ABSTRACT
The chapters on the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era haveshown us history at high speed: drastic changes in government, in legal systems, in property relations, in international boundaries, in ways of thinking about society and politics – all compressed into a relatively few years. No less drastic were the means by which changes were brought about: revolution, civil wars, large-scale warfare between the Great Powers. Now we will turn to another history, proceeding at a decelerated pace, where changes occurred gradually over decades, and their impact is measured in the demographic abstractions of birth-or death-rates, in the dry figures of the gross national product or real wages, in such unspectacular developments as the transformation of crop rotation systems, the building of canals and paved highways, or small producers’ declining direct access to the market.
