When World War II broke out, the economic history of Modern Europe was largely an underdeveloped and uncultivated field. One country only, Britain, had a well-established school of economic historians, which was already quite prolific. In Germany, there had been a promising start at the end of the 19th century, mostly with the historical school of economists, but it had largely petered out, even before the deadly influence of Nazism set in. In other countries, a number of scholars had done valuable and even brilliant work, but they were few and isolated, and political, diplomatic, religious history remained supreme. This was the case, for example, in France, which had one single chair of economic history in its eighteen universities, despite the passionate campaign which had been waged during the 1930's to promote work in economic and social history by the new journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, under the leadership of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Moreover, pre-war economic history was mostly institutional, with a side-line in the study of techniques and innovations. As Professor Herlihy points out in another article for works on the earlier centuries, scholars were “thinking primarily in terms of institutions and of total economic systems based upon them.”

What are the new interests, the new methods, and the new conceptions of European economic development which over the past thirty years have formed or reformed our discipline? In partial answer to this difficult question, we shall first consider the economic history of what we may call traditional Europe, and which we shall extend, very roughly, from the early Middle Ages until the seventeenth century.

At a time when so many people under thirty regard most people over thirty as hopeless dotards, an almost sexegenarian cannot feel too comfortable as the caster of horoscopes for future medieval research. Surely David Herlihy would have been a more suitable prophet, had he not been assigned the traditionally historiographic role of inspecting the past; so would Harry Miskimin, were he not otherwise employed. Here I am, nevertheless, with no choice but trying to race ahead as fast as I can; fifteen minutes, one and a half per century of the middle ages, are quickly gone.

It is graceless, perhaps, to begin by quarrelling with the program committee in my initial remarks, but I must plead that the assignment itself—to propose an agenda for early modern economic history—provides a mandate for such seemingly uncouth behavior. The controversial issue, of course, is the periodization of economic history into the traditional Middle Ages (pre-1500) and the Early Modern Period (post-1500). The division has never been sharp in political or intellectual history, but it is even less meaningful in economic history—there is no single, dramatic, economic event, no ninety-five theses, to establish a break—and the intellectual consequences of the division at 1500 have often been pernicious. When specialists of the early modern period assert nascent capitalism, medievalists point to thirteenth century Italy. When early modernists lay their claims to discovery and colonization, medievalists point first to the early eastern Mediterranean colonies of the Italian city-states and then to the Atlantic explorations of Spain and Portugal, begun in the fourteenth century. If rapid early modern economic growth is the issue, the medievalist will again cry foul and recall that growth was, at least in part, merely the inevitable recovery from the economic collapse of the later middle ages.

Economists and historians have raked over the economic experience of Europe like a family ransacking the town dump for a diamond ring inadvertently dropped into the trash. Now and then they run hurriedly over the whole field. Most of the time they are digging deep in one corner or rushing anxiously from one spot to another, picking up the objects they find there, examining them closely and then discarding them. The results are a junk collector's delight. But they do not necessarily include any diamonds.