Abstract
Throughout the seventeenth century, neither government officials nor interested laymen had any comprehensive quantitative idea of what was happening in the economic life of their own region, let alone of Europe as a whole. Some Italian cities had already compiled censuses in the sixteenth century, but that was exceptional. There was no shortage of commentators and politicos, like the arbitristas1 in Spain, who wrote on a variety of contemporary social and economic problems, but most of their output was rhetorical and superficial, and often deeply committed politically. The disadvantages of lacking recorded information and statistics on many aspects of material life were gradually recognised towards the end of the century, when the fiscal needs of governments and improvements in scientific and statistical methods could provide the incentives and means for the first steps in this direction. But only during the eighteenth century did the study of political economy and the training of administrative officials catch up with practical realities to such an extent that long-term government policies might take hold — and become more than just piecemeal and often ineffectual application of sometimes self-contradictory measures advocated by particular pressure groups to shift financial burdens, to affect the balance of trade, to protect infant or ailing industries, or to secure commercial monopolies overseas.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The ideas of the arbitristas are discussed by J. H. Elliott, ‘Self-perception and decline in early 17th-century Spain’, PP, 74 (1977), 41–61.
See the bibliography for general surveys of demographic patterns. For east-central Europe, see E. Fügedi, ‘The demographic landscape of east-central Europe’, in East-central Europe in Transition, ed. A. Maczak et al. (Cambridge, 1985), who suggests that the seventeenth century was a major demographic disaster for this area.
For the Ottoman Empire, P. F. Sugar, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule (Seattle, 1977), pp. 221–4
and B. McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 83–7.
Increased incidence of disease was not always the consequence of high food prices, and some diseases spread irrespective of the nutritional condition of the recipient. English evidence from the 1690s suggests that the harvest failures then, although not of famine proportions as elsewhere in Europe, were accompanied by low incidence of disease, while the opposite is true of the 1680s, when cereals were plentiful: A. B. Appleby, ‘Epidemics and famine in the Little Ice Age’, JID, 10 (1980), 643–53
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (London, 1981), esp. pp. 320–55
A. G. Carmichael, ‘Infection, hidden hunger and history’, JID, 14 (1983–4), 249–64.
For France, see e.g. P. Deyon, Etude sur la société urbaine au xuiie. siècle: Amiens (Paris, 1967), p. 498
for Finland, E. Jutikkala, ‘The great Finnish famine of 1696–97,’ SEHR, 3 (1955), 48–63.
A. B. Appleby suggested in ‘Grain prices and subsistence crises in England and France, 1590–1740’, JEcH, 39 (1979), 865–87, that famines were avoided in England because the prices of oats and to some extent of barley were independent of the other cereals — although both wheat and maize were grown in southern France, the wheat was for export only and was always too dear for ordinary local consumption, so that the area did not escape the danger of effective ‘monoculture’.
J. A. Eddy, ‘The Maunder minimum: sunspots and climate in the reign of Louis XIV’, in The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, ed. G. Parker and L. M. Smith (London, 1978)
G. Utterström, ‘Climatic fluctuations and population problems in early modern history’, SEHR, 3 (1955), 3–47
E. le Roy Ladurie, ‘Climat et récoltes aux xviie et xviiie siècles’, A, 15 (1960), 434–65; and some consistent evidence from other approaches to climatic history, presented in the special issue of JID, 10/4 (1980).
G. E. Fussell, ‘Low Countries’ influence on English farming’, EcHR, 74 (1959), 611–22.
These urban densities, merely estimates, are not unlike those for post-war British cities, but Glasgow had a net density in 1951 of 400 per hectare, and during the later nineteenth century some of its poorer parishes exceeded twice that density, according to A. Gibb, Glasgow: the Making of a City (Glasgow, 1983), pp. 130f and 161.
A. Sharlin, ‘Natural decrease in early modern cities’, PP, 79 (1978), 126–38, and the subsequent debate, in PP, 92 (1981), 169–80.
Cf. P. Clark and P. Slack, English Towns in Transition 1500–1700 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 85–96.
C. D. O. Malley, ‘The medical history of LXIV’, in LXIV and the Craft of Kingship, ed. J. C. Rule (Ohio, 1969), pp. 132–54.
C. M. Cipolla, Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1976), and his Cristofano and the Plague (London, 1973). Health boards on the Italian model had been attempted in France in the sixteenth century, and became common in other parts of Europe by the seventeenth.
More recent contributions include J. N. Biraben, ‘La peste en 1720 à Marseilles’, RH, 247 (1972), 402–26, and his Les hommes et la peste, vols 1–2 (Paris, 1975–6)
M. W. Flinn, ‘Plague in Europe and the Mediterranean countries’, JEEH, 8 (1979), 131–48
A. B. Appleby, ‘The disappearance of plague: a continuing puzzle’, EcHR, 33 (1980), 161–73, with comments by P.A. Slack in the subsequent issue of EcHR, 34 (1981), 469–76
P. A. Slack, The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985).
H. Phelps Brown and S. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices (London, 1981) — the most substantial attempt to devise a long-term index, but not fully satisfactory because of the underlying assumptions of continuity in consumption patterns, and because of the selective records on which it is based.
See also D. C. Coleman, The Economy of England 1450–1750 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 99–103; Goubert, Beauvais, pp. 547–76
B. S. Pullan, ‘Wage-earners and the Venetian economy, 1550–1630’, EcHR, 16 (1964), 408–26
R. T. Rapp, Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-century Venice (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 130–7
J. de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750 (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 184–7
D. Woodward, ‘Wage-rates and living standards in pre-industrial England’, PP, 91 (1981), 28–45
K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700 (London, 1979), pp. 39–42
A. Perrenoud, La population de Genève, vol. 1 (Geneva, 1979), pp. 357–61
M. J. Elsas, Umriss einer Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Deutschland, vols 1–2 (Leiden, 1936–40)
J. Bérenger, Finances et absolutisme autrichien (Paris, 1975), pp. 182–4
G. Vigo, ‘Real wages of the working class in Italy’, JEEH, 3 (1974), 378–99.
But all figures are necessarily tentative: see M. Sonenscher, ‘Work and wages in Paris in the 18th century’, in Manufacture in Town and Country, ed. M. Berg, P. Hudson and M. Sonenscher (Cambridge, 1983) pp. 147–72.
The evidence is uneven and scattered: for a survey, see M. Flinn, The European demographic system 1500–1820 (Brighton, 1981), chs 2–3. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp. 218–19, have argued that the proportion of dependents and children in the seventeenth century is not as great as Gregory King in particular assumed: in fact the under-15s represent 28–31 per cent of the English population in the later seventeenth century.
See especially Family Forms in Historic Europe, ed. R. Wall and others (Cambridge, 1983), chs 1 and 17. Information on the Kent village is from Lasiert, cited by J. L. Flandrin, Families in Former Times (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 56–8.
The literature on this aspect is expanding rapidly; see notably D. Underdown, ‘The taming of the scold’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. A. J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 116–36
G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives (London, 1979)
and N. Z. Davis, ‘Women on top’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London, 1975), pp. 1245–51.
S. D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), emphasises regional differences in the status of women, stressing that there was some female economic independence in those areas, for example the pastoral north, where women had a specific role in production and marketing.
For the best survey of English evidence on the family, see R. A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450–1700 (London, 1984), ch. 5.
There has been some debate, notably since P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (London, 1962), regarding the prevalence of love and other emotions in the early modern family, but the consensus now supports what common sense would suggest, namely that such elemental human emotions are not historically conditioned.
D. V. Glass, ‘Two papers on Gregory King’, in Population in History, ed. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London, 1965), pp. 159–220
G. Holmes, ‘Gregory King and the social structure of pre-industrial England’, TRHS, 27 (1977), 41–68.
See also T. Arkell, ‘The incidence of poverty in England in the later 17th Century’, Social History, 12 (1987), 23–47.
N. Solomon, La campagne de nouvelle Castile d’après les ‘Relaciones topograficas’ (Paris, 1964), pp. 257–66.
H. Kamen, Spain in the later Seventeenth Century (London, 1980), p. 276, suggests that Spanish towns often had 40 per cent poor, of whom half were wholly destitute
cf. J. Casey, The Kingdom of Valencia in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 37–44.
Survey in Flinn, European Demographic System, pp. 65–75; see also S. Hochstadt, ‘Migration in pre-industrial Germany’ CEH, 16 (1983), 195–224.
Clark and Slack, English Towns, p. 91–4, 117–21; K. Wrightson, English Sodety 1580–1680 (London, 1982), pp. 26–38, 40–4.
For a Swedish case-study, see S. Lundkvist, ‘Rörlighet och social struktur i 1610-talets Sverige’, HTS, 94 (1974), 192–255, with an English summary 256–8.
R. Grassby, ‘English merchant capitalism in the late 17th Century’, PP, 46 (1970), 87–107; his ‘The personal wealth of the business community in 17th-century England’, EcHR, 23 (1970), 220–34; and Puritans and Revolutionaries, ed. D. Pennington and K. Thomas (Oxford, 1978), pp. 355–81.
Copyright information
© 1990 Thomas Munck
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Munck, T. (1990). The framework of life. In: Seventeenth Century Europe. History of Europe. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20626-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20626-1_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-28641-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-20626-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)