The Carolingian Economy

by Adriaan Verhulst

• ISBN13: 9780521808699
• ISBN10: 0521808693
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-21
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book is about the economy of the Carolingian empire (753–877), which extended from the Pyrenees and the northern shores of the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and from the Atlantic coast to the Elbe and Saale rivers. It is the first comprehensive evaluation of the topic in English in over twenty years. The study of the Carolingian empire as an economic rather than a political entity can be justified both because of the major interference of political authority in the economy, and because of the distinctive economic characteristic of growth; and while some regions within the empire had a much more developed economy than others, the whole period is basically one of economic expansion, in parallel with the cultural upheaval of the 'Carolingian Renaissance’.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(8)
Part I Land and people	9	(20)
Landscape and settlement	11	(12)
Demography	23	(6)
Part II Production	29	(56)
Agricultural production	31	(30)
Agricultural technique	61	(11)
Craft and industrial production	72	(13)
Part III Commerce	85	(30)
Organisation	87	(10)
Directions of trade	97	(18)
Part IV The dynamics of the Carolingian economy	115	(21)
Money and price movements	117	(9)
The economy and the state	126	(6)
The long perspective	132	(4)
Bibliography	136	(15)
Index	151