Should-Read: Charles Wilson (1967): Trade, Society, and the State

Should-Read: What was my most prized and (I thought) original insight of 1991–one that I worked hard to discover and document in DeLong and Shleifer, “Princes and Merchants”–was, to Charlie Wilson 25 years earlier, a throwaway half paragraph:

Charles Wilson (1967): Trade, Society, and the State: “The two areas which in 1500 represented the richest and most advanced concentrations…

…of trade, industry and wealth were the quadrilateral formed by the Italian cities Milan, Venice, Florence and Genoa; and the strip of the Netherlands that ran from Ypres north-east past Ghent and Bruges up to Antwerp. It was not merely coincidence that these were the areas where the tradesmen of the cities had been most successful in emancipating themselves from feudal interference and in keeping at bay the newer threat of more centralized political control offered by the new monarchies. In the fleeting intervals between the storms of politics and war, men here glimpsed the material advance that was possible when tradesmen were left in peace unflattered by the attentions of strategists who regarded their activities as the sinews of war.

Precisely because the political and social relationships in which the merchants here lived were so relatively simple, these economic societies left behind them very little in the way of speculative literature. The precocious economic development of the cities of Italy and the Low Countries was cradled in the civic independence of those cities where merchants had achieved political power. The way in which that power was exercised varied from one city to another. At Venice the ‘state’ seemed to achieve a certain degree of independence of the rich patricians themselves, while it did not in Genoa. The Venetian Republic built galleys, fixed freight rates, auctioned galleys to private bidders, maintained factories and arranged routes and protection for Venetian ships. Yet neither here nor in the Netherlands did the political or social situation provoke merchants or statesmen into speculation about the relationship between economic and other activities. Such ‘economic’ literature as emerged from these urban economies was of two kinds: either ruminations, in the medieval tradition, on the moral implications and problems posed by business life, or attempts to deal with the purely technical problems ofa mercantile economy—largely questions of exchange, credit and money. Far the most fertile source of semi-economic literature at Florence, Venice and Genoa in the sixteenth century was the seemingly endless controversy on the legitimacy of interest…

Charles Wilson (1967): Trade, Society, and the State, in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol 4.