European Industries 1500-1700 [antikvár]

European Industries, 1500-1700The two centuries roughly comprised between Columbus's first voyage of discovery and the creation of the Bank of England form a distinct period in the economic history of Europe, and the economic historian, conscious though he may be of the risks involved in periodisation, feels comparatively few qualms in carving those two centuries out of the flow of human events and in presenting them as a distinct segment of our past. For the two hundred years that witnessed the discovery and opening up of a new continent, the emergence of new economic powers on the shores of the North Sea, the penetration of the market economy into eastern Europe and Scandinavia, the harnessing of resources and manpower to the unprecedented needs of the absolute monarchy, clearly have a claim to a separate place in the annals of mankind.Once such a place has been granted, however, there still is the danger of making too much of change and novelty while losing sight of all that represented mere continuity with the preceding age. The danger is especially real in the case of industry: it is tempting, for instance, to assemble such information as we possess on the growth of English coal mining, Dutch shipbuilding, or Swedish iron output, and then portray the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not only as an age of considerable industrial expansion, but as one indeed during which mining and manufacturing moved to the forefront of Europe's economic life and replaced agriculture as the leading sector of its economy. This would be grossly misleading: for all the changes and the progress experienced in those two centuries, Europe's industrial sector as it stood in 1700 bore far greater resemblance to its medieval antecedent than to its nineteenth-century successor.Around 1700 industrial technology, in spite of some sig-[5]