Town and Country in Europe, 1300-1800 (review)

Town and Country in Europe, 1300-1800. Edited by Steven R. Epstein (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 343 pp. $64.95

The interplay between town and country is an indispensable theme in the history of the European city, central to classic social science debates about the transition to capitalism, the development of Western market economies, and modernization. Marx, Weber, and Pirenne, among the other patriarchs of the social sciences, depicted late medieval and early modern cities as central engines of economic growth and political transformation, islands of innovation and political and legal muscle that acted as solvents upon a static rural order.¹ Although this "town-based model" of economic history, as Epstein has dubbed it, has faced considerable revision in the last quarter-century, newer work in modernization theory and proto-industrialization has all too often affirmed an urban-centric viewpoint, implicitly equated inertia with ruralness, or unwittingly posited town and countryside as competitors in a zero-sum game.

In this substantial book, Epstein has brought together thirteen essays to reappraise urban-rural relations over the longue durée between the late Middle Ages and the eighteenth century. Although they differ in style and geographical focus, the essays are held together by their authors' commitment to reappraise town and country relations with a set of common questions concerning urban demographics, networks and hierarchies, town-state and town-country relations, economic policy and institutional arrangements, rural markets and industrialization, and state formation. The result is a deeply researched book with considerable range—from Sweden in the north to the kingdom of Naples in the south—and rigorous empiricism that downplays traditional distinctions between medieval and early modern as its authors seek to pinpoint the relationship between urbanization and economic growth, market life, and industrialization. The volume is especially noteworthy for its comprehensiveness and comparative bent. Rich urban zones, such as the Low Countries, that are typically underappreciated in Anglo-American scholarship, are given focused attention, and under-researched regions, such as Scandinavia and east-central Europe, are the subject of state-of-the-field essays. Lesser-studied areas, like the Italian Messogiorno, are given equal treatment to their more readily studied contiguous areas, in this case central and northern Italy. Given its geographical diversity, the book might have succumbed to disjointedness, but it stays cohesive because of its unified topic and methodology: a functionalist commitment to defining urbanity by merit of economic, institutional, and political life (and not strictly by a demographic yardstick) and structural analysis that tracks patterns of economic development, crisis, and integration.

Although the authors claim different specialties, all seek to revise the standard town-country distinction by seeing cities and their hinterlands less as clear-cut opposites than as deeply integrated spheres of interaction. The cities in this volume are no heroic centers of rationalism and modernity in a forward-moving narrative of modernization. Lords and monarchs are not unflinching antagonists to urban growth and market liberalization, and rural people—the most stereotyped set player in the classic town-country model—are not agrarian innocents. In his trenchant introduction, Epstein expresses dissatisfaction with the various historiographical schools' overoptimistic valuation of cities as forward-moving hubs of capital, production, and distribution, and with their dichotomous distinction between cities, on the one hand, and states, on the other. Cities with too much power or collective rights could retard commercial growth and market integration, as occurred in the Netherlands, where interurban infighting was as common as cooperation. Feudal lords, princes, and monarchs gave support to trade and the mobility of capital, and although they founded new towns to assert their interests, they also helped established ones, two of them being Castille and Sweden, as demonstrated in the essays of Pablo Sánchez-Lences, and monarchs gave Perhaps the most significant reappraisal undertaken by this volume's authors has less to do with the antagonism between town and state than with proto-industrialization and rural commercial life...