The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (review)

The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. By DAVID HACKETT FISCHER. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 . Pp. 552 . $16 .95 (paper).

This book has been widely acclaimed and has already been reprinted several times. But it is hard to see why, since it only delivers an enormous amount of interesting economic information like buckshot and even then misses its target altogether. The author tells us in his preface that "prices may be studied as clues to the nature of change itself [and] to describe and hopefully to explain the rhythm of change regimes and deep change in price movements during the past eight hundred years." A reviewer should evaluate a book on how well it meets the target set by the author himself. By that, that is the author's own, standard, this book does badly. As per its subtitle on "The Rhythm of History," this book does even worse if that is to mean world history or its explanation; and it does so with a more confusing grabbag of unrelated collateral material at the end of the text than in the body of the work.

The main argument, if any, is set out in the Introduction and the Conclusion, while the intervening chapters examine four long "waves" of price ups and downs in medieval times, the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries, the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries, and the twentieth century. "A primary purpose of this project is descriptive. One of its organizing assumptions is that a task of empirical description may be undertaken without an apparatus of theory," the author informs us on page 312 after having lost himself and the reader in the empirical woods without an adequate theoretical map to guide us. Moreover, this anti-theoretical "assumption" is itself a theory, which is doubly contradicted by the evidence: first the author advances a different theory in the Introduction and then his failure to satisfactorily deal with his own evidence is itself evidence that his "theory" is useless.

The first wave Fischer examines is the medieval one from 1180 - 1350 (although it still continued after that). Alas the text is limited to "the Western world" with a "world bank" that operated only in Europe and the Mediterranean; and what he writes there is contradicted by his Appendix B in which he indicates that the fourteenth-century crisis was worldwide and not just European--even his text refers to a European balance of trade deficit with Asia. However, the preceding economic expansion, which he neglects completely other than to mention a simultaneous period of global warming, also was Afro-Eurasian. The author pretends to study the rhythm of the European economy, but fails to hint and much less analyze how the same was and would long continue to be almost entirely dependent on those of Asia. For Europe was but a marginal outpost that sought to get in on the Asian action through the Crusades and the Venetian traders whom Fischer mistakenly claims to have dominated East-West trade when they merely stood at the western end of the line.

Fischer's examination of the second wave suffers similarly. Again the text treats it as a purely European phenomenon, but Appendix C claims--falsely--that the seventeenth-century crisis was worldwide, which is belied by Asian evidence. On the other hand, it is true that events in Europe were crucially affected by the development in Asia and the Americas, which Fischer simply disregards other than to say that the sixteenth-century price revolution in Europe came (but from Asia, which he does not say) before the inflow of silver from the Americas, the very value and use of which was derived from the Asian and particularly Chinese demand for silver. Moreover, he attributes the European price revolution primarily to population growth without being aware that in Asia population grew even faster without generating inflation there.

Fischer's treatment of eighteenth...