The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Dark Ages in English Economic History?

Abstract

Traditionally, an inaugural lecture should be used by the new occupant of a University Chair to expatiate upon the nature, methods and significance of the subject which he professes. But those are matters which my predecessors at the London School of Economics have so illuminated, both by precept and by example, that I am forced to choose a more modest theme. My purpose is merely to offer some comments upon the present state of the study of modern economic history in this country and, in particular, to draw attention to a tendency which has recently developed for modern economic history to be split, somewhere in the eighteenth centuly, not merely into two periods but almost into two separate subjects. Despite the convention that modern economic history begins with the sixteenth century, it has, of course, long been realised that some sort of dividing line was to be found somewhere or other in the eighteenth. But, until recently, historians working on either side of that line tended to plough similar furrows. Not only did they ask similar questions; to a surprising and even suspicious extent they arrived at similar answers. On either side of the line one could find the small land-owner always disappearing and the middle classes always rising; capitalism always growing; trade always expanding; the standards of living of the working classes always falling. And but two decades ago, almost perfect equiibrium was obtained; for it was discovered that the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had produced an industrial revolution to balance the more notorious revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth. So great was the emphasis on the continuity of English economic life and on the basic similarities between the various centuries that at times one was led to doubt whether anything happened in the eighteenth century at all. In recent years, as I see it, the trend has been in the opposite direction. The emphasis on continuity has been seriously weakened. But it has been weakened, less by changes in historical interpretation, than by changes in historical method. A generation ago, the main requirement of an economic historian was that he should be able to read, since most of his sources were literary. The archetype of the learned monograph consisted of a thin rivulet of text meandering through