Driven by crises: Price integration on the grain market in late medieval Flanders
研究利用14世纪早期佛兰德城市的新粮食价格序列，发现14世纪中期的价格冲击促进了粮食市场整合，危机时期市场运行更好但价格持续上涨，挑战了中世纪晚期经济收缩和贸易孤立的观点。
Abstract At the centre of the debate on pre‐industrial economic growth is the study of market integration, a topic that has increasingly been the focus of intense scientific interest in recent decades. However, this has remained limited to the early modern and modern periods, mainly due to the availability of relevant data. New grain price series have been constructed for several Flemish cities dating back to the early fourteenth century. As one of the most populated regions in the late Middle Ages, the case of Flanders shows that the extraordinary sequence of price shocks in the mid‐fourteenth century had a positive impact on the degree of price integration in the grain market. The Flemish grain market functioned better in times of crisis, but caused prices to rise steadily across the entire integrated system during the prolonged crisis period. Whereas many studies have labelled the late Middle Ages – particularly the fifteenth century – as an age of economic contraction with more isolated trade networks, this study shows that Flanders remained a highly economically integrated region.