The Economic Crisis of the Seventeenth Century after Fifty Years

2009/08/03 by Jan de Vries · 2 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Ancient history #Asian Studies and History #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #Economic Thought #Economic transformation #Economics #Economy #Epistemology #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Historiography #History #Law #Periodization #Philosophy #Political economy #Political science #Skepticism #Tying

paper · doi:10.1162/jinh.2009.40.2.151

openalex publication_date 2009/08/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/29

Abstract

Since its introduction more than fifty years ago, the concept of a general seventeenth-century crisis has met with skepticism from most historians of Europe. Yet this historiographical latecomer persists as a seemingly necessary feature of early modern periodization. The economic contraction of the era is broadly accepted, but the crisis concept makes a larger claim—that the economic reversals led, ultimately, to a regrouping, a transformation of basic patterns and possibilities of European economic life. The challenge has always been to find a common thread—a credible theory—capable of tying together the disparate events of the time. The theoretical apparatus of fifty years ago may no longer serve, but more recent research offers possibilities for a rehabilitation of the concept of economic crisis.

Citations

• Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England
• The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War
• The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth
• The Economic Depression of the Renaissance
• THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE THIRTY YEARS’WAR1
• Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Reconsidered

Cited by

• It was ideas and ideologies, not interests or institutions, which changed in Northwestern Europe, 1600–1848
• History of Europe [wikipedia]

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