de Vries

The concept of general crisis has survived the doubts and objections of a generation of historians because of an intuitive sense of historical distance across a few seventeenth-century decades. In his introduction, Rabb reminds us of the historical distance that bridges the "move from the condemnation of Galileo to the knighthood of Isaac Newton," to which we can, with little effort, add others-for instance, the profound difference between the Iberian models of colonial exploitation and the northern joint stock trading companies, and the shift from universalistic patrimonial states to administrative polities with balance of power objectives.³

Evocations of crisis and descriptions of a century that was, as Trevor-Roper lamented, "broken in the middle, irreparably broken," are not lacking.⁴ What has been lacking, from the outset of the crisis debate, is a credible explanation of how the crisis "worked" in historical time to bring about these intriguing before and-after contrasts, and how it came to involve all aspects of the common life of European society, thus making the crisis general. In my own essay, I proposed limiting the crisis to a "salvageable core" of economic change, but reading our assembled essays I am now more inclined to think that a more comprehensive account may yet be possible.

Imagine, for a moment, that the confessionalization project conducted by the major Christian churches faded from view toward the mid-seventeenth century not because it failed but because (as Bever suggests herein) it had succeeded in creating disciplined populations obedient to state institutions and capable, where market economies had developed sufficiently, of industrious responses to market opportunities.⁵ Under the most favorable circumstances, this process led to societies founded more on incentive than coercion; more on obedience than violence.

This phenomenon, though common to much of Europe, had its fullest impact-economic and political-in a limited area, where contingent events swept aside institutional obstacles to political, religious, and economic change and led to the establishment of early forms of constitutional government and of durable "public spheres," what has recently been labeled an "open access order." The term refers to a political system based on individual, free association through private and public organization, in contrast to the prevailing "limited access orders," based on familial status, exclusive organizations and rent seeking.⁶

The new political order was at least partially visible in many European cities, but most fully in the Dutch Republic and, later, in England. It combined freedom of conscience, open international trade, and competitive domestic markets (or fair approximations of these ideals) that made it a uniquely information-rich environment, stimulating merchants in the development of institutions and practices to exploit this resource and providing broad, unforeseen opportunities to many others-philosophers, theologians, craftsmen, soldiers, and politicians. The tools developed by an open, commercial society to utilize information-accountancy, periodical press/publishing, and stock exchange-simultaneously offered a political-economic challenge to the rest of Europe and created a social-cultural opening with broad ramifications. Soll's contribution herein delineates the pathways by which the logic of this new order penetrated elsewhere in Europe and exerted influence beyond the realm of commerce, strictly defined.

Seventeenth-century demographic trends may not have had a decisive causal role to play in the crisis, but they fashioned a context of contraction that added extra leverage to the Dutch challenge and forced a response. England, by fits and starts that culminated in a decisive change of regime, embraced the new models. Elsewhere Soll describes a partial appropriation of the "open access order" by states under pressure, seeking economic rationalization while also acting to preserve state absolutism and religious monopoly. Their strategies could strengthen the state and inflict harm on the more open societies, but they were too self-contradictory for broad economic improvement.⁷

Standing behind demographic trends are the institutions and patterns of household behavior explored in McCants' article herein. The macro-level story of population change sets the stage for the crisis; it constrains the response of historical actors but does little to account for the choices made. More significant, though still not well understood...