THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION

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THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION

From 1400 to 1700 is a period commonly called the Renaissance. Historically speaking, this word Renaissance is used to indicate the general change from the civilization which we call medieval to that in which we live, and which we think of as modern. A great many aspects of civilization were altering; ideas and customs which had existed for centuries were dying out and were being replaced by new. Feudalism, for example, was giving way to the strong central government of kings; the Christian church of the West, for centuries united in obedience to the bishop of Rome, began to split up into independent sections; new methods of warfare appeared, in which gunpowder and standing armies were important; new kinds of architecture succeeded Gothic types of building; new forms of painting, sculpture, music and literary expression became common. Knowledge was expanding; people were learning more about many things, from their own bodies to the stars, about anatomy, disease, the earth, the atmos

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phere, the movements of the heavenly bodies. What we call the spirit of the Renaissance was active; its aspects were eagerness to learn, curiosity, criticism, and enthusiasm for adventure and invention.

It is the economic changes of this period 1400 to 1700 which are described by the term Commercial Revolution. Changes are always going on, of course, in commerce as well as in social and political affairs; revolutions are perhaps as frequent in one as in another. But between 1400 and 1700 changes in methods of conducting business, in trading centers, in shipping, in the financial aspects of commerce and in the theories underlying practice were so numerous, so pronounced and so rapid that the total effect seems to have been revolutionary. Undoubtedly the changes which were transpiring in government, religion and culture helped to accelerate and make more thoroughgoing those in commerce. Commerce, like most other phases of civilization, passed, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, from medieval to modern form and manner.

To grasp the character and extent of this Revolution certain aspects of medieval commerce must be noted. From about 400 A. D. to nearly 1000 A. D. there was, in Western Europe, very little trade on what we should estimate as a large scale. Travel and the movement of people from one locality to another were difficult and dangerous. People "stayed put" in the Middle Ages; until the time of the crusades there was very little journeying about. The profound ignorance of geography, of places beyond one's immediate locality, helped to create a fear of strange regions and

strangers which amounted to superstition. Real dangers, such as robber barons, pirates, bad roads or no roads at all-broken bridges-or no bridges at all-provided very effective obstacles to trade. Still more significant, however, was the fact that, under feudalism, Europe was divided into thousands of political units. Few of these units, or fiefs, were large enough in area or in population to need much trade or to provide sufficient demands for marketing on any considerable scale. Even if reasonable law and order existed in some fiefs, there might be little peace and security in neighboring lands. Feudal warfare was common, and was not favorable to the welfare of commerce. Each feudal lord, moreover, collected tolls on traffic and these tolls so increased the cost of goods which had been transported any distance that most people could not afford to buy. Heavy and bulky articles were not often transported; grain, for example, might be plentiful in one region, but so scarce in even an adjacent locality that people were starving. Yet grain could not be transported from the land of plenty to the land of dearth because costs would eat up the profit, or raise the price so high that the starving people could not pay it. Items of small size and comparatively light weight, such as spices and silks or cottons, were the chief articles of trade; they were expensive and

rare.

Medieval civilization, therefore, got along with the bare necessities of life. Each community, manor or town, was pretty nearly self-sufficient; within these small centers of population was produced most of what was needed-clothes and food, weapons and tools.

Few surplus products were made because there was little opportunity to sell them outside of the immediate locality.

Commerce was also hindered, in the Middle Ages, by the absence of any standard coinage. Whether it was the lack of hard money (cash or sound currency) which prevented trade, or whether it was the small amount of trade which caused the inadequate coinage, it is not necessary, at this point, to inquire. Many of the greater feudal lords minted their own coins; so did some of the towns. But there was no powerful state to make its coins "good" over a fairly large area, to prevent counterfeiting and debasing and to insure that the face value of a coin would be maintained. The local coins issued by the lords or the towns were often good only in a limited neighborhood-like the tokens issued by European cities after the Great War. They were often clipped, sweated and debased by the addition of lead or other alloy. No one trusted their face value, and all money was customarily bitten, or rung on the counter, or weighed when payments were being made. This situation indicates, as concretely as anything could, the condition of commerce. Credit was hardly known; the taking of interest on loans was prohibited by the Church and the use of bills of exchange came about only very late (perhaps toward the end of the crusades). Thus it may be seen that, as a technical expression has it, there was no money economy in the Middle Ages, and the facilities for transacting business on any scale beyond the purely local were almost entirely lacking.

With the coming of the crusades about 1100, a new