from ecological processes with an economic component We turn to economic processes with an ecological component. We need to examine how the economy, which under feudalism was virtually embraced within the political system, achieved autonomy. Economic development in its European form required above all freedom from arbitrary political acts concerning private property. Goods and factors of production had to be free to be traded. Prices had to be set by unconditional exchange if they were to be undistorted signals of what goods and services really were in demand, where and in what quantities.

Power in the Dark Ages was in the hands of those who commanded the means of coercion. A market economy was an improbable child to be fathered by men who held their position by the assertion of will backed when the need arose by personal victory in combat. A strategic question of economic history concerns the conditions under which power came instead to be exercised by the purse, with police powers mostly a latent threat and physical force on any scale in the control of the central government. Several centuries of change and experiment, recurrent rather than wholly cumulative, were needed to establish that shift in the distribution of power.