The seventeenth century in Europe was bloody and violent. Some examples: a continental war that went on for thirty years (1618-1648), three British civil wars (1639-1651), naval wars between England and the Netherlands (1652-1674), and military efforts to rein in France’s Louis XIV and the Spanish Hapsburgs.
At the same time, however, economic changes were quietly occurring, laying a foundation for the Industrial Revolution. That’s the little-known subject of this post.
“What happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a wholesale shift of industry, including rather sophisticated sectors, from city to countryside,” writes Jan de Vries in his informative book Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750.[1]
This shift from cities to rural areas is not the typical “Industrial Revolution” story, which says that peasants were forced off the farm and into the cities, making them available for burgeoning industrial factories. To some extent that did happen later, but manufacturing in England and other parts of western Europe started in rural areas, not cities. Here’s how, according to de Vries.
The protocol for most history articles is to begin with a critique of previous historians’ writing or to note that they have missed something important. Most historians do this politely. Sometimes though, exchanges can be heated, even a bit nasty. It isn’t all dull behind the covers of the Economic History Review.
I’ve seen two such debates in my limited experience—an animated conversation with just barely contained hostility. In both cases, the conflicts were between a “social” and an “economic” historian and between a man and a woman. Here’s a summary of one. [1]
In 2004, economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie criticized a new approach to the history of pre-modern guilds—“rehabilitation” literature that painted guilds as contributing to economic efficiency rather than being merely self-interested monopolists (as economists had been saying for years). She called these “stimulating perspectives,” but they needed to be“tested against alternative theories,” which she then proceeded to do with an empirical study of a weavers’ guild in southwestern Germany. Nothing was untoward in her remarks.
A few years later, S. R. Epstein replied. First, he said that Ogilvie used merely a “single—arguably even singular” example. Her goal was to “demolish a view now held by a majority of scholars with relevant expertise in early modern economic history.” “[H]er article not only misrepresents essential elements of modern international scholarship” but also “fails to address significant elements of her [own] selected study.” All that in one paragraph.
