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Concept
Commercial Revolution
Summary
In European history, the Commercial Revolution saw the development of a European economy – based on trade – which began in the 11th century AD and operated until the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. Beginning 1100 with the Crusades, Europeans rediscovered spices, silks, and other commodities then rare in Europe. Consumer demand fostered more trade, and trade expanded in the second half of the Middle Ages (roughly 1000 to 1500 AD). Newly-forming European states, through voyages of discovery, investigated alternative trade routes in the 15th and 16th centuries, which allowed European powers to build vast, new international-trade networks. Nations also sought new sources of wealth and practiced mercantilism and colonialism. The Commercial Revolution is marked by an increase in general commerce, and in the growth of financial services such as banking, insurance and investing.
The term itself was used by Karl Polanyi in his The Great Transformation: "Politically, the centralized state was a new creation called forth by the Commercial Revolution...". Later the economic historian Roberto Sabatino Lopez, used it to shift focus away from the English Industrial Revolution. In his best-known book, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1971, with numerous reprints), Lopez argued that the key contribution of the medieval period to European history was the creation of a commercial economy between the 11th and the 14th century, centered at first in the Italo-Byzantine eastern Mediterranean, but eventually extending to the Italian city-states and over the rest of Europe. This kind of economy ran from approximately the 14th century through the 18th century. Walt Whitman Rostow placed the beginning "arbitrarily" in 1488, the year the first European sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. Most historians, including scholars such as Robert Sabatino Lopez, Angeliki Laiou, Irving W. Raymond, and Peter Spufford indicate that there was a commercial revolution of the 11th through 13th centuries, or that it began at this point, rather than later.
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