ABSTRACT
The economic landscape of a town in the ancien regime was a constantly changing chessboard where the rules of the game tended to create a balance of mutually accepted roles. The balance was always very fine; the chessmen were for ever haggling over the rules and dreaming up new tactics. Numerous factors, internal or external, trigger and mould the process of continual readjustment. Consider, say, the consequences of technological innovation on the demarcations of labour, or the commercial and economic impact of foreign markets opening and closing as war or plague dictated. Events of this kind jeopardised whole chains of production and wrecked any previous equilibrium.
