Exam 2 Perry CH15

Question 1

subsistence level

Answer 1

a standard of living (or wage) that provides only the bare necessities of life.
1450-1700: For most of these people, life hovered around the subsistence level, sometimes falling below subsistence during times of famine and disease.

Question 2

Guilds:

Answer 2

an association of craftsmen or merchants formed for mutual aid and protection and for the furtherance of their professional interests.
The domestic system represents an important step in the evolution of capitalism. Nevertheless, it significantly differed from the medieval guild system.

Question 3

The price revolution:

Answer 3

Linked to overseas expansion was another phenomenon: unprecedented inflation during the sixteenth century, known as the price revolution
EX. In the sixteenth century, English landlords aggressively pursued the possibilities for profit resulting from the inflation of farm prices and launched a two-pronged attack against the open-field system in an effort to transform their holdings into market-oriented, commercial ventures.

Question 4

open-field system and copyhold:

Answer 4

Arable land was worked according to ancient custom. The land was divided into strips, and each peasant of the manor was assigned a certain number of strips. This whole pattern of peasant tillage and rights in the commons was known as the open-field system. The open-field system, geared to providing subsistence for local villages, prevented large-scale farming for distant markets.
By the fifteenth century, much manor land was held by peasant tenants according to the terms of a tenure known in England as copyhold.
For the copyholder, access to the commons often made the difference between subsistence and real want because the land tilled on the manor might not produce enough to feed a family.

Question 5

enclosure and leasehold

Answer 5

enclosure, fencing off the commons and thereby depriving their tenant peasantry of the use of the common land. Restriction of rights to the commons deprived tenants of critically needed produce.
Then landlords changed the conditions of tenure from copyhold to leasehold. Copyhold was heritable and fixed; leasehold was not. When a lease came up for renewal, the landlord could raise the rent beyond the tenant’s capacity to pay.

Question 6

convertible husbandry:

Answer 6

development, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of a new kind of farming known as convertible husbandry. This farming system employed a series of innovations that replaced the old three-field system of crop rotation, which had left one-third of the land unplanted at any given time.
The new techniques allowed farmers to cultivate all their land every year and diversified agriculture. Convertible husbandry alternated the planting of soil-depleting cereals with the planting of soil-restoring legumes and grazing. For a couple of years, a field would be planted in cereals; in the third year, peas or beans would be sown to return essential nitrogen to the soil; then for the next four or five years, the field would become pasture for grazing animals, whose manure would further restore the soil for replanting cereals and restarting the cycle. The land thus returned to grain produced much more than land used in the three-field system.

Question 7

the “domestic system” (“cottage industry”)

Answer 7

well developed by the seventeenth century, gave rise to what is known as the domestic system of cottage industry. The manufacture of woolen textiles is a good example of how the system worked.

Question 8

Capitalism:

Answer 8

The domestic system represents an important step in the evolution of capitalism. It was not industrial capitalism, because there were no factories and the work was done by hand rather than by power machinery; nevertheless, the domestic system significantly broke with the medieval guild system.

Question 9

Mercantilism

Answer 9

The second government stimulus comprised state policies meant to increase investment, which they no doubt sometimes did, though not always. Collectively, these policies constitute what is known as mercantilism: the conscious pursuit by governments of courses of action supposed to augment national wealth and power. One characteristic expression of mercantilism was the pursuit of a favorable balance of international payments.

Question 10

consumer society:

Answer 10

Between 1660 and 1750, England became the world’s first consumer society: more and more people had more and more money to spend, and they acquired a taste for conspicuous consumption (which previously had always been confined to the aristocracy). Discretionary goods were available—lace, tobacco, housewares, flowers— and consumers wanted them.

Question 11

Double-entry bookkeeping

Answer 11

During the Middle Ages, important advances were made in business practices, such as double-entry bookkeeping and the growth of credit and banking facilities.

Question 12

insurance

Answer 12

Business practices related to shipping also developed in the fourteenth century. A system of maritime insurance, without which investors would have been highly reluctant to risk their money on expensive vessels, evolved in Florence. By 1400, maritime insurance had become a regular item of the shipping business, and it was destined to play a major role in the opening of Atlantic trade.

Question 13

joint-stock company

Answer 13

At least equally important to overseas expansion were business enterprises known as joint-stock companies, which allowed small investors to buy shares in a large venture. These companies made possible the accumulation of the huge amounts of capital needed for large-scale operations such as the building and deployment of merchant fleets—amounts quite beyond the resources of one person.

Question 14

Bank of England (1694):

Answer 14

established in 1694 as a private bank to fund the English government’s war effort against France

Question 15

What economy was England’s chief rival in the seventeenth century?

Answer 15

Dutch republic (the Netherlands)

Question 16

What, historically, was the relationship between the fiscal-military state and mercantile capitalism?

Answer 16

a “fiscal-military state” relied heavily on mercantile capitalism to finance its military power, essentially using the wealth generated through trade and colonial exploitation to fund large armies and navies, often through policies that heavily favored merchant classes and protected their trade interests in exchange for supporting the state’s military ambitions; this created a symbiotic relationship where the state used its military might to secure trade advantages, while merchants contributed significantly to the state’s war chest through taxes and economic activity.

Question 17

John Kay and the flying shuttle

Answer 17

shuttle—allowed wool weavers to double their output and to work at home. Weavers produced faster than spinners until James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1768) enabled the operator to work several spindles at once powered only by human energy.

Question 18

James Hargreaves and the spinning jenny:

Answer 18

spinning jenny (1768) enabled the operator to work several spindles at once powered only by human energy.

Question 19

Richard Arkwright:

Answer 19

powered a spinning machine by water or animal energy.

Question 20

Samuel Crompton and the spinning mule:

Answer 20

(1779), Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule powered many spindles, first by human and later by animal and water energy. These changes improved spinning so much that there were shortages in weaving until edmund cartwright

Question 21

Edmund Cartwright and the power loom:

Answer 21

Edmund Cartwright developed a power loom in 1787. To the end of the century, there was a race to speed up first the spinning and then the weaving by changing the power to looms or to new, larger devices for the jenny.

Question 22

James Watt and the steam engine:

Answer 22

James Watt, who perfected the steam engine, had been tutored in Newtonian mechanics. His engine revolutionized the manufacturing of cotton and the draining of coal mines.

Question 23

Henry Cort:

Answer 23

Coal made brittle metal until Henry Cort copied the French practice of using a furnace with two separate compartments, one for the coke and one for the iron ore. By the 1780s, trial and error, copying, and adapting had perfected wrought iron so that it became the most widely used metal for construction and machinery.

Question 24

Henry Bessemer:

Answer 24

In the 1860s, Henry Bessemer converted pig iron into steel by removing impurities in the iron.

Question 25

William Siemens:

Answer 25

William Siemens and Pierre and Émile Martin developed the open-hearth process, which could handle much greater amounts of metal than Bessemer’s converter. Steel quickly replaced iron.

Question 26

The railroad:

Answer 26

But canals were outmoded fairly quickly by railroads, which, though they were much more expensive, were more flexible. Railroads also caught the public imagination much as automobiles, airplanes, and space ships would in the twentieth century. Steam-powered engines replaced horse-powered railroads in the 1820s. Thinking railroads were essential for defense and fostered national unity, Continental governments expended major efforts to develop rail networks.

Question 27

limited liability:

Answer 27

In the 1850s, limited liability was applied to the stock of most English businesses, and a little later it was extended to banking and insurance companies. By the 1860s, France, Germany, and the United States permitted limited liability, which released a flow of savings into industry.

Question 28

What were the major social transformations that resulted from industrialization?

Answer 28

Urbanization
Changes in social structure:

Question 29

Changes in social structure:

Answer 29

bourgeois politicians held the highest offices in much of Western Europe, sharing power with aristocrats, but in Central and Eastern Europe, aristocrats remained dominant into the twentieth century. Wealthy bourgeois emulated the aristocracy—buying great estates, marrying their daughters to sons of aristocrats—but they were the elite of the new industrial age, not of the Old Regime. Although some barriers may have diminished between the landed elites and the middle class, industrialization sharpened distinctions between the middle and laboring classes. Equally as diverse as the middle class, laborers encompassed different economic levels—rural laborers, miners, and city workers. Rural laborers included farmers and cottage workers and those who were both.

Question 31

the domestic system:

Answer 31

both. In the 1700s and 1800s, much production took place in the villages, usually in the home, hence the term domestic system. A middleman supplied materials to a farming family, who wove or spun them at piecework rates. This system, which preceded factory production, undercut workers’ livelihoods and ultimately forced their children or grandchildren into urban labor.

Question 32

artisans (in comparison with factory labor):

Answer 32

The artisans were the largest group of city workers until the 1850s, and in some places for much longer. Some of them worked in construction, printing, small tailoring or dressmaking establishments, food preparation, and food processing. Others were craftspeople who produced such luxury items as furniture, jewelry, lace, and velvet. As a group, artisans were distinct from factory workers; their technical skills were difficult to learn, and traditionally their crafts were regulated by guilds, which still served both social and economic functions. Artisans were usually educated; they could read and write and generally shared technical knowledge and political discussion. They lived in a city or village for generations and maintained stable families, often securing places for their children in their crafts.

Question 33

the English Factory Acts:

Answer 33

The English Factory Acts were a series of measures, beginning in 1802, that limited the hours of women and children who labored in mines and factories. By 1833, children under thirteen could work no more than nine hours a day, and no one aged thirteen to eighteen could work more than twelve hours or at night.

Question 34

the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834:

Answer 34

In 1834, a reform of the Poor Law (which dated from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I) tried to differentiate between the “deserving” poor and the “undeserving” poor. The New Poor Law required anyone receiving assistance to live in a prisonlike workhouse. Legislators thought only those who were truly needy would submit to such conditions just to receive a meal and shelter. They were right. The poor and the unemployed working class hated the workhouse, where families were separated by age and sex, miserably fed, and hired out to manufacturers and farmers for less than the going wage. Nonetheless, in the “hungry forties,” poverty was so widespread that there were not enough workhouses for the homeless and the jobless.

Question 35

Secularization

Answer 35

The Industrial Revolution also hastened the secularization of European life. In the cities, former villagers, separated from traditional communal ties, drifted away from their ancestral religion. Governments’ power over individuals through public education and required military service contributed greatly to a secular, nationalistic society.