Like King Midas, the Spanish monarchs of the sixteenth century, Charles V and Philip II, found that an abundance of precious metal could be as much a curse as a blessing. The reason? They dug up so much silver to pay for their wars of conquest that the metal itself dramatically declined in value – that is to say, in its purchasing power with respect to other goods. During the so-called ‘price revolution’, which affected all of Europe from the 1540s until the 1640s, the cost of food – which had shown no sustained upward trend for three hundred years – rose markedly. In England (the country for
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