There were large and important differences in the social structures of the major European nations, but there were many shared characteristics as well. European society was dominated by a small number of noble families who enjoyed privileged access to high offices in the church, government, and military and, in most cases, exemption from taxation. Below them was a much larger class of prosperous commoners that included many clergy, bureaucrats, professionals, and military officers as well as merchants, some artisans, and rural landowners. The vast majority of men and women were very poor. Laborers, journeymen, apprentices, and rural laborers struggled to earn their daily bread and often faced unemployment and privation. The poorest members of society lived truly desperate lives, surviving only through guile, begging, or crime.
Women remained subordinated to men.
Some social mobility did occur, however, particularly in the middle. The principal engine of social change was an economy stimulated by long-distance trade and by access to the gold and silver of the Americas. Because cities enjoyed the benefits of this expansion disproportionally, they were the principal arenas of new opportunity and social mobility.


The Bourgeoisie
Europe's cities grew in response to expanding trade and rising commercial profits. In 1500 Paris was the only northern European city with over 100,000 inhabitants. By 1700 both Paris and London had populations over 500,000, and eleven other European cities contained over 100,000 people. Urban wealth came from manufacturing and finance, but especially from trade, both within Europe and overseas. The French called the urban class that dominated these activities the bourgeoisie (boor-zwah-ZEE) (burghers, town dwellers). Members of the bourgeoisie devoted long hours to their businesses and poured much of their profits back into them or into new ventures.
Even so, most had enough money to live comfortably in large houses, and some had servants. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wealthier consumers could buy exotic luxuries imported from the far corners of the earth- Caribbean and Brazilian sugar and rum, Mexican chocolate, Virginia tobacco, North American furs, East Indian cotton textiles and spices, and Chinese tea.
The Netherlands provides one of the best examples of this new bourgeois reality. The Dutch Republic was the most egalitarian European country in the early modern period. While it retained a nobility, wealthy commoners dominated its economy and politics. Manufacturers and craftsmen turned out a great variety of goods in their factories and workshops. The highly successful textile industry concentrated on the profitable weaving, finishing, and printing of cloth, leaving spinning to low-paid workers elsewhere. Along with fine woolens and linens, the Dutch also made cheaper textiles for mass markets. Factories in Holland refined West Indian sugar, brewed beer made from Baltic grain, cut Virginia tobacco, and made imitations of Chinese ceramics (see Environment and Technology: East Asian Porcelain in Chapter 20. Free from the censorship and religious persecution imposed by political and religious authorities else-where, Holland's intellectuals were active in the Scientific Revolution and early Enlightenment, and its printers published books in many languages, including manuals with the latest advances in machinery, metallurgy, agriculture, and other technical areas. For a small nation that lacked timber and other natural resources, this was a remarkable achievement.
With a population of 200,000 in 1700, Amsterdam was Holland's largest city and Europe's major port. The Dutch developed huge commercial fleets that dominated sea trade in Europe and overseas. Around 1600 they introduced new ship designs, including the fluit, or "flyboat," a large-capacity cargo ship that was inexpensive to build and required only a small crew. As their trade with distant markets developed they introduced another successful type of merchant ship, the heavily armed "East Indiaman," that helped the Dutch establish their supremacy in the Indian Ocean. By one estimate, the Dutch conducted more than half of all the oceangoing commercial shipping in the world in the seventeenth century (for details see Chapters 19 and
201. Dutch mapmaking supported these distant commercial connections (see Environment and Technology: Mapping the World).
into serdam also served as Europe's financial center. Seventeenth-century Dutch banks had such a reputation for security that wealthy individuals and governments from all over western Burope entrusted them with their money. The banks in turn invested these funds in real estate, loaned money to factory owners and governments, and provided capital for commercial opera. tions overseas.
ns overduals seeking higher returns than those provided by banks could purchase shares in a joint-stock company, a sixteenth-century forerunner of the modern corporation. Individuals bought and sold shares in specialized financial markets called stock exchanges, an Italian inno. vation transferred to the cities of northwestern Europe in the sixteenth century. The lively Amster. dam Exchange, begun as an outdoor market around 1530, moved into impressive new quarters in
1611. It remained Europe's greatest stock market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Dutch government played a direct role in this process by pioneering the creation of monopoly commercial enterprises like the Dutch East and West India Companies, which were granted monopolies for trade with the East and West Indies (see Diversity and Dominance:
Commercial Expansion and Risk). France and England soon chartered monopoly trading companies of their own. These companies then sold shares to individuals to raise large sums for overseas enterprises while spreading the risks (and profits) among many investors (see Chapter 18). In this same era insurance companies were developed to insure long-distance voyages against loss; by 1700, purchasing insurance had become standard commercial practice.
Governments also sought to promote trade by investing in infrastructure. The Dutch built numerous canals to speed transport, lower costs, and drain the lowlands for agriculture. Other governments financed canals as well, including systems of locks to raise barges up over hills.
One of the most important was the 150-mile (240-kilometer) Canal du Midi built by the French government between 1661 and 1682 to link the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
After 1650 the Dutch faced growing competition from the English, who were developing their own close association between business and government. With government support, the English merchant fleet doubled between 1660 and 1700, and foreign trade rose by 50 percent. As a result, state revenue from customs duties tripled. In a series of wars (1652-1678) the English government used its new naval might to break Dutch dominance in overseas trade and to extend England's colonial empire.
Some successful members of the bourgeoisie in England and France chose to use their wealth to raise their social status. By retiring from their businesses and buying country estates, they could become members of the gentry. They loaned money to impoverished peasants and to members of the nobility and in time increased their land ownership. Some sought aristocratic husbands for their daughters. The old nobility found such alliances attractive because of the large dowries that the bourgeoisie provided. Even in colonial settings, a small number of affluent and ambitious families purchased titles of nobility. While this kind of social mobility satisfied the desire for elevated status in hierarchical societies, it also removed the capital of the most successful bourgeoisie families from commerce and production.


Peasants and Laborers
Serfdom, which bound men and women to land owned by a local lord, had begun to decline after the great plague of the mid-fourteenth century. As population recovered in western Europe, the competition for work exerted a downward pressure on wages, reducing the usefulness of serfdom and other forms of forced labor to landowners. While there had been a brief expansion of slavery in southern Europe with the introduction of African slaves around 1500, Europeans shipped nearly all African slaves to the Americas after 1600. In eastern Europe, on the other hand, forced labor endured. Large-scale landowners in Russia and elsewhere who produced grains for growing urban markets continued to rely on the bound labor of serfs to ensure their profits.
There is much truth in the argument that western Europe continued to depend on unfree labor but kept it at a distance in its colonies rather than at home (see Chapters 17 and 18). In any event, legal freedom did little to make a peasant's life safer and more secure. The efficiency of European agriculture had improved little since 1300. As a result, bad years brought famine; good ones provided only small surpluses. Indeed, the material conditions experienced by the poor in western Europe may have worsened between 1500 and 1750 as the result of warfare, environmental degradation, and economic contractions. Europeans also felt the adverse effects of a century of relatively cool climate that began in the 1590s. During this Little Ice Age average temperatures fell only a few degrees, but the effects were startling (see Issues in World History:
Climate and Population to 1500 on page 430). By 1700 high-yielding new crops from the Americas were helping the rural poor avoid star-vation. Once grown only as famine foods, potatoes and maize (corn) became staples for the rural poor in the eighteenth century. Potatoes sustained life in northeastern and central Europe and in Ireland, while poor peasants in Italy subsisted on maize. The irony is that all of these lands were major exporters of wheat, but the laborers who planted and harvested this crop could not afford to eat it.
Other rural residents made their living as miners, lumber-jacks, and charcoal makers. The expanding iron industry in England provided work for all three, but the high consumption of wood fuel caused serious deforestation. One early-seventeenth-century observer lamented:
"Within man's memory, it was held impossible to have any want of wood in England. But ... at present, through the great consuming of wood . .. and the neglect of planting of woods, there is a great scarcity of wood throughout the whole kingdom." Eventually, the high price of wood and charcoal encouraged smelters to use coal as an alternative fuel. England's coal mining increased twelvefold, from 210,000 tons in 1550 to 2,500,000 tons in 1700 and nearly 5 million tons by 1750.
France was more heavily forested than England, but increasing deforestation prompted Jean Baptiste Colbert, France's minister of finance, to predict that "France will perish for lack of wood." In Sweden and Russia, where wood fueled the furnaces of iron foundries, deforestation became an economic threat in the late eighteenth century as iron production rose.
Even in the prosperous Dutch towns, half of the population lived in acute poverty. Authorities estimated that permanent city residents who were too poor to tax, the "deserving poor," made up 10 to 20 percent of the population. That calculation did not include the large numbers of "unworthy poor" -recent migrants from impoverished rural areas, peddlers traveling from place to place, and beggars (many with horrible deformities and sores) who tried to survive on charity. The pervasive poverty of rural and urban Europe shocked those who were not hardened to it. In about 1580 the mayor of the French city of Bordeaux (bor-DOH) asked a group of visiting Amerindian chiefs what impressed them most about European cities. The chiefs are said to have expressed astonishment at the disparity between the fat, well-fed people and the poor, half-starved men and women in rags. Why, the visitors wondered, did the poor not grab the rich by the throat or set fire to their homes??
In fact, misery provoked many rebellions in early modern Europe. For example, in 1525 peasant rebels in the Alps attacked both nobles and the clergy as representatives of the privileged and landowning classes. They had no love for merchants either, whom they denounced for lending at interest and charging high prices. Rebellions multiplied as rural conditions wors-ened. In southwestern France alone some 450 uprisings occurred between 1590 and 1715, many of them set off by food shortages and tax increases. A rebellion in southern France in 1670 began when a mob of townswomen attacked the tax collector. It quickly spread to the country, where peasant leaders cried, "Death to the people's oppressors!" Authorities dealt severely with such revolts and executed or maimed their leaders.


Women and the Family
Women's social and economic status was closely tied to that of their husbands. In some nations a woman could inherit a throne (see Table 16.1 on page 453 for examples)-in the absence of a male heir. These rare exceptions do not negate the rule that women everywhere ranked below men, but one should also not forget that class and wealth defined a woman's position in life more than her sex. The wife or daughter of a rich man, for example, though often closely confined, had a materially better life than any poor man. Sometimes a single woman might secure a position of respon-sibility, as in the case of women from good families who headed convents in Catholic countries.
But while unmarried women were routinely controlled bv fathers and mar ted woman counties. by husbands, some widows independently controlled substantial properties and other assets.
In contrast to the arranged marriages that prevailed in much of the rest of the world, young men and women in early modern Europe often chose their own spouses, but privileged families were much more likely to arrange marriages than poor ones. Royal and noble families carefully plotted the suitability of their children's marriages in furthering family interests. Bourgeois parents were less likely to force their children into arranged marriages, but the fact that nearly all found spouses within their own social class strongly suggests that the bourgeoisie promoted marriages that advanced their social aspirations or furthered their business interests.
Europeans also married later than people in other cultural regions. Sons often put off marriage until they could live on their own. Many young women also had to work-helping their parents, as domestic servants, or in some other capacity to save money for the dowry expected by potential husbands. A dowry was the money and household goods-the amount varied by social class-that enabled a young couple to begin marriage independent of their parents. As a result, the typical groom in western and central Europe could not hope to marry before his late twenties, and his bride would be a few years younger- in contrast to the rest of the world, where people usually married in their teens.
Besides enabling young people to be independent of their parents, the late age of marriage in early modern Europe also held down the birthrate and thus limited family size. Even so, about one-tenth of urban births were to unmarried women, often servants. Many mothers, unable to provide for these infants, left them on the doorsteps of churches, convents, or rich households to be raised as
"orphans." Many neglected children perished; and many young women newly arrived in Europe's fast-growing cities from the countryside were forced into brothels or begging by their poverty.