The Seventeenth-Century Depression

Abstract

Most of the seventeenth century was marked by a worldwide depression: the “decline of Spain,” the decline of Italy and of the Ottoman Empire, the Thirty Years War in Germany. These developments, long treated as isolated phenomena and variously attributed to one or another specific and often noneconomic cause, are now being increasingly recognized by modern historiography to have been the mutually related processes of a single global crisis (Hobsbawm 1960). What is more, the crises and depression of the seventeenth century may—and should—be traced and related to the earlier economic expansion: the development of capital accumulation in the sixteenth century. It is clear that the depression of the seventeenth century followed the growth of the sixteenth century and brought the latter temporarily to a halt, but it has not yet generally been accepted that the general crisis of the seventeenth century must be interpreted as a necessary economic and political development—the consequence of the economic limitations of growth and accumulation in the previous sixteenth-century upswing.

It is now commonly admitted that there was, for several decades in the seventeenth century, a period of major economic and social recession, crisis and secular readjustment, which contrasts strikingly with the periods of economic expansion which preceded it and followed it. Its effects were not confined to any single country, but with a few marginal exceptions these can be traced throughout the entire range of the economic area dominated by, and from, Western Europe, from the Americas to the China Seas; nor were they confined to the economic field.

—Eric Hobsbawm (1960)