Introduction

The subject of this book is the economic life of the five generations of Europeans who lived in the last great epoch before the onset of industrialization. This epoch, variously labeled as traditional or classic Europe, or the ancien régime, stands between two periods of notable economic expansion. It begins as the long sixteenth-century expansion – which includes the organization of a world-wide network of trade links – sputters fitfully to its end. Around the mid-eighteenth century it is dissolved by a quickening of demographic and economic life that inaugurates a long secular expansion. Fundamentally shaped by the Industrial Revolution, this new expansion altered the most enduring structural characteristics of economic life to usher in the Brave New World that we inhabit today.

The economic history of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has long attracted attention for what light it could shed on the periods that preceded and followed it: here one could perhaps find the causes of the exhaustion of the vast empires and early capitalism of the sixteenth century as well as the preconditions of modern industrialization. While this period forms an identifiable unit in economic history, it does not readily offer unifying themes for the historian. Perhaps for this reason many historians have focused their attention on the structure – the immutable features – of economic and social life in this period.