Markets And Growth In Early Modern Europe

This is the first study to analyze a wide spread of price data to determine whether market development led to economic growth in the early modern period.

This is the first study to analyze a wide spread of price data to determine whether market development led to economic growth in the early modern period.

In discussions on European pre-modern economic growth, the role of individual freedom and of the state has loomed large. This book examines whether different kinds of 'freedoms' (absolutist, parliamentary and republican) caused different economic outcomes, and shows the effect of different political regimes on long term development. It thus offers

This edited collection, first published in 1991, focuses on the commercial relations, marketing structures and development of consumption that accompanied early industrial expansion. The papers examine aspects of industrial structure and work organisation, including women’s work, and highlight the conflict and compromise between work traditions and the emergence of a market culture. With an overarching introduction providing a background to European manufacturing, this title will be of particular interest to students of social and economic history researching early industrial Europe and the concurrent emergence of a material, consumer culture.

This volume takes stock of recent research on economic growth, as well as the development of capital and labour markets, during the centuries that preceded the Industrial Revolution. The book underlines the diversity in the economic experiences of early modern Europeans and suggests how this variety might be the foundation of a new conception of economic and social change.

This is the first study to analyze a wide spread of price data to determine whether market development led to economic growth in the early modern period.

It is often assumed that natural philosophy was the forerunner of early modern natural sciences. But where did these sciences’ systematic observation and experimentation get their starts? In Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, the laboratories, workshops, and marketplaces emerge as arenas where hands-on experience united with higher learning. In an age when chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and botany intersected with mining, metallurgy, pharmacy, and gardening, materials were objects that crossed disciplines. Here, the contributors tell the stories of metals, clay, gunpowder, pigments, and foods, and thereby demonstrate the innovative practices of technical experts, the development of the consumer market, and the formation of the observational and experimental sciences in the early modern period. Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe showcases a broad variety of forms of knowledge, from ineffable bodily skills and technical competence to articulated know-how and connoisseurship, from methods of measuring, data gathering, and classification to analytical and theoretical knowledge. By exploring the hybrid expertise involved in the making, consumption, and promotion of various materials, and the fluid boundaries they traversed, the book offers an original perspective on important issues in the history of science, medicine, and technology.

In 1929 two French historians, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, founded Annales, a historical journal which rapidly became one of the most influential in the world. They believed that economic history, social history and the history of ideas were as important as political history, and that historians should not be narrow specialists but should learn from their colleagues in the social sciences. Two of the most distinguished French members of the Annales school are represented in this volume - Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - the core of which is the debate on the Price Revolution of the sixteenth century dealt with by Cipolla, Chabert, Hoszowski and Verlinden. Within the volume, all the contributions are oriented towards Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and all are concerned with long-term changes, and with the relation between economic growth and social change. It includes articles on the European movement of expansion discussed by Malowist and the activities of the Hungarian nobles as entrepreneurs discussed by Pach, and two articles on wider issues: Le Roy Ladurie on the history of climate, and Braudel, summing up the Annales programme, on the relation between history and the social sciences. This classic text was first published in 1972.