Name: Sajal

Course: BA (history honours)

Year: 2nd year, 4th semester

Roll no: 210450

Subject: Rise of Modern West-2

Assignment 1

Question: examine the various theories accounting for the 17th century crisis to you think England
escaped this crisis?

Answer:

Introduction:
The 17th century is a period of the reversal of some of the 16 th century trends in Europe. It
was a period that witnessed an overall contraction of the European economy, the
commercial and industrial sectors began to lose their drive because of the lack of support of
agriculture. Many parts of Europe experienced uprising, major conflicts, wars and
breakdown of political structures. Demographically also many parts of Europe showed
declined or stagnation. There are many different interpretations to the characteristics of 17 th
century Europe. Debate amongst the historians are regarding the nature of the crisis. Several
scholars describe the 17th century as a period of crisis. A debate has been going on among
historians on the nature and the scale of the problems that Europe experienced. Though the
debate is still alive, a majority of the scholars believe that the 17 th century was a period of
crisis. from contemporary records period was viewed as one of turbulence with term like,
“times of troubles” and “days of universal shaking.” Voltaire, writing in the 1740’s
propounded the existence of crisis. he linked the decline in Europe to the demise of other
power like the Mughals, ottomans and the mings. Geoffrey parker says that Voltaire was the
first one to give a world dimension to the idea of the crisis. Among modern historians it was
Paul hazard who first talked of the crisis in his work, “crisis of the European mind” he saw
the 1598 and 1715 as a ‘century of crisis’. he talked of a crisis in demography, polity, climate
and ecology. The term ‘crisis’ was used for the first time by English Marxist historians Eric J
Hobsbawm in his pair of 1954 articles titled “the crisis of the seventeenth century”
published in past and present, and it cemented by his contemporary, Hugh Trevor-Roper, in
his 1959 article titled "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century" published in the same
journal. Hobsbawm discussed the crisis emphasising that it was an economic crisis. While
Trevor-Roper saw a wider crisis, "a crisis in the relations between society and the State." He
argued that in the middle years of the 17th century, Western Europe saw a widespread
break-down in politics, economics and society caused by a complex series of demographic,
religious, economic and political problems. Trevor-roper believed that it was a “general
crisis” and the various events such as the English Civil War, the Fronde in France, the climax
of the Thirty Years War in Holy Roman Empire and revolts against the Spanish Crown in
Portugal, Naples and Catalonia were all manifestations of the same problem. The most
important cause of the crisis in Trevor-Roper’s opinion, was the conflict between “Court”
and “Country”; i.e., between the increasingly powerful, centralizing, bureaucratic, sovereign
princely states represented by the court, and the traditional, regional, land-based aristocracy
and gentry representing the country. In addition, the intellectual and religious changes
introduced by the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation were important secondary
causes of the "general crisis".

ERIC J HOBSBAWM

In 1954, E.J. Hobsbawm published his essay "The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century" in the
English Journal Past & Present. As a Marxist historian and scholar of English history,
Hobsbawm saw the events of 17th century Europe culminating in an economic crisis. For
Hobsbawn this economic crisis was the final break from the feudal economic system which
allowed the transition to the capitalistic economy of the Industrial Revolution. For him,
capitalism had in some areas had taken hold at different times up to the 16th century. By
the 18th century it had been established in the rising bourgeois society, so according to him
the transition must have taken place in the interim of the 17th century.

Capitalism during the 17th century is generally described as a parasite operating within the
constraints of a feudal apparatus. Hobsbawm held that if capitalism was to rise, feudal or
agrarian society must be revolutionized. In his paper ‘The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’,
he outlined the criteria necessary for capitalism to become dominant. He wrote that, first,
there must be enough accumulated capital to fund capitalistic expansion. Second there
must be increase in the division of labour so that production can increase to capitalist levels.
A large quantity of wage earners who exchange their monies for goods and service at
market is also required. And last, the colonial system had to be revolutionized.

He divides his essay into two portions: in the first part he provides his reasons for believing
that there an economic crisis and in the second part he explains the changes that he
believes took place. In Hobsbawm’s articles, the crisis stands in for the revolutionary
situation that allows the contradictions of the prevailing mode of production (feudalism, in
this case) to be overcome and then be superseded by a new mode of production
(capitalism). The narrative is purely Marxist. Hobsbawm asked, “why did the expansion of
the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries not lead straight into the epoch of the eighteenth
and nineteenth century Industrial Revolution? What, in other words, were the obstacles in
the way of capitalist expansion?” He believed this was because the capitalist elements of
sixteenth-century Europe expanded “within a [feudal] social framework which it was not yet
strong enough to burst, and in ways adapted to it rather than to the world of modern
capitalism.”

Hobsbawm says one of the only positive results of this crisis was the rise of absolutism, since
for him it solved three main problems in Europe.

1) Government became enforced over large areas

2) It could gather enough capital for lump-sum payments

 3) It could now run its own armies.

But even absolutism was a result of the economic crisis. As causes of this crisis, Hobsbawm
cites four areas: the specialization of `feudal capitalists' in the case of Italy, the
contradictions of expansion in Eastern Europe, the contradictions of expansion in overseas
and colonial markets, and the contradictions of home markets. To Hobsbawm, Italy was a
prime example of how the capital up to this point was poorly invested. The poor economic
choices of the wealthy (investment in the arts and architecture instead of improved means
of production) created the economic decline of Italy. The lack of innovation meant the slow
growth of capitalism, or as Hobsbawm states it, "economic expansion took place within a
social framework which it was not yet strong enough to burst". These obstacles combined
with the sharp deflation following the Thirty Years' War created a European-wide economic
crisis.

HUGH TREVOR-ROPER

The first major response to Hobsbawm's economic crisis theory appeared in Past & Present
in 1959. Hugh Trevor-Roper was another English historian but not a Marxist like Hobsbawm.
Like Hobsbawn, Trevor-Roper also accepted the idea of general crisis but perceived it
differently. In his article “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century”, Trevor-Roper
called into question Hobsbawm's interpretation and found a general lack of solid evidence
for the `economic crisis'. Rather he saw it as a general political crisis, i.e., a crisis in the
relationship between state and society. This theory, conceived by Trevor-Roper, takes as its
point of departure the contemporaneous revolutions in the middle of the century, the
economic crisis being regarded as an established fact. According to Trevor- Roper the crisis
was the result of a conflict between a puritanically minded opposition (the ‘country’) and a
parasitic bureaucracy created by the Renaissance state during the boom of the sixteenth
century, which became difficult to endure during the period of decline and the lengthy wars
in the seventeenth century. Trevor-Roper critises Hobsbawn and asserts that Hobsbawm
was looking for a capitalistic, violent revolution that fit Marxist historical thought, as
opposed to viewing the data objectively and then drawing conclusions.

Trevor-Roper narrows the period of crisis from the century-long frame of Hobsbawm's
article to the years between 1640-1660. In this period Trevor-Roper sees a plethora of
revolutions that are indicative of his `spreading disease' metaphor of the crisis (Theodore
Rabb will later use this same metaphor). These revolutions result from the widening cracks
in society. The cause of these disparate revolutions is a "crisis in the relations between
society and State." At the heart of his thesis is the idea that the 16th century saw the
growth of princely courts at the expense of city autonomy. With this growing court was a
burgeoning bureaucracy tied to the court which grew they became top-heavy and extended
into jurisdictions previously held by local lords and townspeople. This infringement of
traditional arrangements and increased squeezing of the peasantry was tolerated so long as
Europe prospered. However, with the general economic slump of the 1620's this top-heavy
bureaucracy met with a state unable to deal with its demands. A fissure between Court and
country led to European-wide revolutions.
The dualism between a parasitic bureaucracy and an indignant, puritanically minded country
opposition does not explain the revolts in the middle of the seventeenth century, which
formed the starting-point of Trevor-Roper’s discussion. The revolts were by no means
directed against a stagnating parasitism, but against a dynamic absolutism which, with its
taxation policy, violated the customary laws and threatened to disrupt the social balance or
deprive parts of the population of their livelihood.

In Alexandra Lublinskaya’s book, French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase, Lublinskaya

challenges many of the premises of Hobsbawms argument. Hobsbawn claims that in the
17th century, wealth became more concentrated than in previous times. In fact, he uses this
argument as a distinguishing factor between the 17th century and the crisis of the 14th
century which had many similarities but did not lead to a capitalist society and an industrial
revolution. He goes on to make the claim that the level of accumulated wealth prior to the
17th century is insufficient to jump start capitalism. He argues that while there may have
been enough concentrated wealth to fund the building of factories and machines, it was still
insufficient for the development of other instruments of industry primarily that of
infrastructure. Lublinskaya argues that while levels of accumulated capital were probably
less than optimal, there were avenues one could pursue to overcome this barrier. There
were many commercial and industrial companies to finance and invest in businesses
requiring large sums of capital. Thus, apparatuses for acquiring large sums of capital to
enable capitalistic enterprise did exist prior to the 17th century. However even if it is a given
that there was an inadequate concentration of capital in prior to the 17th century to
establish capitalism, Hobsbawm still fails to demonstrate how the crisis affected to use of
capital. Hobsbawm argues that there was no division of labor under feudal society to enable
mass production leading to capitalistic profits. However, Lublinskaya shows that there was a
concentration of disperse manufactures in Germany, Spain and especially France who had
already established large scale manufacturing using division of labor since the early 16th
century. So it can hardly be said that this necessary criteria for capitalism was missing in, or
originated by the 17th century.

R MOUSNIER

For Mousnier, the participation of the nobility in the peasant revolts of the Fronde argues
against Trevor-Roper. Trevor-Roper does not distinguish between the powerful, high level
bureaucrats (people like the Cecils or Olivares) and the lower, moderate officials. To
Mousnier, the struggle is less one between Court and Country, and more a struggle between
the last vestiges of feudalism and emerging, modern government. The Fronde is not the
critical moment in early modern France but instead the French Wars of Religion of the late
sixteenth century. Mousnier does admit that Trevor-Roper is on the right track, but says that
the revolutions of this period need to be exhaustively re-examined. For him too, it was less
an economic crisis but one involving changes in the social framework.

JH ELLIOT

Elliott disagrees with Trevor-Roper over the issue of Court vs. Country also, claiming that
Spain spent considerably more on war and navies than on Court and offices. In the case of
the Catalonian revolt of the 1640's, he finds no parasitic bureaucracy, since that province
did not even pay for her own defense. That burden lay on the taxpayers of Castille. Elliot
reasons instead that the revolts of the 1640's (Catalonia, Portugal, and Naples) were caused
by the Count Duke Olivares' attempts at extending taxation to areas outside Castille, and
this policy threatened their identity as separate kingdoms from Castille. In essence, Elliott
says it is "the imperious demands of war" that brought about revolt.

JAN DE VRIES

In The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750, Jan de Vries made crisis the
organizing concept for a long stretch of European economic history, and he defined it in
terms that Hobsbawm could easily have endorsed. Although industrialization came only
later, the “age of crisis” was necessary to change the rules of European economic life.
Increasing the supply of Europe’s productive resources “could not be accomplished without
altering the very structure of the society, for they were hidden in an economy of
households, villages, and economically autonomous market towns and small administrative
cities. Primarily labor, but also foodstuffs, raw materials, and capital had to be liberated
from this bound, localized economy to be marshaled for use in the larger-scale regional and
international economies.” The seventeenth century’s harsh conditions—its wars, soaring
taxation, bankruptcies, and famines—did the job. The eighteenth century could advance in
fundamentally new directions, with market-driven labor and large agrarian enterprises,
sufficiently capitalized to supply the needs of a growing non-agricultural population. The
survey of the most important economic sectors indicates that the seventeenth-century crisis
was not a universal retrogression, but that it hit the various sectors at different times and to
a different extent.

NIELS STEENSGARD

Niels Steensgaard, published his essay in 1970. By this time the debate over a `general crises
had been active for over 15 years. Steensgaard accepts that the idea of a crisis has become
synonymous with the early modern period. In reviewing the literature, he says the term had
been used in four distinct ways:

1) a general economic crisis,

2) a general political crisis (Trevor-Roper),

3) a crisis in the development of capitalism (Hobsbawm),

4) a crisis in all aspects of human life (Mousnier)

He goes on to add that a possible fifth category could be created to include opponents of
the theory like Schöffer. In his approach to establishing the existence of crisis, Steensgaard
divides his essay into three parts. He examines the validity of economic crisis, political crisis,
and the issue of absolutism. For him, the economic crisis was not universal, but instead
affected different regions of Europe at different times. He takes the idea a step further by
claiming that if protection as a service (meaning the cost of creating, supplying, and
maintaining state armies) is considered, then there is definitely no economic crisis in the
period. He suggests that the crisis was one of distribution (money, goods, services) and not
one of production. Both from an economic and from a political point of view, the tracks
pointed in the same direction; those symptoms of crisis that may be demonstrated led to an
already well-known phenomenon: the growing power of the state, frequently characterized
by the introduction of absolutism. The crisis was not a production crisis but a distribution
crisis; the revolts were not social revolutionary, but reactionary against the demands of the
state. In every case it was the governments that acted in a revolutionary manner: the tax
demands disrupted the social balance. They did not create a revolutionary situation: they
were in themselves a revolution. The six contemporaneous revolutions can only be seen as
one if we rechristen them ‘the six contemporaneous reactions.

On the question of political crisis, Steensgaard disagrees with Trevor-Roper's "Court vs.
country" thesis, asserting that in battles over state finances revolutions were reactions
against growing governmental demands for higher revenues. As he puts it: "in every case it
was the governments that acted in a revolutionary manner: the tax demands disrupted the
social balance." In the final section, Steensgaard also disagrees with the Russian scholar
Porshnev's idea that absolutism was a conscious effort to subjugate and exploit the masses
by the nobility, and that the key issue is not the existence of absolutism itself but the nature
of any exploitation that may or may not have occurred.

Perhaps the most useful aspect of Steensgaard's critique of the general crisis theory is his
assertion, in concurrence with J. H. Elliott, that the 17th century, and specifically the mid-
century revolutions, have increasingly become viewed through the distorting lense of the
19th century. Steensgaard calls into question the very nature of these mid-century
`revolutions' and asks whether they are in fact comparable to later ideological movements.
Ultimately, with the rise of absolutism in this period, Steensgaard feels that we should
rethink the effects it had on shaping the society of Europe.

GEOFFREY PARKER

Europe in Crisis: 1598-1648

Geoffrey Parker assimilated much of the previous scholarship with new studies in areas such
as climate to expand on a crisis theory. In introducing the works of Steensgaard, Schöffer,
and others in his The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, edited with Lesley Smith,
Parker discussed how certain periods of history contain widespread examples of crisis. He
asserts that these crises must be linked by specific global causes, and in the case of the
general crisis of the 17th century Parker cites recent climatic studies that reveal cooling
trends worldwide corresponding to agricultural crisis. Poor harvest led to rising bread prices
for a growing worldwide population. The instability this caused created or exacerbated
political unrest that was matched by rising religious tension. Parker emphasizes the
worldwide nature of the crisis, and like Rabb, calls for continued scholarship in other areas
of the world. Parker does this not to raise doubts about the existence of the crisis but to
further understand it. For him, the crisis is a certainty. He argues that no convincing account
of the General Crisis can now ignore the impact of the unique climatic conditions that
prevailed. Indeed, the wealth of data in both the human and natural “archives” encouraged
Le Roy Ladurie to write the Comparative Human History of Climate that he had abandoned
in 1967 for lack of evidence. The first volume, which appeared in 2005, proclaimed that
Reduced solar energy received on earth—whether due to fewer sunspots, more volcanic
activity, or both—not only lowers the global temperature; it also changes the climate. In
normal summers, a column of rising heat over Central Asia attracts the monsoon system,
which means that easterly winds blowing from equatorial America bring heavy rains to East
and Southeast Asia. By contrast, reduced solar energy means that the snow lingers in
Central Asia, reflecting the sun’s heat instead of absorbing and radiating it as dark land
surfaces do; without the column of rising heat, westerly winds blowing from equatorial Asia
to America take the monsoon rains eastward, a phenomenon called El Nin˜o. This shift
dramatically affects the world’s climate: whereas in normal years heavy rains nurture the
harvests of South and East Asia, in El Nin˜o years they bring floods to Central and South
America instead and create drought in Asia and Australasia.

1) First, mean temperatures decline far more in the Northern Hemisphere (home to
most of the humankind and the site of most mid-seventeenth-century revolts, wars,
and mortality) than at the equator, in part because increased snow cover and sea ice
reflect more of the sun’s rays back into space. Thus, any significant extension of the
polar ice caps and glaciers (both of which occurred in the mid-seventeenth century)
further reduces temperatures in northerly latitudes.

2) Second, any fall in overall temperature triggers extreme climatic events. To pluck
three notable mid-seventeenth-century examples: In the winter of 1620–1621, the
Bosporus froze over so hard that people could cross on foot between Europe and
Asia.

Thus Parker asks that how can historians link the harsh winters, cool summers, droughts,
and floods of the 1640s—to say nothing of the sunspot minimum, the volcanic maximum,
and the more frequent El Nin˜os—with individual cases of state breakdown such as the
revolts of Scotland, Ireland, and England against Charles I, or the collapse of Ming rule in
China? And he believes that we must not paint bull’s-eyes around bullet holes and argue
that since climatic aberrations seem to be the only factor capable of causing simultaneous
upheavals around the globe, therefore those aberrations “must” have caused the
upheavals. .

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN

For Wallerstein, who set out to write a history of the Europe centered capitalist world
economy, the answer was a firm “no.” He opened the second volume of his study, which
focused on the seventeenth century, with an introductory section on the crisis concept:
“The term crisis ought not to be debased into a mere synonym for cyclical shift.” From his
perspective, the genesis of the system under which we continue to live is found in the long
sixteenth century. From that point onward, despite periods of expansion (Phase A) and
contraction (Phase B), the emphasis should be placed on continuity: competition among
countries, the geographical expansion of this world economy, booms and depressions—all
of them contributing to the development of a capitalist system already firmly in existence.
The major problem with the idea of a "general crisis" is that it is impossible to identify a
period in which all or most of the European economy was simultaneously gripped by a
depression. In Spain, for example, economic and population decline was at its worst from
1590-1630 a period in which, however, the Dutch "economic miracle" reached its height.
Likewise, when Spain embarked on a fragile economic recovery after 1670, the Low
Countries, southern France and much of Eastern Europe tumbled into deep and protracted
economic recessions. This diversity makes it impossible to reduce to a simple formula a
series of regional economic crises which, while exhibiting certain similarities, varied widely
in their timing and intensity.

CONCLUSION

Numerous empirical and theoretical aspects of the seventeenth-century crisis therefore

remain subject to debate. Moreover, neither Hobsbawm's Marxist teleological stage theory
of economic development nor Trevor-Roper's court/country distinction, command much
assent today. But the concept widely continues to stimulate new research and new
explanations of existing data. As a result, the outlines of a new interpretation are beginning
to appear. It emphasizes continuities- for example, the acceleration of previously initiated
regional differentiation, agrarian specialization, commercialization, and ruralization of
industry. And while contributing to the role it played in changing the path of history or as
some scholars suggests being a ‘catalyst’ in bringing the pre-industrial era it thereby
contributes to a more discriminating understanding of both the significance of the
seventeenth century and the nature of crisis in the early modern world.

CITATION:
 Aston, Trevor, ed. Crisis in Europe 1560–1660. New York, 1965.

 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth,
Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. Richard Tuck (1651; repr., Cambridge, 1996).

 Stephan J. Lee, Aspects of European History, 1494-1789, London, 1984.

 Parker, Geoffrey, and Lesley M. Smith, eds. The General Crisis of the Seventeenth
Century. London, 1978.