Author: Simon Middleton Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351343297 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 401
Book Description
Market Ethics and Practices, c. 1300–1850 analyses the nature, development, and operation of market ethics in the context of social practices, ranging from rituals of exchange and unofficial expectations to law, institutions, and formal regulations from the late medieval through to the modern era. Divided into two parts, the first explores the principles and regulations of market ethics, such as the relations between professed norms and economic behaviour across a range of geographies and chronologies. The chapters consider key subjects such as medieval attitudes towards merchant activities across Europe, North Africa, and Asia; market regulations and the notion of the "common good"; Adam Smith’s conception of moral capitalism; and the combining of religious and capitalist ethics in Nat Turner’s "Confession." The second part provides microstudies that offer insights into topics such as household and market relations in colonial New England; the harsher side of the consumer economy experienced by a family of parasol sellers from Lyon; informal Jewish networks in the early modern Caribbean and slave trade; merchant networks and commercial litigation in eighteenth-century France; and early encounters and the informal norms of fur trading between Europeans and Native Americans. This book provides an understanding of the key pre-modern economic historiography, whilst pointing students towards new debates and the historical significance for our collective economic future. It is ideal for students and postgraduates of late medieval and early modern economic history.
Author: Tanja Skambraks Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110643758 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 156
Book Description
Markets feature prominently in recent research of premodern historians as well as economists. Discussions cover the questions, for example, how a market can be grasp as a place, an event or a mechanism of exchange, or whether premodern economies have just hosted markets or if some of them can even be regarded as market economies. The proposed volume will now turn to the agents who forged and connected markets. Exchange was done between persons and with the help of persons: Artisans, retailers and poor people tried to better their living conditions by engaging on the market, merchants interconnected different markets, urban personnel (such as brokers, men working at the public scales, or the town council as a whole) regulated and facilitated exchange. By focusing on economic practices and the agents who performed them, the volume aims at analyzing the specific characteristics of premodern markets, the reasons why people became active on the market and the institutions which formed exchange processes and were in turn shaped by them.
Author: Christine Zabel Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000364070 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 302
Book Description
This volume historicizes the use of the notion of self-interest that at least since Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith’s theories is considered a central component of economic theory. Having in the twentieth century become one of the key-features of rational choice models, and thus is seen as an idealized trait of human behavior, self-interest has, despite Albert O. Hirschman’s pivotal analysis of self-interest, only marginally been historicized. A historicization(s) of self-interest, however, offers new insights into the concept by asking why, when, for what reason and in which contexts the notion was discussed or referred to, how it was employed by contemporaries, and how the different usages developed and changed over time. This helps us to appreciate the various transformations in the perception of the notion, and also to explore how and in what ways different people at different times and in different regions reflected on or realized the act of considering what was in their best interest. The volume focuses on those different usages, knowledges, and practices concerned with self-interest in the modern Atlantic World from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, by using different approaches, including political and economic theory, actuarial science, anthropology, or the history of emotions. Offering a new perspective on a key component of Western capitalism, this is the ideal resource for researches and scholars of intellectual, political and economic history in the modern Atlantic World.
Author: Tawny Paul Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108496946 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
Examines debt insecurity in eighteenth-century Britain, a period of famously rapid economic growth when many people nevertheless experienced financial failure.
Author: Koji Yamamoto Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0191059684 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
This study examines the darker side of England's culture of economic improvement between 1640 and 1720. It is often suggested that England in this period grew strikingly confident of its prospect for unlimited growth. Indeed, merchants, inventors, and others promised to achieve immense profit and abundance. Such flowery promises were then, as now, prone to perversion, however. This volume is concerned with the taming of incipient capitalism — how a society in the past responded when promises of wealth creation went badly wrong. It reveals a history of numerous visible hands taming incipient capitalism, a story that Adam Smith and his admirers have long set aside. The notion of 'projecting' played a key role in this process. Thriving theatre, literature, and popular culture in the age of Ben Jonson began elaborating on predominantly negative images of entrepreneurs or 'projectors' as people who pursued Crown's and their own profits at the public's expense. This study examines how the ensuing public distrust came to shape the negotiation in the subsequent decades over the nature of embryonic capitalism. The result is a set of fascinating discoveries. By scrutinising greedy 'projectors', the incipient public sphere helped reorient the practices and priorities of entrepreneurs and statesmen away from the most damaging of rent-seeking behaviours. Far from being a recent response to mainstream capitalism, ideas about socially responsible business have long shaped the pursuit of wealth, power, and profit. Taming Capitalism before its Triumph unravels the rich history of broken promises of public service and ensuing public suspicion — a story that throws fresh light on England's 'transition to capitalism', especially the emergence of consumer society and the financial revolution towards the end of the seventeenth century.
Author: Laura Kolb Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030597695 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 421
Book Description
Early Modern Debts: 1550–1700 makes an important contribution to the history of debt and credit in Europe, creating new transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives on problems of debt, credit, trust, interest, and investment in early modern societies. The collection includes essays by leading international scholars and early career researchers in the fields of economic and social history, legal history, literary criticism, and philosophy on such subjects as trust and belief; risk; institutional history; colonialism; personhood; interiority; rhetorical invention; amicable language; ethnicity and credit; household economics; service; and the history of comedy. Across the collection, the book reveals debt’s ubiquity in life and literature. It considers debt’s function as a tie between the individual and the larger group and the ways in which debts structured the home, urban life, legal systems, and linguistic and literary forms.
Author: Philipp Robinson Rössner Publisher: Policy Press ISBN: 1529211247 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
‘Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government,’ wrote Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, ‘and with them, the liberty and security of individuals.’ However, Philipp Robinson Rössner shows how, when looked at in the face of history, it has usually been the other way around. This book follows the development of capitalism from the Middle Ages through the industrial revolution to the modern day, casting new light on the areas where premodern political economies of growth and development made a difference. It shows how order and governance provided the foundation for prosperity, growth and the wealth of nations. Written for scholars and students of economic history, this is a pioneering new study that debunks the neoliberal origin myth of how capitalism came into the world.
Author: Thomas Leng Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198794479 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
This is the first modern study of the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers - England's most important trading company of the sixteenth century - in its final century of existence as a privileged organisation. Over this period, the Company's main trade, the export of cloth to northwest Europe, was overshadowed by rising traffic with the wider world, whilst its privileges were continually criticised in an era of political revolution. But the Company and its membership were not passive victims of these changes; rather, they were active participants in the commercial and political dramas of the century. Using thousands of neglected private merchant papers, Fellowship and Freedom views the Company from the perspective of its members, in the process bringing to life the complex social worlds of early modern merchants. For members, 'freedom' meant not just the right to access a privileged market, but also to trade independently, which could conflict with the 'fellowship' of corporate affiliation, and the responsibilities to the collective that it entailed. The study's major theme is the challenge of maintaining corporate unity in the face of this and other pressures that the Company faced. It restores the centrality of the Merchant Adventurers within three important historical narratives: England's transition from the margins to the centre of the European, and later global, economy; the rise and fall of the merchant corporation as a major form of commercial government in premodern Europe; and the political history of the corporation in an era of state formation and revolution.
Author: Luca Clerici Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030420647 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
This book illustrates the complexity and variety of victualling systems in early modern Italy. For a long time, the historiography of urban provisioning systems in late medieval and early modern times featured a conceptual opposition between victualling administration and the market. In this book, on the contrary, the term ‘victualling system’ (sistema annonario) is employed according to its historical meaning, designating an organised set of public and private channels, evolved typically in urban contexts, for the procurement and distribution of the goods essential for the daily life of common people. According to this definition, specifically, a victualling system included also the market, as one of the different channels for the procurement and distribution of goods. What characterises the Italian case in the European context are both the earliness of these institutions and the long-lasting political and economic fragmentation of the peninsula: these factors determined the great variety and complexity of the solutions adopted. In order to show these features, the analysis focuses on four central issues: the configuration of systems, institutional pragmatism and variety, articulation of circuits, and plurality of actors. The seven relevant case-studies included in this book, all based on direct archival research, cover a wide range of geographical contexts and institutional arrangements, from the North to the South of the peninsula, and include both large-sized cities (Milan and Rome), medium-sized cities (Bergamo, Vicenza, and Ferrara), and entire regions (the March of Ancona, and Sicily). This allows the reader to appreciate regional and local differences in detail, making this book of interest for academics and scholars in economic, social, and urban history.
Author: Bloomsbury Publishing Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350253529 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
The Enlightenment was a time of monetary turmoil and transformation in Europe. Change began with a riot of experimentation, including novel ideas about human agency and capacity to promote economic progress, efforts to reframe divinity in terms (like the providential) compatible with market exchange, new instruments of credit, and innovative institutions such as national banks and capital markets. Europeans, including the settler societies in North America, improvised frantically: people faced the task of everyday exchange in changing media; governments took up the project of creating currencies that supported their political power; artists and writers raced to represent new forms of wealth and interpret the issues they raised; and intellectuals struggled to conceptualize, and tame, patterns of monetary transformation. The result was a rich debate, still unsettled, about the sources of value, the morality of the market, and the very nature of money. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.
Author: Simon Middleton
Author: Tanja Skambraks
Author: Christine Zabel
Author: Tawny Paul
Author: Koji Yamamoto
Author: Laura Kolb
Author: Philipp Robinson Rössner
Author: Thomas Leng
Author: Luca Clerici
Author: Bloomsbury Publishing