The American Way: A Geographical History of Crisis and Recovery by Earle Carville

Author:Earle, Carville [Earle, Carville]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780742599215
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2013-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.1. Europe and the Mediterranean, 1500-1700, with population estimates for major regions/nations/empires.

To understand Elizabeth’s willingness to risk everything in her support for Drake and for the privateering industry is to come to grips with the perilous state of the English economy, circa 1575. Population had grown at a spectacular pace; prices had risen to unprecedented levels; English grain prices, for example, increased by as much as 500 percent during the century, and raw wool commanded exceptionally high prices from Flemish weavers (Phelps-Brown and Hopkins 1957: 298), all of which “loosed” the strings of English society. For some, these changes translated into astounding prosperity; for others, a miserable poverty. In a time when “sheep ate men,” to use Marx’s apt expression, enclosing landlords evicted the unfortunate peasants and cottagers whose tenures were insecure. For these poor families, the new economy dictated a term of unemployment (seasonal or year-round) that they served out as squatters in the country forests or adrift among London’s teeming masses (the city approached 120,000 by 1575; Coleman 1955-56; Stone 1966). Conversely, those blessed with secure tenures in land, that is, owners or even tenants with long leases at fixed rates, soon acquired greater wealth and hurriedly spent it in a gluttony of conspicuous consumption. The rising yeomen and gentry rebuilt their homes (and the English landscape), decorated them with the finest silks and tapestries, and tabled them with exotic foods, including fine wines and spices, citrus, sugar, and the like, imported from Venice, the Levant, and Morocco and which, by 1590, constituted 65 percent of English imports (Stone 1949-50).

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