This book is aimed at students and researchers of history and economics alike. It provides a concise overview of current approaches, methods and sources in premodern economic history, focusing on the time between c. 1300 and c. 1600. To demonstrate how research in premodern economic history can be done in practice, we present sample studies that analyse different economic aspects of the Holy Roman Empire. Studies on this large area still need to be connected to the grand narratives of premodern economic history, like the rise of the West, the industrious revolution, or the evolution of a market economy . In sum, our book has a twofold objective: We want to provide an access to methods and sources for studying premodern economic history as well as give an insight into recent studies of the German premodern economy, thereby paving the path to reconnecting German premodern economic history with the grand narratives that have been developed mainly for Western European regions, like Italy, Flanders, France and England.
The premodern economy is one of the most fascinating and most challenging subjects of study: Analysing it includes the study of history as well as economics. That might sound like a truism. But with the increased use of mathematical models in economics and economic history in the second half of the twentieth century, economic history has been done quite differently depending on whether it was situated in an economics or at a history department. By bringing both perspectives together in one book, we would like to strengthen a strand of current research which reconnects with an even older tradition in economic history: Starting with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent scholars such as Max Weber or Gustav von Schmoller have regarded the economy not as a well-defined section of society, but as a part of society which is intricately entangled with politics, social history and questions of ethics. During the past hundred years, there have always been scholars who were convinced that economic activities follow specific rules, but that they cannot be understood if they are not seen as embedded in a society with its specific resources , institutional set-up and norms of behaviour. Albert O. Hirschman and Amartya Sen, for example, rank among the prominent proponents of this view of the economy.
Accordingly, economic history serves as one perspective to study past societies. Recent debates emphasise that to understand economic history, we need both the birdâs-eye view and the studies of individual or small groupâs choices, practices and decisions. The focus on the individual, embedded in cultural traditions, institutional constraints and social obligations, complements the macro-perspective on population movements , aggregate supply or demand , or averages of real wages: Those who want to understand and explain the premodern economy have to comprehend economic processes such as the workings of supply and demand or the concept of inflation . At the same time, researchers of the premodern economy have to grasp the features and basic concepts of a society which is to a certain degree foreign to their own. They have to understand, for example, unfamiliar mentalities with regard to interest rates, or conceptions of a society with a preordained social order. It is also relevant to have a basic understanding of how to read and interpret premodern types of sources.
In sum, to understand and analyse the premodern economy, historians and economists have to work together. This book lays the ground for such a cooperation: It is one of the first to present in one book historiansâ and economistsâ work on the premodern economy. The overview of methodological approaches, sources and research discussions will hopefully give historians and economists alike some orientation in the field. In short, the question this book answers is: How can we do premodern economic history? We tackle this question from a very practical perspective: We show how premodern economic history has been studied during recent decades. This brings into view a wide range of methodological approaches and sources.
The practical examples presented here (Chaps. 6, 7 and 8) analyse the Holy Roman Empire during the period c. 1300â1600. The region and the time frame were chosen because both offer a very colourful perspective on economic history: As a non-centralised, rather fragmented European region, reaching from Burgundy in the West to the Baltic Sea in the East and from the North Sea to Italy in the South, the Holy Roman Empire comprised a variety of regions and forms of government.
The period between c.1300 and c.1600 stands out as an epoch of special interest in two regards: First, the quantity and quality of sources that survived differ from the sources that were preserved from the periods before and after: By far more sources have survived from this period than from any earlier period in history, and they cover a greater range of economic phenomena. Merchants became sedentary during the Commercial Revolution of the High Middle Ages. Thus, their business organisation developed into more complex structures as they had to write down accounts as well as letters to their business partners. A differentiated administration emerged in many towns , and the urban council and personnel produced serial, administrative sources. The landlords also began to introduce written records into their administration, while the monasteries were being able to draw on a tradition dating back to the Early Middle Ages. Hence, for the first time we are able to grasp everyday economic practices and to collect data from serial sources. Nevertheless, these sources do not provide statistical data in the modern sense. They were not recorded in order to be evaluated with statistical methods. In sum, the sources have to and can be analysed with a number of different methodological approaches. Researchers who want to study the premodern economy between 1300 and 1600 thus have to reflect meticulously on the methods which they employ.
Second, these three centuries are of interest because they span the time between two periods of fundamental transformation of the European economy. During the fourteenth century, important external factors changed the conditions and constraints for economic activity in Western Europe and Germany: The first indications of the Little Ice Age changed the climate , and longer periods of coldness and more rain modified the conditions for agriculture which lay at the foundation of the premodern economy. The Black Death ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, always bringing very high death rates with it and profoundly changing the resources of economic productivity and distribution (see section âPopulation, Demography and Economic Growthâ in Chap. 2). Furthermore, the Commercial Revolution that had changed the way business was done came to an end (section âCommercial Revolutionâ in Chap. 2). New techniques and tools of administration and trade had been developed and were spreading throughout Europe. In the German lands, more and more towns had been founded, which modified and enriched the economic structure and its institutions (section âUrbanisationâ in Chap. 2). Certain agricultural regions were developing into special cultivation areas, with a close connection to urban (consumer) markets, division of labour and a joint organisation of production and distribution.
After 1600, the set-up of the European economy changed profoundly again. Roughly a century after the first wave of European colonisation had started, its effects and consequences began to transform the economic system in Europe: Economic activities became oriented towards the Atlantic Ocean, and the longer and riskier endeavours all around the world prompted the emergence of new kinds of business organisations such as chartered companies . The Thirty Yearsâ War (1618â1648) devastated large parts of the German lands and massively reduced the population . The period between c.1300 and c.1600 is thus characterised as premodern in the sense that this economy was distinctly not a modern one, while in retrospect we can assess that some features of a modern economy were preconfigured during those centuries, such as division of labour , the difference between town and count...