Tag: price revolution

I’ve been reading a bit about the petrol nations, and how discovering extensive oil reserves in a country often has a kind of “hollowing out” effect on the nation’s economy unless they act to put certain safeguards in place, or are already a significantly developed economy at the time the oil reserves are found. I’m curious about whether there are any historical equivalents to the effect that oil reserve discoveries have on a nation-state, whether raw resources or otherwise.

Well, the resource curse doesn’t just have to do with oil…

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And if you’re looking for a historical example, I would go with the Price Revolution that the Spanish Empire suffered after its conquest of the Americas, where a tidal wave of gold and silver did enormous, lasting damage to the Spanish economy. 

You mention that feudal rents were nominal so didnt account for inflation, what difference would it make if they did adjust according to inflation/how could that be done?

Given that the Price Revolution played a major role in the relative decline of the nobility’s economic and thus military and political power, allowing for the rise of both the bourgeoisie and the monarchical nation-state…it would change a lot.

Not that things wouldn’t happen – the commercial and industrial revolutions are still going to happen, and the early modern military revolution is still going to happen, regardless of the position of the nobility – but it’s more that the nobility would be better positioned to fight the political ramifications of these changes. Whether they would succeed and make all of Europe look like a rationalized Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or fail and the only difference is that it takes a lot more violence for those political revolutions to succeed, I don’t know.

One of the major changes that would happen is that the peasantry of Europe would be much, much worse off, because one of the few routes to upward mobility they had was making more money off of the increase in food prices relative to their rent. So maybe you’d see a lot more peasant rebellions than in OTL?