In earlier periods, Ottoman economic and fiscal downturn was associated above all with the catastrophic effects of the price revolution of the late sixteenth century. However, this economic downturn was not unique to the Ottomans, but was shared by European states as all struggled with the diverse pressures of inflation, demographic shifts, and the escalating costs of warfare. By placing the Ottomans in comparative context with their neighbors, scholars have demonstrated that the multiple crises experienced by the Ottomans in the late sixteenth and early-to-mid seventeenth centuries can be seen as part of a wider European context characterized as the 'general crisis of the seventeenth century', rather than a sign of uniquely Ottoman decline. The assumption that the Ottoman economy was unable to recover from these crises was rooted both in the poor state of the field's knowledge of the Ottoman economy in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and also in how easily it seemed to fit with pre-existing ideas about Ottoman decline. However, subsequent research demonstrated that, in the words of Şevket Pamuk, the eighteenth century "was in fact a period of recovery for the Ottoman monetary system," indicating that "the old thesis of continuous decline cannot be sustained." Far from declining, the first half of the eighteenth century was a period of significant expansion and growth for the Ottoman economy.