The seventeenth century has long been described as an age of general crisis, and this volume argues that the label misleads. Between roughly 1600 and 1750 the European world-economy contracted, but its outer boundaries scarcely moved and no qualitative break occurred. What took place was a downturn inside a capitalist system already functioning, not the collapse of one order into another, and it was mild precisely because the crisis of feudalism had already been resolved.

Prices, cereal yields, land use, bullion stocks, wages and population all point to a plateau rather than a catastrophe. Contraction redistributed rather than destroyed. Core zones kept the higher-value industries while cheap textiles moved to rural peripheries, landlords in those peripheries met falling profits by pressing labor harder, and a semiperipheral zone consolidated in between.

Hegemony is the other thread: Dutch primacy is traced through production, then commerce, then finance, and its decline through the same sequence in the same order.