Like everyone else, historians write with specific audiences in mind. Some books are aimed at the general public, some at small groups of specialists; some are textbooks meant just for the classroom, while others try to sort out big problems in ways that will both interest specialists and make sense to those who don't know much about the field. So when reading a work of history, the starting point has to be a question: what kind of book are you dealing with? Knowing which category a book fits into will help you understand what information you can get from it and what you should look for as you read.
Nothing we're reading in this course counts as a textbook, that is, a book that lays out the basics, supplying a simplified narrative of events. Instead, the first three books we're reading are attempts by prominent historians to make sense of some big questions about early modern life. We're starting with the most basic question of them all, how did Europeans keep themselves alive in this period, and what was their life like? (In the coming weeks, we'll move on to books dealing at a similar level with two other basic aspects of early modern life, war and government.) There will be lots of details in all three of these books. But in all of them the details are really secondary to bigger questions, of the kind that we'd ask about any society, including our own. In doing the reading, try not to get bogged down in the details. Instead, ask yourself what matters for a big-picture understanding of this society.
To help in that effort, I'll be posting questions here about each of the readings; they're meant to indicate what I believe matters in the books, as opposed to the details, and they'll form the basis for our class discussions.
1) De Vries focuses on the period 1600-1750; where does that period fit in relation to the Industrial Revolution? To other big events that affected Europe's economic life, like the encounter with the Americas? De Vries argues that this period is important for understanding what happened in the Industrial Revolution; what connections does he see between the two? How could a period of economic crisis produce industrialization?
2) What made this an "age of crisis?" Think both about the signs of crisis, the indicators that the European economy was having a hard time, and about causes—what forces produced the hard times? How hard were hard times in this society?
3) How important were agriculture and the countryside in early modern Europe? Why did so many people live in the countryside? De Vries speaks of "yield ratios" as a key concept for understanding early modern agriculture; what's that about, and what were the period's yield ratios? Why were they so low, and what needed to change in order to improve them?
4) De Vries describes the "divergent paths" that different regions of Europe followed during the early modern period. What's the basic story? Where did conditions improve, and where did they stagnate? On his interpretation, what needed to change in order for agriculture to improve? He also describes an important division between western Europe and the region east of the Elbe River; what was the difference between those two regions, and how did relations between them change?
5) In thinking about how any society changes, an important question concerns the roles of technology and of social arrangements: that is, does a society change because of new inventions and discoveries, or because of new ways of organizing collective life? How does de Vries answer this question for seventeenth-century Europe? Were social or technological changes more important in reshaping European life during this period? What technological and social changes does he see in the period?
Stay tuned—I'll provide some more questions late in the week.
