Melissa Levin 1-19-10

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AP Euro The Expansion of Europe in the 18 Century

 Rising Atlantic powers- Holland, France, and above all-England

 End of the 17th c. economy of Europe- agrarian.
 About 80% of people drew their livelihoods from agriculture (possible
exception Holland)
 Land was stingy, output was distressingly low, harvests were poor
 when lands caprices + bad weather= catastrophic
 famine foods- people gathered chestnuts, bark, dandelions and grass and ate
these substitutes to escape starvation. Such inadequate food led to illnesses
and epidemics. # of deaths soared in famine years.

 open field system- greatest accomplishment of medival agriculture developed

by European peasants. Divided the land to be cultivated by the peasants of a
given village into several large fields , which were in turn cut up into long,
narrow strips. Peasants farmed each field as a community.
 Problem: exhaustion of the soil. After planting year after year, nitrogen int eh
soil depleted, crop failiure certain.
 Crop rotations introduced, villages maintained open meadows for hay and
natural pasture. Lands were called common lands- set aside primarily for
draft horses and oxen.
 Poor women would go through fields picking up single grains that had fallen.
Painting The Gleaners by Jean Francois Millet shows this.
 State and landlord heavy taxes stripped peasants of their meager earnings.
 Peasants in eastern Europe worse off then serfs in western Europe. Few
limitations on amount of forced labor the lord would require.
 Social conditions better in western Europe. Peasants were generally free from
serfdom.

 Possible way for peasants to improve conditions: take land from those who
owned but did not labor. Technological process, new farming methods to
enable Europeans to produce more and eat more. Replace the idle fallows
with crops. This led to the agricultural revolution- greatest milestone for
humans.
 Enclosure- innovating agriculturalists needed to enclose and consolidate their
scattered holdings into compact, fenced in fields in order to farm more
effectively. The innovators needed to enclose their individual shares of the
natural pasture.
 The old system of unenclosed open fields and the new system of continuous
rotation coexisted in Europe for a long time.

 The new methods of the agricultural rev. originated in the Low countries .
The vibrant, dynaimic middle class of seventheenth c. republican Holland was
the most advanced in Europe.