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An Economic History of Europe from Feudalism to Mercantilism
An Economic History of Europe from Feudalism to Mercantilism
Origins of Feudalism• Feudalism emerged as a result of the
decentralization of an empire dependent on cavalry to keep order.
• Mounted soldiers began to secure a system of hereditary rule over their allocated land and their power over the territory came to encompass the social, political, judicial, and economic spheres.
• Only when the infrastructure existed to maintain unitary power—as with the European monarchies—did Feudalism begin to yield to this new power structure and eventually disappear.
Feudalism
• Feudalism was a combination of legal and militarycustoms in medieval Europe that flourishedbetween the 9th and 15th centuries.
• Feudalism was a way of structuring society aroundrelationships derived from the holding of land inexchange for service or labor.
• Feudalism describes a set of reciprocal legal andmilitary obligations among the warrior nobility,revolving around the three key concepts of lords,vassals and fiefs. Marc Bloch argued thatFeudalism includes not only the obligations of thewarrior nobility but those of all three estates of therealm: the nobility, the clergy, and the peasantrybound by manorialism.
Lords, Vassals and Fiefs• Lords - an appellation for people who have authority, control, or power
over others acting like a master, a chief, or a ruler.
• Vassals - is a person who has entered into a mutual obligation to a lord or monarch. The obligations often included military support and mutual protection, in exchange for certain privileges, usually including the grant of land.
• Fiefs - consisted of heritable property or rights granted by an overlord to a vassal who held it in fealty (or "in fee") in return for a form of feudal allegiance and service, usually given by the personal ceremonies of homage and fealty. The fees were often lands or revenue-producing real property held in feudal land tenure: these are typically known as fiefs or fiefdoms.
Bayeux Tapestry
• Scene 23: Harold swearing oath on holy relics to William, Duke of Normandy. Titulus: UBI HAROLD SACRAMENTUM FECIT WILLELMO DUCI (Where Harold made an oath to Duke William)
Vassalage• Before a lord could grant land (a
fief) to someone, he had to make that person a vassal.
• This was done at a commendation ceremony, which was composed of the two-part act of homage and oath of fealty.
• During homage, the lord and vassal entered into a contract in which the vassal promised to fight for the lord, while the lord agreed to protect the vassal from external forces.
End of Feudalism
• Feudalism itself decayed and effectively disappeared in most of Western Europe by about 1500. It lingered on in parts of Central and Eastern Europe as late as the 1850s. Russia finally abolished serfdom in 1861.
• At an early stage of the French Revolution, on 4 August 1789, France abolished the long-lasting remnants of the feudal order.
Monasteries and Economic Development
• Monasteries spread throughout Europe and became important centers for the collection of knowledge related to agriculture and forestry and more generally intellectual progression and education.
• Monasteries welcomed aspiring priests to come study and learn, allowing them even to challenge doctrine in dialogue with superiors.
• Since monasteries offered respite for weary pilgrim travelers, monks were obligated also to care for their injuries or emotional needs. Over time, lay people started to make pilgrimages to monasteries instead of just using them as a stop over. By this time, they had sizeable libraries that attracted learned tourists.
• By 900 AD in Europe, developments in iron smelting allowed for increased production, leading to developments in the production of farm tools such as ploughs, hand tools and horse shoes.
• Watermills were initially developed by the Romans, but were improved throughout the Middle Ages, along with windmills, and were provided the power needed to grind grains into flour, cut wood and process flax and wool, and irrigate fields.
• Field crops included wheat, rye, barley and oats; they were used for bread and animal fodder. Peas, beans, and vetches became common from the 13th century onward as food and as a fodder crop for animals; it also had nitrogen-fixation fertilizing properties. Crop yields peaked in the 13th century, and stayed more or less steady until the 18th century.
Agricultural Development
Famines and plagues
• Famines were usually localized and did not affect awide area. Soil exhaustion, overpopulation, wars,diseases and climate change caused hundreds offamines in medieval Europe. Around 1300, centuriesof European prosperity and growth came to a halt.Famines such as Great Famine of 1315–1317 slowlyweakened the populace.
• A plague like the Black Death killed its victims in onelocality in a matter of days or even hours, reducing thepopulation of some areas by half as many survivorsfled.
• Depopulation caused labor to become scarcer; thesurvivors were better paid and peasants could dropsome of the burdens of feudalism. There was alsosocial unrest; France and England experienced seriouspeasant risings.
Technology• A major technological advance
came in long-distance navigation,from the 8th Century to the 12thCentury.
• Viking raids and the Crusaderinvasions of the Middle East led tothe diffusion of and refinement oftechnology instrumental tooverseas travel.
• People made improvements inships, particularly the long ship.
• The astrolabe, for navigation,greatly aided long-distance travelover the seas.
• The improvements in travel in turnincreased trade and the diffusion ofconsumer items.
Crafts and urban growth• From the 11th Century to the 13th
Century, farmers and small-scaleproducers of crafts increasinglymet in towns to trade their goods.
• Craft associations called guildsfostered the development of skillsand the local growth of trade inparticular goods.
• Over the course of the centuries ofthis period towns grew in size andnumber, first in England,Flanders, France, Germany andnorthern Italy.
Guilds• an association of artisans or merchants who
control the practice of their craft in a particular town
• they shaped labor, production and trade
• they controlled progression of apprentice to craftsman, journeyman, master and grandmaster
• a result of the guild framework was the emergence of universities at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford around the year 1200; they originated as guilds of students or of masters
Merchant Capitalism• The core of this system was in merchant
houses, backed by financiers acting as intermediaries between simple commodity producers.
• Economic activity over a broad geographic range began to intensify in both northern and southern Europe in the 13th Century.
• Trade flourished in particularly by the 13th Century. Leading the trade in Mediterranean Europe were traders from the port cities of Genoa and Venice. The wealth generated in Italy fueled the Italian Renaissance.
Italian Renaissance• The Italian Renaissance was the earliest manifestation of the
general European Renaissance, a period of great cultural changeand achievement that began in Italy during the 14th century andlasted until the 16th century, marking the transition betweenMedieval and Early Modern Europe.
• The era is best known for the renewed interest in the culture ofclassical antiquity after the period that Renaissance humanistslabeled the Dark Ages
• The Italian Renaissance is best known for its culturalachievements• Literature – Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto• Social Science - Castiglione (The Book of the Courtier) laid out his vision of
the ideal gentleman and lady, while Machiavelli cast a jaundiced eye on theactual truth of things in The Prince
• Painting - Giotto di Bondone, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca,Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli,Leonardo da Vinci, and Titian
• Architecture, as practiced by Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, AndreaPalladio, and Bramante
• The Aldine Press, founded by the printer Aldo Manuzio, active in Venice,developed Italic type and the small, relatively portable and inexpensiveprinted book that could be carried in one's pocket
Hanseatic League• In cities linked to the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, a trade
monopoly developed in the Hanseatic League. This facilitated the growth of trade among cities in close proximity to these two seas. Long-distance trade in the Baltic intensified, as the major trading towns came together in the Hanseatic League, under the leadership of Lübeck.
• The League was a business alliance of trading cities and their guilds that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe and flourished from the 1200 to 1500, and continued with lesser importance after that. The chief cities were Cologne on the Rhine River, Hamburg and Bremen on the North Sea, and Lübeck on the Baltic.
• The Hanseatic cities each had its own legal system and a degree of political autonomy. The Hanseatic League was founded for the purpose of joining forces for promoting mercantile interests, defensive strength and political influence.
Mercantilism
• Mercantilism was an economic theory andpractice, dominant in Europe from the 16th tothe 18th century, that promoted governmentalregulation of a nation's economy for thepurpose of augmenting state power at theexpense of rival national powers.
• Mercantilism includes a national economicpolicy aimed at accumulating monetaryreserves (bullion) through a positive balance oftrade, especially of finished goods.
Mercantilist Policies• High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods;
• forbidding colonies to trade with other nations;
• monopolizing markets with staple ports;
• banning the export of gold and silver, even for payments;
• forbidding trade to be carried in foreign ships;
• subsidies on exports;
• promoting manufacturing through research or direct subsidies;
• limiting wages;
• maximizing the use of domestic resources; and
• restricting domestic consumption through non-tariff barriers to trade.
Mercantilism Critics
• Adam Smith and David Hume were the founding fathers of anti-mercantilist thought
• Hume famously noted the impossibility of the mercantilists' goal of a constant positive balance of trade.
• Adam Smith noted that at the core of the mercantile system was the "popular folly of confusing wealth with money”. He also rejected the mercantilist focus on production, arguing that consumption was paramount to production.
Mercantilism and empire• The basis of the British Empire was founded in the age of
mercantilism, an economic theory that stressedmaximizing the trade inside the empire, and trying toweaken rival empires. The British Empire first took shapein the early 17th century, with the English settlement of theThirteen, Canada's Maritime provinces, and the sugarplantation islands of the Caribbean.
• Mercantilism was the basic policy imposed by Britain on itscolonies. Mercantilism meant that the government and themerchants became partners with the goal of increasingpolitical power and private wealth, to the exclusion of otherempires.
• The government protected its merchants—and kept othersout—by trade barriers, regulations, and subsidies todomestic industries in order to maximize exports from andminimize imports to the realm. The government took itsshare through duties and taxes, with the remainder goingto merchants in Britain.
East India Company• an English and later British joint-stock
company, formed to pursue trade with the EastIndies, but which ended up trading mainlywith the Indian subcontinent and Qing China
• EIC received a Royal Charter from QueenElizabeth on 31 December 1600, wealthymerchants and aristocrats owned theCompany's shares
• EIC eventually came to rule large areas of Indiawith its own private armies, exercising militarypower and assuming administrative functions(1757 - 1858)
British Burma• British rule in Burma lasted from 1824 to 1948, from the
Anglo-Burmese wars through the creation of Burma as a Province of British India to the establishment of an independently administered colony, and finally independence on 4 January 1948
• With the arrival of the British, the Burmese economy became tied to global market forces and was forced to become a part of the colonial export economy
• The rich soil of the land around the Irrawaddy delta was exploited for the production of rice, which became Burma’s principal export
• With its quickly growing economy came industrialization with a railway built throughout the valley of the Irrawaddy, and hundreds of steamboats travelling along it
Industrial Revolution: 1750s-1840s• In Britain, the Industrial Revolution was a period of
economic transformation from the 1750s to the 1830s, characterized by the growth of a new system comprising factories, railroads, coal mining and business enterprises using new technologies that it sponsored.
• The new system operated first on textiles, then spread to other sectors and by the mid 19th century totally transformed the British economy and society, setting up sustained growth; it spread to parts of America and Europe and modernized the world economy.
• Success in building larger, more efficient steam engines after 1790 meant that the cost of energy fell steadily. Entrepreneurs found uses for stationary engines in turning the machines in a factory and a mill or the pumps at a mine, while mobile engines were put into locomotives and ships.
Important Technological DevelopmentsThe commencement of the Industrial Revolution isclosely linked to a small number of innovations:
• Textiles – Mechanized cotton spinning powered bysteam or water greatly increased the output of a worker.The power loom increased the output of a worker by afactor of over 40. The cotton gin increased productivityof removing seed from cotton by a factor of 50.
• Steam power – The efficiency of steam engines increasedso that they used between one-fifth and one-tenth asmuch fuel.
• Iron making – The substitution of coke for charcoalgreatly lowered the fuel cost for pig iron and wroughtiron production. Using coke also allowed larger blastfurnaces, resulting in economies of scale. The rollingmill was fifteen times faster than hammering wroughtiron. Hot blast greatly increased fuel efficiency in ironproduction.
The Development of Machine Tools
• The Industrial Revolution created a demand for metal parts used in machinery.
• This led to the development of several machine tools for cutting metal parts.
• The first large machine tool was the cylinder boring machine used for boring the large-diameter cylinders on early steam engines. The planning machine, the milling machine and the shaping machine were developed soon thereafter.
The Rise of the Factory System• By the time of the Industrial Revolution, the
putting-out system was common whereby farmersand townspeople produced goods in their homes,often described as cottage industry. Merchantcapitalist provided the raw materials, typically paidworkers by the piece, and were responsible for thesale of the goods.
• Some early spinning and weaving machinery wasaffordable for cottagers. Later machinery such asspinning frames, spinning mules and power loomswere expensive, giving rise to capitalist ownershipof factories.
• Many workers, who had nothing but their labor tosell, became factory workers out of necessity.
Other Developments• Chemicals – impact on glass, textile, soap, paper, iron and steel
industries
• Cement - Portland cement used in tunnels and sewers
• Gas lighting - first gas lighting utilities were established in London between 1812 and 1820
• Glass making - the cylinder process used to make sheet glass
• Paper machine - a machine for making a continuous sheet of paper on a loop of wire fabric was patented in 1798
• Agriculture – seed drill, iron plough, threshing machine, cotton gin
• Mining – steam engine made deep mining possible
• Transportation – roads, canals, railroads, steamships
Positive Impact of the Industrial Revolution• Standards of living - Robert E. Lucas, Jr., "for the first time in
history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth ....“
• Food and nutrition - Before the Industrial Revolution, advances in agriculture or technology soon led to an increase in population, which again strained food and other resources, limiting increases in per capita income. This condition is called the Malthusian trap, and it was finally overcome by industrialization.
• The Industrial Revolution created a middle class of professionals.
• Consumers benefited from falling prices for clothing and household articles
• Population increased fourfold
• Urbanization
• Philanthropy
Negative Impact of the Industrial Revolution
• Cities – no planning, working people lived in slums, no sanitation system, no potable water
• Public Health and Life Expectancy – cholera, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid; declining life expectancy
• Child labor
• Lack of recreation
• Concentration of wealth
Results of the Industrial Revolution
