THE NERVE CENTERS OF THE REVOLUTION

An economic revolution is not as sharply defined as a political one. Both the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations are of 1776; but while no one will question that the American Revolution broke out in 1776 and attained its goal by 1783, it would be impossible to single out an initial and a terminal date for the Industrial Revolution and preposterous to expect that it could achieve radical change in less than ten years. The same can be said for the Commercial Revolution, a concept that has not yet won as general acceptance as that of the Industrial Revolution, mainly because a large number of economic historians have little training in pre-modern history and little inclination to look for radical change where the lack of reliable statistical material limits the opportunities for quantitative study.

Quantity, however, is only one dimension of history and does not provide clear-cut subdivisions within a millennium of sustained growth. With the exception of approximately two centuries (from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth, but the interval was not exactly the same in every part of Europe), the economy of Europe has been expanding ever since the tenth century. Naturally the figures of our day dwarf those of the Industrial Revolution; these in turn are much larger than those of the Commercial Revolution. The chain reaction of mutually strengthening factors, however, does not substantially differ from one subperiod to another.