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
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