The 17th century was called the Dutch 'Golden Age'. Over the course of 80 years, the tiny United Provinces of the Netherlands overthrew Spanish rule and became Europe's dominant power. In this book, Julia Adams explores the role that Holland's great families played in this dramatic history.
This fascinating study follows the fortunes of the Höchstetter family, merchant-manufacturers and financiers of Augsburg, Germany, in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, and sheds light on the economic and social history of failure and resilience in early modern Europe. Carefully tracing the chronology of the family’s rise, fall and transformation, it moves from the micro- to the macro-level, making comparisons with other mercantile families of the time to draw conclusions and suggest insights into such issues as social mobility, capitalist organization, business techniques, market practices and economic institutions. The result is a microhistory that offers macro-conclusions about the lived experience of early capitalism and capitalistic practices. This book will be valuable reading for advanced students and researchers of economic, financial and business history, legal history and early modern European history.
James tells how “iron masters“ of a classical industrial cast were succeeded by generations who wanted to shift to information-age systems technologies, and how families and firms wrestled with social and economic changes that occasionally tore them apart. The author shows how these firms illuminate a European model of “relationship capitalism.“
This volume takes stock of recent research on economic growth, as well as the development of capital and labour markets, during the centuries that preceded the Industrial Revolution. The book underlines the diversity in the economic experiences of early modern Europeans and suggests how this variety might be the foundation of a new conception of economic and social change.
As the wealthiest German merchant family of the sixteenth century, the Fuggers have attracted wide scholarly attention. In contrast to the other famous merchant family of the period, the Medici of Florence, however, no English-language work on them has been available until now. The Fuggers of Augsburg offers a concise and engaging overview that builds on the latest scholarly literature and the author’s own work on sixteenth-century merchant capitalism. Mark Häberlein traces the history of the family from the weaver Hans Fugger’s immigration to the imperial city of Augsburg in 1367 to the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. Because the Fuggers’ extensive business activities involved long-distance trade, mining, state finance, and overseas ventures, the family exemplifies the meanings of globalization at the beginning of the modern age. The book also covers the political, social, and cultural roles of the Fuggers: their patronage of Renaissance artists, the founding of the largest social housing project of its time, their support of Catholicism in a city that largely turned Protestant during the Reformation, and their rise from urban merchants to imperial counts and feudal lords. Häberlein argues that the Fuggers organized their social rise in a way that allowed them to be merchants and feudal landholders, burghers and noblemen at the same time. Their story therefore provides a window on social mobility, cultural patronage, religion, and values during the Renaissance and the Reformation.
Smith explains how France abandoned merchant capitalism for the corporate enterprise that would come to dominate its economy and project influence around the globe. Opposing the view that French economic and business development was crippled by missed opportunities and entrepreneurial failures, he presents a story of considerable achievement.
In this new textbook, Andrea Colli gives a historical and comparative perspective on family business, examining through time the different relationships within family businesses and among family enterprises, inside different political and institutional contexts. He compares the performance of family businesses with that of other economic organizations, and looks at how these enterprises have contributed to the evolution of contemporary industrial capitalism. Central to his discussion are the reasons for both the decline and persistence of family business, how it evolved historically, the different forms it has taken over time, and how it has contributed to the growth of single economies. The book summarises previous research into family business, and situates many aspects of family business - such as their strategies, contribution, failure and decline - in an economic, social, political and institutional context. It will be of key interest to students of economic history and business studies.
The Dutch Republic was an important hub in the early modern world-economy, a place where hundreds of monies were used alongside each other. Sebastian Felten explores regional, European and global circuits of exchange by analysing everyday practices in Dutch cities and villages in the period 1600-1850. He reveals how for peasants and craftsmen, stewards and churchmen, merchants and metallurgists, money was an everyday social technology that helped them to carve out a livelihood. With vivid examples of accounting and assaying practices, Felten offers a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money. This book uses new archival evidence and an approach informed by the history of technology to show how plural currencies gave early modern users considerable agency. It explores how the move to uniform national currency limited this agency in the nineteenth century and thus helps us make sense of the new plurality of payments systems today.
In this Very Short Introduction James Fulcher considers what capitalism is, the forms it can take around the world, and its history of crises and long-term development. In this new edition he discusses the fundamental impact of the global financial crises of 2007-8 and what it has meant for capitalism worldwide.
"Long-distance oceanic and overland trade along the Eurasian landmass in the 1400s was largely dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders and predominantly conducted over short trajectories by sole traders or organized around small-scale enterprises. Yet, within two centuries of Europeans' arrival in the Indian Ocean in 1498, long-distance trade throughout Eurasia was mainly taken over by them. By 1700, they had formed new, large-scale, and impersonal organizations, primarily a joint-stock business corporation between English East India Company (EIC) and Dutch East India Company (VOC). This allowed them to transform trade from an enterprise dominated by many small traders moving goods over short segments to a vertically integrated firm that was able to control goods from their origin to the end consumers. This rise of the business corporation proved essential for the economic rise of Europe. Why did the corporation arise indigenously only in Europe, and given its effective organization of long-distance trade, why wasn't it mimicked by other Eurasian civilizations for 300 years? Harris closely examines the role played by forms of organization in the transformation of Eurasian trade between 1400 and 1700, comparing the organizational forms that were used in four major civilizations: Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Western European. Through this comparative perspective, he argues that the organizational design of the EIC and VOC, the first long-lasting joint-stock corporations, enabled large-scale multilateral impersonal cooperation for the first time in human history. He also argues that this new organizational form enabled the English and Dutch to deploy more capital, more ships, more voyages, and more agents than other organizational forms"--