Tag: maize

Price Revolutions and Their Historical Impact

In 1996, leading economic historian, David Hackett Fischer, published The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. If you ponder the subtitle, you may grasp the work’s ambition.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has been arguing with Fischer for many years that, in making the transition from business to historical cycles, Fischer’s position is problematic.

There are, of course, detailed histories of prices, such as Thomas Tooke’s A History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation during the Years 1793–1856 (6 volumes, 1838–1857).

In the first four volumes he treats (a) of the prices of corn, and the circumstances affecting prices; (b) the prices of produce other than corn; and (c) the state of the circulation. The two final volumes, written with William Newmarch, deal with railways, free trade, banking in Europe and the effects of new discoveries of gold.

Wikipedia (links added)

Tooke-type price histories are one thing, but what about Fischer’s price revolutions? Max Weber (who predates Fischer by almost a century) seems to endorse this concept. In Weber’s General Economic History (German: Wirtschaftsgeschichte), he writes:

The great price revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries provided a powerful lever for the specifically capitalistic tendencies of seeking profit through cheapening production and lowering the price. This revolution is rightly ascribed to the continuous inflow of precious metals, in consequence of the great overseas discoveries. It lasted from the thirties of the 16th century down to the time of the Thirty Years’ War, but affected different branches of economic life in quite different ways. In the case of agricultural products an almost universal rise in price set in, making it possible for them to go over to production for the market. It was quite otherwise with the course of prices for industrial products. By and large these remained stable or rose in price relatively little, thus really falling, in comparison with the agricultural products. This relative decline was made possible only through a shift in technology and economics, and exerted a pressure in the direction of increasing profit by repeated cheapening of production. Thus the development did not follow the order that capitalism set in first and the decline in prices followed, but the reverse; first the prices fell relatively and then came capitalism.

Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books (3rd printing), 1966, pages 230-231.

Notice the last sentence above, Weber explicitly describes price revolutions exactly as Fischer argues.

In the history books we read, the emphasis is always on colorful personalities, inventions and other more theatrical events. This obviously omits the idea of phenomena like price revolutions. We cannot explain history merely by these personalities; we need to zoom out and view the larger picture.

Are There Deep Rhythms in History?

Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard wrote a very intriguing book in recent years with the title, This Time Is Different with the implication that fundamental discontinuities (i.e., this time is different) are questionable, if one looks deeply enough.  In the introduction of the book, the author raises the questions of “deep rhythms in history” without answering his own question.  Here’s a potential organizing principle: the world is always a system of violence directed at the weak. Take this entry from the Larousse Dictionary of World History:

Arawaks

The original inhabitants of the Bahamas (Lucayos) and the Greater Antilles (Taínos) who practiced a subsistence agriculture based on seafood, game, maize and cassava using Neolithic technology.  They live mainly in coastal settlements of large villages with caneyes (family houses) and bohios (chiefs’ houses) and had a hierarchical politico-religious structure based on a hereditary ruler, the cacique, who possessed a ceremonial stool (dulho).  A priestly caste-controlled worship of gods of place and nature (zemis) and ceremonies which led to heaven (coyaba). 

They were exterminated as a people by the Spaniards after 1519.

The words maize, tobacco, potato, hammock, canoe and hurricane all derive from the Arawak language.

If we think of the Rohingas of Myanmar, the Yazidis, the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Darfur people in Sudan, of recent decades, we see a deep rhythm in history: the destruction of the unprotected.  Notice that the first Jewish ghetto in Europe (Venice) was established in 1516 around the time that the Arawak murders begin on a systematic basis.

This never-really-discussed basic rhythm of group violence has been glorified (e.g., The Iliad of Homer, the Aeneid of Virgil, the Old Testament, Scandinavian sagas, Japanese “war tales” such as the Heike Monogatari, etc.)

The omission in all education of this world-violence theme gives students a false sense of “how the world got to now.”