Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Turchin is professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and adjunct professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut. Sergey A. Nefedov is senior research scientist at the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ural Branch.

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"Secular Cycles is an ambitious, audacious, and engaging achievement from two very talented scholars. This stimulating book will attract interdisciplinary attention from those interested in global history and secular economic change."--Cormac Ó Gráda, author of Famine

"I am impressed and delighted by the breadth, rigor, creativity, originality, and power of this book. The graphs present the data in a fashion that will be clear to any audience, and the text is straightforward and persuasive. This book carries the study of historical dynamics to a whole new level."--Jack A. Goldstone, George Mason University

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"Secular Cycles is an ambitious, audacious, and engaging achievement from two very talented scholars. This stimulating book will attract interdisciplinary attention from those interested in global history and secular economic change."--Cormac Ó Gráda, author of Famine

"I am impressed and delighted by the breadth, rigor, creativity, originality, and power of this book. The graphs present the data in a fashion that will be clear to any audience, and the text is straightforward and persuasive. This book carries the study of historical dynamics to a whole new level."--Jack A. Goldstone, George Mason University

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SECULAR CYCLES

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Table of Units and Currencies.................................................................ixChapter 1 Introduction: The Theoretical Background...........................................1Chapter 2 Medieval England: The Plantagenet Cycle (1150–1485)..........................35Chapter 3 Early Modern England: The Tudor-Stuart Cycle (1485–1730).....................81Chapter 4 Medieval France: The Capetian Cycle (1150–1450)..............................111Chapter 5 Early Modern France: The Valois Cycle (1450–1660)............................143Chapter 6 Rome: The Republican Cycle (350–30 BCE)......................................176Chapter 7 Rome: The Principate Cycle (30 BCE–285 CE)...................................211Chapter 8 Russia: The Muscovy Cycle (1460–1620)........................................240Chapter 9 Russia: The Romanov Cycle (1620–1922)........................................261Chapter 10 General Conclusions...............................................................303Acknowledgments...............................................................................315References Cited..............................................................................317Index.........................................................................................341

Chapter One

1.1 Development of Ideas about Demographic Cycles

The modern science of population dynamics begins with the publication in 1798 of An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus pointed out that when population increases beyond the means of subsistence, food prices increase, real wages decline, and per capita consumption, especially among the poorer strata, drops. Economic distress, often accompanied by famine, plague, and war, leads to lower reproduction and higher mortality rates, resulting in a slower population growth (or even decline) that, in turn, allows the subsistence means to "catch up." The restraints on reproduction are loosened and population growth resumes, leading eventually to another subsistence crisis. Thus, the conflict between the population's natural tendency to increase and the limitations imposed by the availability of food results in the tendency of population numbers to oscillate. Malthus's theory was extended and further developed by David Ricardo in his theories of diminishing returns and rent (Ricardo 1817).

According to the Malthusian argument, the oscillation in population numbers should be accompanied by systematic changes in certain economic variables, most notably food prices. Fortunately, data on prices are reasonably abundant in historical sources, and it is possible to construct time series documenting price fluctuations over very long periods of time. Compilations of price trends appeared as early as the sixteenth century. For example, Ruggiero Romano (1967) reports that a time series of grain prices between 1500 and 1593 appeared in an appendix of La Patria del Friuli Restaurata by Jacopo Stainero, published in 1595 in Venice. The data on prices in medieval and early modern England were made available to historians by Thorold Rogers (1862). By the 1930s the empirical material had accumulated to the point where it became very clear that European prices had gone through a number of very slow swings between 1200 and 1900 (Simiand 1932, Griziotti-Kretschmann 1935, Abel 1980).

A most important and lasting contribution wasWilhelm Abel's Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, the first German edition of which was published in 1935. Abel compiled a rich data set containing time-series information about prices, wages, rents, and population movements in Western and Central Europe from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, ensuring that the empirical importance of his work would remain high to this day. The most striking pattern to emerge was the wavelike movement of grain prices (expressed in terms of grams of silver). There were three waves or "secular trends" (Abel 1980:1):

1. An upward movement during the thirteenth century and early fourteenth century, followed by a decline in the late Middle Ages

2. Another upsurge in the sixteenth century, followed by a decline or apparent equilibrium (depending on the country) during the seventeenth century

3. A third increase during the eighteenth century, followed by irregular fluctuations during the nineteenth century, eventually converging to an early twentieth-century minimum

The twentieth century saw another (fourth during the last millennium) period of price inflation (Fischer 1996).

On the basis of the observed patterns, Abel argued that the fluctuations in the circulation of money could not adequately explain the long-term trends in the price of grain. By contrast, population moved more or less in the same direction as the food prices and in an inverse ratio to wages (Abel 1980:292–93). Abel concluded that the Malthusian-Ricardian theory provided a better explanation of the data than the monetarist theory. Furthermore, the Malthusian-Ricardian theory predicted that an increasing population would result in a specific progression of effects. Rents would rise first, with grain prices lagging behind rents, the price of industrial goods lagging behind grain prices, and workers' wages bringing up the rear. The evidence showed that this was precisely what happened (until the whole system was dramatically changed in the nineteenth century).

Abel's conclusions were soon supported and extended by other historians, with the most influential contributions made by Michael Postan, working in England, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in France. In a talk given in 1950, Postan rejected a monetarist explanation of long-term price movements during the Middle Ages and firmly asserted the primacy of the demographic factor (Hilton 1985). Le Roy Ladurie was an even more consistent follower of Malthus. In The Peasants of Languedoc, first published in French in 1966, he argued that southern France went through a great agrarian cycle lasting from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth (Le Roy Ladurie 1974:289). Although Le Roy Ladurie did not completely ignore the social and political aspects of the cycle, his explanation of the causes underlying the cycle was firmly Malthusian. Speaking in 1973, he said, "it is in the economy, in social relations and, even more fundamentally, in biological facts, rather than in the class struggle, that we must seek the motive force of history" (quoted in Hilton 1985:4).

Such a radical Malthusian position could not but provoke a reaction from scholars working within the Marxist tradition. Although some Marxist historians doubted the very fact of a drastic and prolonged population decline from 1350 to 1450 (Kosminsky 1956), others accepted it but preferred to explain it as the "crisis of feudalism." In an influential book first published in 1946, Maurice Dobb argued that the cause of the crisis was the inefficiency of feudalism as a system of production, coupled with the growing needs of the ruling class for revenue (Dobb 1963:42–47). The "feudal lust for expanded revenue" was a result of two processes: growth in the size of the parasitic class and the increasing extravagance of noble consumption. These two...