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Money, Prices, Wages, and 'Profit Inflation' in Spain, the Southern

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Money, Prices, Wages, and 'Profit Inflation' in Spain, the Southern Money, Prices, Wages, and ‘Profit Inflation’ in Spain, the Southern Netherlands, and England during the Price Revolution era: ca. 1520 - ca. 1650 John H. Munro Professor Emeritus of Economics University of Toronto, Toronto, Canadá [email protected] Resumo Esse artigo reexamina a famosa tese de 1929 de Earl Hamilton sobre a “Inflação de lucros” e o “nascimento do capitalismo industrial moderno” durante o período da Revolução dos Preços (1520-1650), e as opiniões de seus inúmeros críticos. Baseado em novas fontes, minhas conclusões diferem de ambos: enquanto foram encontradas mais evidências a respeito da inflação de lucros na Inglaterra do que os seus críticos poderiam admitir, nenhuma foi encontrada sobre a região do sudeste holandês, onde os salários industriais tenderam a crescer mais que os preços industriais. Este estudo conclui com um exame sucinto dos efeitos sobre a inflação em dois outros fatores de custo: terra, em termos de aluguéis reais, e capital, em termos de juros reais, os quais caíram com a inflação. Ambos os custos ficaram atrás dos preços industriais no período moderno na Inglaterra e nos Países Baixos, apesar dos juros reais ficarem mais atrás que os aluguéis reais. Palavras-chave: moeda, cunhagem (moeda metálica), Revolução dos Preços, inflação, “inflação de lucros”, “deflação de lucros”, índices de preço ao consumidor, salários reais e nominais, artesãos de construção, pedreiros, Espanha, Inglaterra, Países Baixos, indústria de grande escala. Abstract This article re-examines Earl Hamilton’s famous 1929 thesis on ‘Profit Inflation’ and the ‘birth of modern industrial capitalism’ during the Price Revolution era (c. 1520 - c. 1650), and the views of his numerous critics. Based on new data, my conclusions differ from both: while finding more evidence for profit inflation in England for this era than his critics would admit, I found none for the southern Netherlands, where industrial wages tended to rise more than industrial prices. This study concludes with a brief examination of the effects on inflation on two other factor costs: land, in terms of real rents, and capital, in terms of real interest rates, which did fall with inflation. Both such costs did lag behind industrial prices in early-modern England and the Low Countries, though real interest rates lagged more than did real rents. Key words: money, coinage, Price Revolution, inflation, ‘profit-inflation’, ‘profit-deflation’, consumer price indices, nominal and real wages, building craftsmen, masons, Spain, England, the Netherlands, large-scale industries. Money, Prices, Wages, and ‘Profit Inflation’ in Spain... Introduction: Hamilton, The second concerns the principal ‘Profit Inflation’, and the consequence of that Price Revolution: so-called ‘profit inflation’, which he Historiography of the Price saw as the fundamental instrument in Revolution the birth of modern industrial capital- 2 n the twentieth-century historiog- ism. His theories have, of course, been raphy of the early-modern Price subject to repeated attacks, and also to I Revolution, and especially of its some unfair ridicule during the past Spanish connections, no economic histo- seventy years.3 rian is more renowned – and indeed more A few brief comments need to controversial – than the late Earl Hamilton be offered here on his first and most (1899-1989). His fame rests on two theses. famous thesis. First, in fairness to this The first is his explanation of that Price oft-maligned and sadly misunderstood Revolution, in terms of the Quantity Theory scholar, he had also contended that, in the of Money: that the long, sustained era of in- first half of the sixteenth century, other flation, from the early sixteenth to the mid monetary factors were probably more seventeenth century, was fundamentally important than Spanish silver imports: the product of monetary factors. Of these in particular, the Central European sil- the most important, though only from ver-copper mining boom and also some the 1550s, was the vast influx of treasure unnamed ‘financial innovations’. (gold and silver) from the Spanish Ameri- Regrettably, he failed to provide cas, above all, the silver from the mines of any elaboration, let alone economic Potosí in modern-day Bolivia (then Peru) analyses, of these two other monetary and Zacatecas, in Mexico.1 factors. Second, for the first half of the 1 See John H. Munro, ‘Classic Review of Earl Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934. xii + 428 pp.). Subtitled: Hamilton and the Price Revolution: A Revindication of His Tarnished Reputation and of a Modified Quantity Theory of Money’. Reviewed for EH.NET BOOK REVIEW, <[email protected]> on 15 January 2007. This review is archived at EH.NET, at this web site: http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/munro. See also John Munro, ‘Price Revolution’, in Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume, eds., The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, 6 vols. (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), vol. 6, pp. 631-34; and John Munro, ‘The Monetary Origins of the “Price Revolution:” South German Silver Mining, Merchant-Banking, and Venetian Commerce, 1470-1540’, in Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giráldez, and Richard von Glahn, eds., Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470-1800 (Aldershot and Brookfield, Vt: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), pp. 1-34; John Munro, ‘Inflation’, in Jonathan Dewald, et al, eds., Europe, 1450-1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons/The Gale Group, 2004), Vol. 3, pp. 262- 265; and John Munro, ‘Money and Coinage: Western Europe’, in Jonathan Dewald, et al, eds., Europe, 1450-1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons/The Gale Group, 2004), Vol. 4, pp. 174-184. See the next note. 2 The fundamental publications by Earl J. Hamilton are: ‘American Treasure and Andalusian Prices, 1503-1660: A Study in the Spanish Price Revolution’, Journal of Economic and Business History, 1 (February 1928), 1-35, reprinted in P.H. Ramsey, ed., The Price Revolution in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1971), pp. 147-81; ‘American Treasure and the Rise of Capitalism, 1500-1700’, Economica, 27 (Nov. 1929), 338-57; ‘Imports of American Gold and Silver into Spain, 1503-1660’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 43 (1929), 436- 72; American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934; reissued 1965); Money, Prices, and Wages in Valencia, Aragon, and Navarre, 1351-1500 (Cambridge, Mass., 1936); ‘Revisions in Economic History VIII: The Decline of Spain’, Economic History Review, 1st ser., 8:2 (May 1938), 168-79; reprinted in E.M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History, 3 vols (London: 1954-62), vol. I, pp. 215-26; War and Prices in Spain, 1651-1800 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1947) ‘Profit Inflation and the Industrial Revolution, 1751-1800’,Quarterly Journal of Economics, 56:2 (February 1942), 256-73; reprinted in F.C. Lane and J.C. Riemersma, eds., Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History (London, 1953), pp. 322-49; and ‘Prices as a Factor in Business Growth: Prices and Progress’, Journal of Economic History, 12:4 (Autumn 1952), 325- 49. This was his Presidential Address to the 12th Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association. 3 See above n. 1, and below, nn. 33, 43, 53. 14 História e Economia Revista Interdisciplinar John H. Munro seventeenth century, he contended that Yet, as recent critics have correctly the role of Spanish issues of copper vel- noted — all of whom had not read Ham- lon coinages was as important or even ilton’s work carefully, the influx of Span- more important than the now diminish- ish-American silver cannot have provided ing influxes of Spanish-American silver the initial cause of that long sustained infla- in producing the inflation that continued tion, because it had commenced in Spain up to the 1650s.4 Just the same, the very itself, the Low Countries, England, and title of his famous monograph – American elsewhere from about 1516-20, and thus Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain – has long before any significant importations of led most casual readers to believe that such silver, i.e., from the later 1550s (see the ‘prime mover’ of that inflation was graph A and Table 1). But most of these indeed ‘American treasure’. critics are just as incorrect in ascribing Hamilton, of course, was hardly the the fundamental causes to demographic first to contend that the the influx of Spanish factors alone – for that is, quite simply, -American silver had played such an impor- bad economic theory. tant role in the European Price Revolution. To be sure, population growth did Adam Smith had said as much in his famous play some important roles, especially in Wealth of Nations (1776).5 Even during the influencing relative price changes (i.e., midst of the Price Revolution era itself, in in particular, in explaining why grain, 1568, the renowned French philosopher timber, and wood-fuel prices rose more Jean Bodin won a signal victory over his de- than other prices during this era). In bate opponent, Jean Cherruyt de Malestroit, terms of the modernized income-ver- in supposedly ‘demonstrating’ that the cur- sion of the so-called Quantity Theory, rent inflation of prices in France was due far the consequences of demographic more to that Spanish-American silver influx changes, especially those inducing than to any coinage debasements.6 Less well structural changes in the economy, are known is an even earlier Spanish publication, reflected in two of the variables in the a treatise of 1556, by the cleric Azpilcueta Equations of Exchange: M.V = P. y (in- Navarra, of the Salamanca School, which come velocity equation) and M = k.P.y made virtually the same contention about (cash balances equation).
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