ABSTRACT
A few words are necessary to explain the title of this chapter. Why does it include the words ‘between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ when the discussion is to be about the economic crisis of the years 1619-22? It is obvious that historical periods do not necessarily tally with the partitions of centuries: the life of a sovereign, the term of office of a minister, or a war, cannot be accommodated in the neat divisions of the calendar. The same applies to price tendencies and commercial affairs. Economic history has its own chronology A comparatively new science, it requires a periodization of its own. For the European economy, the sixteenth century ends in 1640 (although some would maintain that it ends in 1630). It is not just a matter of taking ten or twenty years from the seventeenth century and attributing them to the sixteenth, since this would be a rather pointless exercise and of little intellectual reward. My aim is, instead, to show how the crisis of 1619-22 did not merely represent a break between the centuries, but determined the character of the new century, marked the failure of the ambitions of a long period in history and, finally, was the point at which the great hopes of capitalism (obviously a mercantilist capitalism) in the sixteenth century were shattered.
