L'évolution du prix du blé dans quelques villes d'Europe occidentale du XVe au XVIIIe siècle

Résumé En

Wheat Price Changes in Certain Western European Towns from the 15th to the 18th Centuries. This article aims at describing the main characteristics of wheat price changes in towns for which there exist extended price records: Amsterdam, Utrecht, Koln, Anvers, Bruges, Paris, Grenoble, Toulouse, Aix-en-Provence, Beziers, Milan, Sienna and Valencia (Spain). As concerns the overall price trend—whose general outlines are already well known—one finds that the steady rise in the sixteenth century was approxi-mately twice as great as that in the eighteenth. Cyclical variations slowly dropped from about 30% in the fifteenth century to 20% in the eighteenth. It is of interest that particularily serious cyclical crises affected almost all of the cities under consideration: a total of 10 in the sixteenth century, but only 7 in the seventeenth and 3 in the eighteenth. We found that there was a slight tendency toward unification of price movement in French towns starting in 1670, though absolute differences remained very marked. This comparative study of prices allowed us to isolate global factors which clearly affected all prices, as well as specifie factors which had only local effects.