Bedevilling the ongoing debate about changes in real-incomes in late-medieval western Europe, especially during the so-called ‘Golden Age of the Labourer’, is the very troubling issue of ‘wage-stickiness’. The standard and long-traditional explanation for this supposed ‘Golden Age’...

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major ‘institutional’ international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the...

This study of the Italian wool-based textile industries (woollens, worsteds, and serges) seeks to examine its rise, expansion, and ultimate decline, over a period of five centuries (from ca. 1200 to ca. 1730) in the context of both international competition and economic conjoncture, in the...

This article, a contribution to the ‘proto-industrialisation’ debate, examines the relative advantages of urban and rural locations for cloth manufacturing in later-medieval England and the Low Countries. From the 11th to the mid-14th century, when the English cloth trade began its seemingly...

This article re-examines Earl Hamilton’s famous 1929 thesis on ‘Profit Inflation’ and the ‘birth of modern industrial capitalism’: namely, that the inflationary forces of the Price Revolution era produced a widening gap between prices and wages, thus providing industrial entrepreneurs...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the ‘draperies’ or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic...

The water-mill, though known in the Roman Empire from the second century BCE, did not come to enjoy any widespread use until the 4th or 5th centuries CE, and then chiefly in the West, which was then experiencing not only a rapid decline in the supply of slaves, but also widespread depopulation,...

One of the most common myths in European economic history, and indeed in Economics itself, is that the Black Death of 1347-48, followed by other waves of bubonic plague, led to an abrupt rise in real wages, for both agricultural labourers and urban artisans – one that led to the so-called...

The basic thesis of this article is that the essential origins of the modern ‘financial revolution’ were the late-medieval responses, civic and mercantile, to financial impediments from both Church and State, concerning the usury doctrine, that reached their harmful fruition in the later...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom in European economic history that long-distance maritime transport was always more cost-effective than overland trade routes. Thus the majority of historians in the past century have attributed the rapid decline of the medieval Champagne Fairs,...