Rural and Urban Society, 1500-1720

Rural Society

• Structures– Cyclical, and foundational.– Tenure-based– Heavily Regional

• Problems– Different paces of Integration– ‘incomplete markets’– Price Revolution, Rent, and Enclosure

Urban Society

• Structures– Nexus economies (Towns possess substantial ‘hinterlands’)– Economic specialization, towns as ‘finishing-sites’– Again, heavily regional

• Problems– Three P’s: Poverty, Protest, Plague.– Suborned to state interests– Boom/Bust + shifts in trade led to precarious existence,

see: decline of Hanseatic League (Lübeck, Hamburg, Stockholm, Krakôw, et al)

Types of Urban Space

• Market town• Commercial Entrepôt• Administrative center– NB: Not mutually exclusive.

• London was both administrative center, and increasingly successful commercial entrepôt as the period progressed. Amsterdam was an immensely successful entrepôt for the later 16th and 17th centuries, before experiencing relative stagnation in the 18th.

Connections

• Migration• Economic integration• Shared pains (bad harvest, plague, war)• Shared population• In some countries, shared political structures.