General accounts will be found also in those two sources. Cheyney’s ** European Background includes some half dozen chapters on important topics in the history of commerce; these chapters offer, in some cases, the only available reading in English, and the book can be warmly recommended. Another book, which is inexpensive, readable, and very valuable, is Beazley’s **Prince Henry; this is full on the beginnings of exploration, and has an especially good collection of early maps. The first part of Fiske’s **Discovery of America presents an admirably written survey of conditions leading to the explorations. The first volume of the Exploration of the World by Jules Verne, N. Y., Scribner, 1879, 3 vols., covers the medieval period as well as that of the great discoveries; it has the merits and failings which the author’s name suggests.

For Prince Henry and the Portuguese discoveries see **Beazley, Stephens, Portugal, chap. 7, Cheyney, chap. 4, or, for a brief and readable account, Oxley, Romance, chap. 7.

For the period following the discoveries, E. J. Payne, Voyages of the Elizabethan seamen, London, 1880, can be recommended; it contains original accounts of the exploits of the great English seamen of the time of Elizabeth (Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake, etc.). Howard Pyle, *The Buccaneers, N. Y., Macmillan, and David Hannay, The sea trader, London, 1912, continue the narrative to a later period.

CHAPTER XVI
DEVELOPMENT OF THE ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION

156. Agriculture.—The next important subject to be discussed in considering the great changes in commerce in the modern period is the development of the economic organization. The influence of the discovery of new lands, new routes, and new wares is so obvious that the discoveries are often represented as the chief cause of the growth of commerce in the modern period. They were unquestionably very important factors in this growth, but European commerce was developing without them, and would have felt their influence much less if it had not been changing in its internal structure. Men were applying new methods of cooperation, which enabled them to make more of their resources at home and to utilize with greatest effect the opportunities for gain abroad. Even at the end of the period the commerce of England with Europe was larger than with all the other continents together.

We shall review briefly in the following sections the main changes in the different branches of production. The topic of agriculture must be dismissed with but a few words. There was a general movement toward freedom of the agricultural classes of western Europe at the beginning of the period. Wars and other political interruptions checked the movement in France, and brought about an actual decline of the cultivators in Germany; England was the only important country in which the country classes became perfectly free. In Europe as a whole, however, the conditions of production in agriculture were decidedly better than they had been in the Middle Ages, and the increased product supported a larger population and furnished a basis for a more extended trade.

157. Development of manufacturing organization in England; persistence of gild restrictions elsewhere.—In manufactures, also, there was a movement toward freedom in the more favored countries. We shall see, in the history of England, how greatly English manufactures, and the commerce depending on them, advanced under the leadership of merchants and capitalists who broke through the old gild restrictions. The striking feature, however, in the manufactures of most countries of this period is the maintenance of the gild system, which became a most serious check on industrial advance. It will be remembered that the gilds grew originally out of the union of artisans in any trade, who banded together to protect their interests, and who were granted certain privileges, especially that of monopoly, that they might regulate the trade more efficiently and so protect the interests of consumers also. At the present time the interests of consumers are sufficiently protected by the competition of producers, who do not need government regulations to tell them that they must sell good wares at low prices if they desire to succeed; and just as soon as exchange becomes sufficiently active to stimulate competition the public gains by having restrictions abolished. In most of the European countries, however, the gild privileges and restrictions were retained until the nineteenth century, with results set forth in the following paragraph.

158. Evils of the gilds.—(1) The privilege of monopoly was abused by limiting entrance to the gild in various ways, so that production was restricted and prices were raised to the detriment of merchant and consumer. Laborers suffered, also, by the lessened demand for their services. (2) Gilds came into frequent conflict over the question as to which had the right to exercise a particular branch of trade or manufacture; these quarrels were similar to those arising between trade unions at the present time. Manufacturers suffered from the separation of allied trades; and time and money, which ought to have gone into the business, were wasted in long lawsuits. (3) The full members of the gilds, the masters, tried to keep the laborers (apprentices and journeymen) in an inferior position, and granted promotion by favor rather than by merit; laborers lost the incentive to good work and were tempted to idleness and disorder. (4) The masters tried to preserve equality among themselves. Any master who was sufficiently enterprising to attempt to extend his business by introducing improvements or by employing more men was pulled back to the general level. (5) Technical improvements were prevented also by the regulations which were adopted originally to secure good quality of the product, but which hardened into a routine prescribing the details of every process of manufacture. (6) After all the restrictions, consumers did not get good quality even when they paid high prices. They could not punish the producers of poor goods by withdrawing their custom; and scamped work, adulteration, and fraud were common.

159. Development of the commercial organization. Rise of wholesalers.—Reviewing the substance of the last few paragraphs we find that the advance in agriculture was local and incomplete, while in manufactures it failed, in great measure, to displace a wornout system inherited from a preceding period. Only in commerce itself were the changes rapid and general in western Europe. Methods of business which before had been practised in only a few Italian cities, were now adopted in the country north of the Alps, and developed rapidly in the leading commercial districts.

A class of professional wholesale merchants now sprang up. Before this time, of course, merchants had on occasion dealt in considerable quantities of wares, but even the leading medieval merchants seem to have been glad to keep up their business by selling in small quantities to consumers. Only in the last century of the Middle Ages do we find in Germany merchants who confined themselves entirely to wholesale trade. As yet they had not become specialists in any one particular ware. An idea both of the variety and of the extent of their transactions can be gained from the business of John von Bodeck, who was a merchant in Frankfort about 1600. He bought silk and drugs in Venice, spices in Amsterdam, and sent them for sale to Hamburg; he bought iron and wax in Hamburg and sent them to Spain; he bought indigo and wool in Spain and sent them to Amsterdam and Antwerp; he bought rye in Amsterdam and sent it to Genoa.