The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History

by David Hackett Fischer

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.