Wars and the Rise of Industrial Civilization, 1640–1740

In: Canadian journal of economics and political science: the journal of the Canadian Political Science Association = Revue canadienne d'économique et de science politique, Band 10, Heft 1, S. 36-78

Abstract

Economic historians are faced with the task of reconsidering modern European history as a whole. No age is more in need of reinterpretation than the hundred years or so which began in England with the outbreak of the Civil War and in France with the accession of the infant Louis xiv. Tawney, his associates, and pupils have revealed the main features of English agrarian, industrial, commercial, and financial development in early modern times. With the copious data provided in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Clapham, his associates, and pupils have built recent English economic history into a solid edifice on massive and precise statistical foundations. But Continental and British economic history have still to be brought into appropriate relationship to each other. And even in modern English economic history, an unfilled gap of more than a century remains. The materials that have been thrown into it are inadequate from about 1640 down to 1740, the year in which the war of the Austrian Succession broke out. The task of arranging such materials as are available into a durable pattern has not been seriously faced. So our knowledge of the place of these hundred years in the rise of industrialism both in Great Britain and on the Continent is vague.