ABSTRACT
Economic history has three major narrative themes: the transition from autarky to market society (or market integration), the development of technology or productive forces, and the extension of manufactory in a fundamentally agrarian world. Its central questions are why past growth was so slow and intermittent, and why economic performance differs between differently structured societies over time. This book addresses the question of what caused historical growth by examining the creation of markets and the consequences of market integration in late medieval and early modern Europe: pre-modern Europe for short.1
