Whales, Logbooks, and DNA
Sixteenth-century Venice was a fascinating place. The glitterati of the Italian Renaissance were close by. The canali (the sewage system) were the best in Europe. The economy was booming. Although comings and goings of the wealthy and powerful are well re
- PDF / 200,708 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 432 x 648 pts Page_size
- 109 Downloads / 171 Views
Whales, Logbooks, and DNA Stephen R. Palumbi
Historical Data Need Careful Analysis Sixteenth-century Venice was a fascinating place. The glitterati of the Italian Renaissance were close by. The canali (the sewage system) were the best in Europe. The economy was booming. Although comings and goings of the wealthy and powerful are well recorded almost everywhere, the history of common commerce is particularly clear in Venice, a center of the European merchant class. “I can without exaggeration claim to see the dealers, merchants and traders on the Rialto of the Venice of 1530 . . . ,” assures Fernand Braudel in his extensive economic history of Europe. This claim is abundantly documented in a superb written record of the ins and outs of Venetian market commerce—but there is a danger in using these data to answer questions for which they were not designed. Take, for example, the evidence for economic stability in late-sixteenthcentury Venice. Detailed price records show that the cost of a loaf of bread in Venetian markets varied by less than 20 percent during the last fifteen years of the century. Because bread was the main market commodity for poorer workers, its price substantially dictated the quality of life for working people. Long-term stability in bread prices suggests long-term economic health and stability for all strata of society. However, this was a time J.B.C. Jackson (eds.), Shifting Baselines: The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-029-3_9, © Island Press 2011
163
164 m e t h o d s i n h i s t o r i c a l m a r i n e e c o l o g y
Figure 9.1. Grain prices and weight of bread loaves in sixteenth-century Venice. (A) Grain prices (lira) varied twofold in Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, despite stable prices for bread. (B) The weight of bread loaves sold in late-sixteenthcentury Venice. Bread prices could remain stable in the face of varying grain prices because the size of a loaf of bread changed with grain cost. (Data from Chapter 2 in Braudel [1978]).
of upheaval, and other data show that grain prices changed wildly during this time (figure 9.1). If grain prices varied, but bread prices did not, one possibility is that Venice, like ancient Rome, sold grain below market price in order keep the cost of bread artificially low in times of economic turmoil. This historical conclusion may appear logical and compelling, but it turns out to be wrong. It depends upon an inadvertent but critical assumption about the historical record. In fact, although the price of a loaf of bread was stable, Venetian bakers varied the size of loaves depending on the price of grain (figure 9.1), a practice that was common in Renaissance Europe. As a result, a loaf was always the same price, but in hard times, that loaf would be up to 50 percent smaller and feed far fewer people. Stable bread prices do not provide conclusive evidence of economic stability. Braudel’s data are not at fault in the above example. But the use of historical observations to answer questions for which they wer
Data Loading...
