Europe's many integrations : geography and grain markets, 1620-1913

Abstract

This article documents and examines the integration of markets across the early modern/late modern divide, exploiting the largest dataset compiled to date on grain prices, spanning one hundred European cities evenly spread across land-locked and low-land areas. Using those series, it studies various measures of integration across distances and regions, and relies on principal component analysis to identify market structures. The analysis finds that European market integration was a gradual and step-wise rather than sudden process, and that early modern market structures were shaped by geography more directly than by political borders.