The Penguin History of the World

2 A New Kind of Society: Early Modern Europe

‘Modern history’ is a familiar term, but it does not always mean the same thing. There was a time when modern history was what had happened since the ‘ancient’ history, whose subject-matter was the story of the Jews, Greeks and Romans; this is a sense which, for example, is still used to define a Modern History course of study at Oxford which includes the Middle Ages. Then it came to be distinguished from ‘medieval’ history, too. Now a further refinement is often made, for historians have begun to make distinctions within it and sometimes speak of an ‘early modern’ period. By this they are really drawing our attention to a process, for they apply it to the era in which a new Atlantic world emerged from the tradition-dominated, agrarian, superstitious and confined western Christendom of the Middle Ages, and this took place at different times in different countries. In England it happened very rapidly; in Spain it was far from complete by 1800, while much of eastern Europe was still hardly affected by it even a century later. But the reality of the process is obvious, for all the irregularity with which it expressed itself. So is its importance, for it laid the groundwork for a European world hegemony.

A useful starting-point for thinking about what was involved is to begin with the simple and obvious truth that for most of human history most people’s lives have been deeply and cruelly shaped by the fact that they have had little or no choice about the way in which they could provide themselves and their families with shelter and enough to eat. The possibility that things might be otherwise has only recently become a conceivable one to even a minority of the world’s population, and it became a reality for any substantial number of people only with changes in the economy of early modern Europe, for the most part, west of the Elbe.

Medieval Europe, like most of the world at that time, still consisted of societies in which, for the most part, surpluses of production over and above the needs of consumption were obtained from those who produced them – peasants – by social or legal institutions rather than by the operation of the market. When we can recognize the existence of a ‘modern’ Europe, this has changed; the extraction and mobilization of those surpluses has become one of the tasks of a protean entity often labelled ‘capitalism’, which operates largely through cash transactions in increasingly complex markets.

We can follow some of these changes as we can follow no earlier ones because for the first time there is reasonably plentiful and continuous quantified data. In one important respect, historical evidence gets much more informative in the last four or five centuries: it becomes much more statistical. Measurement therefore becomes easier. The source of new statistical material was often government. For many reasons, governments wanted to know more and more about the resources or potential resources at their disposal. But private records, especially of business, also give us much more numerical data after 1500. The multiplication of copies as paper and printing became more common meant that the chance of their survival was enormously increased. Commercial techniques appeared which required publication of data in collated forms; the movements of ships, or reports of prices, for example. Moreover, as historians have refined their techniques, they have attacked even poor or fragmentary sources with much greater success than was possible even a few years ago.

All this has provided much knowledge of the size and shape of change in early modern Europe, though we must be careful not to exaggerate either the degree of precision such material permits or what can be learnt from it. For a long time the collection of good statistics was very difficult. Even quite elementary questions, about, for example, who lived in a certain place, were very difficult to answer accurately until recent times. One of the great aims of reforming monarchs in the eighteenth century was merely to carry out accurate listings of land within their states – cadastral surveys, as they were called – or even to find out how many subjects they had. It was only in 1801 that the first census was held in Great Britain – nearly eight centuries after the Domesday Book. France did not have her first official census until 1876, nor the Russian empire her only one until 1897.

Such delays are not really surprising. A census or a survey requires a complex and reliable administrative machine. It may arouse strong opposition (when governments seek new information, new taxes often follow). Such difficulties are enormously increased where the population is as illiterate as it was in much of Europe for the greater part of modern history.

New statistical material can also raise as many historical problems as it solves. It can reveal a bewildering variety of contemporary phenomena, which often makes generalization harder; it has become much harder to say anything at all about the French peasantry of the eighteenth century since research revealed the diversity hidden by that simple term and that perhaps there was no such thing as a French peasantry, but only several different ones. Finally, too, statistics can illuminate facts while throwing no light at all on causes. Nevertheless after 1500 we are more and more in an age of measurement and the overall effect of this is to make it easier to make defensible statements about what was happening than in earlier times at other places.

Demographic history is the most obvious example. At the end of the fifteenth century, European population was poised on the edge of growth which has gone on ever since. After 1500 we may crudely distinguish two phases. Until about the middle of the eighteenth century the increase of population was (except for notable local and temporary interruptions) relatively slow and steady; this roughly corresponds to ‘early modern’ history and was one of the things characterizing it. In the second phase the increase much accelerated and great changes followed. Only the first phase concerns us here, because it regulated the way in which modern Europe took shape. The general facts and trends within it are clear enough. Though they rely heavily on estimates, the figures are much better based than in earlier times, in part because there was almost continuous interest in population problems from the early seventeenth century onwards. This contributed to the foundation of the science of statistics (then called ‘political arithmetic’) at the end of the seventeenth century, mainly in England. It produced some remarkable work, though not much more than a tiny island of relatively rigorous method in a sea of guesses and inferences. Nevertheless the broad picture is clear. In 1500 Europe had about 80 million inhabitants, two centuries later she had fewer than 150 million and in 1800 slightly fewer than 200 million. Before 1750 Europe had grown fairly steadily at a rate which maintained her share of the world’s population at about one-fifth until 1700 or so, but by 1800 she had nearly a quarter of the world’s inhabitants.

Obviously, therefore, for a long time there were no such startling disparities as appeared later between the rate of growth in Europe and that elsewhere. It seems reasonable to conclude that this meant that in other ways, too, European and non-European populations were less different than they were to come to be after 1800. The usual age of death among Europeans, for example, still remained low. Before 1800 they were on the average always much younger than nowadays, because people died earlier. At birth a French peasant of the eighteenth century had a life expectancy of about twenty-two years, and only a roughly one in four chance of surviving infancy. Then chances were much the same as those of an Indian peasant in 1950 or an Italian under imperial Rome. Comparatively few people would have survived their forties and, since they were less well fed than we are, they would have looked old to us at that age, and were probably rather small in stature and unhealthy-looking. As in the Middle Ages, women tended still to die before men. This meant that many men made a second or even a third marriage, not, as today, because of divorce, but because they were soon widowers.

The average European couple had a fairly short married life. West of a line running roughly from the Baltic to the Adriatic, they had shorter marriages than east of it, moreover, because those who lived there tended to make their first marriage later in their twenties, and this was long to be a habit making for different population patterns east and west. Generally, though, if Europeans were well-off they could afford a fairly large family; the poor had smaller ones. There is strong inferential evidence both that some form of family limitation was already taking place in some places in the seventeenth century and that other methods of achieving it than abortion and infanticide were in use. Further cultural and economic facts are needed to explain this mysterious topic. It remains one of those areas where a largely illiterate society is almost impossible to penetrate historically. We can say very little with confidence about early birth control and still less about its implications – if there were any – for the ways in which early modern Europeans thought about themselves and their control over their own lives.

Overall, demography also reflected the continuing economic predominance of agriculture. For a long time it produced only slightly more food than was needed and could feed only a slowly growing population. In 1500 Europe was still largely a rural continent of villages in which people lived at a pretty low level of subsistence. It would have seemed very empty to modern eyes. England’s population, heavy in relation to area by comparison with the rest of the continent, was in 1800 only about a sixth of today’s; in eastern Europe there were huge empty spaces for which population was eagerly sought by rulers who encouraged immigration in all sorts of ways. Even though it was growing rapidly, Europe’s population was dwarfed by that of Asia.

Yet the towns and cities managed to grow in number and size, one or two of them spectacularly faster than the population as a whole. Amsterdam reached a total of about 200,000 inhabitants in the eighteenth century. Paris probably doubled in size between 1500 and 1700, and rose to slightly less than half a million. London shot ahead of Paris by going up from about 120,000 to nearly 700,000 in the same two centuries; in the much smaller English population this, of course, meant a much bigger shift to urban life. A significant new word came into use in English: suburbs. But it is not easy to generalize about medium-sized and smaller towns. Most were quite small, still under 20,000 inhabitants in 1700, but the nine European cities of more than 100,000 people in 1500 had become at least a dozen 200 years later. Yet Europe’s predominance in urbanization was not marked in these centuries and the world’s biggest cities were still in Asia.

Neither urbanization nor population growth was evenly spread. France remained the largest west European nation in these years; she had about 21 million inhabitants in 1700, when England and Wales had only about 6 million. But it is not easy to make comparisons because estimates are much less reliable for some areas than others, and because boundary changes often make it hard to be sure what we are talking about under the same name at different times. Some certainly underwent checks and possibly setbacks in their population growth in a wave of seventeenth-century disasters. Spain, Italy and Germany all had bad outbreaks of epidemic disease in the 1630s, and there were other celebrated local attacks such as the Great Plague of London of 1665. Famine was another sporadic and local check; we hear even of cannibalism in the mid-seventeenth century in Germany.

Poor nutrition and the lower resistance to disease it led to quickly produced disaster when coupled to the disruption of the economy which could follow a bad harvest. When accentuated by warfare, of which there was always a great deal in central Europe, the result could be cataclysmic. Famine and the diseases which followed armies about in their baggage-trains could quickly depopulate a small area. Yet this in part reflected the degree to which economic life was still localized; the converse was that a particular town might be unscathed even in a campaigning zone if it escaped siege or sack, while only a few miles away another was devastated. The situation was always precarious until population growth began to be overtaken by increases in productivity.

In this, as in so many things, different countries have different histories. A renewed expansion of agriculture seems to have got under way in the middle of the fifteenth century. One sign was the resumption of cultivation of land which had reverted to waste in the depopulation of the fourteenth century. Yet this had made little headway in any but a few places before 1550 or so. It remained confined to them for a long time, though by then there had already been important improvements in techniques which raised the productivity of land, mainly by the application of labour, i.e., by intensive cultivation. Where their impact was not felt the medieval past long lingered in the countryside. Even the coming of money was slow in breaking into the near self-sufficiency of some communities. In eastern Europe serfdom actually extended its range when it was dying out elsewhere. Yet by 1800, taking Europe as a whole and a few leading countries in particular, agriculture was one of the two economic sectors where progress was most marked (commerce was the other). Overall, it had proved capable of sustaining a continuing rise of population at first very slowly, but at a quickening rate.

Agriculture was slowly changed by increasing orientation towards markets, and by technical innovation. They were interconnected. A large population in the neighbourhood meant a market and therefore an incentive to sell produce. Even in the fifteenth century the inhabitants of the Low Countries were already leaders in the techniques of intensive cultivation. It was in Flanders, too, that better drainage opened the way to better pasture and to a larger animal population. Another area with relatively large town populations was the Po valley; in north Italy new crops were introduced into Europe from Asia. Rice, for example, an important addition to the European larder, appeared in the Arno and Po valleys in the fifteenth century. On the other hand, not all crops enjoyed instant success. It took about two centuries for the New World’s potato to become a normal item of consumption in England, Germany and France, in spite of its obvious nutritional value and much promotional folklore stressing its qualities as an aphrodisiac and value in the treatment of warts.

From the Low Countries agricultural improvements spread in the sixteenth century to eastern England, where they were slowly elaborated further. In the seventeenth century London became a corn-exporting port, and in the next continental Europeans would come to England to learn how to farm. The eighteenth century also brought better husbandry and animal breeding. Such improvements led to increased yields of crops and a quality of livestock now taken for granted but until then unimaginable. The appearance of the countryside and its occupants was transformed. Agriculture provided the first demonstration of what might be done by even rudimentary science – by experiment, observation, recording and experiment again – to increase human control of the environment more rapidly than could the selection imposed by custom. Improvement favoured the reorganization of land into bigger farms, the reduction of the number of smallholders except on land which specially favoured them, the employment of wage labour, and high capital investment in buildings, drainage and machinery.

The speed of change must not be exaggerated. One index of change in England was the pace of ‘enclosure’, the consolidation for private use of the open fields and common lands of the traditional village. It was only at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth that the Acts of Parliament authorizing this became frequent and numerous. The complete integration of agriculture with the market economy and the treatment of land simply as a commodity like any other would have to wait for the nineteenth century, even in England, the leader of world agriculture until the opening of the transoceanic cornlands. Yet by the eighteenth century the way ahead was beginning to appear.

Greater agricultural productivity in the end eliminated the recurrent dearths which so long retained their power to destroy demographic advance. Perhaps the last moment when European population seems to have pressed on resources, so as to threaten another great calamity like that of the fourteenth century, came at the end of the sixteenth century. In the next bad spell, in the middle decades of the following century, England and the Netherlands escaped the worst. Thereafter, famine and dearth became in Europe local and national events, still capable, it is true, of causing large-scale demographic damage, but gradually succumbing to the increasing availability of imported grain. Bad harvests, it has been said, made France ‘one great hospital’ in 1708–9, but that was in wartime. Later in the century some Mediterranean countries depended for their flour on corn from the Baltic lands. True, it would be a long time before import would be a sure resource; often it could not operate quickly enough, especially where land transport was required. Some parts of France and Germany were to suffer dearth even in the nineteenth century, and in the eighteenth century the French population grew faster than production so that the standard of living of many Frenchmen then actually fell back. For the English rural labourer, though, some of that century was later looked back to as a golden age of plentiful wheaten bread and even meat on the table.

In the late sixteenth century one response to the obscurely felt pressure of an expanding population upon slowly growing resources had been the promotion of emigration. By 1800, Europeans had done much to people lands overseas. In 1751 a North American reckoned that his continent contained a million persons of British origin; modern calculations are that about 250,000 British emigrants went to the New World in the seventeenth century, 1½ million in the next. There were also Germans (about 200,000) there, and some French in Canada. By 1800 it seems reasonable to suppose that something like 2 million Europeans had gone to America north of the Rio Grande. South of it there were about 100,000 Spaniards and Portuguese.

Fear that there was not enough to eat at home helped to initiate these great migrations and reflected the continuing pre-eminence of agriculture in all thinking about economic life. There were important changes in three centuries in the structure and scale of all the main sectors of the European economy, but it was still true in 1800 (as it had been true in 1500) that the agricultural sector predominated even in France and England, the two largest western countries where commerce and manufacture had much progressed. Moreover, nowhere was anything but a tiny part of the population engaged in industry entirely unconnected with agriculture. Brewers, weavers and dyers all depended on it, while many who grew crops or cultivated land also spun, wove or dealt in commodities for the market.

Apart from agriculture, it is only in the commercial sector that we can observe sweeping change. Here there is from the second half of the fifteenth century a visible quickening of tempo. Europe was then regaining something like the commercial vigour first displayed in the thirteenth century and it showed in scale, technique and direction. Again there is a connection with the growth of towns. They both needed and provided a living for specialists. The great fairs and markets of the Middle Ages still continued. So did medieval laws on usury and the restrictive practices of guilds. Yet a whole new commercial world came into existence before 1800.

It was already discernible in the sixteenth century when there began the long expansion of world commerce which was to last, virtually uninterrupted except briefly by war, until 1930, and then to be resumed after another world war. It started by carrying further the shift of economic gravity from southern to north-western Europe, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, which has already been remarked. One contribution to this was made by political troubles and wars such as ruined Italy in the early sixteenth century; others are comprised in tiny, short-lived but crucial pressures like the Portuguese harassment of Jews which led to so many of them going, with their commercial skills, to the Low Countries at about the same time.

The great commercial success story of the sixteenth century was Antwerp’s, though it collapsed after a few decades in political and economic disaster. In the seventeenth century Amsterdam and London surpassed it. In each case an important trade based on a well-populated hinterland provided profits for diversification into manufacturing industry, services and banking. The old banking supremacy of the medieval Italian cities passed first to Flanders and the German bankers of the sixteenth century and then, finally, to Holland and London. The Bank of Amsterdam and even the Bank of England, founded only in 1694, were soon international economic forces. About them clustered other banks and merchant houses undertaking operations of credit and finance. Interest rates came down and the bill of exchange, a medieval invention, underwent an enormous extension of use and became the primary financial instrument of international trade.

This was the beginning of the increasing use of paper money, instead of bullion. In the eighteenth century came the first European paper currencies and the invention of the cheque. Joint stock companies generated another form of negotiable security, their own shares. Quotation of these in London coffee-houses in the seventeenth century was overtaken by the foundation of the London Stock Exchange. By 1800 similar institutions existed in many other countries. New schemes for the mobilization of capital and its deployment proliferated in London, Paris and Amsterdam. Lotteries and tontines (a cross between a group annuity and a lottery) at one time enjoyed a vogue; so did some spectacularly disastrous investment booms, of which the most notorious was the great English South Sea ‘Bubble’. But all the time the world was growing more commercial, more used to the idea of employing money to make money, and was supplying itself with the apparatus of modern capitalism.

One effect quickly appeared in the much greater attention paid to commercial questions in diplomatic negotiation from the later seventeenth century and in the fact that countries were prepared to fight over them. The English and Dutch went to war over trade in 1652. This opened a long era during which they, the French and Spanish fought again and again over quarrels in which questions of trade were important and often paramount.

Governments not only looked after their merchants by going to war to uphold their interests, but also intervened in other ways in the working of the commercial economy. Sometimes they themselves were entrepreneurs and employers; the arsenal at Venice, it has been said, was at one time in the sixteenth century the largest single manufacturing enterprise in the world. They could also offer monopoly privileges to a company under a charter; this made the raising of capital easier by offering better security for a return. In the end people came to think that chartered companies might not be the best way of securing economic advantage and they fell into disfavour (enjoying a last brief revival at the end of the nineteenth century). None the less, such activities closely involved government and so the concerns of businessmen came to shape policy and law.

Occasionally the interplay of commercial development and society seems to throw light on changes with very deep implications indeed. One example came when a seventeenth-century English financier for the first time offered life insurance to the public. There had already begun the practice of selling annuities on individuals’ lives. What was new was the application of actuarial science and the newly available statistics of ‘political arithmetic’ to this business. A reasonable calculation instead of a bet was now possible on a matter hitherto of awe-inspiring uncertainty and irrationality: death. With increasing refinement men would go on to offer (at a price) protection against a widening range of disasters. This would, incidentally, also provide another and very important device for the mobilization of wealth in large amounts for further investment. But the timing of the discovery of life insurance, at the start of what has sometimes been called the ‘Age of Reason’, suggests also that the dimensions of economic change are sometimes very far-reaching indeed. It was one tiny source and expression of a coming secularizing of the universe.

The most impressive structural development in European commerce was the sudden new importance to it of overseas trade from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards. This was part of the shift of economic activity from the Mediterranean to northern Europe already observable before 1500, which first made visible the lineaments of a future world economy. Until about 1580, though, these were still largely drawn by the Iberian peoples. They not only dominated the South Atlantic and Caribbean trades, but after 1564 there were regular sailings of ‘Manila galleons’ from Acapulco to the Philippines; so China was brought into commercial touch with Europeans from further east, even as the Portuguese established themselves from the west. Global commerce was beginning to eclipse the old Mediterranean trade. By the late seventeenth century, while the closed trade of Spain and Portugal with their transatlantic colonies was still important, overseas commerce was dominated by the Dutch and their increasingly successful rivals, the English.

Dutch success had grown out of the supply of salted herrings to European markets and the possession of a particularly suitable bulk-carrying vessel, the ‘flute’ or fly-boat. With this the Dutch first dominated the Baltic trade; from it they advanced to become the carriers of Europe. Though often displaced by the English in the later seventeenth century, they maintained a far-flung network of colonies and trading stations, especially in eastern Asia, where they overpowered the Portuguese. The basis of English supremacy, though, was the Atlantic. Fish were important here, too; the English caught the nutritious cod on the Newfoundland banks, dried it and salted it ashore, and then sold it in Mediterranean countries, where fish was in great demand because of the practice of fasting on Fridays. Bacalao, as it was called, can still be found on the tables of Portugal and southern Spain, once the tourist coast is left behind. Gradually, both the Dutch and English broadened and diversified their carrying trade and became dealers themselves, too. Nor was France out of the race; her overseas trade doubled in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Rising populations and some assurance of adequate transport (water was always cheaper than land carriage) slowly built up an international trade in cereals. Shipbuilding itself promoted the movement of such commodities as pitch, flax and timber, staples first of Baltic trade and later important in the economy of North America. More than European consumption was involved; all this took place in a setting of growing colonial empires. By the eighteenth century we are already in the presence of an oceanic economy and an international trading community which does business – and fights and intrigues for it – around the globe. In this economy an important and growing part was played by slaves.

Most of them were Africans, the first of whom to be brought to Europe were sold at Lisbon in 1444. In Europe itself, slavery had by then all but withered away (although Europeans were still being enslaved and sold into slavery by Arabs and Turks). Now it was to undergo a vast extension in other continents, and acquire its nefarious association with race. Within two or three years over a thousand more Africans had been sold by the Portuguese, who soon set up a permanent slaving station in West Africa. Such figures show the rapid discovery of the profitability of the new traffic but gave little hint of the scale of what was to come. What was already clear was the brutality of the business (the Portuguese quickly noted that the seizure of children usually ensured the docile captivity of the parents) and the complicity of Africans in it; as the search for slaves went further inland, it became simple to rely on local potentates who would round up captives and barter them wholesale.

Why did Africa become the centre for the slave-trading scourge? Concepts of race had a great deal to do with it: some Europeans already regarded Africans as hard-working, docile and lacking in intelligence. These racist views probably had more to do with the concentration of slave-traders on Africa than did the weakness of most African political structures or the co-operation of many African princes or merchants, even though the latter reasons are not without significance. The fact that European powers already had trading ports almost all around the African coast, and the resistance among both native Americans and the priests who attempted to convert them against wholesale enslavement in the Americas, also pointed to Africa as the place from which slaves could be brought. Ironically, European racism therefore created an Atlantic mix of all ethnic groups, with millions of Africans being settled all over the American continents.

For a long time, Europe and the Portuguese and Spanish settlements in the Atlantic islands took almost all the slaves West Africa supplied. Then came a change. From the mid-sixteenth century African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic to Brazil, the Caribbean islands and the North American mainland. The trade thus entered upon a long period of dramatic growth, the demographic, economic and political consequences of which are still with us. African slavery, based on the selling by Africans of other Africans to Portuguese, Englishmen, Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and their subsequent sale to other Europeans in the Americas, is a phenomenon whose repercussions have been much more profound than the enslavement of Europeans by Ottomans or Africans by Arabs. The approximate numbers of those enslaved, too, have seemed easier to establish, if only approximately. Much of the labour which made American colonies possible and viable was supplied by African slaves, though for climatic reasons the slave population was not uniformly spread among them. Always the great majority of slaves worked in agriculture or domestic service: black craftsmen or, later, factory workers were unusual.

The slave trade was commercially very important, too. Huge profits were occasionally made – a fact which partly explains the crammed and pestilential holds of the slave-ships in which were confined the human cargoes. They rarely had a death rate per voyage of less than 10 per cent and sometimes suffered much more appalling mortality. The supposed value of the trade made it a great and contested prize, though the normal return on capital has been much exaggerated. For two centuries it provoked diplomatic wrangling and even war as nation after nation sought to break into it or monopolize it. This testified to the trade’s importance in the eyes of statesmen, whether it was economically justified or not.

It was once widely held that the slave trade’s profits provided the capital for European industrialization, but this no longer seems plausible, at least not as a main cause. Industrialization was a slow process. Before 1800, though examples of industrial concentration could be found in several European countries, the growth of both manufacturing and extractive industry was still in the main a matter of the multiplication of small-scale artisan production and its technical elaboration, rather than of radically new methods and institutions. Two centuries of gunnery had brought mining and metallurgy to a high pitch, while scientific instruments and mechanical clocks testified to a wide diffusion of skill in the making of precision goods. And concepts arrived at in science began slowly to seep into production and form new types of technology.

Such advantages as these shaped the early pattern of the industrial age and slowly began to reverse a traditional relationship with Asia. For centuries oriental craftsmen had astounded Europeans by their skill and the quality of their work. Asian textiles and ceramics had a superiority which lives in our everyday language: china, muslin, calico, kapok are still familiar words. Then, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Europe had started to catch up, notably in mechanical and engineering skills. Asian potentates began to seek Europeans who could teach them how to make effective firearms; they even collected mechanical toys which were the commonplaces of European fairs.

Such a reversal of roles was based on Europe’s accumulation of skills in traditional occupations and their extension into new fields. This happened usually in towns; craftsmen often travelled from one to another, following demand. So much it is easy to see. It is harder to see what it was in the European mind that pressed the European craftsman forward and also stimulated the interest of his social betters so that a craze for mechanical engineering is as important an aspect of the age of the late Renaissance as is the work of its architects and goldsmiths. After all, this did not happen elsewhere.

Early industrial areas grew by accretion, not only around the centres of established European manufactures (such as textiles or brewing) closely related to agriculture but in the countryside. This long continued to be true. Old trades created concentrations of supporting industry. Antwerp had been the great port of entry to Europe for English cloth; as a result, finishing and dyeing establishments appeared there to work up further the commodities flowing through the port. Meanwhile, in the English countryside, wool merchants shaped the early pattern of industrial growth by ‘putting out’ to peasant spinners and weavers the raw materials they needed. The presence of minerals was another locating factor; mining and metallurgy were the most important industrial activities independent of agriculture and were widely dispersed.

But industries could stagnate or even, sometimes, collapse. This seems to have happened to Italy. Its medieval industrial pre-eminence disappeared in the sixteenth century while that of the Flemish Low Countries and western and southern Germany – the old Carolingian heartland – lasted another century or so until it began to be clear that England, the Dutch Netherlands and Sweden were the new manufacturing leaders. In the eighteenth century Russia’s extractive industries would add her to the list of industrial countries. By then, too, other factors were beginning to enter the equation; organized science was being brought to bear on industrial techniques and state policy was shaping industry both consciously and unconsciously.

The long-term picture of overall expansion and growth obviously requires much qualification. The most important caveat is to remember that the great European growth phase – in which it and its American offshoots became qualitatively different from everywhere else – mostly did not start until the nineteenth century. Dramatic fluctuations could easily occur even later, when a bad harvest could lead to runs on banks and a contraction of demand for manufactured goods big enough to be called a slump. The growing development and integration of the economy could cause new forms of distress. Not long after 1500, for example, it began to be noticed that prices were rising with unprecedented speed. Locally this trend was sometimes very sharp indeed, doubling costs in a year. Though nothing like this rate was maintained anywhere for long, the general effect seems to have been a roughly fourfold rise in European prices in a century.

Given twentieth-century inflation, this does not seem very shocking, but it was quite novel and had great and grave repercussions. Some property-owners benefited and some suffered. Some landowners reacted by putting up rents and increasing as much as possible the yields from their feudal dues. Some had to sell up. In this sense, inflation made for social mobility, as it often does. Among the poor, the effects were usually harsh, for the price of agricultural produce shot up and money wages did not keep pace. Real wages therefore fell. This was sometimes made worse by local factors, too. In England, for example, high wool prices tempted landlords to enclose common land and thus remove it from common use in order to put sheep on it. The wretched peasant grazier starved and, thus, as one famous contemporary comment put it, ‘sheep ate men’. Everywhere in the central third of the sixteenth century there were popular revolts and a running disorder which reveal both the incomprehensibility and the severity of what was going on. Everywhere it was the extremes of society which felt the pinch of inflation most sharply; to the poor it brought starvation, while kings were affected because they had to spend more than anyone else.

Much ink has been spent by historians on explaining this century-long price rise. They no longer feel satisfied with the explanation first put forward by contemporary observers, that the essential cause was a new supply of bullion which followed the opening of the New World mines by the Spanish; inflation was well under way before American bullion began to arrive in any significant quantity, even if gold later aggravated things. Probably the fundamental pressure always came from a population whose numbers were increasing when big advances in productivity still lay in the future. The rise in prices continued until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Then it began occasionally even to show signs of falling, until a slower increase was resumed around 1700.

Out of ‘the great divergence’ – the process by which western Europe first caught up with the advanced parts of Asia and then surpassed them – came unique departures in European economy and society that set the continent and its colonial offspring on the path of dominating the world. The starting point for Asia and Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was rather similar if one for instance compares the richest parts of China (say Jiangsu province) to advanced parts of northern Italy, Flanders or England. The small regions of Europe that were getting rich quite rapidly may already have had some advantages: states were weak and could do less damage to economic development. Some cities had a high degree of autonomy and in a few of these concepts of rights and property were being developed. This ‘software’ may have played a role in setting the stage for Europe’s advancement, although the most urbanized parts of Asia had advantages in other areas.

What seems to have mattered most for the great divergence was a particular combination of hardware and software that was unique to parts of Europe, at least from the eighteenth century on. Some regions of Europe – and especially Britain – had easy access to coal, and could use it as a cheap form of high-intensive energy. At the same time, through its weapons technology and its strategic emphasis on high-intensity warfare, Europe took possession of colonies which it could exploit for raw materials and to which it could export some of its excess population. But while all of this was developing, ideas were changing too – most significantly the inquisitive manner that helped transport some science over to new technologies for production. And it was this ability to produce that, from around 1800 on, set Europe apart as a distinctly new form of society.

In our own day we need no reminders that social change can quickly follow economic change. We have little belief in the immutability of social forms and institutions. Three hundred years ago, many men and women believed them to be virtually God-given and the result was that although social changes took place in the aftermath of inflation (and, it must be said, for many other reasons) they were muffled and masked by the persistence of old forms. Superficially and nominally much of European society remained unchanged between 1500 and 1800 or thereabouts. Yet the economic realities underlying it changed a great deal. Appearances were deceptive.

Rural life had already begun to show this in some countries before 1500. As agriculture became more and more a matter of business (though by no means only because of that), traditional rural society had to change. Forms were usually preserved, however, and the results were more and more incongruous. Although feudal lordship still existed in France in the 1780s it was by then less a social reality than an economic device. The ‘seigneur’ might never see his tenants, might not be of noble blood, and might draw nothing from his lordship except sums of money which represented his claims on his tenants’ labour, time and produce. Further east, the feudal relationship remained more of a reality. This in part reflected an alliance of rulers and nobles to take advantage of the new market for grain and timber in the growing populations of western and southern Europe. They tied peasants to the land and exacted heavier and heavier labour services. In Russia serfdom became the very basis of society.

In England, on the other hand, even the commercialized ‘feudalism’ which existed in France had gone long before 1800, and noble status conferred no legal privilege beyond the rights of peers to be summoned to a parliament (their other legal distinction was that like most of the other subjects of King George III, they could not vote in the election of a Member of Parliament). The English nobility was tiny; even after its reinforcement by Scottish peers, the House of Lords at the end of the eighteenth century had fewer than 200 hereditary members, whose legal status could only be transmitted to a single successor. In France there were perhaps a quarter of a million nobles on the eve of the Revolution.

On the other hand, the wealth and social influence of English landowners were immense. Below the peerage stretched the ill-defined class of English gentlemen, linked at the top to the peers’ families and disappearing at the other end into the ranks of prosperous farmers and merchants who were eminently respectable but not ‘gentlefolk’. Its permeability was of enormous value in promoting cohesion and mobility. Gentlemanly status could be approached by enrichment, by professional distinction, or by personal merit. It was essentially a matter of a shared code of behaviour, still reflecting the aristocratic concept of honour but one civilized by the purging away of its exclusiveness, its gothicisms and its legal supports. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the idea of the gentleman became one of the formative cultural influences of English history.

In fact, ruling hierarchies differed from country to country. Contrasts could be drawn right across Europe. There would be nothing tidy about the result. None the less, a broad tendency towards social change which strained old forms is observable in many countries by 1700. In the most advanced countries it brought new ideas about what constituted status and how it should be recognized. Though not complete, there was a shift from personal ties to market relationships as a way of defining people’s rights and expectations, and a shift from a corporate vision of society to an individualist one. This was most notable in the United Provinces, the republic which emerged in the Dutch Netherlands during this era. It was in effect ruled by merchants, particularly those of Amsterdam, the centre of Holland, its richest province. Here the landed nobility had never counted for as much as the mercantile and urban oligarchs.

Nowhere else in Europe had social change gone as far by 1789 as in Great Britain and the United Provinces. Elsewhere questioning of traditional status had barely begun. Figaro, the valet-hero of a notably successful eighteenth-century French comedy, jibed that his aristocratic master had done nothing to deserve his privileges beyond giving himself the trouble to be born. This was recognized at the time as a dangerous and subversive idea, but hardly caused much alarm. Europe was still soaked in the assumptions of aristocracy (and was to be for a long time even after 1800). Degrees of exclusiveness varied, but the distinction between noble and non-noble remained crucial. All that had changed was that not so many people still automatically thought it was a distinction which ought to be reflected in laws.

Just as some men began to feel that to describe society in terms of orders, with legally distinct rights and obligations, no longer expressed its reality, so also a few of them were beginning to feel less sure that religion upheld a particular social hierarchy. It was still for a long time possible to believe that

The rich man in his castle,

the poor man at his gate,

God made them, high and lowly,

and ordered their estate

as an Ulsterwoman put it in the nineteenth century. But this was not quite the same thing as saying that a fixed, unchanging order was the expression of God’s will. Even by 1800 a few people were beginning to think God rather liked the rich man to have made his own way in the world rather than simply inheriting his father’s place. ‘Government is a contrivance of human wisdom for the satisfaction of human wants,’ said an eighteenth-century Irishman, and he was a conservative, too. A broad utilitarianism was coming to be the way more and more people assessed institutions in advanced countries, social institutions among them.

The old formal hierarchies were under most pressure where strain was imposed upon them by economic change – increasing mobility, the growth of towns, the rise of a market economy, the appearance of new commercial opportunities – but also by the spread of literacy and social awareness. Broadly speaking, three situations can be distinguished. In Russia, and almost to the same extent in Poland or East Prussia and Hungary, agrarian society was still so little disturbed by new developments that the traditional social pattern was not only intact but all but unchallenged at the end of the eighteenth century. In these continental countries, safe from the threats to the existing order implicit in the commercial development of maritime Europe, the traditional ruling classes not only retained their position but had often showed that they could actually enlarge their privileges.

In a second group of countries, there was enough of a clash between the economic and social worlds which were coming into being and the existing order to provoke demands for change. When political circumstances permitted its resolution, these would demand satisfaction, though they could be contained for a time. France was a noisy example, but in some of the German states, Flanders and parts of Italy there were signs of the same sort of strain. The third group of countries were those relatively more open societies, such as England, the Netherlands and, across the sea, British North America, where the formal distinctions of society already meant less by comparison with wealth (or even talent), where legal rights were widely diffused, economic opportunity was felt to be widespread, and wage-dependency was very marked. Even in the sixteenth century, English society seems much more fluid than that of continental countries and, indeed, when the North Americans came to give themselves a new constitution in the eighteenth century they forbade the conferring of hereditary titles. In these countries individualism had a scope almost untrammelled by law, whatever the real restraints of custom and opportunity.

It is only too easy in a general account such as this to be over-precise, over-definite. Even the suggested rough tripartite division blurs too much. There were startling contrasts within societies which we might misinterpret if we think of them as homogeneous. In the advanced countries there was still much that we should find strange, even antediluvian. The towns of England, France and Germany were for the most part little Barchesters, wrapped in a comfortable provincialism, lorded over by narrow merchant oligarchies, successful guildsmen or cathedral chapters. Yet Chartres, contentedly rooted in its medieval countryside and medieval ways, its eighteenth-century population still the same size as 500 years earlier, was part of the same country as Nantes and Bordeaux, thriving, bustling ports which were only two of several making up the dynamic sector of the French economy. A mature and clearly defined individualist and capitalist society, wholly conscious of itself as such did not exist in any European country. What marked the countries in which the capitalist transformation had got furthest was the increased speed of their change away from the situation in the great majority of the rest of the world.

Sometimes this won them admiration from would-be reformers. One great questioner of the status quo, Voltaire, was greatly struck by the fact that even in the early eighteenth century a great merchant could be as esteemed and respected in England as was a nobleman. He may have exaggerated slightly, and he certainly blurred some important nuances, yet it is remarkable – and a part of the story of the rise of Great Britain to world power – that the political class which governed eighteenth-century England was a landed class (and fiercely reflected landed values), yet constantly took care to defend the commercial interests of the country and accepted the leadership and guidance in this of the collective wisdom of the City of London. Though people went on talking of a political division between the ‘moneyed’ and the ‘landed’ interest, and though politics long remained a matter of disputed places and conflicting traditions within the landed class, interests which in other countries would have contested with these nevertheless prospered and were not alienated. The explanations must be complex. Some, like the commercialization of British agriculture, go far back into the history of the previous century; some, such as the growth of facilities for private investment in the government and commercial world, were much more recent.

The coincidence of the advanced social evolution of the Netherlands and Great Britain with their economic, and especially their commercial, success is striking. This was once largely attributed to their religion: as a result of a great upheaval within Christendom both had ceased to be dominated by the Catholic Church. Anti-clericals in the eighteenth century and sociologists in modern times sought to explore and exploit this coincidence; Protestantism, it was said, provided an ethic for capitalism. This no longer seems plausible. There were too many Catholic capitalists, for one thing, and they were often successful. France and Spain were still important trading countries in the eighteenth century, and the former seems to have enjoyed something like the same rates of growth as Great Britain, though she was later to fall behind. England and the Netherlands were both countries with Atlantic access, and so were among those which had tended to show economic growth ever since the sixteenth century. Yet this is not an explanation which goes very far, either. Scotland – northern, Protestant and Atlantic – long remained backward, poor and feudal. There was more to the differences separating Mediterranean and eastern Europe from the north and west than simple geographical position, and more than one factor to the explanation of differing rates of modernization. The progress of English and Dutch agriculture, for example, may owe more to the relative scarcity of land in each country than to anything else.

The social and economic structure of the European east remained fundamentally outside the western processes of change until the nineteenth century. Deep-rooted explanations have been offered – that, for example, a shorter growing season and less rich soils than were to be found further west gave it from the start a poorer return on seed, and therefore handicapped it economically in the crucial early stages of agricultural growth. It had man-made handicaps, too. Settlement there had long been open to disturbance by Central Asian nomads, while on its southern flank lay the Balkans and the frontier with Turkey, for many centuries a zone of warfare, raiding and banditry. In some areas (Hungary, for example) the effects of Turkish rule had been bad and had led to depopulation.

In the Russia which emerged from Muscovy in this period, the serf population grew larger as a proportion of the whole. Harsher laws put state power behind the masters’ control of the peasants. In other eastern countries (Prussia was one), the powers of landlords over tenants were strengthened. This was more than just a kingly indulgence of aristocracies which might, if not placated, turn against royal authority. It was also a device for economic development. Not for the first time, nor the last, economic progress went with social injustice; serfdom was a way of making available one of the resources needed if land was to be made productive, just as forced labour was in many other countries at many other times.

One result, which is still in some degree visible, was a Europe divided roughly along the Elbe. To the west lay countries evolving slowly by 1800 towards more open social forms. To the east lay authoritarian governments presiding over agrarian societies where a minority of landholders enjoyed great powers over a largely tied peasantry. In this area towns did not often prosper as they had done for centuries in parts of western Europe. They tended to be overtaxed islands in a rural sea, unable to attract from the countryside the labour they needed because of the dead hand of serfdom. Over great tracts of Poland and Russia even a money economy barely existed. This uneven development created a division-line through Europe, which would be reproduced again and again in later European history.

These divides were discernible in informal institutions, too; in the rights and opportunities of women, for example, the improvement of which is always the surest sign of the progress of civilization. Here another division line could be drawn, that between Mediterranean Europe and the north, which was in due course extended to run between Latin and North America. Formally and legally, little changed anywhere in these centuries; the legal status of women remained what it had been and this was only to be questioned right at the end of this period. Nevertheless, the real independence of women and, in particular, of upper-class women does seem to have been extended in the northern countries. Even in the fifteenth century it had been remarked by foreigners that Englishwomen enjoyed unusual freedom. This lead does not seem to have diminished, but in the eighteenth century there are signs that in France, at least, a well-born woman could enjoy considerable real independence.

This was in part because the eighteenth century brought the appearance of a new sort of upper-class life, one which had room for other social gatherings than those of a royal court, and one increasingly independent of religious and family ritual. At the end of the seventeenth century we hear of men in London meeting in the coffee-houses from which the first clubs were to spring. Soon there appears the salon, the social gathering of friends and acquaintances in a lady’s drawing-room, which was especially the creation of the French; some eighteenth-century salons were important intellectual centres and show that it had become proper and even fashionable for a woman to show an interest in things of the mind other than religion. When Mme de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, had her portrait painted, she chose to have included in the picture a book – Montesquieu’s sociological treatise, Défense de l’esprit des lois. But even when women did not aspire to blue stockings, the salon and the appearance of a society independent of the court presented them with a real, if limited, escape from the confinement of the family, which, together with religious and professional gatherings, had until then been virtually the only structures within which even men might seek social variety and diversion.

By the end of the eighteenth century we have arrived at the age of the female artist and novelist and of acceptance of the fact that spinsterhood need not mean retirement to a cloister. Where such changes came from is not easy to see. In the early years of the century the English Spectator already thought it worthwhile to address itself to women readers as well as to men, which suggests that we should look a fair way back. Perhaps it helped that the eighteenth century produced such conspicuous examples of women of great political influence – an English queen and four empresses (one Austrian and three Russian) all ruled in their own right, often with success. But it is not possible to say so with confidence, for the prehistory of female emancipation is still an under-developed field of research.

Finally, none of this development touched the lives of the overwhelming majority of the people, even in those societies of early modern Europe that had moved the furthest towards capitalism. There had not yet come into being the mass industrial jobs which would provide the first great force to prise apart the unquestioned certainties of traditional life for most men and women alike. Though they may have weighed most heavily in the most agricultural areas of Europe or where religion had its greatest hold on matters such as the subordination and seclusion of women, those certainties were everywhere still dominant in 1800.