The 16th century was a period of vigorous economic expansion. This expansion in turn played a major role in the many other transformations—social, political, and cultural—of the early modern age.
By 1500 the population in most areas of Europe was increasing after two centuries of decline or stagnation. The bonds of commerce within Europe tightened, and the “wheels of commerce” (in the phrase of the 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel) spun ever faster. The great geographic discoveries then in process were integrating Europe into a world economic system. New commodities, many of them imported from recently discovered lands, enriched material life. Not only trade but also the production of goods increased as a result of new ways of organizing production. Merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers accumulated and manipulated capital in unprecedented volume. Most historians locate in the 16th century the beginning, or at least the maturing, of Western capitalism. Capital assumed a major role not only in economic organization but also in political life and international relations. Culturally, new values—many of them associated with the Renaissance and Reformation—diffused through Europe and changed the ways in which people acted and the perspectives by which they viewed themselves and the world.
This world of early capitalism, however, can hardly be regarded as stable or uniformly prosperous. Financial crashes were common; the Spanish crown, the heaviest borrower in Europe, suffered repeated bankruptcies (in 1557, 1575–77, 1596, 1607, 1627, and 1647). The poor and destitute in society became, if not more numerous, at least more visible. Even as capitalism advanced in the West, the once-free peasants of central and eastern Europe slipped into serfdom. The apparent prosperity of the 16th century gave way in the middle and late periods of the 17th century to a “general crisis” in many European regions. Politically, the new centralized states insisted on new levels of cultural conformity on the part of their subjects. Several states expelled Jews, and almost all of them refused to tolerate religious dissenters. Culturally, in spite of the revival of ancient learning and the reform of the churches, a hysterical fear of witches grasped large segments of the population, including the learned. Understandably, historians have had difficulty defining the exact place of this complex century in the course of European development. The century’s economic expansion owed much to powerful changes that were already under way by 1500. At that time, Europe comprised only between one-third and one-half the population it had possessed about 1300. The infamous Black Death of 1347–50 principally accounts for the huge losses, but plagues were recurrent, famines frequent, wars incessant, and social tensions high as the Middle Ages ended. The late medieval disasters radically transformed the structures of European society—the ways by which it produced food and goods, distributed income, organized its society and state, and looked at the world.
The huge human losses altered the old balances among the classical “factors of production”—labour, land, and capital. The fall in population forced up wages in the towns and depressed rents in the countryside, as the fewer workers remaining could command a higher “scarcity value.” In contrast, the costs of land and capital fell; both grew relatively more abundant and cheaper as human numbers shrank. Expensive labour and cheap land and capital encouraged “factor substitution,” the replacement of the costly factor (labour) by the cheaper ones (land and capital). This substitution of land and capital for labour can be seen, for example, in the widespread conversions of arable land to pastures; a few shepherds, supplied with capital (sheep) and extensive pastures, could generate a higher return than plowland, intensively farmed by many well-paid labourers.
Capital could also support the technology required to develop new tools, enabling labourers to work more productively. The late Middle Ages was accordingly a period of significant technological advances linked with high capital investment in labour-saving devices. The development of printing by movable metal type substituted an expensive machine, the press, for many human copyists. Gunpowder and firearms gave smaller armies greater fighting power. Changes in shipbuilding and in the development of navigational aids allowed bigger ships to sail with smaller crews over longer distances. By 1500 Europe achieved what it had never possessed before: a technological edge over all other civilizations. Europe was thus equipped for worldwide expansion.
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