The relationship between power and the monetary economy has fascinated historians, particulary with reference to the rise and fall of capitalist states. Capitalism has been potentiallyvisible since the dawn of history, and that it has developed in associations with cycles of political power down the ages. Far in advance of the industrial revolution, there were signs announcing the coming of capitalism: the rise of the towns and of trade, the emergence of a labour market, the increasing density of society, the spread of the use of money, the rise in output, the expansion of long- distance trade or to put it another way the international market.

When, in the first century AD, India penetrated the islands of the East Indies; when Rome held an area even greater than the Mediterranean in her power; when China invented paper money in the ninth century; when the West reconquered the Mediterranean between the eleventh and thirteenth century; when a world market began to take shape in the sixteenth century, the 'biography of capital' was starting to be written in the secular trend.   It would however be a mistake to imagine capitalism as something that developed in a series of stages or leaps - from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism to finance capitalism, with some kind of regular progression from one phase to the next, with 'true' capitalism appearing only at the late stage when it took over production, and the only permissible term for the early period being mercantile capitalism or even 'pre-capitalism'. In fact the great 'merchants' of the past never specialized: they went in indiscriminately, simultaneously or successively, for trade, banking, finance, speculation on the Stock Exchange, 'industrial' production, whether under the putting-out system or more rarely in manufactories.

The whole panoply of forms of capitalism - commercial, industrial, banking, art and architecture - was already deployed in thirteenth- century Florence, in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, in London before the eighteenth century.

Two centuries after its beginnings, European captialism brought great prosperity  to the cluster of  North Italian towns centred on the Venetian Republic.  Here was the coincidental rebirth of much that the Greeks and the Romans had known, but which mediaevalism had forgotten or ignored. Rennaisance, or "rebirth" is too simple a word to describe a movement that discovered ways of living, seeing and thinking that Greek and Roman civilization had never envisaged.

What happened, though it was of massive importance, happened gradually. The slow emergence, first of all in Italy, later spreading northward across the Alps and westward to Southern France and Spain, of a new attitude to the art of living manifested itself in all the arts, but in none more strikingly than in painting and sculpture. However, this was only one expression of the spirit of an observant, enquiring, intelligent people, deeply concerned with the behaviour and sensations of men and women and with the appearance of the material world in which they live.

It is undoubtedly the case that in the early nineteenth century, the coming of machines made industrial production a high-profit sector and capitalism went over to it on a massive scale. But it was by no means confined to this sector. When the first fantastic profits of the cotton boom in Britain fell, in the face of competition, to 2 or 3%, the accumulated capital was diverted to other industries, steel and railways for instance. To an even greater extent there was a return to finance capitalism, to banking, to more speculation than ever on the Stock Exchange, to major international trade, to the profits derived from exploitation of the colonies, to government loans etc. Power was in the hands of a few families who maintained economic power because they had little or no specialization in production systems. For example, the Wendel family in France were steelmasters, bankers, mill- owners in the Vosges and suppliers of military equipment for the Algiers expedition in 1830. In general, when money could no longer be made from local natural resources, capital moved on leaving a much changed environment.

The theory of prices was worked out in about 1929- 32 by economists looking at the contemporary situation. Historians followed suit, and thanks to their work, it gradually became possible to go back in time, producing a series of ideas, evidence and a new language. The overall movement was divided up into particular economic movements, each being given its own code, period and, if possible, significance.

Seasonal shifts, which can still play a role even today are usually obscured in the complicated economies of the present day. But they were not always so invisible. Poor harvests or food shortages could in a few months create inflation equivalent to the entire sixteenth-century price revolution! The poor were then obliged to live on as little as possible until the next harvest.

Other movements, or as they tend to be called cycles, imply a much longer time-span. In order to distinguish between them, they have been dubbed with the names of certain economists: thus a Kitchin is a short cycle of three or four years; the Juglar, or intra-decade cycle lasts from 6 to 8 years; a Labrousse (also known as an intercycle or inter-decade cycle) can last 10 or 12 years or more: this is the combination of the latter phase of a Juglar (three or four years) and of a whole Juglar which fails to take off and thereafter remains at a low level: a half-Juglar plus a whole Juglar in other words. The classic example of the Labrousse is the intercycle which brought depression and stagnation to France between 1778 and 1791 on the eve of the Revolution, which it must surely have helped to unleash. The hypercycle or Kuznets, a double Juglar, lasts about twenty years, while a Kondratief spreads over a half-century or more: one Kondratieff began in 1791, reached its peak in 1817 and then went downhill until 1851, lasting almost until the Second Empire in France (1852-1870).

All these cycles are of course contemporaneous with each other, synchronic: they coexist, overlap and intensify or diminish by their own movements the general trend. But it is technically easy to divide the general trend into particular movements, and to eliminate one group or another, the better to study an individual movement.