European Politics, Economics, Society in 1450-1650
During 1450-1650, the Papacy lost its authority and power over the life of the state (in the 17th century). The new social order was marked by the strong power of the ruler and the military strength of the sovereign. The political order was marked by the emergence of nation-states. Such countries as France, England, Spain, and Portugal transformed their feudal systems into royal monarchies. The new social order was characterized by the emergence of new social classes such as the peasantry, workers, and urban population.
Different industries fared very differently at various periods; there were distinct phases of development, and far from being spread evenly across the country, the changes were highly concentrated geographically, creating significant spatial differentials at any one time. These have often been noted, the temporal sequences and varying industrial fortunes quite frequently, the regional element less so, but they have seldom been brought into an operative relationship with each other.
Europe, which had to accept and absorb the new industrialism and the many social changes associated with it, was not a stagnant, inert, or purely traditional continent. On the contrary, Europe was a continent made up of many variegated and contrasting economies and was in the process of fundamental development and change. Changes in population, climatic conditions, techniques and forms of organization, changes in markets, and the political power of the crown, nobility, and gentry, kept the system in constant flux. By the later eighteenth century, changes had become faster, and the differences between regions wider than ever.
It is not easy to impose order on the chaos of differing systems of tenure, obligations, payments, technique, and of law that characterized European agriculture at the time. For the land was difficult to supervise and control, and perhaps even to understand from the towns; customary relationships and unwritten conventions, in largely illiterate communities, were more significant than those rigidified on paper; and the exigencies or calamities of harvest failure, enemy occupation, epidemic, migration, or simple population rise could impose ad hoc solutions which could take a long time to find their way into the official or nominal structure.
In some sense, the medieval town represented an antithesis to the feudal countryside: it had usually bought its freedom from feudal obligations, it administered itself, it existed by industrial specialization, by trade over shorter or longer distances, by grasping the opportunities of change. Most historians have taken the towns to be a powerful dissolving element in feudal society. There were towns and cities that lived by trade, but the basis of most was their industrial production.
As the centuries passed, however, the system that had once been progressive increasingly came to impose rigidity on the economy until ultimately it became a fetter on progress. Thus, as components of town councils, guilds obstructed immigration or the acceptance of settlers as full citizens, often condemning their own town to stagnation while others advanced. By refusing to recognize masterships acquired elsewhere, they inhibited the mobility even of qualified craftsmen. Apart from natural resources, labor was the main factor of production since capital requirements were negligible. It was the labor that tended to be cheap where there was no alternative employment on the land and which, in varying measure, accentuated the pull of industry towards the less fertile regions of Europe.