Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 1 (2004), p. 116

Adriaan Verhulst has written an useful and accessible Cambridge Medieval textbook on the Carolingian economy, drawing upon a lifetime’s research. The book focuses upon economic issues as opposed to the more familiar political ones made famous by the book’s dedicatee, François Ganshof. The short introduction provides a clear overview of the historiography of this subject, briefly describing in turn the contribution of major medieval historians including Henri Pirenne, Alfons Dopsch, Maurice Lombard, Sture Bolin, Philip Grierson and, more recently Georges Duby. Verhulst himself belongs in this galaxy of distinguished historians. The book then comprises ten clearly written chapters, amply footnoted, on landscape and settlement, demography, agricultural production, agricultural technique, craft and production, commercial organization, directions of trade, money and prices, the state economy and, finally, a short but cogent summary offering a ‘long perspective’. In many ways, the book is a model of synthesis – a historian’s summary serving as an attractive first step towards reading Michael McCormick’s monumental The origins of the medieval economy (CUP, 2001) which appeared as Verhulst’s book was in press.

Verhulst summarizes an impressive amount of information into each of these chapters. Not only does he provide a compelling overview of the historical debates, but he manages a considerable survey of the pertinent and contemporary archaeological literature from both sides of the Alps. Much of this is taken from the recent European Science Foundation’s ‘Transformation of the Roman World’ project. The chapter on agricultural history review production is a typical example. He reduces the recent debates stimulated by Pierre Toubert on Italian estate management in this period to one cogent page. Many might quibble, but it is an invaluable index to Toubert’s vast studies of Latium’s estate histories. The chapters on crafts as well as commerce are no less impressive for the wealth of archaeological and documentary data woven together.

The underlying thrust of the book is developed from a quotation by Chris Wickham that the Carolingian economy was ‘a network of subsistence-based exchange’ (p.2). Verhulst uses this to distinguish between minimalists and maximalists: those who interpret the sources to show a closed agrarian-based economy without towns, merchants or trade, or those who, largely using data from Carolingian estate surveys, polyptychs, believe this age marked the ‘take off’ of the western economy. Verhulst’s position is clear: taking a ‘long perspective’, he concludes that it is the cyclical movements within the period that should now command our interest. Towns and trade, he argues, are the best indicators of these movements (as McCormick tellingly shows in his huge book cited above). Interestingly, he uses the archaeological typology of trading towns, emporia, as a framework for relocating the familiar historical events of the age. Hence, while clearly uncertain about the motives for the early eighth-century rise of the emporia, it is, he maintains, the great zenith of these places in the years from 775–90 to c. 830 which sets the stage for the ninth century. On the one hand, their decline, he argues, is responsible for the Viking attacks. On the other hand, thanks to the successful establishment of well-organized ‘big estates’, producing surpluses, during a pause in the Viking attacks in the 860s new towns were created which became the cornerstone of the middle ages.

Verhulst is possibly the first historian to acknowledge these nuances in the economic cycles using archaeological data. Notwithstanding ever increasing refinements of these data (see for example, Simon Coupland, ‘Trading places: Quentovic and Dorestad reconsidered’, Early Medieval Europe 11 (2002), pp.209–32 and Tim Pestell and Katharina Ulmschneider (eds), Markets in early medieval Europe (2003)), this is a historian using contemporary sources, evaluating them and setting a new historical agenda that is all the more impressive for being concise and compelling. As a textbook it is presently without rival and well worthy of the best work of its dedicatee.