The Great Wave

The Great Wave compares long periods of sustained price inflation from medieval Europe to the twentieth century. Fischer identifies successive movements in which population, food and energy supplies, money, credit and state finance combined to drive prices upward before conflict and institutional change produced a new equilibrium.

The study moves between quantitative evidence and the lived consequences of inflation for wages, rents, inequality, crime and political expectations. Its recurring pattern is not presented as a rigid cycle; instead, the book uses comparison across centuries to ask why economic pressure repeatedly becomes social crisis and how societies eventually stabilise.