Crisis Before Economy

The financial experience of mid-sixteenth-century Englishmen and women was dominated by an inflation so sustained, so unprecedented, and so traumatic as to be known to modern historians as ‘the price revolution’. Contemporary writers addressing ‘this dearth which in such plenty comes, contrary to his kind’, recognized the inflation as a crisis disrupting received systems of value, one in which prices had somehow become detached from the cyclical variations of agricultural plenty and scarcity. But they did not express this crisis as we would, as an economic crisis, proper to the totality we know as ‘the economy’. Rather, the ‘dearth’ was a crisis of the ‘common-wealth’, the political totality that inscribed material goods as continuous with social and even religious goods. For these writers, the crux between the normative administration of common-wealth and the disastrous aberration of ‘dearth’ was the Crown's new policy of debasement of the silver coinage. The material alloy of brass in the sterling made visible the political corruption of the masters of policy, manifesting the close interdependence of material and political values in the making of the debased coin. The ideological freight of debasement and purification articulated these objects not only in the local, daily registers of getting and spending, nor only in the registers of fiscal policy, but into the sacral register of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Together, these convergent discourses of debasement help to define the difference between the sixteenth-century experience of ‘common-wealth’ and modern economic experience.