieudonné, Manuel de numismatique
française (4 vols., Paris, 1912–36); Albert Feaveryear, The Pound Sterling: A History of
English Money (2d ed. rev., Oxford, 1963); W. C. Mitchell, A History of the Greenbacks
(Chicago, 1903); Octavio Gil Farres, Historia de la moneda española (2d ed., Madrid, 1976);
Kirsten Bendixen, Denmark’s Money (Copenhagen, 1967); A. Lohr, Osterreichische
Geldgeschichte (Vienna, 1946); I. G. Spasskij, The Russian Monetary System (3d ed.,
Leningrad, 1962; Eng., Amsterdam, 1967).
On the problem of money of account, see Marc Bloch, “La monnaie de compte,” Annales
d’Histoire Économique et Sociale (1935); idem, “Le problème de la monnaie de compte,”
ibid. (1938); Luigi Einaudi, “The Theory of Imaginary Money from Charlemagne to the French
Revolution,” in F. C. Lane and J. C. Riemersma, eds., Enterprise and Secular Change
(Homewood, Ill., 1953) 229–61. Good discussions appear in Lane and Mueller and McCusker
above.
A major work on “bookkeeping barter,” of a more general importance than its title
implies, is W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston, 1724–1775 (Cambridge,
1945).

Population
Indispensable to this inquiry are general works on historical demography, which tend to
explain price movements as the result of changes in population growth. Leading works include
D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography
(London, 1965; rpt. 1974); W. R. Lee, ed., European Demography and Economic Growth
(London, 1979); R. D. Lee, ed., Population Patterns in the Past (New York, 1977); R. J.
Mols, Introduction à la demographie historique des villes d’Europe du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle
(3 vols., Gembloux, 1954–56); and Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System,
1500–1820 (Baltimore, 1981) with an excellent bibliography of more than seven hundred
works in demographic history.
National studies of general interest include J. C. Russell, British Medieval Population
(Albuquerque, 1948); E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England,
1541–1871 (Cambridge, 1981), an indispensable work; Julius Beloch,
Bevölkerungsgeschichte Italiens (3 vols., Berlin, 1937–61); and Maris A. Vinovskis, ed.,
Studies in American Historical Demography (New York, 1979), with a bibliography (pp. 21–
25).
On methods and models of demographic analysis, the best introduction is still George W.
Barclay, Techniques of Population Analysis (New York, 1958), now unhappily out of print;
also Nathan Keyfitz and Wilhelm Flieger, Population: Facts and Methods of Demography
(San Francisco, 1971); and Alfred Sauvy, General Theory of Population (1966; London,
1969).

Climate and Environment

Also important for the study of prices is the literature on climate and ecological change.
Here the leading works are Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., Climate and
History: Studies in Interdisciplinary History (Princeton, 1981); H. H. Lamb, Climate: Past,
Present, and Future (2 vols., New York, 1972, 1977); idem, Climate, History, and the
Modern World (London, 1982); T. M. L. Wigley, M. J. Ingram, and G. Farmer, eds., Climate
and History: Studies in Past Climates and Their Impact on Man (Cambridge, 1981);
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the
Year 1000 (1967; New York, 1971); Reid Bryson and Thomas J. Murray, Climates of Hunger
(Madison, 1977); A. S. Goudie, Environmental Change (Oxford, 1977); Patrick Richard
Galloway, Population, Prices, and Weather in Preindustrial Europe (Berkeley, 1987); W.
Dansgaard, “One Thousand Centuries of Climatic Record from Camp Century on the
Greenland Ice Sheet,” Science 166 (1969) 377–81; Christian Pfister, “Fluctuations climatiques
et prix céréaliers en Europe du XVIe au XXe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 43 (1988) 25–53.
On the historical geography of price movements, the classic work is P. Hall, ed., Von
Thünen’s Isolated State: An English Edition of De Isolierte Staat (Oxford, 1966). Von Thünen
rings continue to resonate in a large literature of economic geography and are sometimes
observed by a study of prices; see J. R. Peet, “The Spatial Expansion of Commercial
Agriculture in the Nineteenth Century: A Von Thünen Interpretation,” Economic Geography 45
(1969) 283–300.

Economic Growth
The central problem in economic historiography during the 1960s and 1970s was to
describe and explain processes of economic growth. A large literature was created, which in
the United States showed little interest in prices except as they impinged upon the measurement
of national product. Nevertheless, this literature bears upon price history in many ways.
Among general works, a classic is Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate,
Structure, and Spread (New Haven, 1966), idem, The Economic Growth of Nations
(Cambridge, 1971); also E. F. Denison, Why Growth Rates Differ (Washington, 1967).
Most of this literature centers on national economies. For Britain, the leading works
include Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth (1688–1959) (Cambridge,
1964); R. C. Floud and D. N. McCloskey, eds., The Economic History of Britain since 1700
(Cambridge, 1981+). A revisionist work is N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during
the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985).
On the United States, see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of
British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985); Douglass C. North, Terry L. Anderson, and
Peter J. Hill, Growth and Welfare in the American Past: A New Economic History (3d ed.,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1983); Lance E. Davis et al., American Economic Growth: An
Economist’s History of the United States (New York, 1972).
On Italy, the best survey is in Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, eds., Storia d’Italia
(Torin, 1973+), a magisterial multivolume work that includes both period volumes and topical
histories on economic subjects.
On the low countries a national economic history that gives much attention to prices is J.
A. van Houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries (New York, 1977).
Still a standard work on Sweden is Eli F. Hecksher, Sevriges ekonomiska historia fran
Gustava Vasa (2 vols. in 4, Stockholm, 1935–49).
For Switzerland, see Antony Babel, Histoire économique de Geneve des origines au
début du XVIe siècle (2 vols., Geneva, 1963).

Agriculture
On agriculture and price history see B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of
Western Europe: A.D. 500–1850 (London, 1963); E. Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution
(Paris, 1967); J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880
(London, 1966); E. Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (Chicago, 1965);
national and regional histories include Joan Thirsk et al., eds., The Agrarian History of
England and Wales (8 vols., Cambridge, 1967 +); J. C. Toutain, Le produit de l’agriculture
française de 1700 à 1958 (Paris, 1961); and Wilhelm Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in
Europe (London, 1980), which is specially helpful for central Europe; the English edition
includes an additional bibliography on English agricultural history.
A general history of agriculture in the United States remains to be written; the leading
works are still Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860
(2 vols., 1933; rpt. Washington, 1958), a work of remarkable scholarship; Percy W. Bidwell
and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (1925;
rpt. New York, 1941); Paul Gates, The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York,
1960); Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York,
1963).
On harvest fluctuations, see W. G. Hoskins, “Harvest Fluctuation and English Economic
Life, 1480–1619,” Agricultural History Review 12 (1964) 28–46; idem, “Harvest Fluctuations
and English Economic Life, 1620–1759,” Agricultural History Review 16 (1968) 15–31; C.
Walford, “Famines of the World, Past and Present,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society
42 (1879).

Technology, Energy, and Transportation

On technology and long-term change, a very large literature includes John A. Clark et al.,
“Long Waves, Inventions, and Innovations,” in Christopher Freeman, ed., Long Waves in the
World Economy (London, 1983), 164–82; David Dickson, “Technology and Cycles of Boom
and Bust,” Science 219 (1983) 933–36; Alan Graham and Peter M. Senge, “A LongWave
Hypothesis of Innovation,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 17 (1980) 283–
311; Alfred Kleinknecht, “Observations on the Schumpeterian Swarming of Innovations,”
Futures 13 (1981) 293–307; Derek J. De Solla Price, “Is Technology Historically Independent
of Science? A Study in Statistical Historiography,” Technology and Culture 6 (1965) 568; an
expression of skepticism appears in Nathan Rosenberg, “Technological Innovation and Long
Waves,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 8 (1984) 7–24.
On secular trends in the history of energy, see Matthew Edel, “Energy and the Long
Swing,” Review of Radical Political Economics 15 (1983) 115–30; George F. Ray, “Energy
and the Long Cycles,” Energy Economics 5 (1983) 3–8.
On transportation and the long run, see Walter Isard, “A Neglected Cycle: The Transport-
Building Cycle,” Review of Economic Statistics 24 (1942) 149–58; idem, “Transport
Development and Building Cycles,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (1942) 90–112.

War, Politics, and Imperialism

On war and long-term Economic movements, see Albert Bergesen, “Cycles of War in the
Reproduction of the World Economy,” in Paul M. Johnson and William R. Thompson, eds.,
Rhythms in Politics and Economics (New York, 1985), 313–32; Paul P. Craig and Kenneth E.
F. Watt, “The Kondratieff Cycle and War: How Close Is the Connection?” Futurist 19 (1985)
25–28; Edward R. Dewey, “Evidence of Cyclic Patterns in an Index of International Battles,
600 B.C.-A.D. 1957” Cycles 21 (1970) 121–58; Charles F. Doran and Wes Parsons, “War and
the Cycle of Relative Power,” American Political Science Review 74 (1980) 947–65; L. L.
Farrar Jr., “Cycles of War: Historical Speculations on Future International Violence,”
International Interactions 3 (1977) 161–79; Joshua Goldstein, Long Cycles, cited above;
idem, “Kondratieff Waves as War Cycles,” International Studies Quarterly 29 (1985) 411–
44; Richard K. Hoskins, War Cycles, Peace Cycles (Lynchburg, Va. 1985); J. S. Lee, “The
Periodic Recurrence of Internecine Wars in China,” China Journal 14 (1931) 111–15, 159–63;
Lewis F. Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Pittsburgh, 1960); Albert Rose, “Wars,
Innovations and Long Cycles,” American Economic Review 31 (1941) 105–07; J. David
Singer and Melvin Small, The Wages of War, 1816–1965 (New York, 1972); Melvin Small and
J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980 (Beverly Hills,
1982)
On the rhythm of imperialism, see Albert Bergeson, “Cycles of Formal Colonial Rule,” in
Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Processes of the World System (Beverly
Hills, 1980); idem, and Ronald Schoenberg, “Long Waves of Colonial Expansion and
Contraction, 1415–1969,” in Albert Bergeson, ed., Studies of the Modern World-System (New
York, 1980).

Culture
On culture and the long run, see John Langrish, “Cycles of Optimism in Design,” Design
Studies 3 (1982) 153–56; J. Zvi Namenwirth, “The Wheels of Time and the Interdependence of
Value Change in America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1973) 649–83; idem and J.
Zvi Namenwirth and Harold D. Lasswell, The Changing Language of American Values: A
Computer Study of Selected Party Platforms (Beverly Hills, 1970).

General Works on Price Movements: Economic Theory

The index to an economics textbook of 565 pages by Donald McCloskey contains the
following entry: “price, pp. II, 1–565.” In the largest sense, all Economic theory is about price
movements. For readers uninitiated in this discipline, the best starting point is a good textbook,
of which there are many. Among broad surveys, Paul Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus,
Economics (14th ed., New York, 1990), is a graceful and good-humored introduction.
The academic discipline of economics is divided in two parts. Macroeconomics studies
the aggregate “behavior” of economic systems and what some economists call “absolute price
levels.” Microeconomics is about individual choices in the market, mostly by two mythical
decision makers, the “consumer” and the “firm.”
Outstanding among textbooks on macroeconomics is Rudiger Dornbusch and Stanley
Fischer, Macroeconomics (New York, 1978), which has the merit for historians of including
chapters that explicitly apply theoretical models to historical events since 1960.
Specially relevant here is Charles W. Calomiris and Christopher Hanes, “Historical
Macroeconomics and American Macroeconomic History,” National Bureau of Economic
Research Working Papers no.4935 (1994), 1–77, which argues for “an historical definition of
the economy” in a “pathdependent way.” The authors give much attention to Kuznets cycles,
which are often called “long swings,” but they have nothing to say about price revolutions,
which would have strengthened their substantive case. Calomiris and Hanes are much
interested in “aggregate-demand shocks,” which produce “endogenous changes in aggregate
supply.” They add a bibliography, which is a helpful guide to recent economic literature on
long swings, a subject that has come to life in the 1990s.
Among microeconomic texts, Donald N. McCloskey, The Applied Theory of Prices (New
York, 1982) is fun to read and might be specially recommended to students of history. Its author
is an economic historian with a sense of humor and an awareness of the human dimensions of
his subject.
On price movements in general and the problem of inflation in particular, economists have
generated a vast literature which offers many different theoretical models of price movements.
Two empirical essays on changing fashions in economic thought are Paul Bairoch and Bouda
Etemad, “La litérature périodique d’histoire économique contemporaine,” Annales E.S.C. 42
(1987) 369–401; and George Stigler, “Statistical Studies of Economic Thought,” in Essays in
the History of Economics (Chicago, 1965), 31–50.
Among the leading schools of thought in the United States are various monetarist
approaches, Keynesian theories, neoclassical cost-push and demand-pull models, administered
price theory, new inflation or competitive inflation theories, sociopolitical models, and
rational expectations theories.
Many economists in America today believe that price movements are determined
primarily by variations in the supply of money. The classic statement of the monetarist model
in the early twentieth century was Irving Fisher, The Purchasing Power of Money (New York,
1911, 1920, 1922, rpt. 1963); also idem, Appreciation and Interest (New York, 1896), The
Rate of Interest (New York, 1907), and The Theory of Interest (New York, 1930). For a
memoir of this remarkable, very interesting and unjustly maligned man, see Irving Norton
Fisher, My Father—Irving Fisher (New York, 1956).
The next generation of monetarists was led by Milton Friedman. In Isaiah Berlin’s
disjunction between the hedgehog who knows one thing and the fox who knows many things,
Friedman is a classic example of the academic hedgehog at work. His many works include
“The Quantity Theory of Money: A Restatement,” in Milton Friedman, ed., Studies in the
Quantity Theory of Money (Chicago, 1956); The Optimum Quantity Theory of Money and
Other Essays (Chicago, 1969); “The Role of Monetary Policy,” American Economic Review
58 (1968) 1–17. His major empirical work was published in a series of monographs: A
Monetary History of the United States (Princeton, 1963), Monetary Statistics of the United
States (New York, 1970), and Monetary Trends in the United States and the United
Kingdom: Their Relation to Income, Prices, and Interest Rates, 1867–1975 (Chicago, 1982).
Also important is Phillip Cagan, Determinants and Effects of Change in the Stock of Money,
1875–1960 (New York, 1965).
Another and more eclectic generation of monetary theory appears in Robert J. Barro and
Stanley Fischer, “Recent Developments in Monetary Theory,” Journal of Monetary
Economics 2 (1976) 151–55. Barro has also given us “Government Spending, Interest Rates,
Prices, and Budget Deficits in the United Kingdom, 1701–1918,” Journal of Monetary
Economics 20 (1987) 221–48; and Robert J. Barro and R. G. King, “Time-Separable
Preferences and Intertemporal-Substitution Models of Business Cycles,” Quarterly Journal of
Economics 99 (1984) 817–39.
For critiques of monetarism, see Robert J. Gordon, ed., Milton Friedman’s Monetary
Framework: A Debate with His Critics (Chicago, 1974); R. J. Ball, Inflation and the Theory
of Money (London, 1964); Harry G. Johnson, Inflation and the Monetarist Controversy
(Amsterdam, 1972–1976).
Keynesian models of price movements tend to differ from other approaches in their
assumption that the movement of prices, wages, rents, and interest are “sticky” in various
ways. See John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (London, 1923); idem, A
Treatise on Money (New York, 1930); idem, The General Theory of Employment, Interest,
and Money (London, 1936). The standard biography is R. F. Harrod, The Life of John
Maynard Keynes (London, 1963). For Keynesian approaches in America see Seymour Harris,
The New Economics: Keynes’ Influence on Theory and Public Policy (London, 1947); James
Tobin, The New Economics One Decade Older (Princeton, 1974); John Kenneth Galbraith, A
Theory of Price Control (Cambridge, 1952); idem, Money (Boston, 1975); R. Clower and A.
Leijonhufvud, “The Coordination of Economic Activities: A Keynesian Perspective,”
American Economic Review 65 (1975) 182–88; Sidney Weintraub, “The Keynesian Theory of
Inflation: The Two Faces of Janus,” International Economic Review 1 (1960); Axel
Leijonhufvud, On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes (New York, 1968);
Herschel Grossman, “Was Keynes a ‘Keynesian’?” Journal of Economic Literature 10 (1972)
26–35; Robert J. Barro, “Second Thoughts on Keynesian Economics,” American Economic
Review 69 (1979) 54–59.
Neoclassical cost-push and demand-pull inflation models were developed in Richard T.
Selden, “Cost-Push versus Demand-Pull Inflation, 1955–57,” Journal of Political Economy
67 (1959) 1–20; Robert J. Gordon, “The Demand For and Supply of Inflation,” Journal of Law
and Economics 18 (1975) 871–74; idem, “Alternative Responses of Policy to External Supply
Shocks,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1 (1975) 183–204; Robert E. Lucas, “Some
International Evidence on Output Inflation Trade-Offs,” American Economic Review 63 (1973)
326–34.
On administered price models and oligopoly theory, which hold that prices are
determined in part by the distribution of economic power, see Gardiner Means, Industrial
Prices and Their Relative Inflexibility, Senate Document 13, 74th Cong., 1st session (1935);
idem et al., The Structure of the American Economy (Washington, 1939); Paul M. Sweezy,
“Demand under Conditions of Oligopoly,” Journal of Political Economy 47 (1939) 569–73;
U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Administered Prices, 86th
Cong., 1st session (1959). On administered prices and excess demand, a suggestive essay is
Martin S. Feldstein, “The Rising Price of Physicians’ Services,” Review of Economics and
Statistics 52 (1970) 121–33.
“New inflation” models appear in W. David Slawson, The New Inflation: The Collapse
of Free Markets (Princeton, 1981); and Frank C. Ripley and Lydia Segal, “Price
Determination in 395 Manufacturing Industries,” Review of Economics and Statistics 55
(1973) 263–71.
Sociopolitical models of inflation include Fred Hirsch and John H. Goldthorpe, The
Political Economy of Inflation (Cambridge, Mass., 1978); Leon N. Lindberg and Charles S.
Maier, The Politics of Inflation and Economic Stagnation (Washington, 1985); and Paul
Peretz, “The Political Economy of Inflation” (thesis, Chicago, 1976).
Rational expectations theory hypothesizes that economic decisions are made not so much
in response to past prices themselves as to perceptions of present and future prices in a world
of incomplete information. This idea was put forward in John Muth, “Rational Expectations
and the Theory of Price Movements,” Econometrica 29 (1961) 315–35. It is examined in
Milton Friedman, “The Role of Monetary Policy,” American Economic Review 58 (1968) 1–
17; R. M. Solow, Price Expectations and the Behaviour of the Price Level (Manchester,
1969); S. J. Turnovsky and M. L. Wachter, “A Test of the ‘Expectations Hypothesis’ Using
Directly Observed Wage and Price Expectations,” Review of Economics and Statistics 54
(1972) 47–54; Stephen Figlewski and Paul Wachtel, “The Formation of Inflationary
Expectations,” Review of Economics and Statistics 63 (1981) 1–10; Clifford F. Thies,
“Interest Rates and Expected Inflation, 1831–1914: A Rational Expectations Approach,”
Southern Economic Journal 51 (1985) 1107–20.
Eclectic works include Gottfried Haberler, Inflation: Its Causes and Cures (Washington,
1966); Gardiner Means et al., The Roots of Inflation (New York, 1975); J. Popkin, ed.,
Analysis of Inflation, 1965–1974 (Cambridge, 1974); K. K. F. Zawadzki, The Economics of
Inflationary Processes (London, 1965).
Other theoretical writings have centered on specific problems, including stagflation,
disinflation, deflation, hyperinflation, long-term inflation, global inflation, the Economic
consequences of inflation, methods of controlling inflation, price and wage controls, price
relatives, price and wage movements, prices and income distribution, prices and interest,
prices and employment, or prices and interest.
On stagflation, a difficult problem for neoclassical economics, see A. S. Blinder,
Economic Policy and the Great Stagflation (New York, 1981); Karl Brunner et al.,
“Stagflation, Persistent Unemployment, and the Permanence of Economic Shocks,” Journal of
Monetary Economics 6 (1980) 467–92; Mokyr and Savin, “Stagflation in Historical
Perspective,” cited above; Mancur Olsen, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic
Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, 1982).
Disinflation and deflation are periodically rediscovered as theoretical problems; see,
e.g., Olivier Wormser, Déflation et dévaluation; Étude comparée de leurs effets sur les prix
(Paris, 1938); Donald Franklin, “Risks of deflation,” Banker 136 (1986) 47.
Hyperinflation as a theoretical problem is studied from a monetarist perspective by
Phillip Cagan, “The Monetary Dynamics of Hyperinflation,” in Milton Friedman, ed., Studies
in the Quantity Theory of Money (Chicago, 1956), 3–24.
Long-term inflation is the subject of Phillip Cagan, Persistent Inflation: Historical and
Policy Essays (New York, 1979); and G. L. Bach, The New Inflation: Causes, Effects, Cures
(Providence, 1958, 1973, 1974). Also useful are James Tobin, “Inflation: Monetary and
Structural Causes and Cures”; Paul Beckerman, “Inflation and Inflation Feedback”; David
Colander, “Towards a Real Theory of Inflation”; Thomas F. Wilson, “Institutional Change as a
Source of Excessive Monetary Expansion”; Y. S. Brenner, “Sources of Inflation: Old and
New”; Edward Marcus, “Inflation, the Terms of Trade, and National Income Estimates”;
Patricia F. Bowers, “A Theoretical Analysis of the Exchange Process and Inflation”; Hyman P.
Minsky, “Institutional Roots of American Inflation”; all in Schmukler and Marcus, eds.,
Inflation through the Ages, 3–146, 265–77.
Global inflation is explored in Michael R. Darby et al., The International Transmission
of Inflation (Chicago, 1985), a monetarist approach; N. Kaldor, “Inflation and Recession in
the World Economy,” Economic Journal 86 (1976) 703–14; D. I. Meiselman and A. B. Laffer,
eds., The Phenomenon of Worldwide Inflation (Washington, 1975); A. J. Brown, The Great
Inflation,1939–51 (London, 1955); idem, World Inflation since 1950 (Cambridge, 1985);
Geoffrey Maynard and W. van Ryckegham, eds., A World of Inflation (New York, 1975);
Gardner Ackley, Stemming World Inflation (Paris, 1971).
The consequences of inflation are discussed in Gardner Ackley, “The Costs of Inflation,”
American Economic Review 68 (1978) 149–54; James Tobin and Leonard Ross, “Living with
Inflation,” New York Review of Books, 6 May 1971, 23–24; K. K. Kurihara, ed., Post-
Keynesian Economics (Aldershot, 1955, 1993); George Terborgh, Essays on Inflation
(Washington, 1971).
On methods of controlling inflation, two leading works in a large literature are Arthur
Okun and G. L. Perry, eds., Curing Chronic Inflation (Washington, 1978); Robert M. Solow
and Paul M. Samuelson, “Analytical Aspects of Anti-Inflation Policy,” American Economic
Review 50 (1960) 177–94; see also from a very different perspective Richard Portes, “The
Control of Inflation: Lessons from East European Experience,” Economica 44 (1977) 109–29.
The effect of price and wage controls is studied in Hugh Rockoff, “Price and Wage
Controls in Four Wartime Periods,” Journal of Economic History 41 (1981) 381–401, which
finds that controls worked better than many neoclassical economists believe; similar
conclusions appear in Orley Ashenfelter and Robert S. Smith, “Compliance with the Minimum
Wage Law,” Journal of Political Economy 87 (1979) 333–50; a study of variability in
effectiveness is Charles C. Cox, “The Enforcement of Public Price Controls,” Journal of
Politial Economy 88 (1980) 887–916.
On the problem of price relatives and the classical problem of Ricardian distribution and
Marshallian scissors, see L. Pasinetti, “A Mathematical Formulation of the Ricardian System,”
Review of Economic Studies 27 (1960) 78–98; Ronald Findlay, “Relative Prices, Growth, and
Trade in a Simple Ricardian System,” Economica 41 (1974) 1–13; Daniel R. Vining and
Thomas C. Elwertowski, “The Relationship between Relative Prices and the General Price
Level,” American Economic Review 66 (1976) 699–708; Mario I. Blejer and Leonardo
Liederman, “On the Real Effects of Inflation and Relative-Price Variability: Some Empirical
Evidence,” Review of Economics and Statistics 62 (1980) 539–44, which explores the
consequences of relative price variability for production and employment; Richard W. Parks,
“Inflation and Relative Price Variability,” Journal of Political Economy 86 (1978) 79–95;
Michael D. Bordo, “The Effects of Monetary Change on Relative Commodity Prices and the
Role of Long-Term Contracts,” Journal of Political Economy 88 (1980) 1088–1109; Paul H.
Earl, Inflation and the Structure of Industrial Prices (Lexington, 1973).
On inflation and wages, see A. A. Alchian and R. A. Kessel, “The Meaning and Validity
of the Inflation-Induced Lag of Wages behind Prices,” American Economic Review 50 (1960)
43–66; T. Cargill, “An Empirical Investigation of the Wage-Lag Hypothesis,” ibid. 59 (1969)
806–16; Arnold H. Packer and Seong H. Park, “Distortions in Relative Wages and Shifts in the
Phillips Curve,” Review of Economics and Statistics 56 (1973) 16–22.
Barry Eichengreen, “Macroeconomics and History,” in Alexander J. Field, ed., The
Future of Economic History (Boston, 1987) 43–90, observes (48) that “no one has as yet
provided a satisfying macroEconomic explanation for sixteenth-century real wage and relative
price trends.”
On inflation and the distribution of income and wealth, see E. Budd and D. Seiders, “The
Impact of Inflation on the Distribution of Income and Wealth,” American Economic Review 61
(1971) 128–38; G. L. Bach and A. Ando, “The Redistributional Effects of Inflation,” Review
of Economics and Statistics 39 (1957) 1–13; G. L. Bach and James B. Stephenson, “Inflation
and the Redistribution of Wealth,” Review of Economics and Statistics 66 (1974) 1–13;
Andrew F. Brimmer, “Inflation and Income Distribution in the United States,” Review of
Economics and Statistics 53 (1971) 37–48; R. G. Hollister and J. L. Palmer, “The Impact of
Inflation on the Poor,” in K. E. Boulding and M. Pfaff, eds., Redistribution to the Rich and the
Poor: The Grants Economics of Income Distribution (Belmont, Calif., 1972); J. Muellbauer,
“Prices and Inequality: The United Kingdom Experience,” Economic Journal 84 (1974) 32–
55; Paul Peretz, The Political Economy of Inflation, cited above; Edward N. Wolff, “The
Distributional Effects of the 1969–1975 Inflation on Holdings of Household Wealth in the
United States,” Review of Income and Wealth 25 (1979) 195–207; Lindert and Williamson,
American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History, 136–38.
Many economists believe that inflation is associated with egalitarian trends, but this
refers mainly to evidence from 1939 to 1970, an anomalous period in the history of prices.
Very different patterns appeared before 1920 and after 1970. Others argue that “the
redistributional effects are more complex than isoften suggested” and that “simple conclusions
that inflation is good for the rich and bad for the poor need to be viewed with considerable
doubt” (Bach and Stephenson, 13), but these judgments also lack historical depth.
On inflation and employment, the classic essay is A. W. Phillips, “The Relation between
Unemployment and the Rate of Change in Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–
1957,” Economica 25 (1958) 283–99. For further discussion, see John A. James, “The
Stability of Nineteenth-Century Phillips Curve Relationship,” Explorations in Economic
History 26 (1989) 117–34; Erik Aerts and Barry Eichengreen, eds., Unemployment and
Underemployment in Historical Perspective (Leuven, 1990). Other contributions include
Milton Friedman, “Nobel Lecture: Inflation and Unemployment,” Journal of Political
Economy 85 (1977) 451–472; James Tobin, “Inflation and Unemployment,” presidential
address, American Economic Review 62 (1972) 1–18; Charles C. Holt et al., The
Unemployment-Inflation Dilemma: A Manpower Solution (Washington, 1971); George L.
Perry, Unemployment, Money Wage Rates, and Inflation (Cambridge, 1966). Helpful
bibliographical notes on inflation and unemployment appear in Maynard and van Ryckeghem,
eds., A World of Inflation, 42–44 and Gerald W. Scully, “Static vs. Dynamic Phillips Curves,”
Review of Economics and Statistics 56 (1974) 387–90.
A thorn in monetarist flesh is the Gibson paradox: that is, the tendency for prices and
interest rates to rise and fall together. Every monetarist of my acquaintance can explain it away,
but it keeps coming back again. This problem has spawned a large literature. See Gerald P.
Dwyer Jr., “An Explanation of the Gibson Paradox” (thesis, Chicago, 1979); Robert J. Shiller
and Jeremy Siegel, “The Gibson Paradox and Historical Movements in Interest Rates,”
Journal of Political Economy, 85 (1977) 891–907; C. Knick Harley, “The Interest Rate and
Prices in Britain, 1873–1913: A Study of the Gibson Paradox,” Explorations in Economic
History 14 (1977) 69–89.

General Works on Price Movements: Social Theory

Another body of theoretical writings has been produced by social scientists and social
historians. This literature is divisible into three large groups that might be called Malthusian,
Marxist, and Smithian.
The first of these schools of thought follows in the footsteps of Malthus. Many scholars
believe that price movements are driven mainly by endogenous demographic trends.
Malthusians believe that population growth tends to force farm prices and rents up while
sending industrial prices and wages down. Others hold that population movements are
themselves constrained by social and cultural systems—an approach taken in this book. But the
idea of endogenous demographic determinants is very strong in the literature of social science.
British historians took the lead in developing this model, primarily with reference to medieval
trends. Among the early general statements was M. M. Postan, “[Section 3, Histoire
économique;] Moyen âge,” IXe Congrès internationale des sciences historiques, … Rapports
(2 vols., Paris, 1950–51) vol. I; rpt. in M. M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and
General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge, 1973), and many other writings
cited below. A Malthusian model was also applied to modern history in H. J. Habbakuk, “The
Economic History of Modern Britain,” Journal of Economic History 18 (1958) 488–501; rpt.
in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, Population in History (London, 1965), 147–58.
Habbakuk asserted, “For those who care for the overmastering pattern, the elements are
evidently there for a heroically simplified version of English history before the nineteenth
century in which the long-term movements in prices, in income distribution, in investment, in
real wages, and in migration are dominated by changes in the growth of population.”
A similar approach was developed in the early modern period by the great French
historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in his grand thèse, Les paysans de Languedoc (Paris,
1966), and his inaugural lecture at the College de France, “L’histoire immobile,” Annales
E.S.C. 29 (1974) 675.
 Another Malthusian contribution of high importance has been made by the American
Economic demographer Ronald Demos Lee, in Econometric Studies of Topics in
Demographic History (New York, 1978), and “A Historical Perspective on Economic Aspects
of the Population Explosion: The Case of Preindustrial England,” in Richard A. Easterlin, ed.,
Population and Economic Change in Developing Countries (National Bureau Comm. for
Economic Research Conference Report no. 30 [1980]; rpt. Chicago, 1987), 517–66. Lee
concludes from a cross-spectral analysis of the Cambridge group’s population estimates and
the Phelps-Brown and Hopkins wage series that the English economy easily absorbed changes
in rates of population growth of about 0.4 percent a year but that “deviations of population size
above or below this trend line, however, had dramatic consequences.” He also believes that
demographic changes were themselves autonomous—a conclusion not firmly grounded.
Some American economists believe that the Malthusian model is fundamentally mistaken
when it is developed into an argument that an increase in population causes the general price
level to rise. Joel Mokyr, for example, insists that “other things equal, the effect of population
growth is deflationary.” This hypothesis is developed in “Discussion,” Journal of Economic
History 44 (1984) 341–3. On this issue opinion is divided among Malthusians themselves.
A different critique of Malthusian theory comes from Marxist historians, who believe that
the prime movers of price movements are changes in modes of production and class relations.
Marxist models have enjoyed a revival among some historians in the Western world during the
1970s and 1980s, at a time when young scholars in eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and
China were turning away from them. Marxist explanations are specially popular among
historians of the early modern era as a way of making sense of transformations in that period.
One body of Marxist theory seeks to explain economic trends primarily in terms of the
transition from one stage of production to another—and especially from feudalism to
capitalism. This approach stimulated a lively theoretical debate in the 1950s, which centered
on the conceptualization of feudal and capital systems and the causes of their transformation.
The movement of prices and especially wages became an important issue in this debate. The
central work was Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London, 1943;
rpt. 1963, 1972). After a critique was published by American Marxist Paul Sweezy in Science
and Society in 1950, a controversy continued in various Marxist journals. Thirteen essays
including Sweezy’s are reprinted in Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to
Capitalism (London, 1976, 1978).
Another body of theoretical literature centers on the relative merits of Marxist and
Malthusian models. An important essay is Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and
Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past and Present 70 (1976), a Marxist
attack on “demographic determinism” in general and on the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
in particular. Brenner insists that “it is the structure of class relations, of class power, which
will determine the manner and degree to which particular demographic and commercial
changes will effect long-term trends in the distribution of income and Economic growth—not
vice versa.” This uncompromising thesis stimulated many articles by academic Marxists and
Antimarxists in Past & Present, from which ten are reprinted in T. H. Aston and C. H. E.
Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in
Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985).
Yet another theoretical debate among Marxists has developed around Immanuel
Wallerstein’s “world-systems” model, an ambitious and thoughtful attempt to combine
Braudel’s problematique with a Marxist model of historical development and the
epistemology of American sociology. The results are set forward in Immanuel Wallerstein, The
Modern World-System (2 vols., New York, 1974, 1989); also idem, “Kondratieff Up or
Kondratieff Down?” Review 2 (1979) 663–73; “Economic Cycles and Socialist Policies,”
Futures 16 (1984) 579–85; “Long Waves as Capitalist Process,” Review 7 (1984) 559–75.
A very different school of historical theory seeks to explain economic and social trends
primarily in terms of systems of exchange and market relationships. It is stigmatized by
Marxists as “Smithian,” or worse, “neoSmithian.” The leading work is by American economic
historians Douglas North and Robert Thomas, The Rise of the West World (Cambridge, 1973);
idem, “The Rise and Fall of the Manorial System: A Theoretical Model,” Journal of
Economic History 31 (1971) 777–803.
Critiques of this approach include Alexander James Field, “The Problem with
Neoclassical Institutional Economics: A Critique with Special Reference to the North/Thomas
Model of Pre-1500 Europe,” Explorations in Economic History 18 (1981) 174–98. See also
R. Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,”
New Left Review 104 (1977).

Catastrophe Studies
Of relevance to the study of the last stage of each price revolution is a growing literature
on crisis and catastrophe. A pioneering work is Pitirim Sorokin, Man and Society in
Calamity: The effects of War, revolution, Famine, pestilence upon Human Mind, Behavior,
Social Organization … (New York, 1946). An interesting French journal has been devoted to
this subject. It was founded as Materiaux pour l’Etude des Calamités in 1925, and became the
Revue pour l’Étude des Calamités in 1938. Cultural and social approaches to the study of
catastrophe are explored in Paul Hugger, “Elemente einer Ethnologie der Katastrophe in der
Schweiz,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 86 (1990) 25–36; and Wieland Jäger, Katastrophe und
Gesellschaft Grundlegung und Kritik von Modellen der Katastrophensoziologie. Other
works include Kai T. Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma,
and Community (New York, 1994); John I. Clarke, ed., Population and Disaster (Oxford,
1989).

The Ancient World

General works on money in the ancient world, with some attention to prices, include A.
R. Burns, Money and Monetary Policy in Early Times (London, 1927); François Lenormant,
La monnaie dans l’antiquité (3 vols., Paris, 1878–79); L. Incarnati, Moneta e scambio
nell’antichitá a nell’ alto medioevo (Roma, 1953).
A starting point for studies of the rhythm of ancient history is Rein Taagepera, “Size and
Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 3000 to 600 B.C.,” Social Science Research 7
(1978) 180–96; idem, “Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600
A.D.,” Social Science History 3 (1979) 115–38.

Price Movements in Mesopotamia

Specialized studies on money and prices in Mesopotamia include Henry F. Lutz, “Price
Fluctations in Ancient Babylonia,” Journal of Economic and Business History 4 (1931–32)
335–55; Howard Farber, “An Examination of Long-Term Fluctuations in Prices and Wages for
North Babylonia during the Old Babylonian Period,” (thesis, Northern Illinois University,
1974); idem, “A Price and Wage Study for Northern Babylonia during the Old Babylonian
Period,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 21 (1978) 1–51; W. H.
Dubberstein, “Comparative Prices in Later Babylonia (625–400),” American Journal of
Semitic Languages and Literatures 56 (1938) 21–72; B. Meissner, Warenpreise in
Babylonien (Berlin, 1936).

Egyptian Prices
Leading works include Angelo Segré, Circolazione monetaria e Prèzzi nel mondo antico
ed in particolare Egitto (Rome, 1922); J. J. Janssen, Commodity Prices from the Ramessid
Period: An Economic Study of the Village of Necropolis Workmen at Thebes (Leiden, 1975);
Karl Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt (Chicago, 1976); T. Reekmans, “The
Ptolemaic Copper Inflation 220–173 B.C.,” Studia Hellenistica 7 (1951) 61; idem, “Economic
and Social Repercussions of the Ptolemaic Copper Inflation,” Chronique d’Egypte 24 (1949)
324; and for Roman Egypt, J. A. Straus, “Le prix des esclaves dans les papyrus d’époque
romaine trouvés dans, l’Egypte,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 11 (1973) 289–
95; A. K. Bowman, “The Economy of Egypt in the Earlier Fourth Century,” in C. E. King, ed.,
Imperial Revenue, Expenditure, and Monetary Policy in the Fourth Century A.D. (Oxford,
1980) 23–40; Roger S. Bagnall, Currency and Inflation in Fourth-Century Egypt (Chico,
Calif., 1985).

Prices in Ancient Greece

Greek prices are discussed in Alfred Jacobs, “Preis (1) Preisgeschichte,”
Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften (Gottingen, 1964), 8:459–76, an excellent short
survey of price movements in classical Greece (600–169 B.C.) and Rome (456 B.C. to A.D.
301), with a bibliography. A pathbreaking attempt at a price history of ancient Greece is Lydia
Spaventa de Novellis, I Prèzzi in Grecia e a Roma nell’antichita (Rome, 1934); a copy of
this work is in the New York Public Library. Also helpful are Gustave Glotz, La travail dans
la Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1920; Eng. tr., New York, 1926); M. I. Finley, Studies in Land and
Credit in Ancient Athens, 500–200 B.C. (New Brunswick, 1952); Chester G. Starr, The
Economic and Social Growth of Ancient Greece, 800–500 B.C. (New York, 1977); K. Christ,
“Die Griechen und das Geld,” Saeculum 15 (1964) 214–29; M. J. Price et al., Essays in Greek
Coinage Presented to Stanley Robinson (Oxford, 1968); L. Lacroix, “La monnaie grecque et
les problèmes de la circulation monétaire,” Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres, Academie
Royale Belgique 55 (1969) 169–80.

Rome
On Roman prices there is a large literature. Some material on prices appears in Michael
Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (2 vols., Oxford, 1926;
rpt. 1957); much more is in Tenney Frank, ed., An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome
(Baltimore, 1933–40).
An important survey is A. H. M. Jones, “Inflation under the Roman Empire,” Economic
History Review 2d ser. 5 (1953) 293–318; a second edition, revised and corrected, appears in
P. A. Brunt, ed., The Roman Economy: Studies in Ancient Economic and Administrative
History (Oxford, 1974), 187–229.
Much data is collected in Richard Duncan-Jones, The Economy of the Roman Empire:
Quantitative Studies (Cambridge, 1974); idem, “The Price of Wheat in Lower Egypt,” in
Structure and Scale in the Roman Economy (Cambridge, 1990), 143–56; idem, “The Price of
Wheat in Roman Egypt under the Principate,” Chiron 8 (1978) 541–60; J. Kolendo, “L’arrêt de
l’afflux des monnaies romaines dans le ‘Barbaricum’ sous Septime-Sévère,” Les Dévaluations
a Rome 2 (Rome) 169–72.
Also useful are G. Rickman, The Corn Supply of Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1980); S. Bolin,
State and Currency in the Roman Empire up to A.D. 300 (Stockholm, 1958); F. M.
Heichelheim, “New Light on Currency and Inflation in Hellenistic-Roman Times, from
Inscriptions and Papyri,” Economic History 10 (1935) 1–11; Sture Bolin, State and Currency
in the Roman Empire to 300 A.D. (Stockholm, 1958); P. Louis, Ancient Rome at Work (London,
1927); H. Mattingly, Roman Coins from the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Western Empire
(New York, 1928).
Period-specific studies include 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; Z. Yaveta, “Fluctuations monétaires et condition de la plèbe à la fin de la
République,” Recherches sur les societes anciennes (Caen, 1971); Tenney Frank, “The
Financial Crisis of 33 A.D.” American Journal of Philology 56 (1935) 336–41; L. C. West,
“The Coinage of Diocletian and the Edict on Prices,” in P. R. Coleman-Norton, ed., Studies in
Roman Economic and Social History in Honor of Allen Chester Johnson (Princeton, 1951),
290–302; Marta Giacchero, ed., Edictum Diocletiani et collegarum de pretiis rerum
venalium … (Genoa, 1974); C. R. Whittaker, “Inflation and the Economy in the Fourth Century
A. D., in C. E. King, ed., Imperial Revenue, Expenditure, and Monetary Policy in the Fourth
Century A.D. (Oxford, 1980), 1–22; M. Fulford, “Coin Circulation and Mint Activity in the
Late Roman Empire: Some Economic Implications,” Archaeological Journal 135 (1978) 67–
114.

Palestine
Prices in Palestine are examined in Daniel Sperber, Roman Palestine, 200–400: Money
and Prices (Ramat-gan, 1974); A. Kindler, ed., The Patterns of Monetary Development in
Phoencia and Palestine in Antiquity (Jerusalem, 1963).

Byzantium
For the eastern empire and Byzantine history, see G. Ostrogorsky, “Löhne und Preise in
Byzanz,” Byzantische Zeitschrift 23 (1932), Italian trans. in Romano, I Prèzzi in Europa, 47–
85; H. Antoniadis-Bibicou, “Démographie, salaires et prix à Byzanze au XIe siècle,” Annales
E.S.C. 27 (1972) 215–46; D. A. Zakythinos, Crise monétaire et crise économique à Byzance
du XIIIe au XVe siècle (Athens, 1948); Michael F. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary
Economy, c. 300–1450 (Cambridge, 1985); Angeliki LaiouThomadakis, Peasant Society in
the Late Byzantine Empire: A Social and Demographic Study (Princeton, 1977); A. L.
Harvey, “The Growth of the Byzantine Rural Economy (thesis, Birmingham, 1983); A. M.
Andréadés, “De la monnaie et de la puissance d’achat des métaux précieux dans l’empire
byzantin,” Byzantion 1 (1924) 75–115; C. Morrison, “La dévaluation de la monnaie byzantine
au XIe siècle: Essai d’interprétation,” Travaux et Mémoires 6 (1976) 3–48; Franz Dölger,
Beitrage zur Geschichte der byzantinischen Finanzverwaltung (Darmstadt, 1927).
Islam
For Islamic prices and wages the leading authority is Eliyahu Ashtor, Historie des prix et
des salaires dans l’Orient médiéval (Paris, 1969); tr. as A Social and Economic History of
the Near East in the Middle Ages (London, 1976); idem, Les métaux precieux et la balance
des payements du Proche-Orient à la fin de la basse époque (Paris, 1971); idem, The
Medieval Near East: Social and Economic History (London, 1978), a collection of essays on
prices, wage and interest movements; idem, “La recherche des prix dans l’Orient médiéale,”
Studia Islamica 21 (1964); idem, “Prix et salaires dans l’Espagne musulmane aux Xe et XIe
siècles,” Annales E.S.C. 20 (1965) 664–79; “Matériaux pur l’histoire des prix dans l’Egypte
médiévale,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 6 (1963) 158–89;
idem, “Le coût de la vie dans l’Egypte médiévale,” Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient 3 (1960) 56–77; idem, “Le coût de la vie dans la Syrie médiévale,”
Arabica 8 (1961) 59–73; idem, “Le coût de la vie en Palestine au Moyen Age,” in L. A. Mayer
Memorial Volume, 154–64; also published in Eretz-Israel 7 (1963); also idem, “Prix et
salaires à l’époque mamlouke,” Revue des Études Islamiques (1949) 49–94; idem, “Essai sur
les prix et les salaires dans l’empire califien,” Rivista degli Studi Orientale 36 (1961) 19–69;
idem, “L’évolution des prix dans le Proche-orient à la basse-époque, Journal of Economic
and Social History of the Orient 4 (1961) 15–46.
Especially strong on the demographic and ecological history of Islam is Xavier de
Planhol’s excellent Les fondements géographiques de l’histoire de l’Islam (Paris, 1968). For
a fiscal perspective see H. Rabie, The Financial System of Egypt, A.H. 564–741/A.D. 1169–
1341 (London, 1972); William Popper, Egypt and Syria under the Circassian Sultans (1382–
1468 A.D.) (Berkeley, 1955).

Ancient Africa
Useful works include 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); and 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.

Polynesia
A. T. Wilson, “Isotope Evidence for Past Climatic and Environmental Change,” Journal
of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1980) 241–50, is an important work on climate and historical
change in Oceania.

East Asia
General works on East Asian civilizations before the modern era include Ping-ti Ho,
Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (1959, 2d ed., Cambridge, 1967); Mark
Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past; A Social and Economic Interpretation (London,
1973); 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. An older but still useful survey is C. P. Fitzgerald, China, A Short Cultural
History (New York, 1935, 1972).
Period-specific studies are R. Hartwell, “A Cycle of Economic Change in Imperial
China: Coal and Iron in North-east China, 750–1350,” Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient 10 (1967)
On the Sung and Ming periods, there are 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;
Ch’uan Han-sheng, “Sung-Ming chien pai-yin kou-mai-li ti pien-tung chi ch’i yuan-yin,”
[“Fluctuations in the purchasing power of silver at their cause from the Sung to the Ming
dynasties,”] Hsin-ya-hseuh-pao [New Asian Journal] 8 (1967) 157–86, with a summary in
English; M. Cartier, “Notes sur l’histoire des prix en Chine du XIVe au XVIIe siècle,” [1368–
1644] 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; W. S. Atwell, “Notes on
Silver, Foreign Trade, and the Late Ming Economy,” Ch’ing shih wen-ti 3 (1977) 1–33; idem
“International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy, circa 1530–1650,” Past & Present 95
(1982) 68–90.
For the Ching period, see Yeh-chien Wang, “The Secular Trend of Prices during the
Ch’ing Period,“ Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of
Hong Kong, 5 (1972) 364; Han-sheng Ch’uan and Richard A. Kraus, Mid-Ch’ing Rice
Markets and Trade: An Essay in Price History (Cambridge, 1975).

The Western World in the Early Middle Ages

On the early medieval West, Rosamond McKitterick, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval
History, vol 2, c. 700-c. 900 (Cambridge, 1995), has chapters on economic organization by
Adriaan Verhulst (481–509) and on money and coinage by Mark Blackburn (538–62) but
nothing on prices.
Price lists for this period appear in Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, El precio de la vida en el
reino astur-leone’s hace mil Años (Buenos Aires, 1945), a rare work that can be found in the
New York Public Library.
General works of economic history on this period include Robert Latouche, Les origines
de l’économie occidentale IVe–XIe siècle (Paris, 1956); and Georges Duby, The Early
Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth
Century (Ithaca, 1978).
Other works centering on the question of subsistence and commerce include P. Grierson,
“Commerce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of the Evidence,” Royal Historical Society
Transactions 9 (1959) 123–40; R. Hodges, Dark Age Economics: The Origins of Towns and
Trade, A.D. 600–1000 (London, 1982); S. R. H. Jones, “Transaction Costs, Institutional
Change, and the Emergence of a Market Economy in Later Anglo-Saxon England,” Economic
History Review 46 (1993) 658–78; P. Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of
the Evidence,” Royal Historical Society Transactions 5th ser. 9 (1959) 123–40; M. de
Bouard, “Problemes des Subsistence dans un État medievale: le marché et les prix des
céréales au royaume angevin de Sicile,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 10 (1938)
483.
On money and coinage, see P. Grierson and M. Blackburn, Medieval European Coinage
(Cambridge, 1986); A. Blanchet, Les tresors de monnaies romaines et les invasions
germaniques (Paris, 1900); Marc Bloch, “Le probleme de l’or au moyen age,” Annales
d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 5 (1933) 1–34, Eng. tr. in Land and Work in Mediaeval
Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch (Berkeley, 1967), 186–229; Carlo Cipolla,
“Currency Depreciation in Medieval Europe,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 15 (1962–
63) 413–22.

The Medieval Price Revolution

General works include Georges Duby, L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans
l’ Occident médiéval (2 vols., Paris, 1962), trans. C. Postan as Rural Economy and Country
Life in the Medieval West (London, 1968); idem, The Early Growth of the European
Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca, 1974)
with a “bibliographical guide”; M. M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society: An
Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages (London, 1972); idem, “Economic
Foundations of Medieval Society,” in idem, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General
Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge, 1973), 2–27; idem, Medieval Economy and
Society (1972); J. Z. Titow, English Rural Society, 1200–1350 (London, 1969); H. E. Hallam,
Rural England, 1066–1348 (Brighton, 1981); Edward Miller, “England in the Twelfth and
Thirteenth Centuries: An Economic Contrast?” Economic History Review 2d ser. 24 (1971) 1–
14.
A heroic attempt to model the main lines of medieval economic history appears in
Richard H. Britnell and Bruce M. S. Campbell eds., A Commercialising Economy: England
1086 to c. 1300 (Manchester, 1995). Graeme Donald Snooks, “The Dynamic Role of the
Market in the Anglo-Norman Economy and Beyond, 1086–1300,” ibid., 27–54, discusses great
waves in prices, population, domestic product, and product per capita from the eleventh
century to the present. Nicholas Mayhew, “Modelling Medieval Monetisation,” ibid., 55–77,
offers a very different estimate of medieval domestic product. The disparity derives from
different readings of Domesday evidence. We are still a long way from closure on questions of
economic growth in the middle ages.
Major local studies of general interest in France include Robert Fossier’s excellent La
terre et les hommes en Picardie, jusqu’ a la fin du XIIIe siècle (2 vols., Paris and Louvain,
1968); Y. Bezard, La vie rurale dans le sud de la région parisienne (Paris, 1929); A. Fierro,
“Un cycle démographique: Dauphiny et Faucigny du XIVe aux XIXe siècle,” Annales E.S.C.
(1969); Joseph Strayer, “Economic Conditions in the Country of Beaumont-le-Roger, 1261–
1313,” Speculum 26 (1951) 277–87; Ph. Wolff, Commerces et marchands de Toulouse (vers
1350-vers 1450) (Pion, 1954); J. Yver, “Remarques sur l’évolution de quelques prix en
Normandie aux XIVe et XVe siècles,” Revue d’Histoire du Droit Français et Étranger 4
(1958) 145–54; G. Fourquin, Les campagnes de la région parisienne à la fin du moyen age
(Paris, 1964); G. Lesage, Marseille Angevine (Paris, 1950).
Among Belgian and Dutch local histories there are L. Genicot, L’économie rurale
namuroise au bas Moyen Age, 1199–1429 (Louvain, 1960); G. Sivery, Structures agraires et
vie rurale dans le Hainaut à la fin du Moyen Age (Lille, 1973); N. DePauw, ed., Ypre jeghen
Poperinghe angeande den verbonden: Gedingsstukken der XIVde eeuw nopens het laken
(Ghent, 1899); G. Des Marez and E. De Sagher, eds. Comptes de la ville d’Ypres de 1267 à
1329 (2 vols. Brussels, 1909).
English local studies include H. P. R. Finberg, Tavistock Abbey: A Study in the Social
and Economic History of Devon (Cambridge, 1951; 2d ed., Newton Abbot, 1969); W. G.
Hoskins and H. P. R. Finberg, Devonshire Studies (London, 1952); H. P. R. Finberg,
Gloucestershire (London, 1955); W. G. Hoskins, Leicestershire (London, 1970); Edward
Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely (Cambridge, 1951); J. B. Harley, “Population Trends
and Agricultural Developments from the Warwickshire Hundred Rolls of 1279,” Economic
History Review 2d ser.II (1958) 8–18; Frances Davenport, The Economic Development of a
Norfolk Manor, 1086–1565 (Cambridge, 1906); E, Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely:
The Social History of an Ecclesiastical Estate from the Tenth Century to the Early
Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 1951); Alan Everitt, Continuity and Colonization: The
Evolution of Kentish Settlement (Leicester, 1986); J. Hatcher, Rural Economy and Society in
Medieval Cornwall, 1300–1500 (Cambridge, 1970); H. E. Hallam, Settlement and Society: A
Study of the Early Agrarian History of South Lincolnshire (Cambridge, 1965); idem, Rural
England, 1066–1348 (Brighton, 1981).
Italian studies include H. Bresc, Un monde méditerranéean: économie et société en
Sicilie, 1300–1450 (2 vols., Rome, 1986).
For Spain there is C. Dufourcq, L’Espagne catalane et le maghrib aux XIIIe et XIVe
siècles . . . (Paris, 1966).
For demographic trends in medieval Europe, see J. Z. Titow, “Some Evidence of the
Thirteenth-Century Population Increase,” Economic History Review 14 (1961) 218–23; Josiah
Russell, Late Ancient and Medieval Population, 20; idem, “Recent Advances in Medieval
Demography,” Speculum 45 (1965) 84–101; idem, “Aspects démographiques des débuts de la
féodalité,” Annales E.S.C, 20 (1965) 1118–27; a critique of Russell’s estimates appears in G.
Ohlin, “No Safety in Numbers: Some Pitfalls in Historical Statistics,” in H. Rosovsky, ed.,
Industrialization in Two Systems: Essays in Honor of Alexander Gershenkron (New York,
1966), 70–81. Other essays include M. M. Postan, “Some Economic Evidence of Declining
Population in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 2 (1950) 221–46;
Julian Cornwall, “English Population in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Economic History
Review, 2d ser. 23 (1970) 32–44; H. E. Hallam, “Population Density in Medieval Fenland,”
Economic History Review 14 (1961) 71–79; and “Some Thirteenth-Century Censuses,” ibid.
10 (1957) 340–61; idem, Rural England, 1066–1348 (Brighton, 1981), 245–50; H. E. Hallam,
“Population Movements in England, 1086–1350,” in Hallam, ed., The Agrarian History of
England and Wales (Cambridge, 1988), II, 508–593; Enrico Fiume, “Sui rapporti economici
tra cittá e contado nell’ etá communale,” Archivio Storico Italiano 114 (1956) 18–68; David
Herlihy, “The Medieval Marriage Market,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976) 3–
27; idem, “The Generation in Medieval History,” Viator 5 (1974) 347–64; E. Baratier, “La
démographie Provençale au XIIIe et XIVe siècle (Paris, 1961).
On medieval price movements, the literature is most abundant for England. Besides
William Beveridge, Prices and Wages in England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century
cited above; idem, “The Yield and Price of Corn in the Middle Ages,” Economic Journal,
Economic History Supplement 1 (1926–29) 162–66; A. L. Poole, “Livestock Prices in the
Twelfth Century,” English Historical Review 55 (1940) 284–95; M. M. Postan and J. Titow,
“Heriots and Prices on Winchester Manors,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 11 (1959)
392–411; J. Longden, “Statistical Notes on Winchester Heriots,” Economic History Review 2d
ser. 11 (1959) 412–17.
The best and most comprehensive studies of English medieval prices are those of D. L.
Farmer (University of Saskatchewan): “Some Price Fluctuations in Angevin England,”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 9 (1956–57) 34–43; “Some Grain Price Movements in
Thirteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 10 (1957) 207–20; “Some
Livestock Price Movements in Thirteenth–Century England,” Economic History Review 2d
ser. 22 (1969) 1–16; “Crop Yields, Prices, and Wages in Medieval England,” Studies in
Medieval and Renaissance History 6 (1983) 117–55; “Grain Yields on Westminster Abbey
Manors, 1271–1410,” Canadian Journal of History 18 (1981) 331–47; “Prices and Wages,”
in H. E. Hallam, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 2, 1042–1350
(Cambridge, 1988), 716–817; “Prices and Wages, 1350–1500,” in E. Miller, ed., The
Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 3, 1348–1500 (Cambridge, 1988), 431–525.
Other price studies include Norman S. B. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn
Market from the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1915); T. H. Lloyd,
“The Movement of Wool Prices in Medieval England,” Economic History Review Supplement
6 (1973) 38–50; P. D. A. Harvey, “The English Inflation of 1180–1220,” Past and Present 61
(1973) 3–30; Mavis Mate, “High Prices in Early Fourteenth–Century England: Causes and
Consequences,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 28 (1975) 1–16.
Specially helpful for price relatives is an unpublished thesis, Clyde George Reed, “Price
Data and European Economic History: England, 1300–1600” (thesis, University of
Washington, 1972).
The most comprehensive French study of the medieval price revolution is still d’Avenel,
Historique économique de la propriété, des salaires des denrées et de tous les prix en
general depuis l’an 1200 jusqu’en l’an 1800, cited above, vols. 2 and 3.
Especially helpful for Italian prices in this period are Gino Luzzatto, “II costo della vita a
Venezia nel Trecento,” Ateneo Veneto 25 (1934); Michel de Bouard, “Problemes de
subsistances dans un état médieval: Le marché et les prix des céréales au Royaume angevin de
Sicile: 1266–82,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 10 (1938); Raimondo Carta–
Raspi, L’economia della Sardegna medievale: scambi e prèzzi (Cagliari, 1940); Magalde and
Fabris, “Notizie storiche e statisttiche sui prèzzi e salari nei secoli XIII–XVIII nelle città di
Milano, Venezia, Genova, Firenze, Lucca, Mantova e Forli”; Faraglia, Storia dei prèzzi in
Napoli . . . and Ettore Rossi and Paolo Maria Arcari, “I prèzzi a Genova dal XII al XV
secolo,” all cited above.
For central and eastern Europe, see, in addition to Abel, Agrarkrisen und
Agrarkonjunktur, cited above, Alfred Dieck, “Lebensmittelpreise in Mitteleuropa und im
Vordern Orient zum 12. bis 17. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und
Agrarsoziologie” 2 (1955), Italian tr. in Romano, ed., I prèzzi in Europa, 143–50 idem,
“Tauschobjekte, Preise und Löhne des Vorderen Orient und Mitteleuropas im Mittelalter und
Nachmittelalter,” Forschungen und Fortshritte 36 (1962); and Waschinski, Wahrung,
preisent-wicklung . . . in Schleswig–Holstein, cited above.
On wages, see William Beveridge, “Wages in Winchester Manors,” Economic History
Review 1st ser. 7 (1936–37) 22–43; idem, “Westminster Wages in the Manorial Era,”
Economic History Review, 2d ser. 8 (1955–56) 18–35; Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones,
“Masons’ Wages in Medieval England,” Economic History 2 (1933) 473–99; idem, The
Medieval Mason (Manchester, 1967); L. F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540
(Oxford, 1952); R. Beissel, Geldwert und Arbeitslohn im Mittelalter (Freiburg in Breisgau,
1884); B. Geremek, Le salariat dans l’artisanat parisien aux XIIIe–XVe siècles (Paris,
1968); Etienne Robo, “Wages and Prices in the Hundred of Farnham in the Thirteenth Century,”
Economic History 3 (1934) 24–34; a discussion of wages appears in H. Thomas Johnson,
“Cathedral Building and the Medieval Economy,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 4
(1967) 191–210; B. W. E. Alford and M. Q. Smith, “The Economic Effects of Cathedral and
Church Building in Medieval England: A Reply,” ibid. 6 (1969) 158–69; H. Thomas Johnson,
“The Economic Effects of Cathedral and Church Building in Medieval England: A Rejoinder,”
ibid., 169–74.
On rent, see E. A. Kominskii, “Services and Money Rents in the Thirteenth Century,”
Economic History Review 5 (1935) 24–45; idem, “The Evolution of Feudal Rent in England
from the Eleventhth to the Fifteenth Centuries,” Past & Present 7 (1955) 12–36; idem, Studies
in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1956); Ronald Witt,
“The Landlord and the Economic Revival of the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, 1000–
1250,” American Historical Review 76 (1971) 965–88; Brice Lyon, “Medieval Real Estate
Developments and Freedom,” American Historical Review 63 (1957) 47–61; P. D. A. Harvey,
ed., The Peasant Land Market in Medieval England (Oxford, 1984); P. R. Hyams, “The
Origins of a Peasant Land Market in England,” Economic History Review 23 (1970) 18–31.
Rates of interest in medieval Europe are surveyed in Sidney Homer, A History of Interest
Rates (New Brunswick, 1963), 94–99.
Monetary movements are explored in Marc Bloch, “Le problème de l’or au Moyen Age,”
Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 5 (1933) 1–34, tr. J. E. Anderson in Land and
Work in Medieval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1967), 186–229. Also important is a companion piece by Bloch, translated by Anderson as
“Natural Economy or Money Economy: A Pseudo–Dilemma,” in ibid., 230–41.
A leading study is Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge,
1988). Other contributions to a large literature include Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and
Money, 1450–1920 (London, 1976); Carlo M. Cipolla, Money, Prices, and Civilization in the
Mediterranean World: Fifth to Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1956), cited above; idem,
“Currency Depreciation in Medieval Europe,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 15 (1963)
413–22; Michael Prestwich, “Early Fourteenth–Century Exchange Rates,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 32 (1979) 470–82; idem, “Edward I’s Monetary Policies and Their
Consequences,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 22 (1969) 406–16; C. C. Patterson, “Silver
Stocks and Losses in Ancient and Medieval Times,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 25
(1972) 205–35; D. M. Metcalf, “English Monetary History in the Time of Offa: A Reply,”
Numismatic Circular 71 (1963) 1651; Frederic Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic
(Baltimore, 1973), in which the author summarizes many years of study on this subject; idem,
“Le vecchie monete di conto Veneziane ed il ritorno dall’ore,” Atto dell Instituto Veneto di
Scienze Letre ed Arti: Classe di Scienzi Morali, Letter, ed Arti 117 (1958–59) 49–78. See
also Robert S. Lopez, “Back to Gold, 1252,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 9 (1956) 219–
40; A. M. Watson, “Back to Gold and Silver,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 20 (1967) 1–
34; L. B. Robbert, “Monetary Flows: Venice, 1150–1400,” in J. F. Richards, ed., Precious
Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Durham, 1983), 274–93.
The problem of velocity is studied in N. J. Mayhew, “Population, Money Supply, and the
Velocity of Circulation in England, 1300–1700,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 48 (1995)
238–57; other important studies of medieval money and prices by the same author include:
“Money and Prices in England from Henry II to Edward III,” Agricultural History Review 35
(1987) 121–32; “Modelling Medieval Monetisation,” in B. M. S. Campbell and R. H. Britnell,
eds., A Commercialising Economy: England, 1086–1300 (Manchester, 1995), 55–77.
On finance a classic work is Mario Chiaudano, “I Rothschild del Dugento: La Gran
Tavola di Orlando Bonsignori,” Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria 42 (1935) 103–42;
William M. Bowsky, The Finance of the Commune of Siena, 1287–1355 (Oxford, 1970);
idem, A Medieval Italian Commune: Siena Under the Nine, 1287–1355 (Berkeley, 1981).
On markets and commerce, see R. H. Britnell, “The Proliferation of Markets in England,
1200–1349,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 34 (1981) 209–221; Richard Hodges, Dark
Age Economics: The Origins of Towns and Trade, A.D. 600–1000 (London, 1982); Raymond
De Roover, “The Commercial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century,” in F. C. Lane and J.
Riemersma, eds. Enterprise and Secular Change (1953).
Industrialization in medieval Europe is the subject of E. M. Carus Wilson, “An Industrial
Revolution of the Thirteenth Century,” Economic History Review 11 (1939) 39–60; Rolf
Sprandel, “La production du fer au moyen age,” Annales E.S.C. 24 (1969) 305–21; Jean
Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York,
1976); William N. Bonds, “Some Industrial Price Movements in Medieval Genoa (1155–
1255),” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 7 (1969–70) 123–39; Henrietta M. Larson,
“The Armor Business in the Middle Ages,” Business History Review 14 (1940) 49–64; C. F.
ffoulkes, “European Arms and Armor,” in G. Barraclough, ed., Social Life in Early England
(London, 1960) 124–38; F. Philippi, Die erste Industrialisierung Deutschlands (Munster,
1909); idem, Das Eisengewerbe im Mittelalter (Stuttgart, 1968).
On agriculture, see J. Z. Titow, Winchester Yields: A Study in Medieval Agricultural
Productivity (Cambridge, 1972), which covers the period from 1209 to 1349; D. L. Farmer
extends this series from 1350 to 1453 in “Grain Yields on the Winchester manors in the Later
Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 30 (1977) 555–66; E. A. Kominskii, Studies
in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1956); David Herlihy,
“The Agrarian Revolution in Southern France and Italy, 801–1150,” Speculum 33 (1958) 23–
41; idem, “The History of the Rural Seignury in Italy, 751–1200,” Agricultural History 33
(1959) 1–14.
For harvests and disettes, see E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in
England, vol. 1, 1259–1400; Heinrich H. W. F. Curschmann, Hungersnöte in Mittelalter. Ein
Beitrag zur deutschen Wirtschafts-geschichte des 8. bis 13. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1900);
M. E. Levasseur, Les prix aperçu de l’histoire économique de la valeur et du revenu de la
terre, en France du commencement du XIIe siècle a la fin du XVIIIe, avec un appendice sur
le prix du froment et sur les disettes depuis l’an 1200 jusqu’ a l’an 1891 (Paris, 1893),
appendix.
For the problem of poverty, see Alfred N. May, “An Index of Thirteenth–Century Peasant
Impoverishment? Manor Court Fines,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 26 (1973) 389–402.
On economic ethics in medieval Europe, there is a large literature. Much of it centers on
the problem of just price. See Henri Garnier, L’idée du juste prix chez les théologiens et
canonistes du Moyen Age (New York, 1973); Benjamin Nelson, “The Usurer and the Merchant
Prince: Italian Businessmen and the Ecclesiastical Law of Restitution, 1100–1550,” Journal of
Economic History Supplement 7 (1947) 104–22; idem, The Idea of Usury (Princeton, 1949);
T. P. McLaughlin, “The Teaching of the Canonists on Usury (Twelfth, Thirteenth, and
Fourteenth Centuries),” Medieval Studies 1 (1939) 81–147; A. Sapori, “L’interesse del danaro
a Firenze nel trecento (Dal testamento di un usuraio),” Archivio Storico Italiano 10 (1928)
161–86; and Noonan, Usury, cited above.
Various other aspects of the relationship between material and cultural history are
explored in J. R. Strayer, “The Crusades of Louis IX,” in K. M. Setton, ed., A History of the
Crusades (Philadelphia, 1962); Jocelin de Brakeland, The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond,
H. E. Butler ed., (London, 1949); Steven Epstein, Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150–
1250 (Cambridge, 1984).
On Chartres Cathedral, see Robert Branner, ed., Chartres Cathedral (New York, 1969);
Lucien Merlet and Eugene de Lepinois, Cartulaire de Notre-Dame de Chartres (3 vols.,
Chartres, 1862–65) 2:103; Robert Branner, ed., Chartres Cathedral (New York, 1969);
Charles Rohault de Fleury, Memoire sur les instruments de la passion de N.-S. J.-C. (Paris,
1870).
The renaissance of the twelfth century is discussed in Charles Homer Haskins, The
Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (London, 1927); R. W. Southern, The Making of the
Middle Ages (New Haven, 1953); Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance
and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 1982); G. Pare et al., La Renaissance du
XIIe Siècle: Les Écoles et l’Enseignement (Paris, 1933); J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English
Economy, 1150–1500 (London, 1980); Carlrichard Brühl, Palatium und Civitas: Studien zur
Profantopographie spatantiker Civitates vom 3. bis 13. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 1975), 1:19.
The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century
The best starting point is Bruce M. S. Campbell, ed., Before the Black Death: Studies in
the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century (Manchester, 1991; rpt. 1992), with an excellent
consolidated bibliography (209–26).
General studies include Edouard Perroy, “A l’origine d’une économie contractée: Les
crises du XIVe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 4 (1949) 167–82; trans. in Rondo Cameron, ed., Essays
in French Economic History (Home-wood, III., 1970); R. E. Lerner, The Age of Adversity:
The Fourteenth Century (Ithaca, 1968); R. Boutruche, Seignurie et féodalité (2 vols., Paris,
1968); R. Delatouche, “La crise du XIVe siècle en Europe occidentale,” Les Études Sociales
28 (1959) 1–19; F. Graus, “Das spätmittelalter als Krisenzeit . . .,” Mediaevalia Bohemica
Supplement 1 (Prague, 1969); idem, “Die Erste Krise des Feudalismus,” Zeitschrift für
Geschichts-wissenschaft 3 (1955) 552–92; Cicely Howell, “Stability and Change, 1300–
1700,” Journal of Peasant Studies 2 (1975) 468–82; N. Hybel, Crisis or Change: the
Concept of Crisis in Light of the Agrarian Structural Reorganization in Late Medieval
England (Aarhus, 1989).
Many schools of interpretation exist: Malthusian, which puts stress on imbalances
between population and the means of subsistence; Marxist, on the class structure and the means
of production; monetarist, on changes in the money supply; market–centered, on structures of
exchange; climatological, on weather events.
The Malthusian model of the crisis is developed in Michael Postan, Essays on Medieval
Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge, 1973); and idem,
The Medieval Economy and Society: An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages
(Berkeley, 1972), cited above. A critique of the Postan thesis appears in Barbara F. Harvey,
“The Population Trend in England between 1300 and 1348,” Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society 5th ser. 16 (1966) 23–42; and D. G. Watts, “Model for the Early Fourteenth
Century,” Economic History Review 20 (1967) 543–47, which argues that the Malthusian
model does not appear to work if one omits the crisis years! Important discussions appear in
Guy Bois, “Against the Neo–Malthusian Orthodoxy,” Past & Present 79 (1978) 60–69. The
thesis is restated in Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval Society and Economic
Change, 1086–1348 (London, 1978), and M. M. Postan and John Hatcher, “Population and
Class Relations in Feudal Society,” Past & Present 78 (1978) 24–37. An argument for local
complexity appears in H. E. Hallam, Rural England, 1066–1348 (Brighton, 1981); idem, “The
Postan Thesis,” Historical Studies 15 (1972) 203–22; and Edward Britton, The Community of
the Vill (Toronto, 1977). Much of this controversy centers on population trends in East Anglia;
strong empirical evidence from there to support Postan is presented in L. R. Poos, “The Rural
Population of Essex in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 38 (1985)
515–30.
Marxist models include R. H. Hilton, “Y eut-il une crise générale de féodalité?” Annales
E.S.C. 6 (1951) 23–30; E. A. Kosminskii, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the
Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1956); Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic
Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past & Present 70 (1976) 30–75; and Guy Bois,
Crise du féodalisme: économie rurale et démographie en Normandie orientale du début du
XIVe siècle au milieu du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1976); trans. as The Crisis of Feudalism. . .
(Cambridge, 1984). For discussions of Marxist models in general and Brenner in particular,
see Trevor Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure
and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985). A critique of Guy
Bois is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “En Haute-Normandie: Malthus ou Marx?” Annales E.S.C.
33 (1978) 115–24. Marxist interpretations in the West have been much influenced by the work
of a Polish scholar, W. Kula, Théorie économique du système féodal: Pour un modèle de l’
économie polonaise XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1970); this study of a later period has had a
major impact on Marxist medievalists.
For monetarist models see J. Schreiner, “Wages and Prices in England in the Later Middle
Ages,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 2 (1954) 61–73; Earl J. Hamilton, “The
History of Prices before 1750,” in Rapports du XVe congrés international des sciences
historiques (Stockholm, 1960) 1:144–64, also separately issued (Stockholm, 1960); W. C.
Robinson, “Money, Population, and Economic Change in Late Medieval Europe,” Economic
History Review 2d ser. 12 (1959) 63–76; N. J. Mayhew, “Numismatic Evidence and Falling
Prices in the Fourteenth Century,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 27 (1974) 1–15; idem,
“Money and Prices in England from Henry II to Edward III,” Agricultural History Review 35
(1987) 121–32; and especially the work of the able American Annalist John Day, The
Medieval Market Economy (Oxford, 1987); idem, “The Decline of a Money Economy:
Sardinia in the Late Middle Ages,” Studia in memoria di Federico Melis (Naples, 1978)
3:155–176; and idem, “Crise du féodalisme et conjunctures des prix à la fin du moyen age,”
Annales E.S.C. 34 (1979) 305–18. A critique of monetarist models in general and Day’s
review-essay in particular is Guy Bois, “Sur la monnaie et les prix a la fin du moyen age:
réponse a John Day,” ibid., 319–23.
On market–centered models, exchange rates, balance of payments, and price surges there
are Mavis Mate, “High Prices in Early Fourteenth-Century England: Causes and
Consequences,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 28 (1975) 1–16; idem, “The Impact of War
on the Economy of Canterbury Cathedral Priory, 1294–1340,” Speculum 57 (1982) 761–78; C.
G. Reed, “Price Movements, Balance of Payments, Bullion Flows, and Unemployment in the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Journal of European Economic History 8 (1979) 479–
86; Michael Prestwich, “Early Fourteenth-Century Exchange Rates,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 32 (1979) 470–82; Edward Ames, “The Sterling Crisis of 1337–1339,”
Journal of Economic History 25 (1965) 496–522; B. Kedar, Merchants in Crisis: Genoese
and Venetian men of Affairs and the Fourteenth-Century Depression (New Haven, 1976).
A fourteenth-century equivalent of an administered price model may be inferred from P.
D. A. Harvey, A Medieval Oxfordshire Village: Cuxham, 1240–1400 (London, 1965).
For climatological models, see the works of Beveridge, cited above, and J. Z. Titow,
“Evidence of Weather in the Account Rolls of the Bishopric of Winchester, 1209–1350,”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 12 (1960) 360–407; idem, “Le climat à travers les rôles de
comptabilité de l’évêché de Winchester (1350–1450),” Annales E.S.C. 25 (1970) 312–50; C.
E. Britton, A Meteorological Chronology to A.D. 1450 (London, 1937); W. T. Bell and A. E. J.
Ogilview, “Weather Compilations as a Source of Data for the Reconstruction of European
Climate during the Medieval Period,” Climatic Change 1 (1978) 331–48; H. E. Hallam, “The
Climate of Eastern England, 1250–1350,” Agricultural History Review 32 (1984) 124–32.
Still useful is C. E. P. Brooks and J. Glasspole, British Floods and Droughts (London, 1928).
An ecological approach, stressing the history of agriculture and the contraction of arable
land, is the subject of R. H. Britnell, “Agricultural Technology and the Margin of Cultivation in
the Fourteenth Century,” Economic History Review 30 (1977) 53–66; J. Z. Titow, Winchester
Yields: A Study in Medieval Agricultural Productivity (Cambridge, 1972); Alan R. H. Baker,
“Evidence in the Nonarum Inquisitiones of Contracting Arable Lands in England during the
Early Fourteenth Century,” Economic History Review 2d ed. 19 (1966) 518–32; A. R. Lewis,
“The Closing of the Medieval Frontier,” Speculum 33 (1958) 475–83. On problems of
marginality, see M. Bailey, “The Concept of the Margin in the Medieval English Economy”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 42 (1989) 1–17; idem, A Marginal Economy?: East
Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989).
On famines, see Hugues Neveux, “Bonnes et mauvaises récoltes du XIVe au XIXe siècle:
Jalons pour une enquète systématique,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 53 (1975);
177–92; Ian Kershaw, “The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 1315–1322,” Past
& Present 59 (1973) 3–50; Elisabeth Carpentier, “Famines et epidemies dans l’histoire du
XIVe siècle,” Annnales E.S.C. 17 (1962) 1062–92; H. S. Lucas, “The Great European Famine
of 1315, 1316, and 1317,” Speculum, 15 (1930) 343–77; H. Van Werweke, “La famine de l’an
1316 en Flandre et dans les régions voisines,” Revue du Nord 41 (1959) 5–14; A. R. Bridbury,
“Before the Black Death,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 30 (1977) 393–410; idem, “The
Black Death,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 26 (1973) 577–92; Marie-Josèphe
Larenaudie, “Les famines en Languedoc aux XIVe et XVe siècles,” Annales du Midi 64 (1952)
27–39; P. J. Capra, “Au sujet des famines en Acquitaine au XIVe siécle,” Revue Historique de
Bordeaux et du Département de la Gironde 4 (1955) 1–32; important evidence of the
magnitude of the famines of 1315–17 appears in L. R. Poos, “The Rural Population of Essex in
the Later Middle Ages,” cited above; on Ireland, see M. E. Crawford, ed., Famine: The Irish
Experience, 900– 1900 (Edinburgh, 1989), especially M. Lyons, “Weather, Famine,
Pestilence, and Plague in Ireland, 900–1500,” 31–74.
On nutrition, see C. Dyer, “Changes in Diet in the Later Middle Ages: the Case of Harvest
Workers,” Agricultural History Review 2d ser. 36 (1988) 21–37; and Standards of Living in
the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge, 1989).
The Black Death and its social and economic impact is the subject of Philip Ziegler, The
Black Death (Harmondsworth, 1969), an excellent popular history. On cultural consequences
of the Black Death, a classic study is Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the
Black Death: The Arts, Religion, and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century (1951); New
York, 1964). Two helpful essays are Elisabeth Carpentier, “La peste noire: Famines et
épidemies au XIVe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 17 (1962) 1062–92; and Frantisêk Graus, “Autour
de la peste noire au XlVe siècle en Bohême,” Annales E.S.C. 18 (1963) 720–24. A large
literature on England includes A. E. Levett, “The Black Death on the Estates of the See of
Winchester,” Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History 5 (1916) 7–180; A. Ballard, “The
Black Death on the Manors of Witney, Brightewell, and Downton,” ibid., 181–216; C.
Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague
(Cambridge, 1891); A. R. Bridbury, “The Black Death,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 26
(1973) 577–92; J. D. F. Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles
(Cambridge, 1970); C. Morris, “The Plague in Britain,” Historical Journal 14 (1971) 205–15;
J. Saltmarsh, “Plague and Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages,”
Cambridge Historical Journal 7 (1941–43) 23–41; J. M. W. Bean, “Plague, Population, and
Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 15
(1963) 423–37; Mavis Mate, “Agrarian Economy after the Black Death: The Manors of
Canterbury Cathedral Priory, 1348–91” Economic History Review 37 (1984) 341–55; Johan
Schreiner, “Wages and Prices in England in the Later Middle Ages,” Scandinavian Economic
History Review 2 (1954) 61–73.
On France the leading work is J. N. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France (2 vols.,
Paris, 1975); also valuable are C. Prat, “La peste noire à Albi,” Annales du Midi 64 (1952)
15–25; and M. Boudet and R. Grand, Étude historique sur les épidémies de peste en Haute-
Auvergne (XIV-XVIII siècle (Paris, 1902). Important local and regional studies in Italy include
David Herlihy, “Population, Plague, and Social Change in Rural Pistoia, 1201–1430,”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 18 (1965) 225–44; Elisabeth Carpentier, Une ville devant
la peste: Orvieto et la peste noire de 1348 (Paris, 1962).
On Spain there are Nicolás Cabrillana, “La crisis del siglio XIV en Castilla: La peste
negra en el obisado de Palencia,” Hispania 28 (1968) 245–58; Jaime Sobrequés Callicó, “La
peste negra en la península ibérica,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 7 (1970–71) 67–102.
For northern and central Europe there are Johan Schreiner, Pest og prisfall i
Senmiddelalderen: et problem in Norsk Historie (Oslo, 1948); H. Klein, “Das grosse Sterben
von 1348/49 und seine Auswirkung auf die Beseidlung der Ostalpenländer,” Mitteilungen der
Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde 100 (1960) 91–170; R. Hoeniger, Der Schwarze
Tod in Deutschland (Berlin, 1882).
On war and political troubles in this period, see J. R. Maddicott, “The English Peasantry
and the Demands of the Crown, 1294–1341,” Past & Present Supplement 1 (1975), rpt. T. H.
Aston ed., Landlords, Peasants and Politics in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1987), 285–
359; E. Miller, “War, Taxation, and the English Economy of the Late Thirteenth and Early
Fourteenth Centuries,” in J. M. Winter, ed., War and Economic Development: Essays in
Memory of David Joslin (Cambridge, 1975), 11–31 ; J. O. Prestwich, “War and Finance in the
Anglo-Norman State,” Royal Historical Society Transactions 5th ser. 4 (1954) 19–44; K. B.
MacFarlane, “England and the Hundred Years War,” Past & Present 22 (1962) 3–17; Robert
Boutruche, La crise d’une societé: Seigneurs et paysans du Bordelais pendant la guerre de
Cent Ans (Paris, 1947); idem, “La dévastation des campagnes pendant la guerre de Cent Ans et
la reconstruction agricole de la France,” Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de
l’Université de Strasbourg, Melanges (Strasbourg, 1945), 125–63. Elena Lourie, “A Society
Organized for War: Medieval Spain,” Past & Present 35 (1966) 54–76; S. L. Waugh, “The
Profits of Violence: The Minor Gentry in the Rebellion of 1321–1322 in Gloucestershire and
Herefordshire,” Speculum 52 (1977) 843–69.
 On social disorders, see Philippe Wolff, “The 1391 Pogrom in Spain: Social Crisis or
Not?” Past & Present 50 (1971) 4–18; P. Elman, “The Economic Causes of the Expulsion of
the Jews in 1290,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 7 (1936–37) 145–54; B. Geremek, “La
lutte contre le vagabondage à Paris aux XIVe et XVe siècles,” Richerche storiche ed
economiche in memoria di Corrado Bargello (Naples, 1970), 2:213–36; M. Mollat and
Philippe Wolff, Ongles bleus, Jacques et Ciompi: Les révolutions populaires en Europe aux
XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris, 1970); L. Mirot, Les insurrections urbaines au début du régne de
Charles VI (Paris, 1905); R. B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London, 1970); R. H.
Hilton, “Peasant Movements in England before 1381,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 2
(1949) 117–36; Charles Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381, ed. E. B. Fryde, (Oxford, 1969);
Lauro Martines, ed., Violence and Disorder in Italian Cities, 1200–1500 (Berkeley, 1972);
William M. Bowsky, “The Medieval Commune and Internal Violence: Police Power and
Public Safety in Siena, 1287–1355,” American Historical Review 73 (1967) 1–17; R.
Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture,
1300–1500 (London, 1976).
On monetary policies, see Harry A. Miskimin, “Monetary Movements and Market
Structure: Forces for Contraction in Fourteenth– and Fifteenth-Century England,” Journal of
Economic History 2d ser. 24 (1964) 470–90; C. G. Reed, “Price Movements, Balance of
Payments, Bullion Flows, and Unemployment in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century,” Journal
of European Economic History 8 (1979) 479–86; Marc Bloch, Esquisse d’une histoire
monétaire de l’Europe (Paris, 1954).
On politics and finance, see May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307–1399
(Oxford, 1959); William M. Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune: Siena under the Nine,
1287–1355 (Berkeley, 1981); idem, “The Impact of the Black Death upon Sienese Government
and Society,” Speculum 39 (1964) 1–34; idem, The Finance of the Commune of Siena, 1287–
1355 (Oxford, 1970).
Outside of Europe, there is much evidence of a world crisis in this era. On major
discontinuities in the history of China during the fourteenth century, see especially Mark Elvin,
The Pattern of the Chinese Past; A Social and Economic Interpretation (Stanford, 1973).
For the history of Africa in the fourteenth century, 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 (London, 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.
Discontinuities in the history of Oceania during the fourteenth century are discussed in A.
T. Wilson, “Isotope Evidence for Past Climatic and Environmental Change,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 10 (1980) 241–50.
For the Middle East see Michael W. Dols, “Mortality of the Black Death in the Mamluk
Empire,” in A. L. Udovitch, The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900: Studies in Economic and
Social History (Princeton, 1981), 397–428; Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle
East (Princeton, 1977); and the works of Ashtor cited above.
A best-selling popular account of high quality is Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror:
The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (Franklin Center, Pa., 1978); for a gentle critique, see
Geoffrey Barraclough’s review in The New Republic.

The Renaissance Equilibrium

General surveys of this period include Denys Hay, The Italian Renaissance in Its
Historical Background (Cambridge, 1977); Eugene F. Rice, The Foundations of Early
Modern Europe (New York, 1970); Brian Pullan, A History of Early Renaissance Italy
(London, 1973); M. W. Ferguson et al., eds., Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago, 1986). A
useful work of reference is J. R. Hale, ed., A Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian
Renaissance (London, 1981).
On the historiography of the Renaissance, an enduring classic is W. K. Ferguson, The
Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston, 1948);
supplemented by idem, “The Reinterpretation of the Renaissance,” in Facets of the
Renaissance (New York, 1959), 1–18; idem, The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York, 1962);
“Recent Trends in the Economic Historiography of the Renaissance,” Studies in the
Renaissance 7 (1960) 7–26; Tinsley Helton, The Renaissance: A Reconsideration of the
Theories and Interpretations of the Age (Madison, 1961); Eric Cochrane, Historians and
Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981).
A major work of cooperative scholarship is Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti eds.,
Storia d’Italia (6 vols., Turin, 1972–1977, especially vols. 2 & 3; also Denys Hay, ed.,
Longman History of Italy, especially Denys Hay and John Law, Italy in the Age of
Renaissance, 1380–1530 (London, 1989).
On major economic trends in this period, see R. S. Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, “The
Economic Depression of the Renaissance,” Economic History Review, 2d ser. 14 (1962) 408–
426; and a critique by Carlo M. Cipolla, “Economic Depression of the Renaissance?” with
rejoinders by Lopez and Miskimin, ibid. 16 (1964) 519–24; C. Barbagallo, “La crisi
economicosociale dell’Italia della Rinascenza,” Nouva Rivista Storica 34 (1950) 389–411,
35 (1951) 1–38; Leopold Genicot, “Crisis: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times,”
Cambridge Economic History of Europe 1:678–694; M. M. Postan, “The Fifteenth Century,”
Economic History Review 9 (1938–39) 160–67; F. Lutge, “Das 14–15 Jahrhundert in der
Sozial und Wirtschaft Geschichte,” Jahrbucher für National Ekonomie und Statistik (1950)
161–213; M. Mollat, “Y-a-t-il une économie de la Renaissance?” in Actes du colloque sur la
Renaissance (Paris, 1958); Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe,
1300–1460 (Cambridge, 1975); idem, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe, 1460–
1600 (Cambridge, 1977).
Demographic trends are discussed in M. M. Postan, “Some Economic Evidence of
Declining Population in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 2 (1950)
221–46; J. Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (London,
1977); E. F. Rice, “Recent Studies on the Population of Europe, 1348–1620,” Renaissance
News 18 (1965) 180–87.
On the problem of deserted villages in Europe, see C. A. Christensen, “Aendringerne i
landsbyens økonimiske og sociale strukur i det 14. og 15. arhundrede,” Historisk Tidsskrift,
12th ser. 1 (1964) 257–349, which includes a summary and conclusion in English; A. Holmsen,
“Desertion of Farms around Oslo in the Late Middle Ages,” Scandinavian Economic History
Review 10 (1962) 165–202; Wilhelm Abel, Die Wüstungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters (2d
ed. Stuttgart, 1955); idem, “Wüstungen und Preisfall im spätmittelalterlichen Europa,”
Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik 165 (1953) 380–427; J. F. Pesez and E. Le
Roy Ladurie, “Les villages désertés en France: Vue d’ensembles,” Annales E.S.C. 20 (1965)
257–90. On deserted villages in the British Isles, see Maurice Beresford, The Lost Villages of
England (London 1954; rpt. 1965); Maurice Beresford and John G. Hurst, Deserted Medieval
Villages (London, 1971); Maurice Beresford and J. K. Joseph, Medieval England: An Aerial
Survey (Cambridge, 1979); Christopher Dyer, “Deserted Villages in the West Midlands,”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 35 (1982) 19–34; K. J. Allison et al., The Deserted Villages
of Oxfordshire (Leicester University Department of English Local History, occasional paper
no. 17, 1965); idem, The Deserted Villages of Northamptonshire (ibid., 1966); K. J. Allison,
“The Lost Villages of Norfolk,” Norfolk Archeology 31 (1957) 116–62; and a very large
literature in county archeology journals.
General and national works of economic and social history for Italy include Armando
Sapori, Studi di storia economica, secoli XIII-XIV-XV (3 vols., Florence, 1955, 1967), the
collected essays of a distinguished economic historian; Gino Luzzatto, An Economic History of
Italy from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century (New
York, 1961); and Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, eds., Storia d’Italia, vol. 2, Dalla
caduta dell’impero Romano al secolo XVIII (2 parts, Turin, 1974), the most useful single
work, with full bibliographical notes.
On relations between economic, social and cultural history, much of the best Italian
historical scholarship in this period consists of local (or rather localized) studies. Of high
quality on Florence are Marvin B. Becker, Florence in Transition (2 vols., Baltimore, 1967);
Gene Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1977); idem,
Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, 1983); Nicolai Rubinstein, The Government of Florence
under the Medici (1434 to 1494) (Oxford, 1966); idem, Florentine Studies: Politics and
Society in Renaissance Florence (Evanston, 1968); Lauro Martines, The Social World of the
Florentine Humanists, 1390–1460 (Princeton, 1963); idem, Power and Imagination: City-
States in renaissance Italy (London, 1979); Frederick Antal, Florentine Painting and Its
Social Background (London, 1948);
For the history of Venice, see Frederic C. Lane, Venice (Baltimore, 1973); Lane and
Mueller, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, cited above; Gino
Luzzato, Storia economica di Venezia dall XI al XVI secolo (Venice, 1961); William J.
Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley, 1968); J. R. Hale, ed.,
Renaissance Venice (London, 1973).
On Pistoia, a model work of social history is David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance
Pistoia: The Social History of an Italian Town, 1200–1430 (New Haven, 1967); and idem,
“Population, Plague, and Social Change in Rural Pistoia,” Economic History Review 2d ser.
18 (1965) 225–44.
 Genoa also has been fortunate in its historians. Among the leading works are V. Vitale, Il
commune del podestà a Genova (Milan, 1951); T. O. De Negri, Storia di Genova (Milan,
1968); J. Heers, Gênes au XVe siècle (Paris, 1961); John Day, Les douanes de Gênes, 1376–
77 (2 vols., Paris, 1963).
For Pavia, there is D. Zanetti, Problemi alimentari di una economica preindustriale
(Turin, 1964), with good price series for the quattrocento. For southern Italy and Sicily, see A.
Petino, Aspetti e momenti di politica granari a Catania ed in Sicilia nel quattrocento
(Catania, 1952). Major multivolume histories of Milan, Mantua, Verona, and Brescia were
published in the 1960s, but I have not found full-scale modern histories of Bologna or Perugia.
On Iberia, the leading works are V. Magalhaes-Godinho, L’economie de l’Empire
portugais aux XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris, 1969); A. Santamaria Arandez, Aportacion al
estudio de la economia de Valencia durante el siglo XV (Valencia, 1966); and the works of
Vicens and Elliott cited above.
Among many excellent French local studies are Guy Bois, Crise du féodalisme, cited
above; P. Wolff, Commerces et merchands de Toulouse, vers 1350-vers 1450 (Paris, 1954);
idem, Les estimes toulousianes des XIV et XV siècles (Toulouse, 1956); G. Sivery, Structures
agraires et vie rurale dans Le Hainaut à la fin du Moyen Age (Lille, 1973); Latouche, La vie
en Bas Quercy du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1923); John Day, “Prix agricoles en
Méditerranée à la fin du XIVe’ me siècle (1382),” Annales E.S.C. 16 (1961) 629–56; Yvonne
Bezard, La vie rurale dans le sud de la region parisienne de 1450 à 1560 (Paris, 1929).
For England in the fifteenth century, see F. R. H. Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition: English
Society in the Late Middle Ages (New York, 1970); R. M. Hilton, The Economic
Development of Some Leicestershire Estates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
(London, 1947); J. A. Raftis, the Estates of Ramsay Abbey (Toronto, 1957); J. W. F. Hill,
Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge, 1948); idem, Tudor and Stuart Lincoln (Cambridge, 1956); A.
L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall (London, 1941).
In Scandinavia, a great classic of local history is A. Holmsen, Eidsvoll Bygds Historie (2
vols., Oslo, 1950–61).
On the low countries, see H. van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the
European Economy, Fourteenth-Sixteenth Centuries (3 vols., Louvain, 1963).
For the rise of the Ottoman Empire, see Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His
Time (Princeton, 1978), 431; a lively survey in English is Patrick Balfour, Baron Kinross, The
Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (New York, 1977).
Biographical approaches to economic history in this period include Frederic C. Lane,
Andrea Barbarigo, Merchant of Venice, 1418–1449 (Baltimore, 1944); Iris Origo, The
Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410 (London, 1957); Gene Brucker,
ed., Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: the Diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio
Dati (New York, 1967); Florence de Roover, “Andrea Banchi, Florentine Silk Manufacturer
and Merchant in the Fifteenth Century,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3
(1966) 223–85; Henri Lapeyre, Une famille de marchands: Les Ruiz (Paris, 1955); Gotz
Freiherr von Pölnitz, Die Fugger (Frankfurt am Main, 1960).
 On price movements, in addition to general works listed above by Elsas for Germany,
Pribram for Austria, Verlinden for Belgium, and Beveridge and Rogers for Britain, there is
also a monographic literature specific to this period. For Britain it includes D. L. Farmer,
“Prices and Wages, 1350–1500” in Edward Miller, ed., The Agrarian History of England and
Wales, vol. 3, 1348–1500 (Cambridge, 1988), 431–525.
For France, there are “La prix du froment à Rouen au XVe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 23
(1968) 1262–82; J. 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; M. Baulant, “Le prix des grains à
Paris de 1431 à 1788,” Annales E.S.C. 23 (1968) 520–40; Guy Bois, “Compatabilité et
histoire des prix: Le prix de froment à Rouen au XVe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 23 (1968) 1262–
68.
For Belgium, there is G. Sivéry, “Les profits agricoles au bas Moyen Age,” Annales
E.S.C. 31 (1976) 626.
The classic work on Spanish prices in this period is Earl J. Hamilton, Money, Prices,
and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre, 1351–1500 (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). Also
helpful is Boaz Shoshan, “Money Supply and Grain Prices in Fifteenth-Century Egypt,”
Economic History Review” 36 (1983) 47–67.
On wages, in addition to works of Abel, Beveridge, d’Avenel, Elsas, Farmer, Phelps-
Brown, Pribram, and Scholliers cited above, see E. Perroy, “Wage Labour in France in the
Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 8 (1955) 232–39; R. H. Hilton, The
Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London, 1969).
On the fall of rent, there is C. A. Christensen, “Krisen pa Slesvig Domkapitels
jordegods,” Historisk Tidsskrift 11th ser. 6 (1960) 161–244.
Money and interest in the fifteenth century is the subject of John Day, “The Great Bullion
Famine of the Fifteenth Century,” Past & Present 29 (1978) 3–54; see also N. J. Mayhew,
“Numismatic Evidence and Falling Prices in the Fourteenth Century,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 27 (1974) 1–15; H. A. Miskimin, “Monetary Movements and Market Structure
—Forces for Contraction in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic
History 24 (1964) 470–490; J. Schreiner, Pest og Prisfall i Senmiddelalderen (Oslo, 1948);
H. van Werveke, “Essor et déclin de la Flandre,” in Studi in onore di Gino Luzzato (Milan,
1950); Harry A. Miskimin, Money and Power in Fifteenth-Century France (New Haven,
1984); idem, Money, Prices, and Foreign Exchange in Fourteenth-Century France (New
Haven, 1963); A. Mackay, Money, Prices, and Politics in Fifteenth-Century Castile (London,
1981); P. Spufford, Monetary Problems and Policies in the Burgundian Netherlands, 1433–
1496 (Leiden, 1970); John H. A. Munro, Wool, Cloth, and Gold: The Struggle for Bullion in
the Anglo-Burgundian Trade, 1340–1478 (Brussels and Toronto, 1972); J. Richards, ed.,
Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Durham, 1983); Raymond
de Roover, The Bruges Money Market around 1400 (Brussels, 1968); and F. C. Lane and R.
C. Mueller, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, 1985),
with a good bibliography of the vast literature on monetary history in this period.
Banking is the subject of Raymond de Roover, The Medici Bank: Its Organization,
Management, Operations, and Decline (New York, 1948); and idem, The Rise and Decline of
the Medici Bank (Cambridge, 1963); and on northern Europe, Richard Ehrenberg, Capital and
Finance in the Age of the Renaissance (New York, n.d.).
For political economy and fiscal movements, see Josef Rosen, “Prices and Public
Finance in Basel, 1360–1535,” Economic History Review, 2d ser. 25 (1972) 1–17; Anthony
Molho, Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance (Cambridge, 1971); political
structure is the subject of Nicolai Rubenstein, the Government of Florence under the Medici,
1434–1494 (Oxford, 1966).
On social structure, see Samuel Cohn, The Laboring Classes of Renaissance Florence
(New York, 1980); E. Powell, The Rising in East Anglia in 1381 (Cambridge, 1896); M. M.
Postan, Medieval Economy and Society, 173; T. W. Page, The End of Villeinage in England
(New York, 1900); R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford,
1975); C. C. Dyer, “A Redistribution of Incomes in Fifteenth Century England,” Past &
Present 39 (1968) 11–33; G. A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-
Century England (Cambridge, 1957); Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice:
The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (Oxford, 1971).
On cultural trends during the Renaissance, see Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oscar Kristeller, and
John Herman Randall Jr., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago, 1948), 225; and
Hans Baron, The Crisis of Early Italian Renaissance (2d ed., Princeton, 1966) Many scholars
before Baron had anticipated this interpretation; one of the first was William Shepherd, The
Life of Poggio Bracciolini (Liverpool, 1837), 458–461.
On the relationship between economic and cultural history in the Renaissance there are
two books by Richard A. Goldthwaite: Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of
Four Families (Princeton, 1968) and The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic
and Social History (Baltimore, 1980).

The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century

The idea of a price revolution in the sixteenth century was developed by German
historians in the late nineteenth century. The pioneering works are Georg Wiebe, Zur
Geschichte der Preisrevolution des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1895) and Julius
Moritz Bonn, Spaniens Niedergang während der Preisrevolution des 16. Jahrhunderts
(Stuttgart, 1896). This idea has spawned a very large literature, in which one finds the same
array of interpretations as in other great waves: monetarist, market-centered, Malthusian,
Marxist, climatological, ecological.
For many years the conventional wisdom was predominantly monetarist, as a
consequence of work by American price historian Earl Hamilton. His major studies were
American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934)
and Money, Prices, and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre, 1651–1800 (Cambridge,
Mass., 1947). A respectful critique appears in Fernand Braudel, “En relisant Earl J. Hamilton:
De l’histoire d’Espagne à l’histoire des prix,” Annales E.S.C. 6 (1951) 202–06.
Fernand Braudel himself used a monetarist model in The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II 2 vol. (1946, tr. Reynolds Sian, London, 1972–3;
Berkeley, 1995). He revised this interpretation in favor of a more market-centered approach in
F. P. Braudel and F. Spooner, “Prices in Europe from 1450 to 1750,” The Cambridge
Economic History of Europe (Cambridge, 1967), 4:378–486.
A major study that qualifies the Hamilton thesis in important ways is Michel Morineau,
Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux métaux; Les retours des trésors américains d’après les
gazettes hollandaises (XVIe-XVIIe siècles) (Paris, New York, and London, 1985); idem, “Des
métaux précieux américains et de leur influence au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle,” Bulletin de la
Société d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 15 (1977) 2–95; idem, “Histoire sans
frontières: prix régionaux, prix nationaux, prix internationaux,” Annales E.S.C. 24 (1969) 403–
21; and other essays listed in the excellent bibliography to Incroyables gazettes.
Other historians in the mid-twentieth century preferred a Malthusian explanation, in which
the growth of population was thought to have driven the revolution in prices. Two useful
collections of articles on this debate are Peter Burke, ed., Economy and Society in Early
Modern Europe: Essays from Annales (New York, 1972) and Peter Ramsay, ed., The Price
Revolution in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1971). Critiques of the literature include
D. O. Flynn, “The ‘Population Thesis’ View of Inflation versus Economics and History,” in
Eddy van Cauwenberghe and Franz Irsigler, eds., Münzprägung, Geldumlauf und
Wechselkurse (Budapest, 1982) 362–82; and idem, “Use and Misuse of the Quantity Theory of
Money in Early Modern Historiography,” ibid., 382–418. Also helpful is H. A. Miskimin,
“Population Growth and the Price Revolution in England,” Journal of European Economic
History 4 (1975) 179–86.
Marxist models include Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic
Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” Past & Present 70 (1976) 30–75; and Trevor Aston
and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic
Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (New York, 1985). A sociological model with a strong
Marxist interpretation appears in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System:
Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth-
Century (New York, 1974).
Other useful works from various perspectives include Alexandre Chabert, “Encore la
révolution des prix au XVIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 12 (1957); A. V. Judges, “A Note on
Prices in Shakespeare’s Time,” A Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge, 1934);
Walter Achilles, “Getreidepreise und Getreidehandelsbeziehungen europâischer Raüme im 16.
und 17. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 7 (1959) 32–55.
Few major processes in modern history have been better documented than the price
revolution of the sixteenth century. Even so, there are inevitably a few academic unbelievers.
Various expressions of skepticism appear in M. Morineau, “D’Amsterdam À Seville: De
quelle realité l’histoire des prix est-il le miroir?” Annales E.S.C. 23 (1968) 178–205; Carlo
Cipolla, “La prétendu ‘révolution des prix’: réflexions sur l’ expérience italienne,” Annales
E.S.C. 10 (1955) 212–16; an expanded English version appears in Burke, ed., Economy and
Society in Early Modern Europe, 43–54.
Many studies of sixteenth-century price movements have been made of national
economies. For Spain, they include in addition to the work of Hamilton cited above, J. Nadal
Oller, “La revolución de los precios españoles en el siglo XVI: Estado actual de la cuestión,”
Hispania 19 (1959) 503–29; J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (New York, 1966);
idem, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, 1970); idem, “The Decline of
Spain,” Past & Present 20 (1961) 52–75; Jaime Vives Vicens with Jorge Nadal Oller, An
Economic History of Spain (Princeton, 1969); idem, Approaches to the History of Spain
(Berkeley, 1967); Earl J. Hamilton, “American Treasure and Andalusian Prices, 1503–1600: A
Study in the Spanish Price Revolution,” Journal of Economic and Business History 1 (1928)
1–35; Pierre Chaunu and Huguette Chaunu, Seville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650) (Paris,
c1977); a summary of findings in this vast work appears in Pierre Chaunu and Huguette
Chaunu, “Économie Atlantique, économie mondiale (1504–1640),” Journal of World History
(1953–54) 91–104, tr. as “The Atlantic Economy and the World Economy,” in Peter Earle, ed.,
Essays in European Economic History, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1974), 113–26; Renate Pieper,
Die Preisrevolution in Spanien, 1500–1640: Neuere Forschung-sergebnisse (Wiesbaden,
1985).
For the price revolution in Portugal, see V. M. Godinho, Prix et monnaies au Portugal

(Paris, 1955); Damai o Peres, Historia monetária de D. Jo o III (Lisbon, 1957).

On Italy, there are Gino Parenti, Prime ricerche sulla rivoluzione dei prèzzi in Firenze
(Florence, 1939); idem, Prèzzi e mercato del grano a Siena (Florence, 1942); Lucien Febvre,
“La révolution des prix à Florence,” Annales d’Histoire Sociale 2 (1940) 239–42; Richard A.
Goldthwaite, “I prèzzi del grano a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo,” Quaderni Storici 10
(1975) 5–36; Amintore Fanfani, “La rivoluzione dei prèzzi a Milano nel XVI e XVII secoli,”
Giornale degli Economisti e Rivista di Statistica 72 (1932) 465–82; idem, Indagini sulla
rivoluzione dei prèzzi (Milan, 1940); Henri Hauser, “La révolution des prix à Milan au XVIe
et au XVIIe siècle,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 4 (1934) 465–82; Giuseppe
Coniglio, Il regno di Napoli al tempo di Carlo V (Naples, 1951); idem, Il viceregno di
Napoli nel secolo XVII (Rome, 1955); idem, “La rivoluzione dei prèzzi nella città di Napoli
nei Secoli XVI e XVII,” Atti della IXa riunione scientifica della Società italiana di statistica
(Roma, 7–8 gennaio 1950) (Spoleto, 1952); Jean Delumeau, vie économique et sociale de
Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (2 vols., Paris, 1957–59); Gabriele Lombardini,
Pane e denaro a Bassano: Prèzzi del grano e politica dell’ approvigionamento dei cereali
tra il 1501 e il 1799 (Venice, 1963); D. Bartolini, “Prèzzi e salari nel Commune di
Portugruaro durante il secolo XVI,” idem., Contribuzione per una storia dei prèzzi e salari;
“La metida del frumento, vino ed oglio dal 1670 al 1685 nel commune di Portuguaro,” all cited
above; I. Jacobetti, Monete e prèzzi a Cremona dal XVI al XVII secola (Cremona, 1965);
Ubaldo Meroni, Cremona Fedilissima, studi di storia economica e amministrativa di
Cremona durante la dominazione spagnola (Cremona 1951); Gianluigi Barni, “Prèzzi,
mercato e calmiere del pesce al principio del secolo XVI,” La Martinella di Milano 11–12
(1957); Gino Barbieri, “L’introduzione del mais dall’America e la storia dei prèzzi in Italia,”
Saggi di storia economica italiana (Bari and Naples, 1948); Jacopo Stainero, Patria del
Friuli restaurata (Udine, 1595); Giuseppe Mira, “I prèzzi dei cereali a Como dal 1512 al
1658,” Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali 12 (1941) 195–211.
 For England, a helpful survey is R. B. Outhwaite, Inflation in Tudor and Stuart England
(London, Melbourne, 1969; 2d ed., 1982); see also Frieda A. Nicolas, “The Assize of Bread
in London during the Sixteenth Century,” Economic History 2 (1930–33) 323–47; Y. S.
Brenner, “The Inflation of Prices in Early Sixteenth-Century England,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 14 (1961) 225–39; idem, “The Inflation of Prices in England, 1551–1650,”
ibid. 15 (1962) 266–84; J. D. Gould, “Y. S. Brenner on Prices: A Comment,” Economic
History Review 2d ser. 16 (1963) 351–60; idem, “The Price Revolution Reconsidered,”
Economic History Review 2d ser. 17 (1964–65) 249–66; P. Bowden, “Agricultural Prices,
Farm Profits, and Rents,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4,
593–695; C. E. Challis, “Spanish Bullion and Monetary Inflation in England in the Later
Sixteenth Century,” Journal of European Economic History 4 (1975) 381–92; R. A. Doughty,
“Industrial Prices and Inflation in Southern England, 1401–1640,” Explorations in Economic
History 12 (1975) 177–92; John U. Nef, “Prices and Industrial Capitalism in France and
England, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review 7 (1937) 155–85; P. J. Bowden,
“Agricultural Prices, Wages, Farm Profits, and Rents, 1500–1640,” in Economic Change:
Wages, Profits, and Rents, 1500–1750 (Cambridge, 1990), 13–115.
An excellent study of Scottish trends in this period is Alex J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout,
Prices, Food, and Wages in Scotland, 1550–1780 (New York, 1995).
On France, see F. Simiand, Recherches anciennes et nouvelles sur le mouvement
général des prix du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1932); André Liautey, La hausse des prix et
la lutte contre la vie chère en France au 16e siècle (Paris, 1921); Frank C. Spooner, The
International Economy and Monetary Movements in France, 1493–1725 (Cambridge, 1972);
P. Raveau, essai sur la situation économique et l’ état social en Poitou, au XVIe siècle
(Paris, 1931); idem, “La crise des prix au XVIe siècle en Poitou,” Revue Historique 54 (1929)
1–44, 268–93; L’agriculture et les classes paysannes: La transformation de la propriété
dans le haut Poitou au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1926); P. Chaunu, “Sur le front de l’histoire des
prix au XVIe siècle: De la Mercuriale de Paris au port d’Anvers,” Annales E.S.C. 4 (1961)
791–803; Marcel Lachiver, “Près des grains a’ Paris et À Meulan dans la second moitié du
XVIe siècle (1573–1586),” Annales E.S.C. 30 (1975) 140–150; Robert Latouche, “Le prix du
blé à Grenoble du XVe au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 20 (1932)
337–51; Henri Hauser, “La question des prix et des monnaies en Bourgogne dans la seconde
moitié du XVIe siècle,” Annales de Bourgogne 4 (1932) 7–21.
For the Netherlands and Belgium, see E. Scholliers, Loonarbied en Honger de Levens-
Standaard in de XVe en XVIe eeuw te Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1960); J. Lejeune, La Formation
du Capitalisme moderne dans la Principauté de Liège au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1939); C.
Verlinden, J. Craeybeckx, and E. Scholliers, “Price and Wage Movements in Belgium in the
Sixteenth Century,” in Peter Burke, ed., Economy and Society in Early Modern Europe:
Essays from Annales; Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700
(New Haven, 1974); J. Lejeune, La formation du capitalisme moderne dans la principauté de
Liège au XVI siècles (Paris, 1939).
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, “Population, 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 approach 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).
On economic aspects of the crisis, a good overview is Jan de Vries, The Economy of
Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750 (Cambridge, 1976); see also Carlo M. Cipolla, ed.,
The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 2, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(Glasgow, 1974; Hassocks and New York, 1976–77). Specially helpful is an excellent survey
by Ruggiero Romano, “Tra XVI e XVII secolo. Una crisi economica: 1619–1622,” Rivista
Storica Italiana 74 (1962) 480–531, which is accessible to English readers as “Between the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Economic Crisis of 1619–22,” in Parker and Smith,
General Crisis, 165–225; see also Romano’s “Encore la crise de 1619–1622,” Annales E.S.C.
19 (1964) 31–37. Many useful essays on economic aspects of the crisis are brought together in
Peter Earle, ed., Essays in European Economic History (Oxford, 1974). Some of the relevant
economic data are published in Geoffrey Parker and C. H. Wilson, eds., Introduction to the
Sources of European Economic History, 1500–1800 (London, 1977).
Specialized economic studies include B. E. Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in
England, 1600–1642: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy (Cambridge,
1959); J. D. Gould, “The Trade Depression of the Early 1620s,” Economic History Review 7
(1954) 81–90; idem, “The Trade Crisis of the Early 1620s and English Economic Thought,”
Journal of Economic History 15 (1955) 121–33; Rene Baehrel, Une croissance: La Basse
Provence rurale . . . (Paris, 1961); Huguette Chaunu and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l’
Atlantique (1504–1650) (8 vols., Paris, 1955–59); Nina Ellinger Bang, Tabeller over
Skibsfart og Varentransport gennem Oresund (vols. 1 and 3, Copenhagen, 1906, 1923); F. C.
Lane, “La marine marchande et le trafic maritime de Venise . . . ,” in Les Sources de l’ Histoire
Maritime . . . (Paris, 1962); Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age,
1500–1700 (New Haven, 1974; S. C. van Kampen, De Rotterdamse particuliere
Scheepsbouw in de tijd van de Republiek (Assen, 1953); Johannes Gerard van Dillen,
Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis van het Bedriffsleven en het Gildewezen van Amsterdam (3
vols., The Hague, 1929–33); Domenico Sella, “The Two Faces of the Lombard Economy in the
Seventeenth Century,” in Frederick Krantz and Paul M. Hohenberg, eds., Failed Transitions in
Modern Industrial Society (Montreal, 1975), 11–15; R. Gaettens, Die Zeit der Kipper und
Wipper der Inflationem (Munich, 1955); N. W. Posthumus, “The Tulip Mania in Holland in the
Years 1636 and 1637,” Journal of Economic and Business History 1 (1929) 434–55; Richard
T. Rapp, Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Cambridge, 1976);
L. Nottin, Recherches sur les variations des prix dans le Gâtinais du XVIe au XIXe siècle
(Paris, 1935); E. Pannier, Prix des grains sur le marché d’Abbeville depuis l’année 1590
(Abbeville, 1865); P. Chaunu, “Au XVIIe siècle, rythmes et coupures: À propos de la
Mercuriale de Paris,” Annales E.S.C. 6 (1964) 1171; Jean Meuvret, “Conjuncture et crise au
XVIIe siècle: L’example des prix milanais,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 8
(1953) 215–219.
On political and social aspects of the general crisis, there is a very large literature. For
general studies of internal disorder and revolution throughout Europe, see Roger Bigelow
Merriman, Six Contemporaneous Revolutions (Oxford, 1938), the expansion of a lecture with
the same title (Glasgow, 1937); also Jack P. Greene and Robert Forster, Preconditions of
Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 1970); C. S. L. Davies, “Peasant Revolts in
France and England: A Comparison,” Agricultural History Review 21 (1973) 122–34; Roland
Mousnier, Fureurs paysannes: Les paysans dans les révoltes du XVIIe Siècle (France,
Russie, Chine) (Paris, 1967, English tr., 1971); M. O. Gately, A. L. Moote, and J. E. Wills Jr.,
“Seventeenth-Century Peasant ‘Furies’: Some Problems of Comparative History,” Past &
Present 51 (1971) 63–80; a survey of this period from another perspective is Perez Zagorin,
Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1982).
The effect of war is a subject of historical controversy. Werner Sombart, Krieg und
Kapitalismus (1913, Munich; New York, 1975) argued that war promoted economic
development in this period; arguments to the contrary are in John U. Nef, “War and Economic
Progress, 1540–1640,” Economic History Review 12 (1942) 13–38; and idem, War and
Human Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1950); see also Frederic C. Lane, “Economic
Consequences of Organized Violence,” Journal of Economic History 18 (1958) 401–17.
Another historiographical problem in this period concerns the effect of the crisis on warfare.
For this question see Geoffrey Parker, “The ‘Military Revolution, 1560–1660’: A Myth?”
Journal of Modern History 48 (1976) 195–214.
On the Thirty Years’ War, the standard works are Günther Franz, Der Dreissigjährige
Kreig und das deutsche Volk (4th ed., Stuttgart, 1978); Cecily Veronica Wedgwood, The
Thirty Years’ War (London, 1938); Siegfried H. Steinberg, The Thirty Years’ War and the
Conflict for European Hegemeny, 1660–1660 (New York, 1966); Josef V. Polisensky, The
Thirty Years’ War (Berkeley, 1971); Henry Kamen, “The Economic and Social Consequences
of the Thirty Years’ War,” Past & Present 39 (1968) 44–48; T. K. Rabb, “The Effects of the
Thirty Years’ War on the German Economy.” Journal of Modern History 34 (1962) 40–51; F.
L. Carsten, “Was There an Economic Decline in Germany before the Thirty Years’ War?”
English Historical Review 71 (1956) 240–47; John C. Theibault, German Villages in Crisis:
Rural Life in Hesse-Kassel and the Thirty Years’ War, 1580–1720 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.,
1995).
For internal disorder in France, see René Pillorget, Les mouvements insurrectionnels de
Provence entre 1596 et 1715 (Paris, 1975); Boris Porschnev, Les soulèvements populaires en
France de 1623 à 1648 (1948, French translation, Paris, 1963); Sal Alexander Westrich, The
Ormée of Bordeaux: A Revolution during the Fronde (Baltimore, 1972); Phillip A. Knachel,
England and the Fronde (Ithaca, 1967); Alanson Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges: the
Parlement of Paris and the Fronde, 1643–1652 (Princeton, 1972); Robert Mandrou, “Les
soulèvements populaires et la société française du XVIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 14 (1959)
756–65; idem, Classes et luttes de classes en France au début de XVIIe siècle (Messina,
1965). Many essays are brought together in P. J. Coveney, ed., France in Crisis, 1620–1675
(London, New York, 1977).
On the English civil wars the standard work is still S. R. Gardiner, History of England
from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War (rev. ed., 10 vols., London,
1883–84); idem, The Great Civil War (rev. ed., 4 vols., London, 1893); idem, History of the
Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1656 (rev. ed., London, 1903); continued by Charles
Harding Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, 1656–1658 (2 vols., London, 1909); and
completed in Godfrey Davies, The Restoration of Charles II, 1658–1660 (Oxford, 1969).
More recent scholarship is surveyed in Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London,
1958); Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (London, 1972);
John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (London, 1976, 1980).
On revolutions within the English revolution, see G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Levellers in the
English Revolution (Ithaca, 1975); Arthur Leslie Morton, The World of the Ranters: Religious
Radicalism in the English Revolution (London, 1970); C. S. L. Davies, “Les révoltes
populaires en Angleterre (1500–1700),” Annales E.S.C. 24 (1969) 24–60; contemporary
works of relevance here include R. Mentet de Salmonet, Histoire des troubles de la Grande
Bretagne (Paris, 1649; English tr., London, 1735); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London,
1651).
On English social structure, contemporary writings include Thomas Smith, De Republica
Anglorum (1583), ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982); William Harrison, The Description of
England (1587), ed. George Edelen (Ithaca, 1968); Thomas Wilson, The State of England,
1600, ed. F. J. Fisher (1936).
 On Spain, see Michel R. Weisser, The Peasants of the Montes: the Roots of Rural
Rebellion in Spain (Chicago, 1976); J. H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans (Cambridge,
1963); Sancho de Moncada, Restauracion Politica de España (1619, ed. J. Vilar (Madrid
1974); on the Portuguese revolution, H. V. Livermore, A New History of Portugal (Cambridge,
1969).
Italian disorders are examined in H. G. Koenigsberger, “The Revolt of Palermo in 1647,”
Cambridge Historical Journal 8 (1944–46) 133–47; idem, Estates and Revolutions: Essays
in Early Modern European History (Ithaca, 1971); Rosario Villari, La revolta antispagnola a
Napoli, le origini (1585–1647) (Bari, 1967).
For eastern Europe, see Jerzy Topolski, “Economic Decline in Poland from the Sixteenth
to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Peter Earle, ed., Essays in European Economic History
(Oxford, 1974); M. Malowist, Croissance et regression en Europe, XIVe–XVIIe siècles (Paris,
1972); M. Malowist, “Poland, Russia, and Western Trade in the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth
Centuries,” Past & Present 13 (1958) 26–41. On unrest in Hungary, see L. Makkai, “The
Hungarian Puritans and the English Revolution,” Acta Historica 5 (1958) 1–27.
For the time of troubles in Russia, see V. O. Kliuchevskii, A Course in Russian History:
The Seventeenth Century, the third volume of a historical classic (1907; Chicago, 1968),
which is organized around a crisis model.
On Scandinavia, see four works by Michael Roberts, The Swedish Imperial Experience,
1560–1718 (Cambridge, 1979, 1984); The Early Vasas: A History of Sweden, 1523–1611
(Cambridge, 1968); Sweden as a Great Power: Government, Society and Foreign Policy,
1611–1697 (New York, 1968); and “Queen Christina and the General Crisis of the Seventeenth
Century,” Past & Present 22 (1962) 36–59.
For the seventeenth-century crisis outside Europe, see A. A. M. Adshead, “The
Seventeenth-Century General Crisis in China,” France-Asie 24 (1970) 251–65; E. J. Van Kley,
“News from China: Seventeenth-Century European Notices of the Manchu Conquest,” Journal
of Modern History 45 (1973) 561–82; Ping-Ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China,
1368–1953 (Cambridge, 1959), James Bunyon Parsons, The Peasant Rebellions of the Late
Ming Dynasty (Tucson, 1970); Jonathan D. Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (New York,
1978); Helen Dunstan, “The Late Ming Epidemies: A Preliminary Survey,” Ch’ing-shih Wen-
t’i 3 (1975) 1–59; Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline
(New Haven, 1981).
On the general crisis in the Middle East, see Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in
Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 1981);
Murat Cizakca, “Price History and the Bursa Silk Industry: A Study in Ottoman Industrial
Decline, 1550–1650,” Journal of Economic History 40 (1980) 533–50; Omer L. Barkan, “The
Social Consequences of Economic Crisis in Later Sixteenth-Century Turkey,” in Social
Aspects of Economic Development (Istanbul, 1964); idem, “The Price Revolution of the
Sixteenth-Century: A Turning Point in the Economic History of the Middle East,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 6 (1975) 3–28.
On the general crisis in America, see P. Chaunu, “Brésil et Atlantique au XVIIe siècle,”
Annales E.S.C. 16 (1961) 1176–1207; Arthur Aiton, “Early American Price-Fixing
Legislation,” Michigan Law Review 25 (1926); Chester L. Gutrie, “Colonial Economy, Trade,
Industry, and Labor in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City,” Revista de Historia de America 5
(1939).

The Equilibrium of the Enlightenment

Price and wage movements through this period are discussed in Wilhelm Abel,
Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur who understands this era (mistakenly) as a time of
prolonged depression but adds much to our understanding in other ways. This interpretation
partly reflected movements in central Europe, which were less positive than in the Atlantic
nations. Other studies show more positive patterns; see E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila
Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage-
Rates,” Economica 23 (1956) 296–314; d’Avenel, Histoire économique de . . . tous les prix
en général, vol. 2.
A comprehensive survey of price movements appears in 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). But this work, for all its many
merits, gives too much credence to Kondratieff models and alpha-beta phases, and too little to
secular trends and relative prices.
For demographic trends the leading works include E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The
Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981) and
Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500–1820 (Baltimore, 1981).
A good survey of economic history in this period is Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe
in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750, cited above.
For various national Economics, see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The
Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985); 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); Jaime Vicens Vives, An
Economic History of Spain (Princeton, 1969); Brian Pullen, ed., Crisis and Change in the
Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1968); Jan de Vries,
The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age (New Haven, 1974); A. H. John, “Some
Aspects of English Economic Growth in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Economica
28 (1961) 176–190; Patrick Chorley, Oil, Silk, and Enlightenment: Economic Problems in
Eighteenth Century Naples (Naples, 1965).
Climate changes in this period are examined in John A. Eddy, “The “Maunder Minimum’:
Sunspots and Climate in the Reign of Louis XIV,” Science 92 (1976) 1189–1202, rpt. in Parker
and Smith, The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 226–68; this is a serious and
important essay. On harvest fluctuations, see W. G. Hoskins, “Harvest Fluctuations and English
Economic Life, 1620–1759,” Agriculture History Review 16 (1968) 15–31.
On agricultural history, see R. V. Jackson, “Growth and Deceleration in English
Agriculture, 1660–1780,” Economic History Review 38 (1985) 333–51.
 On price movements and markets, in addition to works cited above by Posthumus and
Phelps-Brown and Hopkins, see C. W. J. Granger and C. M. Elliott, “A Fresh Look at Wheat
Prices and Markets in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 20 (1969)
257–65; Walter Achilles, “Getreidepreise und Getreide Handelsbeziehungen europäischer
Räume im 16 und 17 Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie 7
(1959) 32–55; Ursula M. Cowgill and H. B. Johnson Jr., “Grain Prices and Vital Statistics in a
Portuguese Rural Parish, 1671–1720,” Journal of Bio-Social Science 3 (1971) 321–29; M.
Couturier, “La fixation des prix des grains et du pain à Chateauneuf-en-Thymerais: 1692–
1741,” Histoire Locale Beauce et Perche 3 (1961) 19–24; R. Meuvret, “Histoire de prix des
céréales en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIme siècle; Sources et publications,” Annales
d’Histoire Sociale 5 (1944) 27–44; idem., “Les mouvements des prix de 1661 à 1715 et leurs
répercussions,” Journal de la Societé de Statistique de Paris 85 (1944), rpt. in Romano, ed.,
I prèzzi in Europa, 315–29; Robert S. Smith, “Indigo Production and Trade in Colonial
Guatemala,” Hispanic American Historical Review 39 (1959); Raymond L. Lee, “Grain
Legislation in Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review (1947); E. Mireaux,
Une province français au temps du Grand Roi: La Brie (Paris, 1958); F. G. Dreyfus,
“Remarques sur le mouvement des prix et la conjuncture en Allemagne de la second moitié du
XVIIe siècle,” Premiere Conference Internationale d’Histoire Économique, Contributions-
Communications, Stockholm, 1960 (Paris, 1960); Marcello Boldrini, “Il prèzzo del pane in
Matelica nel secolo XVII [1642–1694],” Giornale degli Economisti 61 (1921) 298–302; I
have not seen J. A. Faber, “Graanhandel, graanprijzen en tarievenpolitiek in Nederland
gedurende de tweede helft der zeventiende eeuw,” Tijdschricht voor Gescheidenis (1962).
Wage movements and living standards may be followed in works of Abel, Phelps-Brown
cited above, Micheline Baulant, “Les salaires du Bâtiment, 1490–1726,” Annales; E.
Scholliers, De Levenstandaard in de XVe en XVIe eeuw te Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1960); Aldo
de Maddalena, “Preise, Löhne und Goldwesen im Verlauf der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung
Mailands,” in Ingomar Bog, ed., Wirtschaftliche und soziale Strukturen im saekularen
Wandel (Hanover, 1974); Jan de Vries, “Peasant Demand Patterns in Friesland, 1550–1750,”
in William N. Parker and E. L. Jones, eds., European Peasants and Their Markets: Essays in
Agrarian Economic History (Princeton, 1975); E. J. Hamilton, “Prices and Wages at Paris
under John Law’s System,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 51 (1936–37) 42–70; idem,
“Prices and Wages in Southern France under John Law’s System,” Journal of Economic
History 3 (1937) 441–61; Domenico Sella, Salari e lavoro nell’ edilizia lombardia durante il
secolo XVII (Pavia, 1968).
For rent, interest, and returns to capital, see H. J. Habakkuk, “The Long-Term Rate of
Interest and the Price of Land in the Seventeenth Century,” Economic History Review 5 (1952–
53) 26–45; idem, “Economic Fortunes of English Landowners in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries,” in E. M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History (New York,
1966) 1:187–201; G. E. Mingay, “The Agricultural Depression, 1730–1750,” Economic
History Review 14 (1962) 323–38; 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).
 On monetary movements, see Louis Dermigny, “Circuits de l’argent et mileux d’affaires
au XVIIIe siècle,” Review Historique 112 (1954) 239–78; idem, “Une carte monetaire de la
France au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 10 (1955) 480–93; John J. McCusker, Money and
Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill, 1978); J. K.
Horsefield, British Monetary Experiments, 1650–1710 (1960, London; New York, 1983),
with an important review by T. S. Ashton in Economic History Review 2d ser. 13 (1960) 119–
22.
On commerce, trade, and migration, see H. E. S. Fisher, “Anglo-Portuguese Trade, 1700–
1770,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 16 (1963) 219–33; V. M. Godinho, “Flottes de sucre
et flottes de l’or, 1660–1770,” Annales E.S.C. 5 (1950) 184–97; J. A. Faber, “The Decline of
the Baltic Grain Trade in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Acta Historiae
Neerlandica I (1966) 108–31.
Fiscal history is the subject of P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England:
A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967) and E. B.
Schumpeter, “English Prices and Public Finance, 1660–1822,” Review of Economic Statistics
20 (1938) 21–37. The institutional structure of economic activity is the subject of W. R. Scott,
The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720
(3 vols., Cambridge, 1912).
On social history in this period many hundreds of local and regional studies have been
completed by Annales historians in Europe and by students of the “new social history” in the
United States. Annalists normally study price and wage movements; American social historians
mostly do not (except the Chesapeake group), but all of these works remain useful. Among
them are R. Baehrel on Provence, P. Deyon on Amiens, P. Goubert on Beauvais, Le Roy
Ladurie on Languedoc, J. Meyer on Brittany, A. Poitrineau on Basse-Auvergne, F. Lebrun on
Anjou, G. Frêche on the Toulouse area, P. St. Jacob on Burgundy, J. Dupâquier on Vexin, G.
Lemarchand on Normandy, Thomas Sheppard on Lourmarin, Patrice Higonnet on Pont-de-
Montvert, and John Day on Sardinia. For central Europe, there are studies by Gerald Soliday
on Frankfurt-am-Main and Gerald Strauss on Nuremberg. In Belgium there is the work of E.
Hélin on the Liége region, C. Bruneel on Brabant. In Britain, there is the work of D. C.
Chambers on the Vale of Trent, W. G. Hoskins and his students on Leicestershire, V. Skipp on
the Forest of Arden, David Hey on Myddle, Shropshire, Margaret Spufford on
Cambridgeshire, and E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, on Colyton, Devon. In America, there
is the work of Philip Greven on Andover, Mass., John Demos on Plymouth, Mass., Kenneth
Lockridge on Dedham, Mass., Daniel Scott Smith on Hingham, Mass., Robert Gross on
Concord, Mass., Linda Auwers on Windsor, Conn., Jessica Kross on Newtown, N.Y.,
Stephanie Wolff on Germantown, Pa., Allan Kulikoff on Prince George’s County, Md., Darrett
and Anita Rutman on Middlesex County, Va., and many other projects.
On the growth of political stability in this period, see C. B. A. Behrens, Society,
Government, and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and
Prussia (London, 1985); Ronald W. Harris, Absolutism and Enlightenment, 1660–1789
(London, 1964, 2d ed. 1967); John G. Gagliardo, Enlightened Despotism (New York, 1967).
On England, see J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725
(London, 1967); Betty Kemp, Kings and Commons, 1660–1832 (New York, 1957); E. N.
Williams, The Eighteenth-Century Constitution (New York, 1960).
On France, the political historiography tends to stress the weakness of the old regime
rather than its strengths; but see Roland E. Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the
Absolute Monarchy, 1598–1789 (2 vols., Chicago, 1979, 1984); Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV
and Twenty Million Frenchmen (New York, 1970).
For Prussia, see Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy (Boston,
1966); Reinhold August Dorwart, Administrative Reform of Frederick William I of Prussia
(Westport, 1953).
On Iberia, see Carl A. Hanson, Economy and Society in Baroque Portugal, 1668–1703
(Minneapolis, 1981), which interprets this period as “an era of relative quiescence in
Portuguese history . . . as in most nation-states, the General Crisis . . . was clearly resolved in
favor of absolutism.”
On cultural and intellectual history there is a very rich literature, which tends, however, to
be careless in its chronology and confused in its assumption of social and economic trends.
The classical work is Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV, (tr. Martyn P. Pollack (London, 1962). In
the twentieth century, many works have been written to deny that this period was truly an “age
of reason.” See, e.g., Carl Becker’s witty but wrong-headed The Heavenly City of the
Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932); Basil Willey, The Eighteenth-Century
Background (New York, 1941); Lester Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in
Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Baltimore, 1959); Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth
Century Confronts the Gods (New York, 1967). A contrary argument appears in Ernst
Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston, 1951). Mediating models are
developed in Albert Soboul, Guy Lemarchand, and Michele Fogel, Le siècle des lumières (2
vols., Paris, 1977); Paul Hazard, The European Mind (New York, 1963); Peter Gay, The
Enlightenment: An Interpretation (2 vols., New York, 1966–69); Roger Mercier, La
réhabilitation de la nature humaine (1700–1750) (Paris, 1980).
Among many helpful monographs are Jean Ehrard, “L’idée de nature en France à l’ aube
des lumières (Paris, 1963; Flammarion ed., 1970); Charles Vereker, Eighteenth-Century
Optimism (Liverpool, 1967); William Letwin, The Origin of Scientific Economics (Garden
City, 1963).
Some of the most important contributions to intellectual history in this period are
biographies. Among them are Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton (Cambridge,
1968); Maurice Cranston, John Locke (London, 1957; rpt. New York, 1979); Ronald Grimsley,
D’Alembert (New York, 1963); Isabel Knight, The Geometric Spirit: The Abbé de Condillac
and the French Enlightenment (New Haven, 1968); and Ira Wade, The Intellectual
Development of Voltaire (Princeton, 1969).

The Price Revolution of the Eighteenth Century

Most historians outside of France are not aware that there was a price revolution in the
eighteenth century. The subject has been so little understood that when Boris Mironov picked
up in Russia unmistakeable evidence of what looked to him like a price-revolution in the
eighteenth century, he concluded that it was a delayed Russian extension of the price-revolution
of the sixteenth century! See Boris Mironov, “The Price Revolution’ in Eighteenth-Century
Russia,” Soviet Studies in History 11 (1973) 325–52;
General historical introductions to this period include Franco Venturi, The End of the Old
Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, tr. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton, 1989); C.
B. A. Behrens, The Ancien Régime (1967, New York, 1979); M. S. Anderson, Europe in the
Eighteenth Century, 1713–1783 (2d ed., London, 1976); Leonard Krieger, Kings and
Philosophers, 1689–1789 (New York, 1970); and Isser Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe:
Tradition and Progress, 1715–1789 (New York, 1982). Still useful are three volumes in the
old Langer series: Penfield Roberts, The Quest for Security, 1715–1740 (New York, 1947);
Walter L. Dorn, Competition for Empire, 1740–1763 (New York, 1940); and Leo Gershoy,
From Despotism to Revolution, 1761–1789 (New York, 1944); and two volumes in the French
Peuples et civilisations series: P. Muret, La prépondérance anglaise, 1713–1763 (Paris,
1937); and Philippe Sagnac, La fin de l’ ancien régime et la révolution Américaine, 1763–
1789 (Paris, 1952). General works of economic and social history include Fernand Braudel,
Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 (1967; New York, 1973); idem, Afterthoughts on
Material Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore, 1977); idem, Civilization and Capitalism,
Fifteenth-Eighteenth Century (3 vols., 1979; New York, 1982–84); Pierre Chaunu, La
civilisation de l’Europe classique (Paris, 1966).
On the economic history of England, see T. S. Ashton, An Economic History of England:
The Eighteenth Century (London, 1955); idem, Economic Fluctuations in England, 1700–
1800 (Oxford, 1959).
For France, the leading works are Ernest Labrousse et al., Histoire économique et
sociale de la France vol. 2, 1660–1789 (Paris, 1970); Roger Price, The Economic
Modernization of France (New York, 1975); H. Sée, La France économique et sociale au
XVIIIe siècle (1925, Paris, 1967); idem, Esquisse d’une histoire économique et sociale de la
France depuis les origines jusqu’à la guerre mondiale (Paris, 1929); Marc Bloch, “La lutte
pour l’individualisme agrare,” Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 2 (1930) 329–81,
511–56, which deals mainly with the eighteenth century.
On Italy, the best beginning is Giulio Einaudi, ed., Storia d’Italia, vol. 3, Dal primo
settecento all’unita (Turin, 1973); specialized studies include Bruno Caizzi, Industria,
commercio e banca in Lombardia nel XVIII secolo (Milan, 1968); Giuseppe Felloni, Il
mercato monetario in Piemonte nel secolo XVIII (Milan, 1968); R. Burr Litchfield, “Les
investissements commerciaux des patriciens florentins au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. 14
(1969) 685–721; Giulio Giacchero, Storia economica del Settecento genovese (Genoa,
1951); Carlo Antonio Vianello, Il settecento milanese (Milan, 1934); R. Romano, Prèzzi,
salari e servizi a Napoli dal secolo XVIII (1734–1806) (Milan, 1965).
On Spain, see Richard Herr, the Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton,
1958); Jaime Carrera Pujal, Historia de la economia española (5 vols., Barcelona, 1943–47),
devotes vols. 3–5 to the eighteenth century. A classic is G. Desdevises du Dezert, L’Espagne
de l’ ancien régime (3 vols., Paris, 1897–1904).
 For central Europe, see W. H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social
Background of the Literary Revival (1935, Cambridge, 1968); Hermann Aubin and Wolfgang
Zorn, eds., Handbuch der deutschen Wirtschafts-und Sozialgeschichte (2 vols., Stuttgart,
1971), 1:495–678; Otto Hintze, “Zur Agrarpolitik Friedrichs des Grossen,” Forschungen zur
brandenburgischen Geschichte 10 (1898) 275–309.
Eastern Europe in this era is studied in M. Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie
vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1963); Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the
Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961); Boris Mironov, ‘The Price Revolution’ in
Eighteenth-Century Russia,” Soviet Studies in History 11 (1973) 325–52; idem, “Le
mouvement des prix des céréales en Russie du XVIIIe siècle au début du XXe siècle,” Annales
E.S.C. 41 (1986) 217–51; and W. H. Reddaway, ed., The Cambridge History of Poland
(Cambridge, 1941).
On northern Europe, the first volume of B. J. Hovde, The Scandinavian Countries, 1720–
1865 (Boston, 1943) is devoted to this period.
For the Middle East see, André Raymond, “The Economic Crisis of Egypt in the
Eighteenth Century,” in A. L. Udovitch, ed., The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900: Studies in
Economic and Social History (Princeton, 1981), 687–709.
For America, John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British
America, 1607–1789 (1985, Chapel Hill, 1991) has an excellent bibliography. Also helpful
are J. H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: European Overseas Empires in the Eighteenth Century
(London, 1971); Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British
West Indies, 1623–1755 (Baltimore, 1974); Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds.,
Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque, 1990);
Harold B. Johnson, “A Preliminary Inquiry into Money, Prices, and Wages in Rio de Janeiro,
1763–1823,” in Dauril Alden, ed., Colonial Roots of Modern Mexico (Berkeley, 1973);
Armando de Ramón and José de Larrain, Origenes de la vida economica Chilena, 1659–1808
(Santiago, 1982).
For localized studies it is interesting to compare Georges Lefebvre, Les paysans du Nord
pendant la Revolution Français (Bari, 1959); Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World
(New York, 1976); Patrick O’Mara, “Geneva in the Eighteenth Century: A Socioeconomic
Study of the Bourgeois City,” (thesis, Berkeley, 1956); Franklin L. Ford, Strasbourg in
Transition, 1648–1789 (Cambridge, 1958); Thomas Sheppard, Loumarin in the Eighteenth
Century: A Study of a French Village (Baltimore, 1971); Patrice Higonnet, Pont-de-Montvert
(Cambridge, 1971); Olwen Hufton, Bay eux in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1967);
and Jeffrey Kaplow, Elbeuf during the Revolutionary Period: History and Social Structure
(Baltimore, 1964).
Demographic movements are discussed in E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The
Population History of England, 1541–1871; A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), 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,” in Glass and Eversley,
eds., Population and History (London, 1965), 434–56; Michael W. Flinn, The European
Demographic System, 1500–1820 (Baltimore, 1981).
 On harvest conditions and subsistence crises see John W. Rogers Jr., “Subsistence Crises
and Political Economy in France at the End of the Ancien Régime,” Research in Economic
History 5 (1980) 249–301; David Landes, “The Statistical Study of French Crises,” Journal
of Economic History 10 (1950) 195–211; Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Climat et recoltes au
XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Annales E.S.C. 15 (1966) 434–65; Douglas Hay, “War, Dearth, and
Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts,” Past & Present 95 (1982)
117–60; J. Jenny, “Le prix du blé à Bourges en 1766: Un tumulte populaire,” Mémoires Union
Societe Savantes, Bourges 8 (1959–60) 49–122.
On price movements and markets in this era, much work has been done in France. The
leading authority is still C.-E. Labrousse: Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en
France au XVIIIe siècle (2 vols., Paris 1933), idem, “Prix et structure regionale: Le froment
dans les régions française, 1782–1790,” Annales d’Histoire Sociale 2 (1940) 382–400; and
La crise de l’économie Française a la fin de l’ancien régime et au début de la Révolution
(Paris, 1943). Also helpful are A. P. Usher, History of the Grain Trade in France, 1400–1710
(Cambridge, 1913), and idem, “The General Course of Wheat Prices in France, 1350–1788,”
Review of Economic Statistics 12 (1930) 159–69. Other studies of French prices include
Georges Frêche, “Études statistiques sur le commerce céréalier de la France méridionale au
XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 49 (1971) 5–43, 183–224; A.
Danière, “Feudal Incomes and Demand Elasticity for Bread in Late Eighteenth-Century
France,” Journal of Economic History 18 (1958) 317–41; R. Latouche, Le mouvements des
prix en Dauphiné sous l’ancien régime; étude méthodologique (Grenoble, 1934) and
Annales E.S.C. 9 (1937) 110; A. Poitrineau, La vie rurale en Basse-Auvergne au XVIIIe siècle
(1726–1789) (2 vols., Paris, 1965); Ruggiero Romano, Commerce et prix du blé à Marseille
au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1956); P. de Saint-Jacob, Les paysans de la Bourgogne du Nord au
dernier siècle de l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1960); P. Saint-Jacob, “La question des prix en
France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, d’après les contemporains,” Revue d’Histoire
Économique et Sociale 36 (1952) 133–46; E. Sol, “Les céréales inférieures en Quercy (prix
de 1751 à 1789)” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 4 (1938) 335–55; G. Afanasiev,
Le commerce des céréales en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1894); J. Letaconnoux, Les
subsistances et le commerce des grains en Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle (Rennes, 1909); Ernest
Blin, Le prix du blé à Avalon de 1756 à 1790 (Paris, 1945); F. G. Dreyfus, “Prix et population
à Treves et à Mayence au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 34 (1956)
241–61; Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide, “L’evolution du prix du blé dans quelques villes
d’Europe occidentale du XVe au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales E.S.C. (1987) 529–48.
For price movements in other nations, see William Beveridge, Prices and Wages in
England from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1939; reissued New York,
1966); Earl J. Hamilton, War and Prices in Spain, 1651–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1947);
Vitorino M. Godinho, Prix et monnaies au Portugal, 1750–1850 (Paris, 1955); Corrado
Vivanti, “I prèzzi di alcuni prodotti agricoli a Mantova nella seconda metà del XVIII secolo,”
Bolletino Storico Mantovano 3 (1958) 499–518; P. J. Middelhoven, “Auctions at Amsterdam
of North European Pinewood, 1717–1808: A Contribution to the History of Prices in the
Netherlands,” Acta Historiae Neerlandicae 13 (1980) 65–89; Astrid Friis and Kristof
Glamann, A History of Prices and Wages in Denmark, 1660–1800 (Copenhagen, 1958);
Tadeusz Furtak, Ceny w Gdansku w latach 1701–1815 [A history of prices in Danzig-Gdansk]
(Lemberg, 1935); Ruth Crandall, “Wholesale Commodity Prices in Boston during the
Eighteenth Century,” Review of Economic Statistics 16 (1934) 117–28; R. Cesse, “La crisis
agricola negli Stati Veneti a meta del secolo XVIII,” Estratto dal Nouvo Archivo Veneto n.s.
42; Giuseppe Prato, La vita economica in Piemonte a mezzo il secolo XVIII (Turin, 1908);
Helena Madurowicz-Urbanska, Ceny zbozaw zachodniej Malopolsce w Drugiej Polowie
XVIII wieku (Warsaw, 1963); William S. Sachs, “Agricultural Conditions in the Northern
Colonies before the Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 13 (1953) 274–90; V. N.
Jakovchevsky, Kupechesky kapital v feodal no-krepostnicesky Rossii [Prices and Profit in
Feudal and Servile Russia] (Moscow, 1953), of which pp. 77–103 and 193–201, with
statistical materials, are translated in Italian in Romano, ed., Prèzzi in Europa, 447–79; this is
mainly a study of Russian prices in the mid- and late eighteenth century. Abel also cites Paul
von Hedemann-Heespen, “Zur Sitten-und-Preisgeschichte des 18 Jahrhundert,” Die heimat.
Monatsschrift des Vereins zur Pflege der Natur-und-Landskunde in Schleswig-Holstein, 21
(1911), which I have not seen.
On wage movements, see Elizabeth W. Gilboy, “The Cost of Living and Real Wages in
Eighteenth-Century England,” Review of Economic Statistics 18 (1936) 134–43; idem, Wages
in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1934, New York, 1969); M. W. Flinn,
“Trends in Real Wages, 1750–1850,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 27 (1974) 395–413,
with commentary in ibid. 29 (1976) 137–144; G. N. Von Tunzelmann, “Trends in Real Wages,
1750–1850, Revisited,” ibid., 33–49; Luigi Dal Pane, Storia del lavoro in Italia dagli inizi
del secolo XVIII al 1815 (Milan, 1958); F. W. Botham and E. H. Hunt, “Wages in Britain
during the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review, 2d ser. 40 (1987) 380–99; L. D.
Schwarz, “The Standard of Living in the Long Run: London, 1700–1860,” Economic History
Review 38 (1985) 24–41; A. Verhaegan, “Note sur le trevail et les salaires en Belgique au
XVIIIe siècle,” Bulletin de l’Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales de l’Universite
de Louvain 19 (1953) 71–88; R. Keith Kelsall, “The General Trend of Real Wages in the
North of England during the Eighteenth Century,” York Archaeological Journal 33 (1936);
idem, “The Wages of Northern Farm Labourers in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Economic
History Review 8 (1937) 80–81; Pierre Vilar, “Elan urbain et mouvement des salaires: Le cas
de Barcelone au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire économique et Sociale 28 (1950); E. H.
Hunt, “Industrialization and Regional Inequality: Wages in Britain, 1760–1914,” Journal of
Economic History 46 (1986) 935–66; idem and F. W. Botham, “Wages in Britain during the
Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 40 (1987) 380–99; L. D. Schwarz,
“Trends in Real Wage Rates, 1750–1790: A reply to Hunt and Botham,” Economic History
Review, 2d ser. 43 (1990) 90–98; J. Söderberg, “Real Wage Trends in Urban Europe, 1750–
1850: Stockholm in Comparative Perspective,” Social History 12 (1987) 155–76.
On problems of poverty, see Cissie Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-la-Provence,
1640–1789 (Baltimore, 1976).
For land prices, see Christopher Clay, “The Price of Freehold Land in the Later
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 27 (1974) 173–89;
Arthur Young, An Enquiry into the Progressive Value of Money in England (London, 1812);
Vicomte G. d’Avenel, Histoire économique de la proprieté des salaires, des denrées et de
tous les prix . . ., vol. 2; Daniel Zolla, “Les variations du revenu et du prix des terres en
France au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle, Annales de l’École Libre des Sciences Politiques 8
(1893), 9 (1894).
For returns to capital, see Homer, History of Interest Rates, cited above; Earl J.
Hamilton, “Profit Inflation and the Industrial Revolution, 1751–1800,” Quarterly Journal of
Economics 56 (1941–42) 256–73.
Commercial conditions and finance are discussed in T. S. Ashton, Economic
Fluctuations in England, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1950); W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock
(Cambridge, Mass., 1945); A. H. John, “Insurance Investment and the London Money Market
of the Eighteenth Century,” Economica 20 (1953) 137–58, Eli Heckscher, “The Bank of
Sweden . . . ,” in J. G. Dillen, ed., History of the Principal Public Banks (The Hague, 1934),
1760; P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development
of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967).
On monetary movements, see Richard A. Lester, Monetary Experiments: Early American
and Recent Scandinavian (Princeton, 1939); Joseph Ernst, Money and Politics in America,
1755–1775 (Chapel Hill, 1973).
On speculative manias, see L. Stuart Sutherland, “Sir George Colebrooke’s World Corner
in Alum, 1771–73,” Economic History 3 (1936) 237–58; Stephan Skalweit, Die Berliner
Wirtschaftskrise von 1763 und ihre Hintergrunde (Stuttgart, 1937); Charles P. Kindleberger,
Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (New York, 1978); Julian
Hoppit, “Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review 39
(1946) 39–58.
On industrialization, see Franklin Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization, the First Stage of the
Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972) 241–61; Paul Mantoux,
The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1928); Rudolf Braun,
Industrialisierung und Volksleben: Die Veränderungen der Lebensformen in einem
ländlichen Industriegebiet vor 1800 (Zurich, 1960); Walther G. Hoffmann, Wachstum und
Wachstumformen der Englischen Industriewirtschaft von 1700 bis zur Gegenwart (Jena,
1940), tr. as British Industry, 1700–1950 (Oxford, 1955; New York, 1965); P. Lebrun,
L’industrie de la laine à Verviers pendant le XVIIIe et le début du XIXe siècle (Liege, 1948).
Another change-indicator that shows a fundamental break in secular trends circa 1730–45
is internal migration. See Jan de Vries, Barges and Capitalism: Passenger Transportation in
the Dutch Economy (1632–1789) (Utrecht, 1981), 221–232.
On the economic effect of war and military spending, see James C. Riley, The Seven
Years War and the Old Regime in France: The Economic and Financial Toll (Princeton,
1986); also good on the “crisis of confidence” in the mid-eighteenth century.
For a contemporary discussions of the price revolution, see the anonymous English
pamphlet Reflections on the Present High Price of Provisions, and the Complaints and
Disturbances Arising Therefrom (London, 1766) in the Kress Collection, Baker Library,
Harvard Business School. Other works include T. de Anzano, Reflexiones económico-
politicas sobre las causas de la alteración de Precios (Saragossa, 1768); Nicholas F. Dupré
de Saint Maur, Essai su les monnaies, ou réflexions sur le rapport entre l’argent et les
denrées (Paris, 1746); idem, Recherches sur la valeur des monnaies et sur les prix des
grains, avant et après le Concile de Francfort (Paris, 1762); Claude J. Herbert, Essai sur la
police générale des grains, sur leur prix et sur les effects de l’agriculture (Paris, 1755); F.
Messance, Recherches sur le population (Paris, 1766), which includes an appendix on the
price of wheat in England and France from 1674 to 1764; Gian Rinaldo Carli, Delie monete e
dell’istituzione delle zecche d’Italia (4 vols., Pisa and Lucca, 1754–60); idem, Del valore e
della proporzione de’metalli monetati con i generi in Italia . . . (Lucca, 1760); A. Zanon,
Dell’agricultura, dell’ arti, e del commercio . . . in Lettere scelte sollàgricultura, vol. 5
(Venice, 1765; Milan, 1804).
On the physiocrats, the leading work is G. Weulersee, Le mouvement physiocratique en
France de 1756 à 1770 (Paris, 1910); La physiocratie à la fin de règne de Louis XV, 1770–
1774 (Paris, 1959); La physiocratie sous les ministères de Turgot et Necker, 1774–1781
(Paris, 1950); see also Ronald L. Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy (Cambridge, 1963);
John W. Rogers Jr., “Opposition to the Physiocrats: A Study of Economic Thought and Policy
in the Ancien Régime, 1750–1780,” (thesis, Johns Hopkins, 1971).
On mercantilism the leading work is still Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism (2 vols., 1935,
New York, 1983) and idem, Revisions in Mercantilism, ed. D. C. Coleman (London, 1969).
On the relationship between economic and cultural history, see John W. Van Cleve, The
Merchant in German Literature of the Enlightenment (Chapel Hill, 1986).
For the problem of cultural discontinuity in the mid-eighteenth century, see Roger
Mercier, La réhabilitation de la nature humaine (1700–1750) (Paris, 1980); T. D. Kendrick,
The Lisbon Earthquake (London, 1956).

The Revolutionary Crisis of 1789–1815

A good introduction is Jacques Godechot, Les révolutions, 1770–1799 (1963, 4th ed. Paris,
1988), with extensive discussions of historiography and a copious bibliography. More detailed
accounts are Jacques Godechot, La grande nation 2 vols. (1956, 2d ed. Paris, 1983); R. R.
Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution (2 vols., Princeton, 1959–64); Martin Gohring,
Weg und Sieg der modernen Staatsidee in Frankreich (Tubingen, 1947).
Histories of national economics in this period include, for Britain, A. D. Gayer, W. W.
Rostow, and A. J. Schwartz, The Growth and Fluctuations of the British Economy, 1790–
1850 (1953; new ed., London, 1975); Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic
Growth, 1688–1959 (1962; 2d ed. Cambridge, 1969); R. C. Floud and D. N. McCloskey, eds.,
The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (Cambridge, 1981); and N. F. R. Crafts, British
Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985), a revisionist essay; and
for Scotland, H. Hamilton, Economic History of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford,
1963).
On France, Ernest Labrousse et al., Histoire économique et sociale de la France (Paris,
1970), vols. 2 and 3; M. Marion, Histoire financière de la France depuis 1715 (Paris, 1914–
25), vols. 2–4 cover the period from 1789 to 1818; Henri Sée, Histoire économique de la
France (Paris, 1939).
For Germany, Hermann Aubin and Wolfgang Zorn, Handbuch der deutschen
Wirtschaftsundsozialgeschichte (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1971).
For the United States in this period see Samuel Blodget, Economica: A Statistical
Manual for the United States of America (Washington, 1806); Curtis P. Nettels, The
Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (New York, 1962); Stuart Bruchey, The Roots
of American Economic Growth, 1607–1861 (New York, 1965); Douglas North, The Economic
Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (1961; New York, 1966); Claudia Goldin and Frank
Lewis, “The Role of Exports in American Economic Growth during the Napoleonic Wars,
1793 to 1807,” Explorations in Economic History 17 (1980) 6–25; Paul David, “The Growth
of Real Product in the United States before 1840: New Evidence, Controlled Conjectures,”
Journal of Economic History 27 (1967) 151–97; Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman,
eds., Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth (Chicago, 1986).
On the history of prices, see Winifred Rothenberg, “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; idem, “The
Emergence of Capital Markets in Rural Massachusetts, 1730–1838,” ibid. 45 (1985) 781–808;
idem, “The Emergence of Farm Labor Markets and the Transformation of the Rural Economy:
Massachusetts, 1750–1855,” ibid, 48 (1988) 537–66; idem, From Market-Places to a Market
Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago, 1992); Anne
Bezanson, Prices and Inflation during the American Revolution: Pennsylvania, 1770–1790
(Philadelphia, 1951); idem et al., Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 1784–1861
(Philadelphia, 1936); idem, “Inflation and Controls in Pennsylvania, 1774–1779,” Tasks of
Economic History 8 (1948) 1–20; Arthur Harrison Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the
United States, 1700–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938); Walter B. Smith and Arthur Harrison
Cole, Fluctuations in American Business, 1790–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1935); George
Rogers Taylor, “Wholesale Commodity Prices at Charleston, South Carolina, 1732–1791,”
Journal of Economic History 4 (1921–22) 356–77; “Wholesale Commodity Prices at
Charleston, South Carolina, 1796–1801,” ibid., 848–67; Thomas Senior Berry, Western Prices
before 1861: A Study of the Cincinnati Market (Cambridge, 1943); Harold V. Roelse,
“Wholesale Prices in the United States, 1791–1801,” Quarterly Publications of the American
Statistical Association 15 (1917) 840–46.
On prices in France, C.-E. Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en
France au XVIIIe siècle (2 vols., Paris, 1933) is still the indispensable work on the price
revolution of the eighteenth century; see also C.-E. Labrousse, “Recherches sur l’histoire des
prix en France de 1500 à 1800,” Revue d’Économie Politique (1939); idem, “Un siècle et
demi de hausse des prix agricoles (1726–1873): presentation d’un nouvel indice général des
prix,” Revue Historique 65 (1940); idem, “Prix et structure régionale: le froment dans les
régions françaises (1782–1790),” Annales d’Histoire Sociale 1 (1939); L. Dutil, L’état
économique du Languedoc à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, 1750–1789 (Paris, 1911); A. Achard,
“Le prix du pain à Ambert, de 1774 à 1790,” Bulletin Historique et Scientifique de
l’Auvergne 57 (1937) 136–39; Georges Sangnier, La crise du blé à Arras à la fin du XVIIIe
siècle 1788–1796 (Fontenay-Le-Comte, 1943).
On English prices, in addition to the works of Tooke and Newmarch, Beveridge cited
above, see N. J. Silberling, “British Prices and Business Cycles, 1779–1850,” Review of
Economic Statistics 5 (1923) 223–61; E. L. Jones, Seasons and Prices: The Role of Weather
in English Agricultural History (London, 1964); W. W. Rostow, “Business Cycles, Harvests,
and Politics, 1790–1850,” Journal of Economic History 1 (1941) 206–21.
On prices in other nations, see Jean Meuvret, “La géographic des prix des céréales et les
anciennes économies européennes: prix méditerranéens, prix continentaux, prix atlantiques à la
fin du XVIIIe siècle, Revista da Economia (1951); Anselmo Bernardino, “Contributo all storia
dei prèzzi in Sardegna tra la fine del secolo XVIII e il principio del secolo XIX,” Giornale
degli Economisti 71 (1931) 423–43.
On wages, see M. W. Flinn, “Trends in Real Wages, 1750–1850,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 27 (1974) 395–413; T. R. Gourvish, “Flinn and Real Wage Trends in Britain,
1750–1850: A Comment,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 29 (1976) 136–42; G. N. Von
Tunzelmann, “Trends in Real Wages, 1750–1850, Revisited,” Economic History Review 2d
ser. 32 (1979) 33–49; Valerie Morgan, “Agricultural Wage Rates in Late Eighteenth-Century
Scotland,” Economic History Review 24 (1971) 181–201; Donald R. Adams Jr., “Wage Rates
in the Early National Period: Philadelphia, 1785–1830,” Journal of Economic History 28
(1968) 404–26; idem, “Some Evidence on English and American Wage Rates, 1790–1830,”
Journal of Economic History 30 (1970) 499–520.
On the tangled “standard of living” debate, in which the effect of the Industrial Revolution
has not been clearly distinguished from the secular trend, see Eric Hobsbawm, “The British
Standard of Living, 1790–1850,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 10 (1957) 46–68; idem,
“The Rising Standard of Living in England, 1800–1850,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 13
(1961) 397–416; and many subsequent contributions in A. J. Taylor, ed., The Standard of
Living in Britain during the Industrial Revolution (London, 1975); F. Collier, The Family
Economy of the Working Class in the Cotton Industry, 1784–1833 (Manchester, 1965).
On social and economic conditions and the coming of the American Revolution, see Gary
B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of
the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1979); Marc Egnal and Joseph Ernst, “An Economic
Interpretation of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972) 3–32;
Alfred Young, The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American
Radicalism (De Kalb, 1976); McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 351–
77; Richard B. Sheridan, “The British Credit Crisis of 1772 and the American Colonies,”
Journal of Economic History 20 (1960) 161–86.
For France, the relationship between prices, wages, and revolutionary events is discussed
in Georges Lefebvre, “Le mouvement des prix et les origines de la Révolution française, ”
Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 9 (1937) 288–329; idem, “La crise
économique en France à la fin de l’ancien régime,” Annales E.S.C. 1 (1946) 51–55; C.-E
Labrousse, La crise de l’économic française à la fin de l’ancien régime et au début de la
révolution (Paris, 1943); Philipe Sagnac, “La crise de l’économie en France à la fin de
l’Ancien Régime,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale (1950); P. de St-Jacob, “La
question des prix en France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, après les contemporains,” Revue
d’Histoire Économique et Sociale (1952) 133–46 George E. Rudé, “Prices, Wages, and
Popular Movements in Paris during the French Revolution,” Economic History Review 2d ser.
6 (1954) 246–267; George Lefebvre, “Les mouvement des prix et les origines de la Revolution
Française,” Annales Historiques de la Revolution Francaise 14 (1937) 289–329; Emmanuel
LeRoy Ladurie, “Révoltes et contestations rurales en France de 1675 à 1788,” Annales E.S.C.
29 (1974) 6–22; F. G. Dreyfus, “Prix et population à Mayence et à Tréves au XVIIIe siècle,”
Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale (1956); Hubert C. Johnson, The Midi in Revolution:
A Study of Regional Political Diversity, 1789–1793 (Princeton, 1986); Roger Chartier,
“Cultures, lumières, doléances: Les Cahiers de 1789,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et
Contemporaine 28 (1981) 68–93; David Ringrose, Transportation and Economic Stagnation
in Spain, 1750–1850 (Durham, 1970).
On subsistence crises of the late eighteenth century, see J. Meuvret, “Les crises de
subsistances et la démographic de la France d’Ancien Régime,” Population 1 (1946) 643–50;
idem, “Demographic Crisis in France from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century,”
Population in History, 507–22; Walter M. Stern, “The Bread Crisis in Britain, 1795–96,”
Economica 31 (1964) 168–87; P. Vilar, “Réflexions sur le ‘crise de l’ancien type,’ ‘inégalité
des reécoltes,’ et ‘sous-développement,’” Conjuncture économique, structures sociales:
Hommage à Ernest Labrousse (Paris, 1974); Jacques Godechot and S. Moncassin,
“Démographie et subsistances en Languedoc du XVIIIe siècle du XVIIIe siècle au début au
XIXe,” Bulletin d’Histoire Économique et Sociale de la Révolution Française (1965); D.
Klingaman, “Food Surpluses and Deficits in the American Colonies, 1768–1772,” Journal of
Economic History 31 (1971) 553–69; Olwen Hufton, “Social Conflict and the Grain Supply in
Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14 (1983) 305–09; G.
Sangnier, La crise du blé à Arras, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (1788–1796) (Fontenay-le-Comte,
1943).
On the French financial crisis, see J. Bouchary, Les manieurs d’argent à Paris à la fin du
XVIIIe siècle (2 vols., Paris, 1939–43) and Les compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du
XVIIIe siècle (3 vols., Paris, 1940–42); L. Dermigny, “La France à la fin de l’ Ancien Régime:
une carte monétaire,” Annales E.S.C. (1955) 480–93; J. F. Bosher, French Finances, 1770–
1795 (Cambridge, 1970).
The role of prices, wages, and subsistence in the outbreak of the French Revolution is
also discussed in Jean Egret, The French Prerevolution, 1787–1788 (1962; Chicago, 1977);
Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (New York, 1973); Jacques Godechot, The Taking
of the Bastille, July 14th, 1789 (1965; New York, 1970); G. Durieux, The Vainqueurs de la
Bastille (Paris, 1911); W. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge, 1980); E.
Barber, The Bourgeoisie in Eighteenth Century France (Princeton, 1955).
Monetary movements in the revolutionary era are the subject of Seymour E. Harris, The
Assignats (Cambridge, 1930); J. Morini-Combi, Les assignats, révolution et inflation (Paris,
1926); G. Hubrecht, Les assignats dans le HautRhin (Strasbourg, 1931); idem, “Les assignats
à Bordeaux du début de la Révolution,” Annales Historique de la Révolution Française 16
(1939) 289–301; Jean Bouchary, Les faux monayers sous la Révolution française (Paris,
1946).
Continuing price problems after the Revolution are discussed in R. Schnerb, “La
dépression économique sous le Directoire après la disparition du papier-monnaie,” Annales
Historique de la Révolution Française 11 (1934) 27–49; J. Bertrand, La taxation des prix
sous la Révolution française (Paris, 1949); W. F. Shepard, Price Control and the Reign of
Terror: France, 1793–1795 (Berkeley, 1953); George Rude and Albert Soboul, “Le maximum
des salaires parisiens et la Révolution française,” Annales Historique de la Révolution
Française (1954) 1–22; Richard Cobb, “Politique et subsistance en l’an III, l’exemple du
Havre,” Annales de Normandie (1955) 135–59; idem, Terreur et subsistances, 1793–1795
(Paris, 1965); O. Festy, L’aggriculture pendant la Révolution française: les conditions de
production et de récolte des céréales (1789–1795) (Paris, 1947).
On prices and political movements in other nations, see L. Dal Pane, Lo Stato Pontificio
e il movimento riformatore del settecento (Milan, 1959); J. Vicens Vives, “Conjuntura
economica y reformismo burgués: Dos factores en la evolucion de España del antiguo
regimen,” Estudios de Historia Moderna 4 (1954) 349–91; R. Werner, L’approvisionnement
en pain de la population du bas-Rhin et de l’armée du Rhin pendant la Revolution (1789–
1797) (Strasbourg, 1951).
On poverty there is a very large literature with different problematiques for France:
Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974) and Alan
Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor (New York, 1981), both with full
bibliographies. For Britain, old Benthamite and Fabian interpretations of the poor law by Sir
George Nichols, the Hammonds, and the Webbs are radically revised in Mark Blaug, “The
Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New,” Journal of Economic History 23
(1963) 151–84; this line of inquiry continues in James P. Huzel, “Malthus, the Poor Law, and
Population in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review 2d ser. 22 (1969)
430–52; idem, “The Demographic Impact of the Old Poor Law: More Reflections on Malthus,”
Journal of Economic History 2d ser. 33 (1980) 367–81; Donald McCloskey, “New
Perspectives on the Old Poor Law,” Explorations in Economic History 10 (1972–73) 419–36.
For the Napoleonic crisis, see A. Chabert, Essai sur les mouvements des prix et des
revenus en France de 1798 à 1820 (Paris, 1945–49); J. Norris, “British Wartime Inflation,
1793–1815: The Beginning of a Pragmatic Tradition,” in B. M. Gough, ed., In Search of the
Visible Past (Waterloo, 1975); Joel Mokyr and N. Eugene Savin, “Stagflation in Historical
Perspective: The Napoleonic Wars Revisited,” Research in Economic History 4 (1979) 198–
259; Glenn Hueckel, “War and the British Economy, 1793–1815: A General Equilibrium
Analysis,” Explorations in Economic History 10 (1973) 365–96; idem, “Relative Prices and
Supply Response in English Agriculture during the Napoleonic Wars,” Economic History
Review 2d ser. 29 (1976) 401–14; A. K. Cairncross and B. Weber, “Fluctuations in Building in
Great Britain, 1785–1849,” Economic History Review 9 (1956) 283–97; J. W. Anderson, “A
Measure of the Effect of British Public Finance, 1793–1815,” Economic History Review; Eli
Heckscher, The Continental Blockade: An Economic Interpretation (Oxford, 1922); A. C.
Clauder, American Commerce as Affected by the Wars of the French Revolution and
Napoleon, 1793–1812 (Philadelphia, 1932); W. F. Galpin, The Grain Supply of England
during the Napoleonic Period (New York, 1925); R. Ruppenthal, “Denmark and the
Continental System,” Journal of Modern History 15 (1943) 7–23; E. Tarlé, Le blocus
continental et le royaume d’Italie (Paris, 1931); C. Northcote Parkinson, ed., The Trade
Winds: A Study of British Overseas Trade during the French Wars, 1793–1815 (London,
1948).
On finance, banking, and interest rates, see N. J. Silberling, “British Financial
Experience, 1790–1830,” Review of Economic Statistics 1 (1919) 321–23; Emmanuel
Coppieters, English Bank Note Circulation, 1694–1954 (Louvain, 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 Development of
American Commercial Banking, 1782–1837 (Kent, Ohio, 1965).
On the relationship between prices and disorder in England, see Douglas Hay, “War,
Dearth, and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts,” Past &
Present 95 (1982) 117–60.
Thomes Malthus and David Ricardo generalized the experiences of their time in Essays
on the Principles of Population (1798) and Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
(1817). A discussion appears in Samuel Hollander, “Ricardo’s Analysis of the Profit Rate,
1813–15,” Economica 40 (1973) 260–82; see also Edmond E. Lincoln, ed., Du Pont de
Nemours on the Dangers of Inflation (a speech in the National Assembly, 25 Sep. 1790;
Boston, 1950). Two classic contemporary accounts are by Arthur Young: An Inquiry into the
Progressive Value of Money in England (London, 1812) and An Enquiry into the Rise of
Prices in Europe (London, 1815). The relationship between economic and cultural movements
appears in D. Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la révolution française, 1715–1787
(Paris, 1933).

The Victorian Equilibrium

General works on European economic history in the nineteenth century include David S.
Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in
Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969); Charles P. Kindleberger,
Economic Growth in France and Britain, 1851–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); P. K.
O’Brien and C. K. Kyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780–1914: Two Paths
to the Twentieth Century (London, 1978); and Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth:
Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven, 1966).
On British economic history, general works include François Crouzet, L’économie de la
Grande Bretagne victorienne, (Paris, 1978) tr. by Anthony Forster as The Victorian Economy
(New York, 1982); Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey, The Economic History of Britain
since 1700 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1981); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: An
Economic History of Britain since 1750 (London, 1968); Peter Mathias, The First Industrial
Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (London, 1969); Phyllis Deane and W.
A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959 (2d ed., Cambridge, 1967); J. D. Chambers,
The Workshop of the World: British Economic History from 1820 to 1880 (London, 1961).
Still instructive is J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain (3 vols.,
Cambridge, 1926–38). A revisonist interpretation appears in N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic
Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985). A classic contribution to price
history in this period is Stanley Jevons, “On the Variation of Prices and the Value of Currency
since 1782,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London (1865).
The French economy is examined in Rondo Cameron, France and the Economic
Development of Europe, 1800–1914 (Princeton, 1961); idem, “Profit, croissance et stagnation
en France au XIXe siècle,” Economic Appliquée 10 (1957) 409–44; Shepherd B. Clough,
“Retardative Factors in French Economic Development in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries,” Journal of Economic History 6 (1946) 91–102; N. Beaurieux, Les prix du blé en
France au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1909).
For German economic history, a major synthesis of economic and political history is
Helmut Bohme, Deutschlands Weg zur Grossmacht . . . (Cologne and Berlin, 1966). Also of
high quality are Wolfram Fischer, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der
Industrialisierung . . . (Gottingen, 1972); Fritz Stern, Bismarck, Bleichroder, and the Building
of the German Empire (New York, 1977); Franz Schnabel, Deutsche Geschichte im
neunzehnten Jahrhundert (4 vols., Freiberg, 1927–37); W. G. Hoffman, Das Wachstum der
deutschen Wirtschaft seit der mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1965; Tubingen, 1971).
The economic history of the United States is surveyed in Lance Davis et al., American
Economic Growth: An Economist’s History of the United States (New York, 1972), 363–65;
and Douglass C. North, Growth and Welfare in the American Past: a New Economic History
(3d ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1983). Specialized studies that give serious attention to price
history include Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New York, 1969); Eugene M. Lerner,
“Inflation in the Confederacy, 1861–65,” in Milton Friedman, ed., Studies in the Quantity
Theory of Money (Chicago, 1956); George E. Dickey, “Money, Prices, and Growth: The
American Experience, 1860–1896” (thesis, Northwestern University, 1968).
On Italy, a general survey is Shepard B. Clough, The Economic History of Modern Italy
(New York, 1964); on prices in Italy during the nineteenth century, many studies have been
published in C. M. Cipolla et al., Archivio economico dell’Unificazione italiana, including P.
Bandettini, “I prèzzi sul mercato di Firenze dal 1800 al 1890” (vol. 5, fasc. 1, 28–34); I.
Delogu, “I prèzzi sui mercati di Cagliari e di Sassari dal 1818 al 1880” (vol. 9, fasc. 4, 20–
24); G. Felloni, “I prèzzi sul mercato di Torino dal 1815 al 1890” (vol. 5, fasc. 2, 36–44);
idem, “I prèzzi sul mercato di Genova dal 1815 al 1890” (vol. 7, fasc. 3, 126–34), A. de
Maddalena, “I prèzzi . . . sul mercato di Milano,” (vol. 5, fasc. 3, 36–44); A. Petino, “I prèzzi .
. . sui mercati di Palermo a di Catania dal 1801 al 1890” (vol. 8, fasc. 5, 20–24); S. Pinchera,
“I prèzzi . . . sui mercati dello Stato Pontifico (dal 1823 al 1860) e Roma (dal 1823 al 1890)”
(vol. 5, fasc., 4, 32–34; and P. Spaggiari, “I prèzzi . . . sul mercato di Poarma dal 1821 al
1890” (vol. 8, fasc. 3, 24–34).
On Spain, there are Juan Sardá, La politica monetaria y las fluctuaciones de la
economia espannñola en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 1948); Nicolas Sanchez Albornoz, Las crisis
de subsistencias de Espana en el siglo XIX (Rosario, 1963); idem, “La formazione del
mercato nazionale: Spagna e Italia,” Rivista Storica Italiana 85 (1973) 907–31; Pierre
Conrad and Albert Lovett, “Problèmes de l’évaluation du coût de la vie en Espagne: 1. Le prix
du pain depuis le milieu du XIXe siècle: une source nouvelle,” Melanges de la Cas Velázquez
5 (1965) 411—41; Juan J. Novara, Contribución a la historia de los precios en Córdoba,
1887–1907 (Cordoba, 1968).
On the Middle East, a useful essay is Haim Gerber and Nachum T. Gross, “Inflation or
Deflation in Nineteenth-Century Syria and Palestine,” Journal of Economic History 40 (1980)
351–57.
On southern Asia, see K. N. Chaudhuri, ed., The Economic Development of India under
the East India Company, 1814–1858 (Cambridge, 1971); John Adams and Robert C. West,
“Money, Prices, and Economic Development in India, 1861–1895,” Journal of Economic
History 39 (1979) 55–68.
On East Asia, pathbreaking works include M. Lee, Economic History of China (New
York, 1921); Richard Henry Tawney, Land and Labor in China (New York, 1932); Albert
Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialisation . . . (Cambridge, 1958).
On Oceania, Australia, and New Zealand, see Edward O. G. Shann, An Economic
History of Australia (London, 1930); N. G. Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic
Development, 1861–1900 (London, 1963); C. G. F. Simkin, The Instability of a Dependent
Economy (London, 1951).
Much work has been done on economic fluctuations in the nineteenth century. A general
study is Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial
Crises (New York, 1978). On specific crises, panics, and depressions, a large literature
includes John D. Post, The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World (Baltimore,
1977), on the crisis of 1816; Murray N. Rothbard, The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies
(New York, 1962); P. Gonnet, “Esquisse de la crise économique de 1827 à 1832,” Revue
d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 33 (1955) 249–92; R. C. O. Mathews, A Study in Trade
Cycle History: Economic Fluctuations in Great Britain, 1833–42 (Cambridge, 1954);
Reginald Charles McGrane, The Panic of 1837 (Chicago, 1924); Peter Temin, The Jacksonian
Economy (New York, 1969); D. Morier Evans, The Commercial Crisis, 1847–48 (1849, rpt.
New York, 1968, 2d ed. 1969); Henry Grote Lewin, The Railway Mania and its Aftermath,
1845–1852 (1936; rpt. New York, 1968); J. R. T. Hughes, Fluctuations in Trade, Industry
and Finance (Oxford, 1960); George W. Van Vleck, The Panic of 1857: An Analytical Study
(New York, 1943); D. Morier Evans, History of the Commercial Crisis, 1857–1858, and the
Stock Exchange Panic of 1859 (1859; rpt. New York, 1969); Hans Rosenberg, Die
Weltwirtschaftskrise von 1857–59 (Stuttgart, 1934); Wladimir d’Ormesson, La grande crise
mondiale de 1857 . . . (Paris, 1933); E. Ray McCartney, Crisis of 1873 (Minneapolis, 1935);
S. B. Saul, The Myth of the Great Depression, 1873–1896 (London, 1969); W. Jett Lauck, The
Causes of the Panic of 1893 (Boston, 1907); H. S. Foxwell, “The American Crisis of 1907,”
in Papers in Current Finance (London, 1919); Franco Bonelli, La crisi del 1907 . . . (Turin,
1971).
On monetary trends, see Wesley C. Mitchell, Gold, Prices, and Wages under the
Greenback Standard (Berkeley, 1908); Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era (Princeton, 1964);
Robert Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party (Baltimore, 1959); Milton Friedman and Anna J.
Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, 1963); idem,
Monetary Statistics of the United States (New York, 1970); idem, Monetary Trends in the
United States and the United Kingdom: Their Relation to Income, Prices, and Interest
Rates, 1867–1975 (Chicago, 1982); Larry T. Wimmer, “The Gold Crisis of 1869,”
Explorations in Economic History 12 (1975) 105–22.
Banks and banking are discussed in Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from
the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1957); idem, Sovereignty and an Empty Purse:
Banks and Politics in the Civil War (Princeton, 1970); Richard H. Timberlake, The Origins of
Central Banking in the United States (Cambridge, 1978); and for quantitative data, J. Van
Fenstermaker, “The Development of American Commercial Banking, 1782–1837” (thesis,
Kent State University, 1965). Forrest Capie and Alan Webber, A Monetary History of the
United Kingdom, 1870–1982 (London, 1985) includes much data on British banking. See also
Sir John Clapham, The Bank of England, a History 2 vol. (Cambridge, 1944); Walter Bagehot,
Lombard Street (5th ed. London, 1873), a classic, which should be read in conjunction with
Frank W. Fetter, “A Historical Confusion in Bagehot’s Lombard Street,” Economica 34 (1967)
80–83; Robert Bigo, Les banques françaises au cours de XIXe siècle (Paris, 1947).
General price studies include Ethel D. Hoover, “Wholesale and Retail Prices in the
Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 18 (1958) 298–316; and Walt W. Rostow,
“Money and Prices: An Old Debate Revisited,” (ms., Austin, 1978), an argument that price
fluctuations were driven by “real” rather than monetary forces (mainly supply shocks).
Monetarist rejoinders appear in Michael Bordo and Anna J. Schwartz, “Money and Prices in
the Nineteenth Century: An Old Debate Rejoined,” Journal of Economic History 40 (1980)
61–67; idem, “Money and Prices in the Nineteenth Century: Was Thomas Tooke Right?”
Explorations in Economic History 18 (1981) 97–127; C. Knick Harley, “Prices and the
Money Market in Britain, 1870–1913,” Explorations in Economic History 14 (1977) 69–89;
P. R. P. Coelho and J. F. Shepherd, “Differences in Regional Prices: The United States, 1851–
1880,” Journal of Economic History 34 (1974) 555–91.
Specialized price studies include Ruth L. Cohen, History of Milk Prices (Oxford, 1936);
W. Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question (1865, London, 2d ed. 1866); C. Knick Harley,
“Western Settlement and the Price of Wheat, 1872–1913,” Journal of Economic History 36
(1978) 865–78; Thorstein Veblen, “The Price of Wheat since 1867,” Journal of Political
Economy 1 (1892) 365–79; L. B. Zapoleon, Geography of Wheat Prices (USDA Bulletin no.
594, Washington, 1918); Robert C. Allen, “Accounting for Price Changes: American Steel
Rails, 1879–1910,” Journal of Political Economy 89 (1981) 512–28; Peter Temin, “The
Causes of Cotton-Price Fluctuations in the 1830s,” Review of Economics and Statistics 49
(1967) 463–70.
The climatic optimum of the nineteenth century is examined in H. H. Lamb, Climate:
Present, Past and Future (2 vols., London, 1977).
Interest rates and returns to capital are the subject of J. M. Fachan, Historique de la rente
française (Paris, 1904); Leonidas J. Loutchitch, Des variations du taux de l’intérêt en France
de 1800 à nos jours (Paris, 1930); Clifford F. Thies, “Interest Rates and Expected Inflation,
1831–1914: A Rational Expectations Approach,” Southern Economic Journal 51 (1985)
1107–20; Gene Smiley, “Interest Rate Movement in the United States, 1888–1913,” Journal of
Economic History 35 (1975) 591–620; C. Knick Harley, “The Interest Rate and Prices in
Britain, 1873–1913: A Study of the Gibson Paradox,” Explorations in Economic History 14
(1977) 69–89.
On rent and real estate prices, see F. M. L. Thompson, “The Land Market in the
Nineteenth Century,” Oxford Economic Papers 9 (1957) 285–308; E. M. Carus-Wilson, “A
Century of Land Values: England and Wales [1781–1880],” in idem, Essays in Economic
History (London, n.p.), 3:128–31; Avner Offer, “Ricardo’s Paradox and the Movement of
Rents in England, c. 1870–1910,” Journal of Economic History 33 (1980) 236–52; Country
Landowners’ Association, The Rent of Agricultural Land in England and Wales, 1890–1946
(London, 1949).
Wages are studied in J. Kucynski, Die Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter in Deutschland
von 1800 bis in die gegenwart (1947); idem, Die Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter unter
dem Kapitalismus (1960–63); P. Mombert, “Aus der Literatur über die soziale Frage und über
die Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Archiv für
die Geschichte der sozialismus über die Arbeiterbewegung 9(1921); A. W. Phillips,” “The
Relation between Unemployment and the Rate of Change in Money Wage Rates in the United
Kingdom, 1861–1957,” Economica 25 (1908) 283–99; Richard G. Lipsey, “The Relation
between Unemployment and the Rate of Change in Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom,
1861–1957: A Further Analysis,” Economica 27 (1960) 1–31; E. H. Phelps-Brown and Sheila
Hopkins, “The Course of Wage Rates in Five Countries, 1860–1939,” Oxford Economic
Papers (Oxford, 1950); Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth: the American
Record since 1800 (New York, 1964); Stephen DeCanio and Joel Mokyr, “Inflation and Wage
Lag during the American Civil War,” Explorations in Economic History 14 (1977) 311–36; P.
R. P. Coelho and J. F. Shepherd, “Regional Differences in Real Wages: The United States,
1851–1880,” Explorations in Economic History 13 (1976) 203–30; E. H. Hunt, Regional
Wage Variations in Britain, 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1973).
American slave prices, which tended to follow global trends in real wages, are charted in
Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (Baton Rouge, 1966); see also Robert Fogel and
Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (2 vols.,
Boston, 1974).
On unemployment, see Marie Dessauer, “Unemployment Records, 1849–59,” Economic
History Review 10 (1939–40) 38–43; and Alex Keyssar, Out of Work; The First Century of
Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1986).
On wealth and income distribution, see Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson,
“Three Centuries of Wealth Inequality,” Research in Economic History 1 (1976) 69–122;
Stephen Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City
(Cambridge, 1964).
On cultural trends in the Victorian equilibrium, Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame
of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1957), is a valuable work though it makes too much of
similarities between Victorian and post-Victorian thought; still useful for this inquiry are G. M.
Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Garden City, 1954) and W. L. Burn, The Age of
Equipoise (1964; New York, 1965).

The Price Revolution of the Twentieth Century

On the origins of the twentieth century price revolution, two general works are
indispensable: Jan Romein, The Watershed between Two Eras: Europe in 1900 (Middletown,
1978); Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth,
1967).
The statistical evidence is summarized in B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics,
1750–1988 (3d ed., New York, 1992); idem, International Historical Statistics: Africa and
Asia (New York, 1995); idem, International Historical Statistics: The Americas and
Australasia (London, 1995); and national yearbooks listed above.
The global dimensions of price movements in the twentieth century are examined in
Arthur B. Laffer, “The Phenomenon of Worldwide Inflation: A Study of International Market
Integration,” in David I. Meiselman and Arthur B. Laffer, eds., The Phenomenon of Worldwide
Inflation (Washington, 1975), 27–52; A. J. Brown, The Great Inflation, 1939–51 (London,
1955); idem, World Inflation since 1950 (Cambridge, 1985); Geoffrey Maynard and W. van
Ryckegham, eds., A World of Inflation (New York, 1975); Gardner Ackley, Stemming World
Inflation (Paris, 1971); Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical
Political Economy (Cambridge, 1987).
On the beginning of the price revolution of the twentieth century, two different
interpretations appear in Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History
of the United States, 1867–1960 (Princeton, 1963) and W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and
Fluctuations, 1870–1913 (London, 1978). Still useful are J. L. Laughlin: “Gold and Prices,
1890–1907,” Journal of Political Economy (1909) 257–71, and idem “Causes of the Changes
in Prices since 1896,” American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings (1911) 26–
36.
On economic trends before 1914, a major work from a monetarist perspective is Michael
Bordo, “The Effect of the Sources of Change in the Money Supply on the Level of Economic
Activity” (thesis, Chicago, 1972). Other studies include Donald McCloskey and J. Richard
Zecher, “How the Gold Standard Worked, 1880–1930,” in J. A. Fraenkel and H. G. Johnson,
eds., The Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments (London, 1976); R. P. Higonnet,
“Bank Deposits in the United Kingdom, 1870–1914,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 20
(1957) 329–67; Austin H. Spencer, An Examination of Relative Downward Industrial Price
Flexibility, 1870–1921 (New York, 1978), on eastern Europe.
For the economic and social history of price movements during and after World War I, see
John Stevenson, British Society, 1914–1945 (London, 1984), 46–102; Arthur Marwick, The
Deluge: British Society and the First World War (Boston, 1965); A. J. P. Taylor, English
History, 1914–1945 (New York, 1965); James Harvey Rogers, The Process of Inflation in
France, 1914–1927 (New York, 1929); Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe:
Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton,
1975); Stephen A. Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial
Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill, 1976); R. H. Tawney, “The
Abolition of Economic Controls, 1918–21,” Economic History Review 13 (1943) 1–30; Alice
Coulon, Recherches sur les origines du boom et de la crise de 1920 (Montlucon, 1946).
Germany’s experience of hyperinflation has engendered a large literature; see Carl-
Ludwig Holtfrerich, The German Inflation, 1914–1923: Causes and Effects in International
Perspective (Berlin, 1986); “Political Factors of the German Inflation, 1914–1923,” in
Schmukler and Marcus, eds., Inflation through the Ages: Economic, Social, Psychological,
and Historical Aspects, (New York, 1983) 400–416; Andreas Kunz, Civil Servants and the
Politics of Inflation in Germany, 1914–1924 (New York, 1986); Gordon Craig, Germany,
1866–1945 (New York, 1978); Gerald Feldman, Iron and Steel in the German Inflation,
1916–1923 (Princeton, 1977); K. Laursen and J. Pederson, The German Inflation, 1918–1923
(Amsterdam, 1964); Gerald D. Feldman et al., The German Inflation Reconsidered: A
Preliminary Balance (Berlin, 1982); idem, The Experience of Inflation: International and
Comparative Studies (Berlin, 1984); idem, Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation auf die
deutschen Geschichte, 1924–1933 (Munich, 1985); idem, The Great Disorder: Politics,
Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924 (New York, 1993).
For other hyperinflations in eastern and central Europe after World War I, see a valuable
group of articles: György Ránki, “Inflation in Post-World War I East Central Europe” and
“Inflation in Hungary”; Ljuben Berov, “Inflation and Deflation Policy in Bulgaria during the
Period between World War I and World War II”; Mugur Isarescu, “Inflation in Romania during
the Post-World War I Period”; Zbigniew Landau, “Inflation in Poland after World War I”;
Alice Teichova, “A Comparative View of the Inflation of the 1920s in Austria and
Czechoslovakia”; all in Schmukler and Marcus, eds., Inflation through the Ages, 475–571;
also Z. S. Katsenellenbaum, Russian Currency and Banking, 1914–1924 (London, 1925); J.
van Walre de Bordes, The Austrian Crown: Its Depreciation and Stabilization (London,
1924).
Price movements between the wars are discussed in Derek H. Aldcroft, Finanz und
wirtschaftspolitsche Fragen der Zwischenkreigszeit (Berlin, 1973); Albert Sauvy, Histoire
économique de la France entre les deux guerres (4 vols., Paris, 1965–75); Emile Moreau,
Souvenirs d’un gouverneur de la Banque de France (Paris, 1954); Sidney Pollard, The
Development of the British Economy, 1914–1950 (London, 1962).
For the great depression see John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston,
1955); Lester V. Chandler, America’s Greatest Depression, 1929–1941 (New York, 1970);
Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Princeton, 1963; Kansas City, 1969); Karl
Brunner, ed., The Great Depression Revisited (Boston, 1981); Peter Temin, Did Monetary
Forces Cause the Great Depression? (New York, 1976).
On price movements during and after World War II see Arthur Joseph Brown, The Great
Inflation, 1939–1951 (New York, 1983); Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade and After:
America, 1945–1960 (New York, 1966); Arthur Hanau, Die deutsche landwirtschaftliche
Preis aud Marktpolitik im Zweiten Weltkreig (Stuttgart, 1975); John J. Klein, “German Money
and Prices, 1932–44,” in Milton Friedman, ed., Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money
(Chicago, 1956); Henry S. Miller, Price Control in Fascist Italy (New York, 1938); Gail E.
Makinin, “The Greek Hyperinflation and Stabilization of 1943–1946,” Journal of Economic
History 46 (1986) 755–807; and A. J. Brown, The Great Inflation, 1939–1951 (London,
1955); and Robert S. Morrison, The Real War on Inflation Has Not Begun . . . (Ashtabula,
Ohio, 1982), which covers the period from 1937 to 1980; A fascinating sidelight is R. A.
Radford, “The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp,” Economica 12 (1945).
The economic history of the United States since World War II is the subject of Robert
Aaron Gordon, Economic Instability and Growth: The American Record (New York, 1974);
Herbert Stein, Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy from Roosevelt to
Reagan and Beyond (rev. ed., New York, 1985); Peter Bohley, Die Recession der Jahre
1957–58 in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika . . . (Berlin, 1963).
On price movements in Germany see Günter Schmölders, “The German Experience,” in
Inflation: Long-Term Problems, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 31 (1975),
201–211; Fritz Rahmeyer, Sektorale Preisentwicklung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,
1951–1977: Eine theoretische und empirische Analyse (Tubingen, 1983).
The Italian experience is the subject of Georgio Rota, L’Inflazione in Italia, 1952–1974
(Turin, 1975). On Belgium, see L. H. Dupriez, Monetary Reconstruction in Belgium (New
York, 1947). For Great Britain, see Paul Ormerod, “Alternative Models of Inflation in the
United Kingdom . . . ,” in Schmukler and Marcus, eds., Inflation through the Ages, 643–58.
On the Communist economies, see Wolfgang Teckenberg, “Economic Well-Being in the
Soviet Union: Inflation and the Distribution of Resources,” in Schmukler and Marcus, eds.,
Inflation through the Ages, 659–676; Jan Adam, Wage Control and inflation in the Soviet
Bloc Countries (London, 1979); F. D. Holzman, “Soviet Inflationary Pressures, 1928–1957,
Causes and Cures,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 74 (1960) 167–88; Fyodor I. Kushnirsky,
Growth and Inflation in the Soviet Economy (Boulder, 1989); Adam Martan, Consumer
Prices in Austria and Hungary, 1945–1972 (Vienna, 1974); Sofija Popov and Milena Jovicic,
Uticaj Licnih Dohodaka na Kretanje Cena (Belgrade, 1971), with a summary and conclusion
in English, a study of cost-push inflation in Yugoslavia; J. M. van Brabant, Regional Price
Formation in Eastern Europe (Doedrecht, 1987), on price movements after 1945.
For China there is Ying Hsin, The Price Problems of Communist China (Kowloon,
1964).
On inflation in Latin America, see Walter Manuel Beveraggi Allendi, La inflacion
Argentina, 1946–1975 (Buenos Aires, 1975); Stefan Robeck, “The Brazilian Experience” and
William P. Glade, “Prices in Mexico: From Stabilized to Destabilized Growth,” in
Proceedings of the American Academy of Political Science 31 (1975) 179–187, 188–200; R.
C. Vogel, “The Dynamics of Inflation in Latin America,” American Economic Review 64
(1974) 102–14; Susan M. Wachter, Latin-American Inflation (Lexington, Mass., 1976); Felipe
Pazos, Chronic Inflation in Latin America (New York, 1972); Rosemary Thorp and Lawrence
Whitehead, eds., Inflation and Stabilisation in Latin America (New York, 1979); John
Williamson, ed., Inflation and Indexation: Argentina, Brazil, and Israel (Washington, 1985);
Alain Ize and Gabriel Vera, La inflacion en Mexico (Mexico City, 1984).
On price trends in South Asia, Chandulal Nagindas Vakil, War against Inflation: The
Story of the Falling Rupee, 1943–1977 (Delhi, 1978); Yogesh C. Halan, “Inflation, Poverty
and the Third World: India’s Experience,” in Schmukler and Marcus, eds., Inflation through
the Ages, 625–42; R. J. Venkateshwaran, The Tragedy of the Indian Rupee (Bombay, 1968);
John Latham, “Food Prices and Industrialization: Some Questions from Indian History,” IDS
Bulletin 9 (1978) 17–19.
For East Asia, see Kokishi Asakuri and Chiaki Nishiyama, eds., A Monetary Analysis
and History of the Japanese Economy, 1868–1970 (Tokyo, 1968); Gilbert Brown, Korean
Pricing Policies and Economic Development in the 1960s (Baltimore, 1973).
For African trends, see Jean Phillipe Peemans, Diffusion du progres économique et
convergence des prix: Le cas Congo-Belgique, 1900–1960; la formation du systeme des prix
et salaires sand une economie dualiste (Louvain, 1968).
For Oceana, there is Bryan Haig, Real Product, Income, and Relative Prices in Australia
and the United Kingdom (Canberra, 1968).
The price shocks of the 1970s are the subject of John M. Blair, The Control of Oil (New
York, 1976); also interesting is Ali D. Johany, The Myth of the OPEC Cartel: The Role of
Saudi Arabia (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, University of Petroleum and Minerals, 1980).
On the new inflacion, see Gardiner Means, “Simultaneous Inflation and Unemployment,”
in Means et al., The Roots of Inflation, (New York, 1975) 19–27; also the many works of
Robert Heilbroner; W. David Slawson, The New Inflation: The Collapse of Free Markets
(Princeton, 1981); also idem, “Price Controls for a Peacetime Economy,” Harvard Law
Review 84 (1971) 1090–1107; idem, “Fighting Stagflation with the Wrong Weapons,”
Princeton Alumni Weekly, 23 Feb. 1983, 33–38.
For other “new inflation” theories, see Robert Lekachman, Economists at Bay (New
York, 1976); Dudley Jackson, H. A. Turner and Frank Wilkinson, Do Trade Unions Cause
Inflation? (Cambridge, 1972); G. L. Bach, The New Inflation: Causes, Effects, Cures
(Providence, R.I., 1973).
On economic policy and attempts to control inflation see Leonardo Leiderman and Lars E.
O. Svensson, eds., Inflation Targets (London, 1995), a survey of policies and outcomes in nine
nations. On the United States, a survey is Richard H. Timberlake, Monetary Policy in the
United States; An Intellectual and Institutional History (Chicago, 1993). Two journalistic
accounts include William Greider, Secrets of the Temple; How the Federal Reserve Runs the
Country (New York, 1987) and Maxwell Newton, The Fed (New York, 1983).
For discussion of stagflation, see Alex McLeod, The Fearsome Dilemma: Simultaneous
Inflation and Unemployment (Lanham, Md., 1984).
The attitudes of economists are discussed in Howard Ellis, German Monetary Theory,
1905–1933 (Cambridge, 1934); John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics in Perspective (Boston,
1987); Lester C. Thurow, The Zero Sum Society (New York, 1981).
On prices and speculators in this period, see John A. Jenkins, “The Hunt Brothers:
Battling a Billion Dollar Debt,” New York Times Magazine, 27 Sept. 1987.
On the cultural and social context of inflation, see Alejandro Conde Lopez, Socio-
economia de la inflation . . . (Madrid, 1973). The impact of inflation upon the youth culture of
this era may be observed in Jonathon [sic] Green, The Book of Rock Quotes (New York,
1982); other discussions include George Katona, “The Psychology of Inflation”; David J.
Webber,” . . . a Political Theory of Inflation”; Arthur J. Vidich, “Social and Political
Consequences of inflation . . . “; Edwin T. Harwood, “Toward a Sociology of Inflation”; Beth
T. Niemi and Cynthia Lloyd, “Inflation and female Labor Force Participation”; Wilhelmina A.
Leigh, “The Impact of Inflation upon Homeownership . . . ”; Bettina Berch, “Inflation of
Housework”; and Donald C. Snyder and Bradley R. Schiller, “The Effect of Inflation on the
Elderly”; all in Schmukler and Marcus, eds., Inflation through the Ages, 745–882.
On inflation and unemployment, the Phillips curve first appeared in A. W. Phillips, “The
Relation between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United
Kingdom, 1861–1957,” Economica 25 (1958) 183–299.
On the distribution of wealth and income see A. B. Atkinson, Unequal Shares—Wealth in
Britain (London, 1972); Peter Wiles, Distribution of Income: East and West (Amsterdam,
1974); Lee Soltow, “Long-Run Changes in British Income Inequality,” Economic History
Review 21 (1968) 17–29; Jeffery G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A
Macro-economic History (New York, 1980); Jeffrey G. Williamson, Did British Capitalism
Breed Inequality? (Boston, 1985); Y. S. Brenner, Hartmut Kaelbe and Mark Thomas, eds.,
Income Distribution in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 1991), 35; A. L. Bowley, Wages
in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1900); idem, Wages and
Income in the United Kingdom since 1860 (Cambridge, 1937).
A very lively book might be written on attempts to predict price movements through the
past century, from Samuel Benner, Benner’s Prophecies of Future Ups and Downs in Prices;
What Years to Make Money on Pig-Iron, Hogs, Corn and Provisions (Cincinnati, 1876) to
Ravi Batra, The Great Depression of 1990; Why It’s Got to Happen—How to Protect Yourself
(New York, 1985, 1987).
On the decline of inflation in the 1990s, leading works include Roger Bootle, The Death
of Inflation: Surviving and Thriving in the Zero Era (London, 1996); Lester C. Thurow, The
Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World (New York,
1996).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began nearly forty years ago at The Johns Hopkins University, where I studied
economic history with Frederic Chapin Lane. Fred, as I later came to know him, was a scholar
of the old school. His special field was the Venetian economy during the late Middle Ages and
the Renaissance. Mine was (and is) American history, but I took a graduate course with him
and found myself deeply drawn to the example of his scholarship. One course led to another,
and then to a doctoral field under his direction on the economic and social history of Florence
and Venice in the fifteenth century.
Those who knew Frederic Lane will understand how it happened. He never attracted
large numbers of students or reached a broad public, but he was a gifted teacher and a truly
great scholar. Later he would be elected president of the American Historical Association as a
testament of esteem by his colleagues.
Fred is now in his grave, but he is still a living presence in my world. I can see him in my
mind’s eye as I write these words—a tall, lean New England Yankee with a laconic manner, a
long leathery face deeply seamed by his many years, and a thick mustache that bristled
dangerously whenever I said something that he thought more than ordinarily obtuse. Fred’s
words were few. His manner was abrupt. He demanded a standard of performance that I had
never met before, and trained his students in an old-fashioned way that has nearly vanished
from my profession.
Fred introduced me to the old historical sciences that are nearly forgotten in America
today: paleography, spaghistics, numismatics and diplomatics in the eighteenth-century sense.
As a matter of course, he insisted on a command of the languages that one needed to study the
history of Venice in the quattrocento—a good many languages altogether. There were written
tests, followed by oral examinations in his office. I vividly remember one of those occasions
more than forty years ago. It was late in the afternoon. The heavy curtains were drawn against
the sun, and the room seemed as dark as a cave when I first entered it. Fred showed me to a
seat near his desk. On a bookcase nearby was a dusty model of an old Venetian galley. The
sharp tip of her sinister prow seemed to be pointed like a dagger in my direction. Fred was
oblivious to these sensations. He rummaged happily through piles of old manuscripts, drew out
one incomprehensible sheet after another, and demanded a sight translation. Sometimes my
failures seemed to gratify him more than my successes, but we persevered. Fred labored to
correct my many errors, and slowly the sinister Venetian galley disappeared into the gathering
shadows of the afternoon. As the last rays of the setting sun slanted through the drawn curtains,
Fred’s mustache stopped bristling and began to twitch in a more hopeful way. Finally he
looked up at me and said, “That will do, Fischer.” It was the nearest thing to a word of praise
that I ever had from him. I went reeling into the twilight as he called after me, “next week,
nostro and vostro accounts.”
After we studied methods of fifteenth-century Venetian accounting (a favorite subject of
Fred’s), he led me to the literature of economic theory. I had not studied economics before. An
advisor at Princeton had told me at an impressionable age that economics was not a fit subject
for a gentleman. “One must have one’s money,” he said to a penurious undergraduate, “but one
need not think of it.”
Fred dismissed that attitude with the contempt that it deserved. He approached economic
theory in historical terms, and encouraged me to burrow into the Hutzler Collection, a
wonderful library of economic theory that had been lovingly assembled by the owner of a
Baltimore department store. I read the classics in first editions, a few with marginalia by their
authors. Fred and I had urgent conversations on theoretical problems that are no longer urgent
today_the theory of surplus value which he judged to be Karl Marx’s only contribution to
knowledge, and the monetarist theories of Irving Fisher and Earl Hamilton, who Fred Lane
knew and respected.
To work with Fred Lane was to meet the leading economic historians of his generation,
who came from many nations to visit him. It was to share the camaraderie that still exists
among an international fraternity. My thinking was strongly influenced by conversations with
Michael Postan, a friend of Fred’s who came to Baltimore in 1959. He was a small ginger-
haired British medievalist who taught me his Malthusian approach to historical problems. His
influence can be seen in the pages of this work.
Fred’s friends included Fernand Braudel and the leading French historians of what would
later be called the “Annales school.” I did not hear that expression until much later in the
1960s. Fred knew them in another way. In 1958 and 1959 we studied the work of the martyred
Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel not for their methods but for their results.
In Fred and his friends I met an ideal of disinterested scholarship that began with an act of
faith that the pursuit of truth was a worthy end in itself. Today that idea is regarded with
contempt by a “post-modern” generation (as it had been in the 1920s and 1930s). But Fred was
a believer, and so am I. At Johns Hopkins I was lucky to study with other historians who were
believers too: Owen Lattimore, Sidney Painter, Wilson Smith, and Vann Woodward. Fred was
in that company. The integrity of his scholarship, and especially his way of combining breadth
with rigor, has been a continuing inspiration to me.
In 1962, I finished my graduate work at Johns Hopkins and took a job at Brandeis. Shortly
afterward, Fred retired and moved to his ancestral home in Massachusetts. I was able to
arrange for him to join the faculty at Brandeis. He became my colleague, but always he
remained my teacher. During the late 1960s, while working mainly in American history, I
taught an occasional course on the history of Italy in the quattrocento, and in the 1970s began
to teach a course on the main lines of change in modern history. Both grew very much from the
work I had done with Fred Lane.
In 1979, those courses gave rise to a short essay that summarized the central themes of
this book. The essay was commissioned by B. A. Rittersporn for The Journal of the Institute
of Socioeconomic Studies. I am grateful for his encouragement, and for the generous support of
Leonard M. Greene, president of the Institute of Socieconomic Studies in White Plains, New
York.
Much of the research for this project was done in four great library systems: Harvard, the
New York Public Library, Oxford and Brandeis. A special word of thanks is due to the
Brandeis reference staff, the best I have ever known, who literally never failed to find the
answer to many difficult questions.
My Brandeis students have as always taught their teacher more than he taught them. On
this subject, I have learned much from Winifred Rothenberg whose dissertation I was
privileged to direct. Winnie has done the best American price history of this generation. Her
work is a model for us all.
While I was teaching at Oxford, I got to know Henry Phelps-Brown whose work
revolutionized price history by centering it on the experience of ordinary people, and
correcting the elitist bias that had dominated earlier scholarship. Henry Phelps-Brown was a
distinguished British civil servant, and a great scholar who shared the same devotion to truth
that I have found in so many other price historians. I learned much from our conversations, and
my wife and I remember with pleasure the kindness and generosity with which Henry and
Evelyn Phelps-Brown received two Americans who were far from home.
The first book-length draft of this work was presented to a conference on quantification in
economics and history at California Institute of Technology. I remember with thanks the
hospitality of our hosts in Pasadena, Morgan Kousser and Lance Davis, and also acknowledge
with gratitude the advice and suggestions of the members of the conference—among them,
David Galenson, Maris Vinovskis, and Daniel Scott Smith. After the conference, Claudia
Goldin and Stanley Engerman generously took time from their busy schedules to read the
manuscript. Special thanks are due to Samuel Cohn of the University of Glasgow, who also
read the manuscript and shared his expertise in social and economic history of the early
modern era. My good friend, John Rowett of Brasenose College, Oxford, had many
constructive suggestions for the modern period.
Portions of this work were presented as a public lecture at Connecticut College, where I
remember with thanks the hospitality of President Oakes Ames and members of the Department
of History. Other ideas were tried out on students and history faculty at Oxford University. A
revised draft was presented as a lecture at Dartmouth College in 1994.
At the Oxford University Press, my editor and friend of thirty years, Sheldon Meyer, read
the manuscript and made many suggestions for its improvement. Joellyn Ausanka shepherded
the book through the press, and India Cooper was a superb copy editor. Jeffrey Ward created
the maps for the book, and it was a pleasure to collaborate with him. Greg Meyer helped us to
get started on the graphs, and contributed to the project his expertise with the Excel program.
Mark Fisher, Kimberly Gazes, Susan Hendricks, and Deborah Melkin worked as research
assistants. Judy Brown and Ina Malaguti were as efficient as ever. My wife Judith took time
from her busy career to help when deadlines loomed. Susanna, Anne, Fred, John, Ann, Will,
Kate and my brother Miles Fischer contributed their encouragement and advice. My parents
were as always an example of wisdom and support. This book is dedicated to them, as a small
token of the love that all of their children and grandchildren feel for them.

Wayland, Massachusetts D. H. F

April 1996
CREDITS
Permission is gratefully acknowledged for the following: Agricultural History Review, for
data in C. J. Harrison, “Grain Price Analysis and Harvest Qualities, 1465–1634,” 19
(1971), 139–51.
Annales E.S.C., for data in Elisabeth Carpentier, “Autour de la peste noir,” 17 (1962) 1062–
92.
Cambridge University Press, for data in Michel Morineau, Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux
métaux (1985); Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities (1974); Joan Thirsk, ed., The
Agrarian History of England and Wales Vol. II, 1042–1350, H. E. Hallam, ed. (1988); and
Vol. V, 1640–1750 (1985).
Economica, for data in Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, “Seven Centuries of the
Prices of Consumables compared with Builders’ Wage Rates,” 23 (1956) 311–314; and
idem, “Wage Rates, Prices and Population Pressure,” 26 (1959) 26, 35–37.
Harvard University press, for data in Earl Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price
Revolution in Spain (1935); Barbara Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English
Communities (1979); Peter Laslett, Karla Osterveen and Richard M. Smith, ed., Bastardy
and Its Comparative History (1980); Frank Spooner, The International Economy and
Monetary Movements in France, 1493–1725 (1972); E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield,
The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (1981).
Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient, for data in Howard Farber, “A
Price and Wage Study in Northern Babylonia . . .” 21 (1978) 34.
Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Inc., for data in M. M. Hyman, M. A. Zimmermann, C. Guroli
and A. Helrich, eds., Drinkers, Drinking, and Alcohol-Related Mortality and
Hospitalizations: A Statistical Compendium (New Brunswick, 1980).
Münsterische Beitràge zur antiken Handelsgeschichte, for data in H.-J. Drexhage, “Eselpreis
im römischen Ägypten: ein Beitrag zum Binnenhandel” 5 (1986) 34–48.
Northwestern University Press, for data in David Herlihy, “Santa Maria Impruneta,” in Nicolai
Rubenstein, ed., Florentine Studies (Evanston, 1968).
Princeton University Press, for data in J. S. Cockburn, ed., Crime in England, 1550–1800
(1977)
Rand McNally, for base maps in R. R. Palmer, Atlas of World History (Chicago, 1957).
Sage Publications, Inc., for data in Ted Robert Gurr, ed., Rogues, Rebels & Reformers: A
 Political History of Urban Crime and Conflict (Beverly Hills and London, 1976).
St. Martins Press, for data in Wilhelm Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe (New York,
1980).
Scandinavian University Press, for data in C. A. Christensen, “Aendringen i landsbyen
økenomiske og sociale struktur i det 14 og 15-århundred,” Historisk Tidsskrift 12 (1964)
364.
INDEX
PAGE NUMBERS IN ITALICS REFER TO FIGURES AND NOTES.

Abel, Wilhelm, 3, 5, 132, 242, 244, 286, 341n1, 342n1, 343–44n1, 364, 367, 371–72, 409,
410, 413, 474
Abramowitz, Moses, 276
account, money of, 282–84
Adelman, Irma, 274
administered prices, 250, 280, 428, 450
Afghanistan, 231
Africa: bibliography, 268, 439, 454, 500
and causes of price revolutions, 245
disease in, 41, 229
and eighteenth century price revolution, 129
famine in, 229
in fourteenth century, 41, 265–68, 454
gold in, 48
medieval price revolution in, 41, 48
politics in, 149
population in, 229
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48
and twentieth century price revolution, 188, 229, 243, 500
and Victorian equilibrium, 168
African Americans, 301
agrarian models. See Labrousse, C. E.
Labrousse cycles
agriculture, 8, 47, 168, 328n4, 424, 447, 455, 475. See also Food prices; Grain prices;
Labrousse cycles
alcohol consumption, 173, 176, 225, 227, 228, 239, 248
Aldcroft, Derek H., 364
Alfonso II (king of Castille), 13
Algeria, 231
Alsace, 78
American colonies, 103, 127, 134, 135, 139, 141, 294, 348n13. See also American
Revolution; United States
American Revolution, 121, 129, 140, 141, 150, 152, 487–88
American treasure, 81–83, 82, 108–9, 128, 129, 332n14, 335n24, 336n36, 336–37n37,
337n38
Americas, 271–72, 474, 480. See also Latin America; North America; specific nation
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 96, 120, 129
ancient world, 259–64, 435–39
Andalusia, 76
Anderson, T. W., 277
Angers, France, 95
Annales school, 315, 367, 369–70, 406, 477
Antwerp, Belgium, 80, 87, 88, 336n29
Arab states, 202, 210, 231. See also Organization of Petroleum Exporting countries (OPEC)
Aragon, 48
Argentina, 168, 188, 232, 372
arms and armor, 22, 322n19
art and architecture, 59, 62, 100, 110, 153, 238
Asahara, Shoko, 232
Asia: bibliography, 440, 493, 499, 500
causes of death in, 265
and causes of price revolutions, 245
disease in, 191
and eighteenth century price revolution, 121
in fourteenth century, 265
population in, 233
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48
trade with, 48
and twentieth century price revolution, 191, 499–500
and Victorium equilibrium, 493. See also specific nation
Asturia, 263
Atkinson’s (A. B.) index, 291
Atwell, W. S., 268
Augsburg, Germany, 70
Australia, 168, 308, 373, 398, 493
Austria: bibliography, 373, 398
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 132, 149
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 110
grain prices in, 6, 120
hyperinflation in, 193
money in, 193
population in, 96
and sixteenth century price revolution, 96, 335n28
and twentieth century price revolution, 193, 194, 203
and Victorian equilibrium, 171
wages in, 132, 335n28
and wars, 121, 149, 157, 171
Austria-Hungary, 181
Austro-Prussian War, 157
d’Avenel, Georges, 28, 104, 344n4, 366, 378
Avignon, 39, 40–41
Azpilcueta, Martin de, 84
Aztecs, 266

Babylon: ancient, 259

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 103, 113
Bacon, Francis, 92
Baehrel, René, 342n2, 406–7
Baldwin II (emperor), 30
Baldwin, Stanley, 195
Balkan states, 152. See also Yugoslavia
Baltic states, 95
Baltimore, Maryland, 155
Bank of England, 224–25
banking, 33–34, 59, 110, 249, 458–59, 466, 490, 494
Baqir, Ghalib M., 274–75
Baron, Hans, 62, 331n24
Barraclough, Geoffrey, 188, 275
Barro, Robert J., 427
Bath, Slicher van, 341n1
Baxter, W. T., 283, 284
Bayle, Pierre, 113
Beauvais, 276
Belgium: bibliography, 373, 374, 398, 442, 458, 463
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 131, 149
energy prices in, 21
grain prices in, 120
interest rates in, 80
medieval price revolution in, 20, 442
money in, 82, 182
religion in, 87
and Renaissance equilibrium, 458
returns to land in, 77, 131
and sixteenth century price revolution, 77, 80, 82, 87, 463
social unrest in, 149
and twentieth century price revolution, 182, 203, 217. See also Low Countries
Benedict XI (pope), 39
Berlin, Germany, 102, 110
Berne, Switzerland, 149
Beveridge, William, 17, 276, 367, 368, 418
Bezanson (Anne) index, 272
bibliography: and bibliographies of price history, 363–64
and primary sources, 365–406
and secondary sources, 406–501
Bieshaar, Hans, 275
Black Death, 41, 42–43, 44–45, 44, 46, 95, 96, 101, 240, 252, 267, 341n1, 451–52
Blair, John M., 208, 358n11
Blinder, Alan S., 7, 278
Bloch, Marc, 317n1, 368, 406
Blum, Jerome, 89
Bodin, Jean, 84, 242, 249
Bois, Guy, 327n9, 328n13, 333–34n18
Bolivia, 374
Bombay, India, 176
Boniface VIII (pope), 39
Bonn, Julius Moritz, 459
Boorstin, Daniel, 256
Bornu Empire, 269
Boserup, Esther, 126
Boston, Massachusetts, 135
Bourbonnais, 126
Bovill, E. W., 268
Bowley, Arthur, 294, 298
Bowley’s Law, 294, 297
Box, Alderman, 85
Bracciolini, Poggio, 331n24
Brakelond, Jocelin de, 28–29
Brandenberg, 124
Braudel, Fernand P., 5, 7–8, 176, 241, 286, 332n14, 333n14, 336n55, 342n2, 360n7, 367,
372, 410–11, 413, 434, 460, 474
Brazil, 234, 270, 375, 399
Brenner, Robert, 434, 435
Brenner, Y. S., 87, 34052
Breslau, Germany, 35
Bretton Woods agreement (1971–73), 224
Bridbury, A. R., 38, 324n31
Bridlington, Canon of, 34
Britain: bibliography, 392, 397, 404, 420, 423, 485
commodity prices in, 181
Depression in, 195
and eighteenth century price revolution, 128, 130, 134, 135, 136–37, 137, 139, 140, 141,
149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 173
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 348n20
family disintegration in, 137, 173
food prices in, 153
gold in, 152, 194
grain prices in, 137, 173
inequalities in, 135, 136–37, 139, 193, 420
 inflation in, 180, 182, 225
interest rates in, 129, 130, 140, 163, 180, 221, 225, 348n20
money in, 128–29, 149, 152, 182, 191, 282–83
politics in, 162, 203–4, 240
price controls/rationing in, 191, 196, 197
religion in, 134
returns to capital in, 129, 130, 162, 163, 180, 221
social unrest in, 162, 485
taxes in, 139, 141
and twentieth century price revolution, 173, 179–81, 182, 184, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193,
194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 203–4, 217, 221, 224–25, 233, 359n30
and Victorian equilibrium, 156, 157, 158, 162, 163, 171–76, 173, 176, 282–83, 491
wages in, 180, 192, 195
and wars, 129, 130, 135, 149, 153, 154, 155, 162, 171–76, 189, 197
welfare in, 132, 195
wholesale prices in, 158, 181, 189, 192, 194, 199. See also England; Ireland; Scotland;
Wales
Bruni, Leonardo, 331n24
Brunt, P. A., 262
Bryan, William Jennings, 181
bubble inflation, 280
Bulgaria, 399
Buonsignori banks, 33
Burma, 210
Burns, Arthur F., 276–77, 287
Burton, Robert, 100–101
Burundi, 229
business cycles, 276–77. See also Kitchin business cycles
Byzantine Empire, 40, 57, 438

Caboche, Simon, 52
Caffa, 41
Calcutta, India, 110, 308
Calomiris, Charles W., 426
Calvinism, 101
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, 303
Cameron, Rondo, 413–14
Canada, 121, 150, 152, 153, 168, 184, 375, 399
candy bars, 202–3
capacity utilization, 193, 204–5, 206, 213, 215, 233
capital. See Returns to capital
capitalism, 243, 247, 295, 298, 303, 304, 310, 323n20
Caribbean Islands, 270
caristia, 23
Carter (Jimmy) administration, 210, 212, 236
Cartier, M., 267, 268
Casimir IV (king of Poland), 56
Castile, 56, 263
Catalonia, 40, 97
catastrophes, 241, 435
Catherine the Great, 112
Catholicism, 77, 86, 87, 101
Chabert, M. A., 409
Chaloner, W. H., 364
Chamberlain, Neville, 195
Charles I (king of England), 269, 270
Charles V (king of Spain), 91
Charles VI (king of France), 52
Charles VII (king of France), 55
Charleston, South Carolina, 272
Chartres, France, 10, 11–13, 16–17, 318–19n2, 448
Chaunu, Pierre, 95, 276, 419
Chesapeake school, 370
Chicago, Illinois, 172, 176, 308
Chile, 104, 232, 271, 375–76, 399
China: bibliography, 267–68, 376–77, 399, 453, 473–74, 499
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120
in fourteenth century, 265, 267–68, 453
grain prices in, 120
 Ming dynasty in, 269
population of, 265, 266, 269
in seventeenth century, 269, 473–74
and twentieth century price revolution, 195, 499
Chmielnicki’s Rebellion, 101
Christianity, 45, 86, 138
Christopher II (king of Denmark), 40
Ch’uan Han-sheng, 268
Cipolla, Carlo, 25, 332n14, 411–12
classical economics, 168
Cleary, M. N., 274
climate: bibliography, 268, 422–23, 448, 450, 465, 475, 495
and causes of price revolutions, 245–46
and eighteenth century price revolution, 142, 148, 155, 156, 245–46
in eleventh century, 267
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 107
in fourteenth century, 35, 245, 266–67, 448, 450
and medieval price revolution, 31, 35, 245–46, 267, 324–25n31
and Renaissance equilibrium, 330n17
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 245
and sixteenth century price revolution, 93, 465
in tenth century, 267
in twelfth century, 267
and twentieth century price revolution, 245, 246
and Victorian equilibrium, 157, 169, 171, 495
“cliometric school, ” 315
Coatsworth, John, 121, 271
coefficient of variation, 291
coefficients of correlation, 338n43
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 116
Cole, Arthur H., 272, 367, 368
Colebrooke, George, 140, 214
collective action, 257–58
Cologne, Germany, 120
Colombia, 202
colonies, 110, 121, 149, 271. See also American colonies
commerce, 168. See also Trade
commodity prices: in ancient world, 259
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 121, 123, 132, 134–35
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 105
and medieval price revolution, 25
and population, 132
and Renaissance equilibrium, 49
and similarities among price revolutions, 238
and sixteenth century price revolution, 69, 82
and twentieth century price revolution, 181, 193, 198, 209, 215, 216
and Victorian equilibrium, 158
communism, 212, 229–30, 499
Comoro Islands, 149
“competitive inflation, ” 202–3
Congo (Democratic Republic), 377
Constantinople, 30, 155
consumer prices: and eighteenth century price revolution, 125, 152, 228
and equilibrium, 228
and seventeenth century crisis, 92
and sixteenth century price revolution, 72, 90, 92, 228
and twentieth century price revolution, 182, 183, 187, 198, 199, 200, 204, 205, 209, 210,
211, 215–16, 217, 220, 226, 228, 228
and Victorian equilibrium, 158, 170
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 84
Corfu, 58
Corsica, 41, 141
cost-push inflation, 126, 278, 280, 428
Cracow, Poland, 75
Crandall, Ruth, 368
Crash of 1987, 215
Crete, 58
crime: and capitalism, 310
 causes of, 309–11
control of, 309–11
and eighteenth century price revolution, 144, 145, 146–47, 305, 306, 306, 308
empirical evidence about, 311
and “enforcement waves, ” 310
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 110, 111
and equilibrium, 225, 239, 309
and food prices, 94
in fourteenth century, 35–36, 37, 38, 306, 306
and inequalities, 309
and medieval price revolution, 35–36, 36, 37, 305, 306, 306
and price revolutions, 248, 250, 305–11, 306, 309
secular trends in, 305–6, 306
and seventeenth century crisis, 94, 306
and similarities among price revolutions, 238, 239
and sixteenth century price revolution, 94, 94, 305, 306
and twentieth century price revolution, 225, 226, 230, 305, 306, 306, 308, 310
and Victorian equilibrium, 172, 176, 308
and wages, 309
and wars, 145
waves of, 306–8, 311
Crimea, 41, 57, 162, 171
Crusades, 13
Cuba, 232, 377
cultural issues: in ancient world, 259
bibliography, 426, 447–48, 459, 468, 469–70, 478, 485, 496, 501
and causes of price revolutions, 243, 246–51
and consequences of price revolutions, 250–51
and differences among price revolutions, 240, 241
and eighteenth century price revolution, 118, 154–55, 485
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 113, 239, 478
and equilibrium, 239, 249
and fourteenth century crisis, 45
and inequalities, 294
 and Marxism, 243
and medieval price revolution, 45, 447–48
and Renaissance equilibrium, 239, 459
and seventeenth century crisis, 100–101, 469–70
and similarities among price revolutions, 237, 238, 239
and sixteenth century price revolution, 75–76, 468
and twentieth century price revolution, 501
and Victorian equilibrium, 174–75, 239, 496. See also art and architecture; Family
disintegration; literature; music; Social issues
cycles, 9, 158, 273–77, 318n7, 415–19 See also specific cycle
Cyprus, 58
Czechoslovakia, 377, 400

Daiches, David, 110

Dakin, E. F., 277
Danish War (1864), 157
Darwinism, 177
data: need for, 254–55
Dati, Gregorio, 331n24
Davis, Lance, 414
Day, John, 48, 315, 369–70
Day, Richard B., 273
De Beers syndicate, 202
Deane, Phyllis, 413
debasements: and Enlightenment equilibrium, 109
and medieval price revolution, 25, 26, 32, 34, 285–86
purpose of, 285–86
and sixteenth century price revolution, 86, 89, 90, 90, 337n38
debt, 223, 238, 248. See also Debasements; Politics; Recoinages
deep change, xv
deflation, 192–93, 196, 232, 238, 249, 429
Delbeke, Joseph, 274
demand-caused inflation, 23, 126, 244–45, 247, 249, 280, 428. See also Population
demographics. See Family disintegration; Population
Denmark: bibliography, 377–78, 400
 and eighteenth century price revolution, 131, 132
farm abandonment in, 47
fiscal crisis in, 100
and fourteenth century crisis, 40, 47
medieval price revolution in, 40
population in, 47
and Renaissance equilibrium, 47
returns to land in, 131
and seventeenth century crisis, 100
and sixteenth century price revolution, 88, 100
social unrest in, 40, 100
and twentieth century price revolution, 203
and Victorian equilibrium, 171
wages in, 132
and wars, 171. See also Scandinavia
deregulation, 210, 224
Descartes, René, 101
Despenser family, 39
detrending, 5, 9, 277
Dewey, E. R., 277
dialectical models of inequalities, 295–96
diamonds, 202
disease: bibliography, 451–52
and differences among price revolutions, 240
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 110
and fourteenth century crisis, 41, 45–46, 240, 451–52
and medieval price revolution, 240
and population, 41, 44–45
and Renaissance equilibrium, 45–46, 48, 53
and seventeenth century crisis, 94–95, 341n1
and sixteenth century price revolution, 68, 87, 94–95
and twentieth century price revolution, 186, 191, 229
and war, 41. See also Black Death
disettes, 31, 53, 107
Disraeli, Benjamin, 164
Dobb, Maurice, 434
Dornbusch, Rudiger, 426
Dracul, Vlad, 57
Drake, Francis, 91
Dretske, Fred, 314–15
drugs, 225, 227, 228, 239, 248
Dublin, Ireland, 110
Duncan-Jones, Richard, 261, 262
Dunn, Marshall, 287
Dutch tulip mania, 280
Dyer, Christopher, 290

Eastern Europe: bibliography, 444–45, 464, 473, 480, 498

and eighteenth century price revolution, 124, 132, 480
hyperinflation in, 193, 499
and late twentieth century crisis, 229, 230, 233
and medieval price revolution, 444–45
money in, 193, 283
politics in, 229–30, 240–41
population in, 72, 124, 233
price controls/rationing in, 212
and seventeenth century crisis, 473
and sixteenth century price revolution, 72, 464
social unrest in, 473
Teutonic Knights in, 13
and twentieth century price revolution, 193, 198, 212, 229, 230, 233, 499
wages in, 132. See also specific nation
ecology, 8, 23, 241, 245–46, 294–95, 422–23, 450–51, 469. See also Climate
economic growth: bibliography, 423
economic theory, 312–16, 426–32. See also specific person or theory
economic wars, 153
economics: as academic discipline, 426
classical, 168
 and “cliometric school, ” 315
and Enlightenment, 116
ethics of, 447
and history, 245, 281, 312–16
laisser faire, 116
macro-/micro-, 426
and problematiques, 315–16, 369–70, 434
science of, 116
theory-centered thinking in, 312–16
and Victorian equilibrium, 177. See also Annales school; specific model
Ecorcheurs, Rebellion of, 53
Edinburgh, Scotland, 110
Edward I (king of England), 32
Edward II (king of England), 35, 36–37, 39–40
Edward III (king of England), 285
Edward IV (king of England), 285
Edward VI (king of England), 337n38
Edwards, Jonathan, 113
Egypt, 155, 231, 259, 262, 436
Ehrard, Jean, 116
eighteenth century price revolution: beginning of, 120–26
bibliography, 478–85
causes of, 245–46, 249
cultural response to, 126–34
dates of, 4, 346n3, 346n4
and instability, 134–42
and medieval price revolution, 132, 152
revolutionary crisis in, 142–56
and sequential differences among price revolutions, 239–46
sixteenth century price revolution compared with, 152, 352n16
and structural similarities among revolutions, 236–39
and Victorian equilibrium, 156–77. See also specific topic, nation or geographical area
Einaudi, Luigi, 368, 408
Eklund, K., 275
Eleanor (queen of England), 29
Elizabeth I (queen of England), 49, 92
Elliott, J. H., 91
Elsas, Moritz, 367
Elvin, Mark, 265, 267
empirical evidence, 297–98, 300, 311
energy prices: bibliography, 425
and causes of price revolutions, 247
and eighteenth century price revolution, 123, 123, 124, 126, 153, 352n18
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 347n9
and medieval price revolution, 21, 35
and similarities among price revolutions, 237
and sixteenth century price revolution, 74, 75, 76, 92, 334n22
and twentieth century price revolution, 208–9, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 218
England: banking in, 110
beginning of medieval price revolution in, 11, 18, 19, 19, 20, 20, 21, 22, 23
climate in, 93
commodity prices in, 121
consumable prices in, 3, 4, 72, 90, 92, 125, 158
crime in, 36, 94, 111, 145, 305, 306, 306, 308, 309
debasements in, 26, 285, 286, 337n38
disease in, 41, 44, 87, 89, 95, 451–52
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 121, 123–24, 125, 129, 131, 132, 133, 141,
144, 145, 153, 155, 282, 479
emergence of market economy in, 263
energy prices in, 21, 74, 75
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 104, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 111, 112, 113,
344n9, 347n9, 348n13
family disintegration in, 302, 303
famine in, 89
food prices in, 74, 75
and fourteenth century crisis, 35, 36–37, 36, 38, 39–40, 44, 44, 306, 451–52
grain prices in, 6, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 31, 35, 50, 51, 74–75, 74, 77, 87, 89, 92, 94, 143,
328–29n6, 34052, 344n9, 347n9
inequalities in, 36–37, 80, 86, 108, 144, 165, 300
 interest rates in, 104, 105, 107, 162, 164
and international exchange, 32–33
manufactured goods in, 74–75, 74, 75
medieval price revolution in, 11, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 33, 35, 36–37, 36, 38, 39–
40, 44, 305, 319n8, 321n12, 323n21, 442–44
money in, 24, 26, 32, 82, 89–91, 90, 91, 104, 109, 263, 282, 283, 285–86, 337n38, 466
peasants in, 28–29, 49, 55
politics in, 56, 111, 112
population in, 20, 20, 44, 44, 72–73, 72, 73, 85, 87, 110, 123–24, 125, 167, 321n12,
333n17, 348n13
price controls in, 35
primary sources about, 392–94
recoinages in, 26, 337n38
religion in, 87, 101
and Renaissance equilibrium, 46–47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 55, 328–29n6, 457
rents in, 77, 79, 79, 104, 105, 130, 131, 161
returns to capital in, 107, 108, 162, 164
returns to labor in, 27, 53, 104, 133, 160
returns to land in, 126, 131, 161, 164
romanticism in, 155
secondary sources about, 442–44, 451–52, 457, 462–63, 466, 472–73, 479, 487, 490–91
and seventeenth century crisis, 91–92, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101, 472–73
silver in, 24, 81, 263, 333n15
and sixteenth century price revolution, 69, 70, 72–73, 72, 74, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 79, 80, 81,
82, 85, 87, 89–92, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 101, 333n15 335n27, 337n38 34052, 462–63,
466
social unrest in, 39–40, 49, 55, 77, 79, 97, 111, 141, 472–73, 487, 490–91
trade in, 23, 323n21
and Victorian equilibrium, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 172
wages in, 27, 53, 55, 74, 78, 104, 104, 108, 132, 133, 153, 159, 160, 335n27
and wars, 38, 46–47, 52–53, 55, 97, 121, 145
welfare in, 153. See also Britain; London, England
Enlightenment, 112–13, 114–15, 116, 138, 154, 345–46n23. See also Enlightenment
equilibrium
Enlightenment equilibrium, 5, 102–16, 120, 128, 160, 166, 239, 251, 252, 303, 474–78. See
also specific nation or topic
environment. See Climate; Ecology
equilibrium, 168, 225, 228, 238–39, 246–47, 252, 259, 323n20. See also Enlightenment
equilibrium; Renaissance equilibrium: Victorian equilibrium
Erzberger, Mattias, 193
Escudier, Jean-Louis, 274
Etz, Donald V., 274
Europe: America price movements compared with, 271–72
in eighteenth century, 271–72
grain prices in, 6
historical compilations about, 371–72
inequalities in, 257, 300
money in, 283, 284
politics in, 240
population in, 13, 19, 44–45, 96, 166
revolutionary crisis in, 151, 240. See also Old World; specific nation or geographical
area
European Economic Community, 213
Everdon, John de, 32
exchange, money of, 282–84

Fair Labor Standards Act (U.S.), 201

family disintegration: and capitalism, 303, 304
causes of, 301–2, 304
and causes of price revolutions, 248
and consequences of price revolutions, 250
and eighteenth century price revolution, 136, 137, 173, 302, 303, 304
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 303
and grain prices, 173
overview of, 239, 301–4, 303
in seventeenth century, 302, 304
and similarities among price revolutions, 238, 239
and sixteenth century price revolution, 302, 303, 304
and twentieth century price revolution, 173, 228, 228, 302, 303, 304
and Victorian equilibrium, 173, 176, 302, 303, 303, 304
 waves of, 302–3, 304
and welfare, 303, 304
famine: bibliography, 451
and differences among price revolutions, 240
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 107
and fourteenth century crisis, 35–37, 240, 326n1, 451
and medieval price revolution, 35–37, 48, 240, 326n1
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 101, 102
and sixteenth century price revolution, 76, 87, 89, 93, 101, 102. See also specific nation
Fanfani, Amintore, 368, 408
Farber, Howard, 260
Farmer, David L., 4, 32, 286, 319n8, 324n31, 326n46
Febvre, Lucien, 406
Federal Reserve Board (U.S.), 194, 205, 212, 216, 217, 220, 222, 224–25
Ferdinand (king of Spain), 56
Field, Alexander James, 435
finance. See Money
Finland, 107, 378, 400
first wave. See Medieval price revolution
fiscal imbalances, 85–87, 97, 100. See also Money
Fischer, Stanley, 426, 427
Fisher, H.A.L., 246
Fisher, Irving, 368–69, 427
Fitzgerald, C. P., 268
Flanders, 38, 40, 97, 348n13
floors, 210, 250
Florence: banking in, 33–34, 59
disease in, 68
and fourteenth century crisis, 40
interest rates in, 80
medieval price revolution in, 25, 33–34, 40
money in, 25, 48
politics in, 59
 population in, 50–51
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48, 49, 50–51, 57, 59, 62
and sixteenth century price revolution, 65–68, 70, 80
social unrest in, 40, 49
wages in, 59
food prices: and causes of price revolutions, 247
and crime, 94
and differences among price revolutions, 240
and eighteenth century price revolution, 123, 123, 126, 142, 144, 147, 147, 148, 153, 155
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103
and fourteenth century crisis, 35, 45
and global markets, 155
and medieval price revolution, 21–22, 23–24, 35, 45
and seventeenth century crisis, 92, 94
and similarities among price revolutions, 237
and sixteenth century price revolution, 73–74, 75, 76, 79, 92, 94
and twentieth century price revolution, 191, 204, 213, 215, 218, 218. See also Grain prices
Ford (Gerald) administration, 210
Fordyce, Alexander, 141
Forrester, Jay W., 275
Fossier, Robert, 320n12
fourteenth century: crisis of, 34, 35–45, 42–43, 240, 242, 245, 265–68, 306, 306, 448–54. See
also Medieval price revolution; specific topic, nation, or geographic area
fourth wave. See Twentieth century price revolution
France: climate in, 93, 107, 142, 148
colonies of, 149
commodity prices in, 121
crime in, 35–36, 146–47
cultural issues in, 118
disease in, 53
and eighteenth century price revolution, 6, 117–20, 121, , 123, 123, 128, 130, 131, 132,
135, 136, 137, 138, 139–40, 141, 142–49, 147, 149, 153–54, 238, 289, 479
energy prices in, 21, 74, 123, 123, 347n9
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 104, 105, 105, 107, 107, 109, 110, 111–12, 113,
344n9, 347n9, 477–78
 family disintegration in, 136, 137
food prices in, 74, 123, 142, 147, 147, 148, 153
and fourteenth century crisis, 35–36, 37–38, 40, 452
grain prices in, 6, 19, 55, 83, 107, 120, 122, 123, 137, 146–47, 330n6, 338–39n43, 344n9
inequalities in, 35–36, 37–38, 117–18, 135, 136, 138, 139–40, 143–46
inflation in, 182
interest rates in, 54, 55, 80, 105, 107, 130, 140, 143, 163, 221
manufactured goods in, 123
medieval price revolution in, 11–13, 19, 19, 20, 25, 28, 32, 35–36, 37–38, 40, 320n8, 442,
444
money in, 25, 32, 48, 82, 83, 91, 109, 128, 142–43, 149, 152, 182, 195, 238, 283, 338–
39n43, 466, 489
peasants in, 37–38, 47, 49, 104, 113, 140, 144–46, 154
politics in, 56, 111–12, 148, 154, 195, 351n10
population in, 13, 20, 72, 73, 333–34n18
price controls in, 148
primary sources about, 378–80, 397, 400
productivity in, 195
religion in, 87, 112
and Renaissance equilibrium, 46–47, 48, 49, 51–53, 52, 53, 54, 55, 330n16, 456–58
rents in, 52, 104–5, 105, 130, 131, 148
returns to capital in, 54, 107, 162, 163, 221
returns to labor in, 53
returns to land in, 52, 104–5, 105, 126, 131
secondary sources about, 442, 444, 452, 456–58, 463, 466, 472, 477–78, 479, 485–87,
488–89, 491–92
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 97, 100, 472
silver in, 24
and sixteenth century price revolution, 70, 72, 73, 74, 78, 80, 82, 83, 87, 93, 95, 97, 100,
333–34n18, 338–39n43, 463, 466
social conflicts in, 49
social unrest in, 40, 52, 97, 100, 472
taxes in, 139–40, 147
trade in, 350n4
and twentieth century price revolution, 182, 184, 189, 191, 193, 194, 195, 199, 204, 217,
221
and Victorian equilibrium, 159, 159, 162, 163, 171, 353n2, 491–92
wages in, 53, 78, 104, 123, 132, 142, 148, 159, 289, 330n16
and wars, 38, 46–47, 52–53, 55, 97, 121, 149, 153–54, 171, 189
welfare in, 138, 144
wholesale prices in, 159, 189, 194, 199. See also French Revolution; Paris, France
Franck, Sebastian, 73
Franco-Prussian War, 157
Franklin, Benjamin, 144
Franze, Gunther, 96
Frêche, Georges and Geneviève, 363–64
Frederick Barbarossa (Holy Roman Emperor), 13
Frederick the Great (king of Prussia), 112
Freeman, Christopher, 274
French Mississippi Bubble, 280
French Revolution, 121, 142–49, 147, 151, 152, 154, 191, 350n4, 485–87, 488–89
Friedman, Milton, 7, 184–85, 224, 276, 278, 427, 496–97
Friis, Astrid, 367, 370
frontiers, 188

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 187–88, 197, 210, 224–25, 236

Galicia, 263
van Gelderen, C., 273
Geneva, Switzerland, 59, 141
Genghis Khan, 265
Genoa, 25, 41, 57, 82, 149, 456
Germany: bibliography, 380–82, 397, 400–401, 463–64, 486, 492, 497–98, 499
climate in, 93, 157
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 126, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 141, 144, 155
energy prices in, 74
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 104, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113
food prices/production in, 74, 191
and fourteenth century crisis, 35, 38
grain prices in, 6, 51, 120
 hyperinflation in, 193, 497–98
inequalities in, 135, 191, 257
interest rates in, 163
medieval price revolution in, 19, 20, 28, 35, 38
money in, 91, 182, 193, 283
peasants in, 87
politics in, 111, 195, 204
population in, 20, 72, 87, 95, 96, 348n13
price controls in, 191
religion in, 86–87, 134
and Renaissance equilibrium, 51
rents in, 105, 131
returns to capital in, 163
returns to labor in, 133
returns to land in, 126, 131
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 95, 96
silver in, 81, 324n28
and sixteenth century price revolution, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 81, 86–87, 93, 95, 96–97, 96,
101, 463–64
social unrest in, 101, 486
taxes in, 191, 193
and twentieth century price revolution, 182, 184, 189, 191, 192–93, 194, 194, 195–96,
197–98, 199, 203, 204, 217, 224, 497–98, 499
and Victorian equilibrium, 156–57, 158, 159, 159, 163, 492
wages in, 104, 132, 133, 159
and wars, 38, 155, 157, 189, 191, 192–93, 195–96, 197–98
wholesale prices in, 158, 159, 189, 194, 199. See also Berlin, Germany; Prussia
Ghana, 229
Ghent, France, 87, 88
Gibbon, Edward, 113
Gibson, A.J.S., 289
Gibson paradox, 242, 432
Gimpel, Jean, 23
Gini ratios, 222, 223, 291, 292, 298, 299
Glamann, Kristoff, 367
global inflation, 204, 210, 211, 234, 430, 496
global markets, 155, 168, 176, 188, 204, 496
Göhring, Martin, 136
gold: bibliography, 420
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 127, 129, 152
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 109
and fourteenth century crisis, 48
and medieval price revolution, 24–25, 29, 32, 34
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48, 59
and sixteenth century price revolution, 81–83, 129, 332n14, 336n35, 337n39, 338n41
supply of, 24, 48, 127, 184–85, 336n35, 338n41
and twentieth century price revolution, 184, 186, 192, 194, 209
and Victorian equilibrium, 171. See also American treasure; Debasements; Recoinages
Goldman, Eric, 200
Goldstein, Joshua, 274
Goldstein, Sidney, 313
Goldstone, Jack A., 415
Goldthwaite, Richard, 59
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 230
Gordon, David M., 275
Gordon, Robert, 205
Goubert, Pierre, 276, 342n2, 418
Gould, J. D., 333n15
Gouldner, Alvin, 314
grain prices: Abel’s studies about, 5
in ancient world, 259, 260, 261
and causes of price revolutions, 242
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 122, 123, 135, 137, 142, 143, 146–47, 152,
352n16
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108, 344n9, 347n9
and family disintegration, 173
and fourteenth century crisis, 35, 36
and medieval price revolution, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 22, 23, 28, 31–32, 35, 36
and monetarism, 242
 and money supply, 338–39n43
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48, 50, 51, 55, 328–29n6, 330n16
and seventeenth century crisis, 92, 94, 96
and sixteenth century price revolution, 70, 71, 74–75, 74, 77, 79, 83, 87–88, 89, 92, 94, 96,
338–39n43, 34052, 352n16
and twentieth century price revolution, 182, 209
and Victorian equilibrium, 158–59, 162, 173. See also specific nation
Great Depression, 193–94, 498
Greece, 57, 260–61, 260, 330n17, 401, 436–37
Griziotti-Kretschmann, Jenny, 5, 410
Gurr, Ted R., 306

Habbakuk, H. J., 104, 433

Haines, Walter W., 415
Haiti, 232
Hakewill, George, 85
Hamelin, J., 271–72
Hamil, R., 274
Hamilton, Earl, 73–74, 332n14, 333n14, 367, 368–69, 413, 460
Hamilton, James D., 277
Hammurapi, reign of, 259, 260
Handel, George Frederick, 103, 113
Hanes, Christopher, 426
Hapsburgs, 77, 336n29
Hardy, Charles O., 414
Harkness, J. P., 274
Harris, José, 368
Hartwell, R., 267
Haskins, Charles Homer, 12–13
Hauser, Henri, 276, 367, 368, 407, 418
Haustein, Heinz-Dieter, 274
Hawley-Smoot tariff (1930), 194
Heilbroner, Robert, 201
Henry II (king of England), 13
Henry IV (king of England), 285
Henry VII (king of England), 56, 79, 285
Henry VIII (king of England), 285, 337n38
Henry, Louis, 407
Herlihy, David, 16, 49, 319n5, 320n8
Hilton, Rodney, 434
historical compilations: continental, 371
early, 366–71
international, 371
of Latin America, 372
national, 372–97
by place, 371
historicism, 241, 245, 246
historicist model, 8, 246
history, 113, 177, 236, 245, 246, 281, 312–16
Hobbes, Thomas, 100
Hobbs, G. D., 274
Hobsbawm, Eric J., 341n1, 342n1
Holstein, 77
Holy Roman Empire, 40
Homer, Sidney, 287
homicide. See Crime
Hoover, Herbert, 194
Hopkins, Sheila, 3, 5, 107, 108, 159, 369, 412, 413, 433, 474. See also Phelps-Brown-
Hopkins price index
Hoskins, W. G., 93
Hoszowski, Stanislas, 79, 334–35n24, 335n28
Hou, C., 268
Houghton, Walter, 176
housewives: wages of, 289
Huang, K., 267–68
Hundred Years War, 46–47
Hungary: bibliography, 382, 401
and fourteenth century crisis, 40
hyperinflation in, 193
 medieval price revolution in, 24
money in, 193
politics in, 56
and Renaissance equilibrium, 56
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 100
silver in, 24
and sixteenth century price revolution, 93, 100
social unrest in, 100
and twentieth century price revolution, 193, 194
Hunt family, 214
hyperinflation: bibliography, 430, 497–98
and eighteenth century price revolution, 149, 152, 158
and monetarism, 430
and twentieth century price revolution, 193, 194, 196, 198, 198, 230, 231, 232, 497–98,
499

Iberia, 19, 97, 456, 478. See also Portugal; Spain

Iceland, 401
Iconoclast disorders, 87
illegitimacy. See Family disintegration
Imbert, Gaston, 274
Imperialism. See Politics; Wars
Incas, 266
income distribution: measures of, 291–92
income in kind, 288, 289–90
India, 188, 204, 213, 266, 269, 308, 382–83, 401
Indies, 84
Indonesia, 401
industrial products. See Manufactured goods
Industrial Revolution, 168, 295, 487
industrialization, 446–47, 484, 487
inequality: bibliography, 431–32, 447, 483, 489–90, 496, 501
and capitalism, 295, 298
causes of, 300, 361n16
and causes of price revolutions, 247–48, 249
 and consequences of price revolutions, 250
and crime, 309
and cultural values, 294
and ecology, 294–95
and eighteenth century price revolution, 117–18, 135–40, 139, 141–42, 143–46, 148, 483
empirical evidence about, 297–98, 300
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 108, 108
and equilibrium, 239, 249, 300
and fourteenth century crisis, 35–38, 40–41, 327n9
and industrial revolution, 295
and Marxism, 295, 361n16
and medieval price revolution, 13, 16, 28–30, 30, 31, 34, 35–38, 40–41, 327n9, 447
models for, 293–97, 298
and population, 295, 296, 298
and prescriptions for thinking about price revolutions, 255, 256–57
and Renaissance equilibrium, 59
and returns to capital, 300
and returns to labor, 300
and seventeenth century crisis, 92, 94
and similarities among price revolutions, 238, 239
and sixteenth century price revolution, 79–80, 85, 86, 86, 89, 92, 94
and twentieth century price revolution, 187–89, 190, 191, 193, 194, 210, 216, 217, 218,
219, 222–23, 222, 230, 231, 234, 256–57, 501
and Victorian equilibrium, 164, 165, 166, 496
and wave patterns, 300
and Welfare State, 297. See also Revolutionary crisis; Social unrest; specific nation
inflation: and administered prices, 280
in ancient world 261
anti-, 200, 205, 207, 215–17, 234, 255
bibliography, 426–27, 428–32, 500
bubble, 280
causes of, 279–81
competitive, 202–3, 250
consequences of, 430
 control of, 430, 500
cost-push, 126, 278, 280, 428
definitions of, 278–81
demand-caused, 23, 126, 244–45, 247, 249, 280, 428
discovery of, 200–203
double-digit, 209, 216, 225
fears of, 252–53
global, 204, 210, 211, 234, 430
and “inflationary psychology, ” 200–201, 216, 252
and inflationary-expectations model, 280
institutionalization of, 201–2, 233, 238, 239
long-term, 430
monetary, 278–80, 284
and “new inflation” models, 428–29, 500
and predictions about price revolutions, 252–53
and prescriptions for thinking about price revolutions, 255–56
price, 238, 278, 279
sociopolitical models of, 429
supply-caused, 280
and twentieth century price revolution, 180, 181–82, 200–203, 206, 207, 211, 215–17, 226,
500
velocity of, 279, 280–81
wage, 278
war, 280–81. See also Hyperinflation; specific nation or price revolution
Innis, Harold, 345n18
Institut National d’Etudes Demographiques, 407
institutional models: of inequalities, 297, 298
insurrections. See Social unrest
interest rates: bibliography, 419–20, 445, 458, 467, 476, 490, 495
and causes of price revolutions, 243, 247, 249
and eighteenth century price revolution, 129, 130, 130, 140, 143, 152
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 104, 105, 107, 348n20, 476
and equilibrium, 239, 249
as historical indicators, 287
 indicators for, 287
and Marxism, 243
and medieval price revolution, 26, 28, 29, 287, 445
and prescriptions for thinking about price revolutions, 255
and Renaissance equilibrium, 54, 55–56, 458
and seventeenth century crisis, 105
and similarities among price revolutions, 238, 239
and sixteenth century price revolution, 77, 80, 336n29, 467
and twentieth century price revolution, 205, 212, 216, 217, 219–20, 221, 222, 225, 234
and Victorian equilibrium, 162, 163, 164, 495. See also specific nation or geographical
area
international compilations, 371, 398
international exchange: bibliography, 448, 450, 464
and late twentieth century crisis, 233
and medieval price revolution, 32–33
and sixteenth century price revolution, 91, 464
and twentieth century price revolution, 224–25, 233
International Monetary Fund, 210
International Scientific Committee on the History of Prices, 367–68
inventory cycles. See Kitchin cycles
Iran, 231
Ireland, 97, 100, 110, 141, 149, 203, 383
Isabella (queen of Spain), 56
Islam, 230–32, 263–64, 267, 439
Israel, 208, 210, 231–32
Italian Renaissance, 239
Italy: arms and armor prices in, 322n19
banking in, 33
climate in, 330n17
disease in, 49–50
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 144, 479–80
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 105, 112
famine in, 87
and fourteenth century crisis, 452
 grain prices in, 6, 19, 120
hyperinflation in, 196
interest rates in, 29, 54, 55–56
medieval price revolution in, 19, 19, 25, 29, 33, 38, 320n8, 443, 444
money in, 25, 182, 283, 466
politics in, 57–58, 195, 203
population in, 13, 50–51, 72, 73, 96, 334n19
primary sources about, 383–85, 397, 402
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48, 49–51, 52, 54, 55–56, 57–58, 330n13, 330n17, 455–56
rents in, 52, 105, 330n13
returns to capital in, 54
returns to land in, 52
secondary sources about, 423, 443, 444, 452, 455–56, 461–62, 466, 473, 479–80, 492, 499
and seventeenth century crisis, 96, 96, 473
silver in, 324n28
and sixteenth century price revolution, 67, 70, 72, 73, 87, 96, 96, 461–62, 466
social unrest in, 40, 149, 473
and twentieth century price revolution, 182, 189, 195, 196, 198, 203, 217, 234, 499
and Victorianequilibrium, 171, 492
wages in, 29, 330n13
and wars, 38, 189, 198
wholesale prices in, 189. See also specific city
Ivan the Great (tsar of Russia), 256

Jacobs, Alfred, 364

Jacobson, Anna. See Schwartz, Anna
Japan: bibliography, 385, 402
consumer prices in, 204
deflation in, 232
energy prices in, 212
politics in, 195
producer prices in, 204
productivity in, 232
religion in, 232
 returns to land in, 219
social unrest in, 232–33
stock markets in, 232
and trade, 212, 232, 233
and twentieth century price revolution, 195–96, 204, 212, 217, 219, 224, 232–33
and wars, 195–96
wholesale prices in, 233
“jawboning, ” 207–8
Jeanne d’Arc, 53
Jefferson, Thomas, 136
Jevons, Stanley, 276
Jews, 45, 101
John XXII (pope), 40
Johnson, Lyman L., 372, 412
Johnson (Lyndon B.) administration, 203, 204–5
Jones, A.H.M., 262
Jörberg, Lennart, 370
Journal of Economic History, 370
Juglar, Clément, 276, 418
Juglar trade cycles, 273, 276, 415, 418
Justice, Alexander, 282

Kauffman, Max, 200–201

Kaufman, Henry, 287
Kennedy, John, 203
Kerhuel, Marie, 409–10
Kett’s Rebellion, 77
Keynes, John Maynard, 206, 294, 367, 368–69, 428
Keynesian economics: bibliography, 428
Kitchin, Joseph, 276, 418–19
Kitchin business cycles, 273, 276, 415, 418–19
Kitwood, T., 274
Kleinknecht, Alfred, 275
Kondratieff, Nikolai D., 273, 368–69, 415–16. See also Kondratieff waves
Kondratieff waves, 5, 273–75, 360n7, 410, 415–18, 474
Koopmans, Tjalling, 313, 369
Korea, 402
Korean War, 198–200, 199, 256, 281
Kuznets, Simon, 276, 296, 298, 368–69, 418
Kuznets cycles, 273, 276, 296, 361n16, 415, 418, 426

Labini, Paolo S., 274

Labrousse, C. E., 146–47, 166, 244, 347n9, 363–64, 370, 407, 409, 410
Labrousse cycles, 241, 244, 273, 276, 415, 418
Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 73, 344n9, 433, 434
lag theory, 300
laisser faire economics, 116
Lamb, H. H., 169, 171
land. See Returns to land
Lane, Frederic, 58, 503–5
Languedoc, 73, 107, 146
Laslett, Peter, 301
Lassalle’s (Ferdinand) Conjecture, 293–94, 297, 298
Latin America: bibliography, 271, 372, 499
commodity prices in, 120
and eighteenth century price revolution, 121, 271, 272
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 347n7
European price movements compared with, 271, 272
hyperinflation in, 232
politics in, 241
revolution in, 232
and twentieth century price revolution, 204, 210, 232, 499
and wars, 232. See also specific nation
Lebergott, Stanley, 189, 289
Lee, Ronald Demos, 433
Lefebvre, Georges, 147, 350n4
Leghorn, 96
Lewis, Arthur, 185
life cycle theories, 296–97
Lille, France, 87, 88
Lindert, Peter, 297, 298
Lipsey, R. G., 414
Lisbon, Portugal, 134
literature, 62, 100, 113, 134, 154–55, 238, 469–70
Liu, P., 267–68
Lloyd George, David, 191
Locke, John, 113
London, England: banking in, 59
crime in, 172, 308
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 129, 135
energy prices in, 21, 334n22
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 102, 110
grain prices in, 102, 135
inequalities in, 94
interest rates in, 162
medieval price revolution in, 20, 35
money in, 48, 129
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48
and sixteenth century price revolution, 94, 334n22
social conflicts in, 49
and twentieth century price revolution, 179–81
and Victorian equilibrium, 162, 172, 176
“long swings”. See Kuznets cycles
long-term secular trends, 245, 252–54, 408–15
Lopez, Robert S., 324n28, 329-30n13
Lorenz curve, 291, 292
Louis IX (king of France), 24
Louis X (king of France), 40
Louis XI (king of France), 55, 56
Louis XIV (king of France), 112, 113, 116
Louis XV (king of France), 112, 119
Louis XVI (king of France), 143, 154
Low Countries: bibliography, 423
and eighteenth century price revolution, 129
famine in, 87
interest rates in, 55, 129
medieval price revolution in, 35
population in, 72
and Renaissance equilibrium, 55
returns to capital in, 129
and sixteenth century price revolution, 72, 88, 96, 97
Lu Tzu-ch’eng, 269
Lublinskaya, A. D., 341n1
Lucas, Henry, 35
Luxembourg, 386
Lyons, France, 80, 336n29

McCloskey, Donald N., 426

McCusker, John J., 282, 284, 364
Macdonald, Ramsay, 195
Macedonia: mentioned, 40
McKinley, William, 181
macroeconomics, 426
Madagascar, 386
Main, Jackson Turner, 294–95
Maitland, F. W., 177
Malawi, 386
Mali, 265–66, 386
Malowist, M., 268
Malthus, Thomas, 73, 242, 243, 295, 298, 491
Malthusians: and causes of price revolutions, 8, 72, 241, 242–43
and fourteenth century crisis, 448, 449
inequality models of, 295
and seventeenth century crisis, 469
and sixteenth century price revolution, 460
and social theory, 432, 433–34
 and twentieth century price revolution, 243. See also Population
Mandel, Ernest, 275
Mandingo Empire, 269
Manuel, Frank, 273
manufactured goods: and causes of price revolutions, 244, 247
and eighteenth century price revolution, 123, 123, 126, 139, 272
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103
and medieval price revolution, 22, 45
and seventeenth century crisis, 96
and similarities among price revolutions, 237
and sixteenth century price revolution, 73, 74–75, 74, 75
and twentieth century price revolution, 218, 218
and Victorian equilibrium, 157. See also specific type of goods
Marchetti, Cesare, 275
Marie Antoinette, 145–46
market revolutions, 295–96
“market-basket” index, 317–18n2
markets: and causes of price revolutions, 248
and differences among price revolutions, 239, 240
and eighteenth century price revolution, 249
global, 155, 168, 176, 188, 204
irrationality of, 249
and predictions about price revolutions, 252
stock, 184, 192, 193, 214–15, 232, 249
and twentieth century price revolution, 252. See also International exchange; Trade
Marseilles, France, 41, 96
Marshall, Alfred, 168, 368–69
Martin I (king of Aragon), 56
Marx, Karl, 73, 177, 295, 298
Marxism: and capitalism, 243
and causes of crime, 309–10
and causes of price revolutions, 8, 241, 243–44
and fourteenth century crisis, 328n13, 448, 449
and inequalities, 295, 361n16
 and interest rates, 243
and Kondratieff waves, 273
and medieval price revolution, 243, 328n13
and “price scissors, ” 323n20, 328n13
and production, 243–44
and rents, 243
and secondary sources about price history, 408, 432, 434–35
and seventeenth century crisis, 341n1, 342n1, 468–69
and sixteenth century price revolution, 243, 460
and social theory, 432, 434–45
and social/cultural issues, 243
and twentieth century price revolution, 243
and Victorian equilibrium, 177
and wages, 243
Mass, Nathaniel J., 277
Massachusetts, 120, 135, 139, 144, 160, 163, 284
Mathias Corvinus (king of Hungary), 56
Maunder minimum, 245
Mayhew, N. M., 324n31
mean deviations, 292
mean/median ratios, 292
Medici family, 59, 62, 66, 67, 68, 3312
medieval price revolution: beginning of, 11–23
bibliography, 420, 441–48
causes of, 19–20, 24–25, 34, 242, 243, 245–46, 249
cultural responses to, 23–30
dates of, 3, 17, 319–20n8
and eighteenth century price revolution, 132, 152
lack of interest in, 6–7
and Marxism, 243
and Renaissance equilibrium, 45–63
and sequential differences among price revolutions, 239–46
sixteenth century price revolution compared with, 102
and structural similarities among revolutions, 236–39
 in tenth century, 263
third stage of, 30–34. See also Fourteenth century: crisis of; specific topic, nation or
geographical area
Mehmed I (sultan of Ottoman Empire), 57
Mehmed II (sultan of Ottoman Empire), 57
Mellon, Andrew, 193–94
Menard, Russell, 370
mercantilism, 116, 485
mercuriales, 365
Merton, Robert, 313
Mesopotamia, 259–60, 259, 436
metrology, 405–6
Metz, Rainer, 274
Mexico, 150, 152, 234, 266, 271, 386, 402
microeconomics, 426
Middle Ages, 305, 441. See also Medieval price revolution; specific century
Middle East: bibliography, 454, 464, 474, 480, 493
and eighteenth century price revolution, 121, 152, 480
and fourteenth century crisis, 454
and seventeenth century crisis, 269–70, 474
and sixteenth century price revolution, 464
and twentieth century price revolution, 204, 230–32
and Victorium equilibrium, 493. See also specific nation
Milan, 57, 82
Mill, John Stuart, 168
Ming dynasty, 269
Mironov, Boris, 479
Miskimin, H. A., 329–30n13
Mitchell, Wesley C., 276–77
mobilia, 16
Modena, 57, 70, 71
Mokyr, Joel, 433–34
monetarism: and causes of price revolutions, 8, 241–42, 244–45
and economic theory, 427–28, 432, 467–68
 and fourteenth century crisis, 448, 449–50
and Gibson paradox, 242, 432
and hyperinflation, 430
and neoclassical economics, 244–45
and sixteenth century price revolution, 81, 241–42, 332n14, 337n38, 338n41, 459–60, 465
and twentieth century price revolution, 184–86, 224, 497
and Victorian equilibrium, 169
monetary inflation, 23, 278–80
monetary systems, 23, 32, 284, 316. See also Monetarism; Money
monetary theory. See Monetarism
money: of account, 282–84, 421
bibliography, 420–21, 441, 445–46, 453, 458, 465–66, 476, 484, 489, 494
and causes of price revolutions, 241–42, 247
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 127–29, 142–43, 149, 152, 282, 283, 284,
484
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 108–9, 476
of exchange, 16, 25, 282–84
and fourteenth century crisis, 453
and global markets, 176
and grain prices, 338–39n43
and late twentieth century crisis, 234
and medieval price revolution, 16, 19, 24, 32, 324n28, 324n31, 445–46
in Middle Ages, 441
mobilia as, 16
pseudo-, 176
quantity theory of, 84
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48, 421, 458
and revolutionary spirit, 489
and similarities among price revolutions, 238
and sixteenth century price revolution, 80–85, 83, 84, 89–91, 337n38, 338n41, 465–66
supply of, 19, 24, 32, 48, 242, 337n38
and twentieth century price revolution, 181, 184–86, 186, 191, 193, 194, 195, 205, 212,
224–25, 234, 355n6
and Victorian equilibrium, 157, 169, 170, 176, 494
and wars, 149, 158. See also Debasements; Recoinages
money wages, 77, 104, 189, 288
Mongols, 265
Monte Carlo model, 293–94
Moore, Geoffrey H., 277
Morineau, Michel, 108–9, 337n38, 406, 460
Munich, Germany, 70
Murad II (sultan of Ottoman Empire), 57
music, 103, 113
Namier, Lewis, 353n2
Naples, 33, 100, 133
Napoleonic Empire, 121, 153–54, 155, 169, 252, 490
Narbonne, 107
Nef, John U., 97, 367
neoclassical economics: and causes of price revolutions, 8, 241, 244–45
and economic theory, 428
and monetarism, 244–45
and price controls, 207, 208, 358n9
and twentieth century price revolution, 202–3, 207–8, 210, 358n9
Netherlands: bibliography, 386–87, 397, 402, 442, 463
and eighteenth century price revolution, 124, 129, 130, 130, 140, 141, 149
energy prices in, 208
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 104, 107, 109
grain prices in, 87
interest rates in, 54, 105, 107, 129, 130, 130, 140, 163, 221
and medieval price revolution, 442
money in, 82, 109, 283
population in, 124
religion in, 87
and Renaissance equilibrium, 54
returns to capital in, 54, 107, 129, 130, 162, 163, 221
and sixteenth century price revolution, 82, 87, 100, 463
social unrest in, 100, 141, 149
and twentieth century price revolution, 203, 208, 221
and Victorian equilibrium, 162, 163
and wars, 149. See also Low Countries; New Netherlands
Neuwirth, Erich, 274
New England: bibliography, 272, 395
climate in, 155
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 126, 153, 155, 272
family disintegration in, 302
gold in, 120
interest rates in, 163, 220
 money in, 127, 283
population in, 155
returns to capital in, 162, 163
returns to land in, 126
in seventeenth century, 270
silver in, 120
and twentieth century price revolution, 220
and Victorian equilibrium, 162, 163
New France, 127, 270, 271–72, 283
“new inflation” models, 428–29, 500
New Netherlands, 270
New Spain, 270
New World, 120, 270. See also Americas; specific nation or geographical area
New York City, 223
New Zealand, 168, 187, 188, 387, 402–3, 493
Newton, Isaac, 113
Nicaragua, 231
Nigeria, 403
Nixon (Richard M.) administration, 206–8, 224, 236, 357–58n9
nominal prices, 285–86
Nordhaus, William D., 279, 426
Normandy, 32, 41, 52
North America: and causes of price revolutions, 244
and eighteenth century price revolution, 127, 150, 282
interest rates in, 234
money in, 127, 234, 282
population in, 186, 233
revolutionary crisis in, 150
and twentieth century price revolution, 186, 188, 204, 233, 234, 244
North, Douglas, 435
Norway, 13, 182, 203, 403. See also Scandinavia

Oceania, 188, 245, 454, 493, 500

oil, 208–9, 209; 210, 212, 213, 215, 216, 256, 280
Old World. See Europe
oligopoly theory, 428
Oman, Charles, 285
Organization of Petroleum Exporting countries (OPEC), 208–9, 208–9, 213
Osier, William, 229
Ottawa Agreements (1932), 194
Ottoman Empire: bibliography, 387–88, 457
disintegration of, 269
and eighteenth century price revolution, 121, 152
emergence of, 40
and medieval price revolution, 40, 57
and Renaissance equilibrium, 57, 457
in seventeenth century, 269
and Venetian empire, 58
Ouellet, F., 271–72
Oxford, England, 306
Oxford University, 13

Padua, 57, 58, 330n19

Pakistan, 388
Palestine/Palestinians, 231, 438
Pareto, Vilfredo, 293, 298
Pareto’s Law, 291, 293, 297, 361n16
Paris, France: crime in, 35–36
cultural issues in, 118
and eighteenth century price revolution, 117–20, 135, 146–47, 148
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 102, 110
food prices in, 146–47, 148
and fourteenth century crisis, 35–36
grain prices in, 83, 102, 120, 135, 146–47
inequalities in, 117–18, 146–47
Juglar cycles in, 276
medieval price revolution in, 16, 35–36
and sixteenth century price revolution, 83
 social unrest in, 146–47
Parker, R.A.C., 195
Parsons, Talcott, 313
Pastoureaux movement, 37–38
Paulus Macedonicus, Lucius, 66
Pavia, 456
Pearlberg, Don, 415
Pearson, Frank A., 272, 414
Peasant Rebellion (England), 49
peasants: and eighteenth century price revolution, 140, 144–46, 154
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 104, 113
and fourteenth century crisis, 35, 37, 41, 327n9
and medieval price revolution, 28–29, 31, 34, 35, 37, 41, 144, 327n9
and Renaissance equilibrium, 47, 49
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 100
and sixteenth century price revolution, 68, 79, 85, 87, 93, 100
and taxes, 85
and wars, 47
Peasants’ Revolt (Switzerland), 100
Peasants’ War (Germany), 87
Peninsular War, 154
Persian Empire, 269
personal violence. See Crime
Peru, 388
Peter the Great (tsar of Russia), 112
Phelps-Brown, E. Henry, 3, 5, 107, 108, 159, 312–13, 367, 369, 433, 474. See also Phelps-
Brown-Hopkins price index
Phelps-Brown-Hopkins indices, 3, 4, 72, 90, 125, 159, 369, 433
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 110, 120, 272
Philip Augustus (king of France), 13
Philip the Fair (king of France), 32
Philip II (king of Spain), 91
Philippines, 388
Phillips (A. W.) curve, 359n22, 359n30, 501
philosophy, 100–101, 112–13
Picardy, 19–20, 28, 47, 320n12
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 62
Ping-ti Ho, 267
Pistoia, Tuscany, 16, 45–46, 46, 48, 49, 52, 456
plague, 41, 48, 68, 89, 94–95. See also Black Death
Plumb, J. H., 111, 345n19
Poland: bibliography, 388–89, 403
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 132, 149
energy prices in, 74
food prices in, 79, 335n24
grain prices in, 75, 79, 120
hyperinflation in, 193
manufactured goods in, 75
money in, 193
peasants in, 79
politics in, 56, 230
religion in, 101
and Renaissance equilibrium, 56
rents in, 79
returns to land in, 79
and sixteenth century price revolution, 74, 75, 79, 101, 334–35n24, 335n28
social unrest in, 101, 149
and twentieth century price revolution, 193, 194, 195, 230, 231
wages in, 132, 335n28
and wars, 195
Polanyi, Karl, 132
politics: bibliography, 425, 452–53, 459, 471, 477, 489
and causes of price revolutions, 248, 249
and differences among price revolutions, 240
and eighteenth century price revolution, 141, 148, 155
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 110–12, 477
and fourteenth century crisis, 452–53
and Renaissance equilibrium, 56, 459
 and seventeenth century crisis, 240, 341n1, 471
and similarities among price revolutions, 237, 238
and twentieth century price revolution, 195, 203–4, 208, 229–30, 231–32
and twentieth century price revolutionm, 240–41
and Victorian equilibrium, 162, 171, 176, 177. See also Revolutionary crisis
Polynesia, 266–67, 440
Poos, L. R., 44
Pope, Alexander, 113
population: bibliography, 421–22, 443, 455, 465, 474, 481, 484
and causes of price revolutions, 247, 249
and commodity prices, 132
and differences among price revolutions, 240, 241
and disease, 41, 44–45
and eighteenth century price revolution, 123–26, 125, 132, 155, 240, 249, 481, 484
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 107, 110, 166, 348n13, 474
and equilibrium, 239, 249
and family disintegration, 304
and fourteenth century crisis, 35, 37, 41, 44–45, 240
and inequalities, 295, 296, 298
and medieval price revolution, 13, 16, 19–20, 23, 31, 35, 37, 41, 44–45, 240, 249, 320–
21n12, 443
and Renaissance equilibrium, 47, 48, 49, 166, 328n4, 455
and seventeenth century crisis, 95, 96–97, 96, 101, 240, 341n1, 342n1
and similarities among price revolutions, 237, 238, 239
and sixteenth century price revolution, 72–73, 72, 75, 85, 87, 95, 96–97, 96, 101, 249,
333n17, 333–34n18, 334n19, 465
and twentieth century price revolution, 186, 187, 188, 204, 209, 229, 231, 233, 355–56n7
and Victorian equilibrium, 166, 167, 168, 356n7
and war, 96–97
world, 355–56n7. See also Malthusians
Portugal: bibliography, 389, 403, 461
colonies of, 121, 271
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 109
money in, 109, 283
price revolutions in, 70, 97, 121, 263, 263, 271, 461
 social unrest in, 97. See also Iberia
Postan, Michael M., 17, 22–23, 48, 72–73, 295, 326n46, 333n17, 433, 504
Posthumus, Nicolaas, 367, 370
Potosí, 81–82, 121, 271, 337n39
predictions, 235–36, 251–53, 501
Pribram, A. F., 367
price controls/rationing: bibliography, 430–31
and eighteenth century price revolution, 148
and medieval price revolution, 34, 35
and neoclassical economics, 358n9
and prescriptions for thinking about price revolutions, 256
and twentieth century price revolution, 191, 196, 197, 197, 199–200, 199, 206–8, 212, 230,
357–58n9
and wars, 256
price currents, 365–66
price floors, 201–2
price history (discipline), 7
price revolutions: in ancient world, 259–64
beginning of, 237, 241, 247
causes of, 7–8, 241–51
climax of, 238, 240, 241, 248–49
consequences of, 8–9, 250–51, 253
and equilibrium, 246–47
fourth stage of, 238, 241, 248–49
in the future, 251–58
human intervention in, 250, 252–53
overview of, 3–10
prescriptions for thinking about, 253–58
and range of annual fluctuations, 240
rates of change among, 239–40
second stage of, 237, 241, 247–48
sequential differences among, 9, 239–46
structural similarities among, 9, 236–39
third stage of, 237–38, 241, 248
 and wave patterns versus cycles, 9, 273–77, 318n7. See also Equilibrium; specific
revolution
“price scissors, ” 45, 243, 323n20, 328n13, 431
price theory, 281
primary sources: and historical compilations, 366–97
and materials on analysis of primary sources, 405–6
mercuriales as, 365
and price currents, 365–66
and serial publications, 397–405
problematiques, 315–16, 369–70, 434
producer prices, 182, 204, 209, 215, 216
production/productivity, 187, 194–95, 216, 218, 232, 240, 243–44, 248
Protestantism, 77, 86–87, 101
Prussia: bibliography, 478
and eighteenth century price revolution, 124, 149
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 112, 478
interest rates in, 163
politics in, 112
population in, 124
returns to capital in, 162, 163
returns to land in, 164
and Victorian equilibrium, 156–57, 162, 163, 164, 171
and wars, 149, 171
Pugachev, Emilian, 141
Puritans, 101

Quesnay, François, 113, 116

Rabb, T. K., 341n1, 342n1

Ragusa, 96
Ramsay, Peter, 77
Rappaport, Steve, 334n22
rational expectations theory, 429
Reagan (Ronald) administration, 214–15, 223–25, 236, 359n28
real estate values: bibliography, 467, 483, 495
 and eighteenth century price revolution, 130, 131, 483
and medieval price revolution, 28
and sixteenth century price revolution, 467
and twentieth century price revolution, 219, 234
and Victorian equilibrium, 161, 164, 495
real output, 166, 168
recoinages, 26, 32, 90, 109, 285–86, 326n46, 337n38
Reformation, 86–87
regulation, 255–56. See also Price controls/rationing
religion, 86–87, 101, 112, 134, 231–33
Renaissance: bibliography, 421, 448
“geometrical spirit” of, 331n24
Italian, 239
prosperity in, 329–30n13
of twelfth century, 12–13, 14–15, 239, 251, 448. See also Renaissance equilibrium
Renaissance equilibrium, 30, 45–63, 60–61, 103, 160, 166, 239, 251, 252, 454–59. See also
specific nation or topic
rents: bibliography, 419–20, 445, 458, 467, 476, 495
and causes of price revolutions, 243, 244, 247, 249
and eighteenth century price revolution, 130, 131, 148
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 104–5, 104, 105, 108, 476
and equilibrium, 239, 249
and Marxism, 243
and medieval price revolution, 26, 28, 28, 34, 41, 327n9, 445
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48, 52, 56, 330n13, 458
and seventeenth century crisis, 341n1
and similarities among price revolutions, 238, 239
and sixteenth century price revolution, 77, 79, 79, 467
and twentieth century price revolution, 219
and Victorian equilibrium, 161, 164, 495
returns to capital: bibliography, 476, 483, 495
and causes of price revolutions, 247
and eighteenth century price revolution, 129–30, 130, 483
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 107, 108, 110, 345n18, 476
 and inequalities, 300
and medieval price revolution, 29, 30
and Renaissance equilibrium, 54, 55–56
and similarities among price revolutions, 238
and sixteenth century price revolution, 77, 79, 80, 86, 92
and twentieth century price revolution, 180, 219, 219, 221, 222
and Victorian equilibrium, 162, 163, 164, 168, 495
and wars, 130, 162. See also Interest rates
returns to labor: and causes of price revolutions, 247
and eighteenth century price revolution, 133
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 104, 104, 110, 345n18
and inequalities, 300
and medieval price revolution, 27, 29, 30
and Renaissance equilibrium, 53
and similarities among price revolutions, 238
and sixteenth century price revolution, 73, 78, 79
and twentieth century price revolution, 188, 189, 219, 358–59n22
and Victorian equilibrium, 160, 161, 168. See also Standards of living; wages
returns to land: bibliography, 467
and eighteenth century price revolution, 126, 131
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 105
and medieval price revolution, 28
and Renaissance equilibrium, 52
and similarities among price revolutions, 238
and sixteenth century price revolution, 77, 79, 79, 86, 92, 467
and twentieth century price revolution, 219, 220
and Victorian equilibrium, 161, 164. See also Real estate values; Rents
revolutionary crisis: bibliography, 485–91
causes of, 245
and differences among price revolutions, 240
and eighteenth century price revolution, 142–56
and seventeenth century crisis, 341n1
and twentieth century price revolution, 232
and Victorian equilibrium, 157. See also American Revolution; French Revolution; Russian
Revolution; Social unrest
Ricardo, David, 126, 130, 298, 431, 491
Richardson, R. C., 364
Rienzi, Cola di, 40
Robin Hood Paradox, 297, 298
Rodger, Richard, 364
Rogers, James E. Thorold, 45
Romania, 403
Romano, Ruggiero, 95, 271, 272, 347n7, 363–64, 372, 408, 412
Romanticism, 154–55
Rome, 39, 40, 68, 261, 261, 262, 437–38
Roosevelt (Franklin D.) administration, 194–95, 196
Roskilde, Bishop of, 47
Rothenberg, Winifred, 120, 272, 284, 370
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 96
Rouen, France, 104, 330n16
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 141
Rowntree, B. S., 296
Rudé, George E., 289
Russia: bibliography, 389–90, 403–4, 473
disease in, 191
and eighteenth century price revolution, 141, 149, 153–54, 155
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 111, 112
food prices in, 191
gold/silver in, 84
grain prices in, 159
hyperinflation in, 193
inequalities in, 89
and medieval price revolution, 13, 40
money in, 193
politics in, 56, 111, 112, 141, 149, 191
price controls/rationing in, 212
and Renaissance equilibrium, 56
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 101, 473
 and sixteenth century price revolution, 84, 89, 93, 101
social unrest in, 101, 141, 149, 191, 473
and twentieth century price revolution, 188, 191, 193, 231, 234
and wars, 153–54, 155, 191. See also Soviet Union
Russian Revolution, 191
Rwanda, 229

St. Albans, England, 29, 36–37

Saloniki, 58
Salvador, 121, 271
Samuelson, Paul, 205, 279, 426
Sanchez-Albornez, Claudio, 263, 264, 317n3
Santa Maria Impruneta, Tuscany, 29, 30
Sardinia, 41
Saul, S. B., 275
savings and loan associations, 223–24
Savonarola, Girolamo, 67–68
Scandinavia: bibliography, 457, 464, 473
disease in, 41
and eighteenth century price revolution, 127, 134, 135
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103
and fourteenth century crisis, 38, 41
inequalities in, 135
medieval price revolution in, 13, 41
money in, 127, 283
population in, 72, 348n13
religion in, 87, 134
and Renaissance equilibrium, 457
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 473
and sixteenth century price revolution, 72, 87, 93, 464
social unrest in, 473. See also Denmark; Norway; Sweden
Schofield, Roger, 123–24, 166, 167
Schumpeter, Joseph A., 274, 277
Schwartz, Anna, 184–85, 276, 337n38, 414, 496–97
science, 113, 177
Scotland: banking in, 110
bibliography, 394, 463
disease in, 41
and eighteenth century price revolution, 128–29, 141
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 107, 110
famine in, 107
medieval price revolution in, 38, 41
money in, 128–29
population in, 107
and sixteenth century price revolution, 93, 97, 100, 463
social unrest in, 100
and twentieth century price revolution, 193
and wars, 38, 97. See also Britain
second wave. See Sixteenth century price revolution
secondary sources: and economic theory, 426–32
general works, 406–26
and historical models, 435–501
and social theory, 432–35
seeing and knowing epistemology, 314–15
Segre, Angelo, 259
Serbia, 404
serial publications, 397–405
Seven Years War, 121, 129, 130, 135, 140
seventeenth century: crisis of, 91–102, 98–99, 240, 243, 245, 252, 269–70, 341–42n1, 468–
74. See also specific nation or topic
Seville, Spain, 95–96, 276
Shakespeare, William, 100
Shinrikyo, Aum, 232–33
Sicily, 41, 100
Siena, 33, 50–51, 57
silver: bibliography, 420
and eighteenth century price revolution, 120, 127, 129
and fourteenth century crisis, 48
 and medieval price revolution, 24, 25, 29, 32, 34, 324n28
and nominal prices, 285–86
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48
and sixteenth century price revolution, 80–83, 129, 332n14, 333n15, 336n35, 337n39,
338n41
speculation about, 214
supply of, 24, 48, 80–81, 127, 184, 336n35, 338n41
and twentieth century price revolution, 181, 184, 209, 214, 215
and Victorian equilibrium, 171. See also American treasure; Debasements; Recoinages;
specific nation
Simiand, François, 5, 334n21, 368–69, 407, 408–9, 410
sixteenth century price revolution: beginning of, 70–75
bibliography, 459–68
causes of, 241–42, 243, 245, 249
climax of, 342n2
cultural responses to, 75–76
dates of, 3–4, 68, 70, 336n36
eighteenth century price revolution compared with, 152, 352n16
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 102–16
and imbalances, 76–87
and instability, 87–91
and Marxism, 243
medieval price revolution compared with, 102
and monetarism, 241–42
second stage of, 75–80
and sequential differences among price revolutions, 239–46
and structural similarities among revolutions, 236–39
and wave patterns, 6, 7. See also Seventeenth century: crisis of; specific topic, nation, or
geographical area
Skipp, Victor, 341n1, 342n1
slave economy, 161–62, 496
Slawson, David, 202–3
Slovenia, 231
Smith, Adam, 117, 432
Smout, T. C., 289
social issues: bibliography, 447–48, 459, 468, 471, 473, 477, 487–89, 497, 501
and causes of price revolutions, 243, 247, 249, 250
and differences among price revolutions, 240, 241
and eighteenth century price revolution, 136
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 477
and fourteenth century crisis, 240
and Marxism, 243
and medieval price revolution, 447–48
and Renaissance equilibrium, 49, 459
and revolutionary crisis, 488–89
and seventeenth century crisis, 471
and sixteenth century price revolution, 76–80, 468
and twentieth century price revolution, 497, 501. See also Inequalities; Social unrest
social sciences, 312–14
social theory, 432–35
social unrest: bibliography, 453, 467, 472–73, 490–91
and causes of price revolutions, 248
control of, 155–56
and differences among price revolutions, 240
and eighteenth century price revolution, 149, 155–56
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 110–11
and equilibrium, 239
and fourteenth century crisis, 39, 453
and late twentieth century crisis, 232–33
and medieval price revolution, 39
and prescriptions for thinking about price revolutions, 257
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48
and revolutionary crisis, 490–91
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 94, 97, 98–99, 100, 341n1, 472–73
and similarities among price revolutions, 238, 239
and sixteenth century price revolution, 87, 93, 94, 97, 100, 467
and twentieth century price revolution, 232–33. See also American Revolution; French
Revolution; specific nation
sociology, 312, 313
Solomou, Solomos, 275
Somalia, 229
Soper, John C., 274, 276
South Africa, 202, 217, 229
South America, 82, 150, 244, 266. See also Latin America; specific nation
Soviet Union, 198, 229–30. See also Russia
Spain: and American treasure, 81, 82, 83, 336–37n37
bibliography, 390–91, 404
climate in, 330n17
colonies of, 121, 149, 271
commodity prices in, 82
and eighteenth century price revolution, 121, 135, 149, 153, 271, 480
energy prices in, 76
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103
fiscal imbalances in, 85–86
food prices in, 73–74
and fourteenth century crisis, 452
inequalities in, 85
and medieval price revolution, 443
money in, 81, 82, 83, 84, 91, 182, 238, 283, 337n38
politics in, 56, 57, 91
population in, 13, 72, 95, 96
primary sources about, 390–91, 404
and Renaissance equilibrium, 56–57, 330n17, 458
secondary sources about, 443, 452, 458, 461, 473, 480, 492–93
and seventeenth century crisis, 93, 95, 96, 96, 473
silver in, 81
and sixteenth century price revolution, 69, 70, 72, 73–74, 76, 81, 82, 82, 83, 84, 85–86, 91,
93, 95–96, 96, 238, 336–37n37, 337n38, 461
social unrest in, 149, 473
taxes in, 85
and twentieth century price revolution, 182, 203, 217
Victorium equilibrium in, 492–93
and wars, 135, 149, 153. See also New Spain
speculation, 213–15, 484, 500–501
“Speenhamland system,” 132, 249
Spiethoff, A., 273
Spooner, Frank C., 276, 284, 286, 336n35, 338n41, 338–39n43, 342n2, 372, 418, 474
Spufford, Peter, 284
Sri Lanka, 391
stagflation, 145, 205–6, 248, 429, 500
standard deviation, 292
standards of living, 187, 237, 239, 288–90
statistical yearbooks, 397. See also Serial publications
Stein, Herbert, 10, 208
stock markets, 184, 192, 193, 214–15, 232, 249
Stockholm, Sweden, 172, 308
Stratton, William, 184
subsistence. See Inequalities; Peasants; Social issues; Social unrest
Supple, Barry, 92
Sweden: bibliography, 391, 404, 423
crime in, 172, 308
and eighteenth century price revolution, 127, 149
famine in, 93
medieval price revolution in, 13, 40
money in, 127, 182
politics in, 149
and sixteenth century price revolution, 93, 100
social unrest in, 40, 100, 149
and twentieth century price revolution, 182, 199, 203, 204, 234
and Victorian equilibrium, 159, 172
wages in, 159
wholesale prices in, 199. See also Scandinavia
Sweezy, Paul, 434
Switzerland: bibliography, 391–92, 404, 423
and eighteenth century price revolution, 141, 149
fiscal imbalances in, 100
medieval price revolution in, 38
 peasants in, 100
politics in, 141
population in, 72
religion in, 87
and seventeenth century crisis, 97, 100
and sixteenth century price revolution, 72, 87, 97, 100
social unrest in, 100, 141, 149
and twentieth century price revolution, 203, 204, 210, 217
and wars, 38, 97
Sydney, Australia, 308
Synod of Dort, 101

Tandeter, Enrique, 372, 412

Tartars, 40
Taureg people, 266
taxes: and causes of price revolutions, 248
and eighteenth century price revolution, 139, 147
and inequalities, 85
and prescriptions for thinking about price revolutions, 257
and sixteenth century price revolution, 85, 86, 97
and twentieth century price revolution, 191, 193, 194, 204, 205, 212, 223, 224, 359n28
Taylor, George Rogers, 272
technology: bibliography, 424–25
Temin, Peter, 169
tenth century, 263, 263, 267
Teutonic Knights, 13, 24, 37
Thailand, 392
Thatcher, Margaret, 225
theology, 100, 101, 113
theory, 312–16. See also Problematiques
Thernstrom, Stephan, 160–61
third century, 261, 262
third wave. See Eighteenth century price revolution
Thirty Years’ War, 96–97, 472
Thomas, Brinley, 276
Thomas, Robert, 435
Thorold Rogers, James E., 45, 285, 286, 324n31, 366
Thurow, Lester, 7, 314, 357n6
Tiepolo’s Rebellion (1310), 39
Tigris and Euphrates Valleys, 259–60
Timasheff, Serge, 313
Tokyo, Japan, 219
Toledo, Spain, 95
Toltec culture, 266
total household economy, 289–90
trade: bibliography, 446, 475, 476–77, 481–82, 483–84, 485
and eighteenth century price revolution, 481–82, 483–84, 485
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 476–77
and medieval price revolution, 23, 24–25, 32–33, 446
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48, 58
and twentieth century price revolution, 212, 224, 232, 233. See also Juglar trade cycles
transportation, 31–32, 168, 425
Trescott, Paul B., 414
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 341n1, 342n1
Truman (Harry S.) administration, 199
Tughlug, Muhammad bin, 266
Turkey: bibliography, 387–88, 392
climate in, 330n17
and eighteenth century price revolution, 152, 155
and late twentieth century crisis, 231, 234
and Renaissance equilibrium, 330n17
and twentieth century price revolution, 210, 231, 234. See also Ottoman Empire
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 188
Tuscany, 30, 34, 40, 45–46, 66, 67, 68, 276, 326n1. See also Pistoia, Tuscany
Twain, Mark, 3
twelfth century: bibliography, 448
climate in, 267
and medieval price revolution, 16, 17
 Renaissance of, 12–13, 14–15, 239, 251, 448. See also Medieval price revolution
twentieth century price revolution: and anti-inflation, 215–17
beginning of, 179–89, 185, 496
causes of, 243, 244, 245, 246, 249–50
climax of, 240–41
consequences of, 250
and current problems, 203–8
dates of, 4–5
and differences from other price revolutions, 188–89, 203
and discovery of inflation, 200–203
and floors, 201–2, 210
and imbalances, 217–28
and late twentieth century crisis, 229–34
and Malthusians, 243
and Marxism, 243
predictions about, 251–53
and price surges and declines, 189–200
and price volatility, 208–15
and sequential differences among price revolutions, 239–46
and structural similarities among revolutions, 236–39
and wave patterns, 7. See also specific nation or topic
Tyler, Wat, 49

Udine, 276
Uganda, 229
Ukraine, 100, 101, 155
underemployment, 289
unemployment, 289
unemployment. See also Wages
United Kingdom. See Britain; England
United States: agriculture in, 424
alcohol consumption in, 173, 225, 227, 228
capacity utilization in, 193, 204–5, 206, 213, 233
and causes of price revolutions, 245
 climate in, 142, 155
commodity prices in, 121, 181, 193, 198
consumer prices in, 170, 182, 183, 187, 198, 199, 200, 205, 209, 210, 216, 220, 226, 228,
228
crime in, 172, 225, 226, 308, 310
data for, 255, 361n19
debt of, 223
deflation in, 192
deregulation in, 210, 224
disease in, 191
and eighteenth century price revolution, 121, 124, 136, 138, 142, 149, 152, 153, 155, 156,
227, 272
and elections of 1896, 181
energy prices in, 124, 153, 208–9, 209, 210, 213, 218, 352n18
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 110
family disintegration in, 136, 228, 228, 301, 302
food prices in, 153, 204, 213, 218
frontier in, 188
gold in, 186, 194
grain prices in, 152, 158–59, 182
Great Depression in, 193–95
inequalities in, 138, 165, 190, 194, 210, 219, 222–23, 257, 294–96, 298, 299, 300, 420
inflation in, 182, 198–99, 200–201, 204, 206, 207, 209–10, 226, 280, 281
interest rates in, 163, 205, 212, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222
manufactured goods in, 157, 218
money in, 152, 157, 169, 170, 181, 182, 184–85, 186, 194, 205, 212, 224–25, 238, 282
politics in, 149, 162, 240
population in, 166
and prescriptions for thinking about price revolutions, 257
price controls/rationing in, 196, 197, 197, 198, 199, 199, 206–8, 357–58n9
price floors in, 201–2
primary sources about, 394–96, 397, 405
producer prices in, 182, 209
productivity in, 194–95, 196, 218
real estate values in, 219
 real output in, 166, 168
returns to capital in, 163, 219, 221
returns to labor in, 189, 219
returns to land in, 164, 219, 220
revolutionary crisis in, 240, 486
romanticism in, 155
savings and loan associations in, 223–24
secondary sources about, 272, 420, 423, 424, 486, 492, 496, 498–99
silver in, 181, 214
and sixteenth century price revolution, 6, 81
slave economy in, 161–62, 496
stock markets in, 184, 214–15
taxes in, 194, 204, 205, 212, 223, 224, 359n28
and trade, 212, 224
and twentieth century price revolution, 181, 182, 182, 183, 184–85, 186, 188, 189, 189,
190, 191, 192, 193–97, 196, 197, 198–210, 206, 207, 209, 212–19, 218, 219, 220, 220, 221,
222–25, 222, 226, 227, 228, 228, 233, 238, 357–58n9, 359n22, 359n23, 359n28, 498–99
and Victorian equilibrium, 157–58, 159, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172,
173, 492
wages in, 160, 181, 189, 192, 194–95, 199, 201, 206–8, 218–19, 218, 219, 357–58n9,
359n22, 359n23
and wars, 121, 153, 155, 157, 171, 189, 196–97, 198–200, 199, 204
and wave patterns, 6
welfare in, 156, 204, 218
wholesale prices in, 158, 159, 170, 181, 182, 189, 197, 199, 199, 218. See also New
England; specific city or state
University of Bologna, 13
University of Paris, 13
University of Salerno, 13
unwed mothers, 136, 137, 173, 176, 228, 248, 250, 301–4, 303
Utrecht, The Netherlands, 35

Van Dale, Pauwels, 88

Van Dr Wee, Herman, 408
Van Duijn, J. J., 274
Van Ewijk, Casper, 274
Vanities, burning of, 68
Venezuela, 397
Venice: bibliography, 456
disease in, 41
and eighteenth century price revolution, 149
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 109
and fall of Venetian republic, 25
interest rates in, 80
and medieval price revolution, 24
money in, 25, 48, 82, 109
politics in, 58
population in, 50–51
and Renaissance equilibrium, 58–59, 62, 330n19, 456
and sixteenth century price revolution, 68, 80, 82, 88, 96
social unrest in, 39, 149
wealth in, 59
Verona, 58, 330n19
Vicenza, 58, 330n19
Victoria (queen of England), 179–81
Victorian equilibrium, 5, 156–77, 174–75, 180–81, 188, 239, 251, 252, 303, 491–96
Vienna, Austria, 110
Vietnam War, 204, 256, 281, 357n6
Vikings, 11
Vilar, Pierre, 171, 407
Virginia, 135, 270
Vives, Vicens, 91
Volcker, Paul, 212
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), 109, 112–13, 134
von Ranke, Leopold, 177

wage series data: biases of, 288–89

wages: in ancient world, 259
bibliography, 419–20, 430–31, 445, 458, 464–65, 476, 482–83, 487, 489, 495–96, 501
 and causes of price revolutions, 243, 244, 247, 249
and crime, 309
definition of, 288, 290
and eighteenth century price revolution, 123, 132, 133, 142, 144, 148, 153, 482–83
and Enlightenment equilibrium, 103, 104, 104, 108, 108, 160, 476
and equilibrium, 249
of housewives, 289
and income in kind, 289–90
and Marxism, 243
and medieval price revolution, 26, 27, 29, 34, 45, 288, 445
minimum, 201
money as, 288
and prescriptions for thinking about price revolutions, 255
and Renaissance equilibrium, 48, 51, 53, 55, 56, 59, 160, 330n13, 458
as returns to labor, 288–90
and revolutionary crisis, 489
and seventeenth century crisis, 92, 341n1
and similarities among price revolutions, 238
and sixteenth century price revolution, 73, 74, 77, 78, 86, 92, 335n27, 464–65
in twelfth century, 160
and twentieth century price revolution, 180, 181, 184, 188, 189, 192, 194–95, 199, 201,
206–8, 217, 218–19, 218, 219, 222, 231, 234, 250, 357–58n9, 358–59n22, 359n23, 501
and Victorian equilibrium, 159–61, 160, 162, 164, 495–96. See also specific nation
Wales, 31, 120, 161, 173, 303
Walesa, Lech, 230
Wallachia, 57
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 434–35
Wang, Yeh-chien, 268
War of 1812, 121, 153, 154
War of the Austrian Succession, 135
war inflation, 280–81
War of Jenkins’ Ear, 135, 349n24
War of the Roses, 55
Warner, Lloyd, 313
Warren, George F., 272, 414
Warren, W. L., 324–25n31
wars: bibliography, 425, 452–53, 471–72, 484
and causes of price revolutions, 248
and crime, 145
and cultural issues, 153
and disease, 41
economic, 153
and eighteenth century price revolution, 128, 129, 130, 135, 145, 149, 152, 152, 153–54,
155, 484
and equilibrium, 239
financing of, 128, 158
and fourteenth century crisis, 38–39, 41, 452–53
and money, 149, 158
and population, 96–97
and price controls/rationing, 256
and Renaissance equilibrium, 46–47, 52–53
and returns to capital, 130, 162
and seventeenth century crisis, 96–97, 98–99, 341n1, 471–72
and similarities among price revolutions, 237, 238, 239
and sixteenth century price revolution, 91, 96–97
and twentieth century price revolution, 189, 191, 192–93, 192, 195–97, 196, 199, 204, 232
and Victorian equilibrium, 157, 162, 171, 176. See also specific war
Washington, George, 135
wave patterns: and cycles, 9, 273–77, 318n7. See also Equilibrium; Price revolutions;
specific revolution
wealth: measures of, 291–92. See also Inequalities
Weinstock, Ulrich, 274
welfare: and eighteenth century price revolution, 132, 138, 144, 153, 155, 156
and family disintegration, 303, 304
and inequalities, 297
and twentieth century price revolution, 187, 204, 218
Wells, H. G., 177
West Indies, 233
wholesale prices: and twentieth century price revolution, 181, 182, 185, 189, 192, 194, 197,
199, 199, 218, 233
and Victorian equilibrium, 158, 159, 170, 185
Wiebe, Georg, 80–81, 336n35, 366–67, 459
William of Orange (king of England), 107
Wilson, A. T., 266–67, 268
Winchester, England, 120
de Wolff, S., 273
Woodward, D., 290
world markets, 155, 168, 176, 188, 204
World War I, 189, 191, 192, 194, 281, 497
World War II, 195–98, 196, 197, 199, 200, 203, 256, 281, 498
Wrigley, Anthony, 123–24, 166, 167
Wurzburg, Germany, 70

Young, Arthur, 130

Young, G. M., 176–77
Yu, T., 268
Yugoslavia, 203, 231, 397, 405

Zagorin, Perez, 341n1

Zaire, 229
Ziegler, Philip, 41
Zinzindorf, 113