Very interesting. Is this partly a story of a commercial revolution before an Industrial Revolution. Rather than clever English learning how to shift away from a land economy, how much did they learn from Antwerp and elsewhere? Land owners were pushed to find new ways to get income be a use rents were deflated. Who provided the ideas and where did they come from?
I don’t think it’s a matter of commercial revolution. I’ve not noticed any major shift in English commercial attitudes. Its merchants seem to have been just as commercially-minded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and landlords responded to inflation much like they had in the mid-fourteenth century, and would revert back to the tactics of the fifteenth-century stagnationary period when the inflation ended in the late 17thC. So to my mind people’s profit-maximising strategies don’t see any innovation really, but are just activated by the changing economic environment.
Excellent podcast. It's always a joy to learn from Anton.
Very interesting. Is this partly a story of a commercial revolution before an Industrial Revolution. Rather than clever English learning how to shift away from a land economy, how much did they learn from Antwerp and elsewhere? Land owners were pushed to find new ways to get income be a use rents were deflated. Who provided the ideas and where did they come from?
I don’t think it’s a matter of commercial revolution. I’ve not noticed any major shift in English commercial attitudes. Its merchants seem to have been just as commercially-minded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and landlords responded to inflation much like they had in the mid-fourteenth century, and would revert back to the tactics of the fifteenth-century stagnationary period when the inflation ended in the late 17thC. So to my mind people’s profit-maximising strategies don’t see any innovation really, but are just activated by the changing economic environment.