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restrictions of the urban guilds condemned large numbers to unemployment. Hence the expansion to the countryside of both the new-drapery and the traditional heavycloth industries of England. Unburdened of guild regulations on production, prices, and labor, the new rural woolen cloth industry was sufficiently elastic to respond to the demands of large-scale export markets for cheap plain cloth, by developing a large-scale organization of production forbidden by the guilds.
    From the middle of the fifteenth century, indeed, there had begun to occur a great transformation of the entire economy of Western Europe. Stagnation and depression proceeded to give way to economic progress, as the state-ridden system of protection and regulation broke apart, and capital was accumulated and invested outside the controls that had encompassed the economy. In the Netherlands, in particular, a development occurred similar to England’s: the rapid emergence of a rural cloth industry, free of urban guild and municipal regulations and taxation. Furthermore, the controls and high taxation of commerce in Bruges drove trade to Antwerp, where, free of hampering legislation, privileges, and taxes, business was able to organize itself on the basis of a new spirit of capitalist progress and economic growth. For a century, Antwerp now became the commercial capital of Europe, drawing by its freedom not only the traditional trades of English wool and cloth, Baltic grain and timber, and luxury goods of the Mediterranean, but also the growing trade in spices and sugars of the Indies—East and West. Antwerp became the main center of importation not only of English wool, but also of English woolen cloth; for woven cloth would be sent to Antwerp for dyeing and finishing. As Henri Pirenne has noted: “Never has any other port, at any period, enjoyed such worldwide importance, because none has ever been so open to all commerce, and, in the full sense of the word, so cosmopolitan. Antwerp remained faithful to the liberty which had made her fairs so successful in the fifteenth century. She attracted and welcomed capitalists from all parts of Europe, and as their numbers increased so did their opportunities of making a fortune.... There was no supervision, no control: foreigners did business with other foreigners freely as with the burgesses and natives of the country at their daily meetings. Buyers and sellers sought one another and came to terms without intermediaries.” *
    The rise of Antwerp as the great center of European commerce was complemented by the growth of the Dutch merchant marine; for the free-trading Dutch were the major carriers of goods to and from the unrestricted and progressive port of Antwerp, and were as motivated by the spirit of liberty and capitalism as was Antwerp. During the fifteenth century, the herring, upon which the Hanseatic trade had been founded, migrated from the Baltic to the North Sea and became a cornerstone of Dutch commercial development. Holland and Zeeland became the major herring fisheries of Europe; they improved the techniques of curing the herring and transporting it to all the ports of Europe, while simultaneously refining the methods of shipbuilding and fishing. Hence the Dutch were able to compete successfully with the Hanseatic traders in the Baltic, the North Sea, and the Atlantic, to Bordeaux and Lisbon.
    Too many historians have fallen under the spell of the interpretation of the late nineteenth-century German economic historians (for example, Schmoller, Bucher, Ehrenberg): that the development of a strong centralizednation-state was requisite to the development of capitalism in the early modern period. Not only is this thesis refuted by the flourishing of commercial capitalism in the Middle Ages in the local and noncentralized cities of northern Italy, the Hanseatic League, and the fairs of Champagne—not to mention the disastrous economic retrogression imposed by the burgeoning statism of the fourteenth