Chapter II - Economic change

Summary

Until a few decades ago, historians of economic change in the sixteenth century concentrated predominantly on the towns, the centres of manufacture and nodal points for both regional and interregional trade. It was held that European expansion overseas, the opening of new markets and new sources of raw materials, above all the acquisition of the precious metals of South America, justified calling the age that of early capitalism. The fact that most people lived on the land and were engaged in exploiting it appeared immaterial in this context, inasmuch as the land and its use appeared still to be limited by ‘feudal’ conditions and thus could not be a part of the progressive developments which were to lead to the Industrial Revolution. However, a scheme that separated town from countryside demonstrated its inadequacy in explaining the emergence of the modern industrial societies of Europe when the attempt was made to transmit the results of a process lasting four centuries to the countries of the Third World. There those one-sided notions concerning industrialisation regularly led to failure. Thus we have come to realise how fundamental the transformation had to be which would enable an agrarian society to undertake industrial growth. A rural economy engaged in producing food, raw materials and in addition beasts as the only mobile source of energy, an economy which of necessity involved a large part of the population, needed to be transformed into an economically defined separate sector to be called agriculture – a sector capable of guaranteeing the provisioning of society in a planned and predictable fashion, but employing only a small part of the population.