ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on economic considerations both to balance the picture, restoring some sense of the continuing industrial importance and vitality of European towns, and to put into perspective the very real urban rigidities that remain. Marxist analysis uses the term 'costs of reproduction' of labour to capture the first category and portrays the second as resistance to capitalist exploitation. Also, urban subsistence wages might be less volatile than rural ones: towns were far better equipped to deal with dearth because of their organized access to distant food supplies. Before turning to the issue of urban inflexibility, however, it is necessary to look at the composition of demand for manufactures, since some goods offered less scope for highly developed spatial divisions of labour than did others. It focuses on stability explained in the framework of conventional microeconomics, although translating the realities of the early modern town into the conceptual apparatus of production and cost theory requires attention to cultural factors.
