Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700

Publshed a number of years ago and written by a distinguished economic historian, this is a useful overview of preindustrial Europe. Cipolla divides the book into 2 parts. The first part is a broad synchronic description of the pre-industrial economy including demography, economy per se, trade, some social history, and technology. This is very much the picture of a predominantly rural society based largely on subsistence agriculture and laboring under Malthusian constraints. Cipolla stresses also that additonal burdens of epidemic disease, war, and weather often imposed stresses beyond the usual Malthusian limits. He is also quite clear on Medieval Europe as a relatively poor backwater compared with China or the Islamic Middle East at its apogee. In the second part of the book, Cipolla points out some of the more dynamic features of pre-industrial Europe. These include the, by modern standards slow, but real improvements in technology, expansion of international trade, increasing urbanization and commerialization of European society, and its engagement in a major way with the great economic Eurasian centers of China, India, and the Middle East. Cipolla describes also how the major commercial loci of Europe changed over time, migrating from northern Italy to the Low Countries, and then to Britain. Cipolla touches on many of the important themes of European economic development in the early modern period preceding the Industrial Revolution. These include the importance of state competition and mercantilism-imperialism, the crucial role of silver from the Americas in facilitating trade with East Asia, the crucial role of European naval technology, the importance of education, and even the importance of the 17th century Scientific Revolution. While this is not a detailed history, Cipolla makes a number of shrewd comments on the fates of individual nations. He discusses, for example, the role of the Franco-Spanish wars in the decline of Northern Italy, why Spain failed to become a major economic power, and the relative de-industrialization of Southern Europe that followed the burgeoning of the Dutch and British economies. Generally quite readable.