John U. Nef

Silver Production in Central Europe, 1450-1618

t X zHE history of silver is one of the few topics treated by economic historians which has caught the attention of civil servants, of A other administrators, and of students of economics. Any general interest in economic history is welcome, for the development of this subject in its broader aspects, in its relations to other branches of history, can help pave the way for a fresh understanding of the history of civilization. The public interest in the history of silver can be explained to a considerable degree by its relation to the history of money and prices. Its importance for the recent history of civilization is small. But in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern age, when credit was relatively little developed, the supplies of silver played a greater part than they do today in determining the wealth and political power of sovereign states. During the Middle Ages and until the thirties of the sixteenth century most of the supplies for all the European countries had come from Germany and from other parts of the disintegrating Holy Roman Empire to the south and east. With the discovery of rich mines in South and Central America, the chief source of supplies shifted abruptly from central Europe to the New World, at a time when months were usually required to make the hazardous journey from Germany across the Atlantic. Adolf Soetbeers enterprising work on the output of precious metal since the discovery of America,2 has been the accepted source for figures concerning the production of silver in central Europe for some

Civilization at the Crossroads - II

The last four or five decades have been a period of increasing tension and insecurity throughout the world, especially among the Western peoples. Pessimism, cynicism, and despair have gained the ascendancy over most of Europe; uncertainty and lack of confidence over much of the United States. It would be natural for businessmen and for social scientists, who measure civilization mainly in terms of real income or the volume of industrial production, to attribute this tension and discouragement to the slowing down in the rate of industrial progress, to the material crisis of the twentieth century.

The Industrial Revolution Reconsidered

Economic history, as a subject of separate study, is now nearly a hundred years old. No other idea which has emerged from it has gained a tithe of the attention that scholars, teachers, and the general public have focused on the “industrial revolution.” Yet there is scarcely a conception in economic history more misleading than one which relates all the important problems of our modern civilization to economic changes that are represented as taking place in England between 1760 and 1832. There is scarcely a conception that rests on less secure foundations than one which finds the key to an understanding of the modern industrialized world in these seventy-two years of English economic history.

Industrial Europe at the Time of the Reformation (ca. 1515--ca. 1540)

DURING the last four hundred years the Western peoples have concerned themselves, to a greater degree than any other peoples before them, with the conquest of the material world. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Europeans generally agreed that the highest ideal in human conduct was the renunciation of earthly pleasures, even though the pleasures themselves might be legitimate in the sight of God. They subordinated actual life to certain absolute values, derived, as they

The Responsibility of Economic Historians

The immediate future of economic history is here. As I look over the program of our sessions, it seems plain that all of us are bound to be thinking about the nature of that future. Our president will speak on this subject with an authority that the rest of us cannot command. But it is up to each of us, however humble, to make such a contribution as the means at our disposal permit. Creative discussion always helps men to edge a little closer toward the truth. Let us hope there will be much of it during the next two days. Professor Innis has asked me to open the formal part of this session by some brief remarks on the relation of economic history to American civilization. I thank him for his confidence, but wish that he had placed the task in more competent hands. The subject I have selected is a vast and complicated one, and all I can hope to offer are a few rough and general suggestions. What I have to say is intended to provoke discussion.

The Significance of The Review of Politics

During the past fourteen years, since the entry of the United States into the Second World War, and especially since the end of the war (with its disillusioning peace blending into the so-called cold war), the United States has had thrust upon it the problems of the overwhelming difficulties of world leadership. Leadership in the true sense of the word cannot be totalitarian or authoritarian. It must be intellectual, moral and spiritual. This our leading statesmen have sometimes recognized, though not, I am inclined to think, often enough. In any event, it is in these spheres that our peoples have been perhaps the least prepared for our mission. Even in the natural sciences, one of the principal creative sources of American leadership has been individual scientists—such as Einstein, Fermi and Teller—bom and trained in Europe, who found asylum in the United States from Nazi or Fascist tyranny. In so far as the creative mind and its place in the national life are concerned, our main weakness has not been, however, in the natural sciences. During the first half of the twentieth century in the United States these have become distinguished in their own right. When it comes to the practical application of science we have led the world. In no other country have the results of new scientific knowledge been utilized technologically to produce as high a standard of living, measured in material quantity, as in the United States.

Architecture and Western Civilization

All aspects of the life of an age are interrelated, even when the interrelations express themselves in cross purposes and intellectual dissolution. Whether or not they embody forms and ideas worthy to be dignified by the name of architecture, the buildings of any period are an expression of it. They reflect, in varying degrees, its economic and social development, the enactments of its legislative bodies, the acts of its administrative officials, the decisions of its law courts, the character and course of its wars. They also express, again in varying degrees, its methods of education, its religious life, its natural science, its thought and its art. They are, to some extent, the expression of past traditions and works of the mind which have retained a hold on the life of the period or have been revived by its thinkers and artists, as classical antiquity has been revived again and again in Western European history since the eleventh century.

On the Future of American Civilization

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries.… Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectively persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire. It spread, and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

Peut-on dégager, d’une masse oppressive de connaissances, les grandes lignes d’un ordre et d’une unité ?

? Se pueden despejar de un caudal opresivo de conocimientos, las grandes linead de un orden y de una unidad ? — Texto de la ponencia que presento, en el Instituto, en junio de 1973, un historiador de la revolution industrial. La creacion del Comite del pensamiento social, primera facultad interdisciplinaria, en la Universidad de Chicago, dedicada a hacer la sintesis de los lazos entre ciencias experimentales y estudios sociales y humanistas. La universalidad de esta institucion.

The Historical Unreality of the Cold War

The mechanization, the automation, the astounding speed of travel and transport and communication, the gigantic cities, the growing density of population which is occurring almost everywhere in our time — are all novel. This Academy and the Center for Human Understanding of the University of Chicago have been established to help cope with these unique conditions of existence, which arrest us as scientists, as historians and other students of man, as writers and other artists, as business men and workers of every kind.