History
Commercial Revolution
The Commercial Revolution refers to the period of European economic expansion, trade growth, and the rise of capitalism from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. It was characterized by the development of global trade networks, the growth of banking and finance, and the emergence of new business practices. This era laid the foundation for the modern global economy.
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10 Key excerpts on "Commercial Revolution"
eBook - ePub- Norman John Greville Pounds(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
CHAPTER NINEThe Commercial Revolution
A Commercial Revolution, in the words of the late Raymond de Roover, is ‘a complete or drastic change in the methods of doing business or in the organisation of business enterprise’. Such a revolution, he claims, occurred at the end of the thirteenth and early in the fourteenth century. It was characterised by a change in the activities of merchants, who gradually ceased to travel with their wares and, instead, entrusted them to ‘common carriers’, and sent their orders and made payment by couriers. It was marked by the development of new forms of partnership; by the appearance of the bill of exchange, which eliminated the need to transport large amounts of specie, together with the mechanism far clearing or discounting them, and by the increasing use of credit, which the bill of exchange made possible. Lastly, more sophisticated methods of book-keeping allowed merchants to assess more easily the success of their enterprises.All these developments in the practice of commerce appeared first in Italy and spread over much of Western Europe. They were adopted in Germany, but had little influence on the trade of the Baltic region and almost none on that of eastern Europe. Beyond serving as bankers to English kings, the Italians made little contribution to economic organisation in Great Britain,1 where the Commercial Revolution was not experienced until the sixteenth century.Before the Commercial Revolution the merchant travelled as a general rule with his wares. The volume of his goods was limited by the means of transport at his disposal, and the speed of his turnover by the slowness of his rate of travel. He carried little currency, in part because it was unsafe to do so, but partly also because the amount in circulation was inadequate for the needs of commerce. Much of his trading was done at fairs, where he could buy goods on the security of goods still in his possession, and wait until the conclusion of the fair before clearing his obligations with other merchants. It was, in fact, a highly refined form of barter. In the final accounting, which brought a fair to a close, only small sums of money had to change hands.
eBook - ePub- G. Renard, G. Weulersse(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
Introduction The Economic and Social Revolution at the Beginning of the Modern Era (Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries) T HIS volume will deal with the economic and social changes which took place in Europe between the second half of the fifteenth century and the last quarter of the eighteenth. This long period was an age of growth and expansion, and of every kind of material progress. After the Turkish attack, which submerged Constantinople, the Balkans and Greece, and even for an instant washed the walls of Vienna, this continent was never again the victim of foreign invasion. Henceforth it was Europe which, like an inexhaustible reservoir of men and of vigour, overflowed the rest of the globe, whose peoples became the conquerors and colonisers of the world, supreme on land and sea, carrying their civilisation to every corner of the earth. At the opening of our period Christian Europe was divided into two quite distinct worlds: the East, where peoples, still semi-barbarie, acted as a rampart against the Mussulman power advancing from Asia, and thus played a part as useful as it was heroic; and the West, which, thus protected, could develop in peace, and repay the Eastern peoples in ideas and in culture what it owed them in security. But it is in the West that we find a fruitful and creative life, and there that we must follow and study it. § 1. Three revolutions precede or accompany the economic revolution; they determine and explain it. The first was a political revolution. It was characterised by two essential facts—the formation of powerful states, and the establishment in these states of a central authority strong enough to guarantee order and tranquillity. Weary of feudal anarchy, which kept the whole country in arms and made peace an accident, the nations of the modern world awoke to consciousness of themselves, and national states were formed
eBook - ePubHow it all Began (Routledge Revivals)
Origins of the Modern Economy
- W. W. Rostow(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
3The Commercial RevolutionI
The old concept of the Commercial Revolution remains a useful and valid notion. It embraces the remarkable expansion of international trade—to Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and Africa—in the wake of the voyages of discovery at the end of the fifteenth century, with all its consequences, within Europe and beyond, down to the beginning of the British takeoff after 1783. From that time the industrial revolution itself begins to shape the scale and patterns of world trade. The question here is: How did the Commercial Revolution relate to the onset of the industrial revolution? To get at that question in an orderly way, it may be useful to summarize briefly how the Commercial Revolution unfolded.II
The Commercial Revolution may be said arbitrarily to have begun in 1488 when the Portuguese Bartholomew Díaz rounded Cape Horn and thus pioneered a nonMediterranean route for trade to the Far East that soon involved direct European contacts in the whole arc from Japan to the Persian Gulf. Over the next thirty-four years, the coastline and islands of the Western Hemisphere were also probed from Labrador to its southern tip, and one of Magellan's five ships came home, without the expedition's leader, after circling the globe. This sequence was influenced to a degree still under debate by the rise of Turkish power in the Levant and eastern Mediterranean, after two centuries of weakness, which had permitted Europe to dominate trade to the Far East, despite the land bridge to be crossed. European trade with the Orient did not cease, but it was conducted thereafter in a less easy environment.
eBook - ePub- Carlton Hayes(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Jovian Press(Publisher)
THE Commercial Revolution
..................FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO A European could search in vain the map of “the world” for America, or Australia, or the Pacific Ocean. Experienced mariners, and even learned geographers, were quite unaware that beyond the Western Sea lay two great continents peopled by red men; of Africa they knew only the northern coast; and in respect of Asia a thousand absurd tales passed current. The unexplored waste of waters that constituted the Atlantic Ocean was, to many ignorant Europeans of the fifteenth century, a terrible region frequented by fierce and fantastic monsters. To the average European the countries surveyed in the preceding chapter, together with their Muslim neighbors across the Mediterranean, still comprised the entire known world.Shortly before the close of the fifteenth century, daring captains began to direct long voyages on the high seas and to discover the existence of new lands; and from that time to the present, Europeans have been busily exploring and conquering—veritably “Europeanizing"— the whole globe. Although religion as well as commerce played an important role in promoting the process, the movement was attended from the very outset by so startling a transformation in the routes, methods, and commodities of trade that usually it has been styled the Commercial Revolution. By the close of the sixteenth century it had proceeded far enough to indicate that its results would rank among the most fateful events of all history.It was in the commonplace affairs of everyday life that the Commercial Revolution was destined to produce its most far-reaching results. To appreciate, therefore, its true nature and significance, we must first turn aside to ascertain how our European ancestors actually lived about the year 1500, and what work they did to earn their living. Then, after recounting the story of foreign exploration and colonization, we shall be in a position to reappraise the domestic situation in town and on the farm.
- Gene William Heck(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Indeed, it would strain logic to deny its probability. Certainly, it is not at all un-realistic to posit that the tandem commercial and capitalistic revolutions that first appeared in 5 th /11 th century Western Europe were inexorably linked – and that both renaissances were heavily influenced, if not pre-cipitated, by Europe’s burgeoning trade relations with Egypt and the Levant described in preceding sections. Is it then not also reasonable to conclude that those highly dynamic new forms of corporate association and financial procedure that accom-panied them might themselves have been profoundly influenced by these ground-breaking commercial interactions? There is much to commend such conclusions. For what is incontro-vertibly clear is that into that static, staid medieval society of priests and knights and peasants in the repressively feudalistic civilization that char-acterized Christian Europe in the 3 rd /9 th –4 th /10 th centuries, there now 6.1. Western Commerce Transformed By Eastern Business Practice 213 entered a new class of merchants, tradesmen, and artisans seeking to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. Banding together for mutual gain, this new mercantile class thus came to form ever-growing dynamic centers of economic enterprise, as an urban bourgeoisie gradually but inexorably evolved. 2 Addressing the macroeconomic impacts of these unfolding socioeconomic phenomena, economic historian C. M. Cipolla asserts: 3 With the appearance of the medieval city and emergence of the European “bourgeoisie,” a new Europe was born. Every sector of social and econ-omic life was transformed. Sets of values, personal conditions and re-lations, types of administration, education, production and exchange, all underwent drastic transformation. The urban revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was the prelude to, and indeed, created the prerequi-sites for, the “Industrial Revolution” of the nineteenth century.
eBook - PDFWestern Civilization
Ideas, Politics, and Society
- Marvin Perry, Myrna Chase, James Jacob, Margaret Jacob, Marvin Perry, Myrna Chase, James Jacob, Margaret Jacob(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 356 ❖ 15 European Expansion: Economic and Social Transformations available for grain production and contributed to the rise in bread prices, which meant even larger profits. Another factor propelling commercial and in-dustrial expansion was the growth of the state. With increasing amounts of tax revenue to spend, the expanding monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bought more and more supplies—ships, weapons, uniforms, paper—and so spurred economic development. The Domestic System Along with commercial and industrial expansion came a change in the nature of the productive en-terprise. Just as the price revolution produced, in the enclosure movement, a reorganization of agri-culture and agrarian society, it similarly affected trade and manufacturing. The reorganization there took place especially in the faster-growing industries—woolen and linen textiles—where an increasingly large mass market outpaced supply and thus made prices rise. This basic condition of the price revolution operated, just as it did in food production, to produce expansion. In the textile industries, increasing demand promoted special-ization. For example, eastern and southwestern England made woolens, and northwestern France and the Netherlands produced linen. Markets tended to shift from local to regional or even to international, a condition that gave rise to the merchant-capitalist. Merchant-capitalists’ operations, unlike those of local producers, ex-tended across local and national boundaries. Such mobility allowed these capitalists to buy or pro-duce goods where costs were lowest and to sell where prices and volume were highest. Because of the size and range of a business, an individ-ual capitalist could control the traditional local producers, who increasingly depended on the capitalist for the widespread marketing of their expanded output.
eBook - ePub- a. Birnie, A. Birnie(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
CHAPTER IV THE REVOLUTION IN COMMERCE I T is important to realize that the continous buying and selling which are characteristic of modern commercial methods are developments of fairly recent date.Until the beginning of the eighteenth century trade was mainly periodic ; that is to say, exchange transactions were for the most part confined to fixed times and places.This was inevitable.When communication was difficult and the volume of trade was slight, the thin and sluggish stream of commerce required to be banked up and conducted through well-defined channels.Under such conditions, the natural centres of traffic were the periodical gatherings of buyers and sellers at fairs and markets, and it was through these institutions that the bulk of commercial business was carried on.The transition to continuous buying and selling began in the late eighteenth century, but the movement made little progress, until the development of the railway and the steamship broke down the physical barriers to communication.Thereupon the stream of trade swelled and overflowed the banks which had been erected to confine it.The limitations of time and space within which the trader had hitherto worked were removed.The area over which commercial transactions took place expanded ;the time during which they took place extended ; periodic trading disappeared ; markets and fairs gradually lost their importance and fresh commercial institutions were created to meet the new conditions.The result was a revolution in the methods of trade, comparable in importance and to some extent in general character to the revolutions already described in agriculture and industry
- L.C.A Knowles(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
3—It created a new desire to dominate colonial areas among the Great Powers. Great Britain had, to increase her Empire to preserve the “open door.” 4—New and intensified international rivalry due to the new accessibility.II.—THE REVOLUTION IN COMMERCIAL STAPLES AND COMMERCIAL ORGANIZATIONThe importance of commodities changed. 1—Bulky commodities, coal, machinery, food stuffs and raw material took the place of spices and colonial products as the principal articles of commerce. 2—There was a new demand for iron for construction and renewals of railways and rolling stock. 3—Disappearance of fairs. 4—Growth of combinations to eliminate the competition made easy by rapid communications: Vertical combinations. Horizontal Combinations. International Combinations. Combinations to purchase raw material. 5—Grow tli of co-ordinated organization in business: Multiple shops. Allied industries under one management. 6—The difficulty of controlling international combines by national machinery.III.—THE CREATION OF A NEW FINANCIAL ERA1—National Finance affected by the bolding and working of State railways. 2—New and extended fields for investment. 3—Problems of taxation of capital invested in several countries. 4—New financial mechanism.IV.—SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION1—New personal mobility led to the growth of towns 2—Growth of new industrial class of transport workers. 3—Increase of shop-keeping and trading classes. 4—Effect on the position of women. 5—Emigration (a) of Europeans. (b) of Asiatics. 6—Government policy with regard to immigration and emigration.E CONOMIC development has passed through three stages. There is first the stage of local economy when the manor and later the town with its surrounding district aimed at being self-sufficing and there was very little intercourse between one part of the country and another. This is the characteristic of the thousand years known as the Middle Ages. After 1492, with the discovery of the sea routes to India and America a national economy began when the nations, supplemented by their new colonies, also aimed at being self-sufficing but within larger areas. Sailing ships, boats on rivers and riding and pack animals were the chief means of communication. The roads were earthen tracks suitable for animals. Towards the end of the period, i.e.,
eBook - PDFWorld Development
An Introduction
- Prodromos Panayiotopoulos, Gavin Capps(Authors)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Pluto Press(Publisher)
One key sub-text in the intricate relationship fashioned between the expansion of Europe and what came to be the Third World was in the impact of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was in part driven by the phase of early mercantile exploration and attempts to offer explanations for the biblically unaccounted for peoples of the world. This curiosity when combined with innovations in Science and Technology, contributed to the questioning of the natural order of things and also questioned the rights of divine kings. In both England and France this culminated in popular revolutions which led to the beheading of both Louis XVI and Charles I. The rolling heads of kings of state symbolised the development of the ‘Enlighten-ment model’ which lies at the heart of ideas about ‘modernisation’ in the Third World. The model drew from the experience of the French Revolution during which the bourgeoisie achieved three major objectives in its struggle with the dying feudal order: first, the abolition of the monarchy and the intro-duction of democracy in the form of a constituent assembly; second, the break-up of the large landed estates held by the nobility; and third, national unification and the development of the nation state. The model was used in the newly independent countries and in their subsequent evolution, to point to the poverty of the ruling elites and their inability to meet even basic criteria necessary for development and modernisation. 12 WORLD DEVELOPMENT: GLOBALISATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 1.1 Gavin Capps The Expansion of Europe: Mercantile Trade 1500–1750 OVERVIEW The period covering 1500 to 1750 can be seen as the era of merchant or mercantile trade. It witnessed major transformations in the economic life of Western Europe, as its feudal societies disintegrated and inter-state rivalry grew. From the fifteenth century onwards, competing European nations sent sailors, soldiers and merchants across the world to locate and monopolise new sources of wealth.
eBook - PDF- Marvin Perry(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 226 ❖ 9 Political and Economic Transformation In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Dutch developed a new kind of farming known as convertible husbandry that also expanded pro-duction. This farming system employed a series of innovations, including the use of soil-restoring le-gumes, that replaced the old three-field system of crop rotation, which had left one-third of the land unused at any given time. The new techniques used all the land every year and provided a more diversified agriculture. T HE E XPANSION OF T RADE AND I NDUSTRY The conditions of the price revolution also caused trade and industry to expand. Population growth that exceeded the capacity of local food supplies stimulated commerce in basic foodstuffs—for example, the Baltic trade with Western Europe. Equally important as a stimulus to trade and industry was the growing income of landlords, merchants, and, in some instances, peasants. This income created a rising demand for consumer goods. Another factor in commercial and indus-trial expansion was the growth of the state. With increasing amounts of tax revenue to spend, the expanding monarchies of the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries bought more and more supplies— ships, weapons, uniforms, paper—and so spurred economic expansion. Innovations in Business Markets tended to shift from local to regional or even to international—a condition that gave rise to the merchant capitalist. The merchant capital-ists’ operations, unlike those of local producers, extended across local and national boundaries. An essential feature of merchant capitalism was the putting-out system of production.
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