More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 7, 2021 - December 31, 2023
In every price-revolution, as we shall see, propertied and powerful elites would oppose economic controls and profit by their absence.
Manorial lords maintained their incomes by raising rents.
Property owners as noted above escape Price Revoutions largely intact, this is most likely due to the inelastic value of land. Peasants had to cultivte the land to survive, and had to pay increasing prices to access it.
fall.
Demographics
Impoverished peasants ate cats, rats, reptiles and insects. Many tried to survive on animal droppings. Others ate the leaves from the trees.
People sought scapegoats for their suffering. Millers and bakers became favorite targets.
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
As price-movements became more volatile, every surge in the cost of living was accompanied by a sudden increase in criminal violence.
Many were homicides, assaults and acts of rage against the cruel suffering that had been visited upon so many people.
This system of repression was the price of stability in the Venetian republic.
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.
Twelve years later, the Capetian dynasty collapsed after more than three centuries in power.
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.
The plague found a vulnerable population that had outstripped the means of its subsistence and was already beginning to decline.
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.
“price scissors.”
Opposite of what occured in beginning of Price Revolution where industrial goods and trade skills remained flat while food increased
In the period from 1314 to 1348, the great wave crested and broke in a shattering catastrophe.
At the end of the wave the Black Death arrived inflicting 50 more years of misery.
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.
This was the period of the Hundred Years War (ca. 1337–1453) between France and England.
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.
At the same time the West had an unfavorable balance of trade with Asia, and specie drained rapidly away.
Only Venetian gold ducats, which have been called “the dollar of the middle ages,” continued to be struck in quantity;
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.”
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.
A long period of comparative equilibrium followed in 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 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.
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.
Most likely due to a more mobile peasantry due to serfdom ending in Western Europe after the Price Revolution, increased wages led to increased choice, decline in population meant rentiers didn't have as many people banging on their doors to rent.
Returns to labor outpaced rewards to land and capital.
These patterns of demographic equilibrium, economic recovery and political stability developed in every part of Europe, but not all at the same time.
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 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,
...more
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.
Gorgias
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.
They marked the beginning of a new material process which economic historians call the price-revolution of the sixteenth century.
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.
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.
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.
Neither Malthus nor Marx can explain what happened in the sixteenth century.
As the demand for food increased, people began to bring marginal lands into cultivation, with large labor and small return.
All Price Revolutions begin with a drying up of opportunity
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.
In Spain, economic historian Earl Hamilton found that “throughout the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century, agricultural prices rose faster than non-agricultural.”
This pattern of price-relatives was much the same as in the long wave of the thirteenth century.
Once food prices began to rise, the cost of energy also started to c...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In an environment that was rapidly losing its forest cover, the rising price of firewood and charcoal soon outstripped even the cost of food.
Energy prices were among the most volatile in the long inflation of the sixteenth century.23
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 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.
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.
