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Italy and the Origins of Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2020

Robert Fredona  and
Sophus A. Reinert
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Keywords

early capitalismeconomic theoryItalyGreat DivergenceHarvard Business SchoolWerner SombartMax WeberFrederic C. LaneRobert S. LopezRaymond de Roover
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Business History Review , Volume 94 , Issue 1: Italy and the Origins of Capitalism , Spring 2020 , pp. 5 - 38
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Copyright © 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Footnotes

William Caferro, Richard Goldthwaite, Julius Kirshner, Reinhold Mueller, John Najemy, Erik S. Reinert, Daniel Lord Smail, and Francesca Trivellato helped us to think more rigorously about the ideas in this essay; Elizabeth Leh provided additional expert assistance, especially in obtaining photographic reproduction rights; we thank them, and we also thank Geoffrey Jones and Walter Friedman of Harvard Business School's Business History Initiative for their continuing support and capacious vision of what business history can be.

References

1 Though see, for the record, Acemoglu, Daron, “Capitalism,” in Economic Ideas You Should Forget, ed. Frey, Bruno and Iselin, David (Cham, Switzerland, 2017), 1–3Google Scholar.

2 Lane, Frederic C., “Meanings of Capitalism,” in “The Tasks of Economic History,” ed. Lane, Frederic C., special issue, Journal of Economic History 29, no. 1 (1969): 5–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A number of items by Lane were reprinted in Lane, Profits from Power: Readings in Protection Rent and Violence-Controlling Enterprises (Albany, 1979); Lane appears to have had in mind this short “memo” (reprinted as chapter 5) when he expressed discomfort with calling all of the items “essays.” See Lane to William D. Eastman, 23 Mar. 1979, MS-0381, series 2, box 7, Frederic C. Lane Papers, John Hopkins University Libraries (hereafter Lane Papers). Worth noting also, in the same folder, are Lane's early extensive notes on the stadial theories of the German Historical School, notes that found their way into the important introduction of Profits from Power, 1–11. For further details on the controversy in Bloomington, see Lane, “Introductory Note,” in “The Tasks of Economic History,” 1–4. The title of the 1969 special issue of the Journal of Economic History was recycled in honor of Edwin F. Gay, who had entitled his inaugural lecture as first president of the Economic History Association “The Task of Economic History”; see supplement, Journal of Economic History 1, no. S1 (1941): 9–16; on Gay's lecture, see Sophus A. Reinert, “Historical Political Economy,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Political Economy, ed. Ivano Cardinale and Roberto Scazzieri (Basingstoke, 2018), 133–69. On Lane, see the biographical sketch by Reinhold C. Mueller, “Frederic C. Lane, 1900–1984: Un profilo, con bibliografia aggiornata,” Ateneo veneto 171 (1984): 269–75; for more detail on Lane as impresario of American economic history, see Giuliana Gemelli, “‘Leadership and Mind’: Frederic C. Lane as Cultural Entrepreneur and Diplomat,” Minerva 41, no. 2 (2003): 115–32; for Lane's thoughts on the origins of capitalism, see Bullard, Melissa Meriam, Epstein, S. R., Kohl, Benjamin G., and Stuard, Susan Mosher, “Where History and Theory Interact: Frederic C. Lane on the Emergence of Capitalism,” Speculum 79, no. 1 (2004): 88–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Lane's interest in sociology long preceded, for example, the founding by Sylvia Thrupp in 1958 of the pathbreaking journal Comparative Studies in Society and History, in which Lane published. A copy of Talcott Parsons's doctoral thesis, “Der Kapitalismus bei Sombart und Max Weber,” is in box 1, HUGFP 42.8.2, Papers of Talcott Parsons, Early Papers, Harvard University Archives. Parsons taught in the Harvard economics department from 1927 until 1931, when a department of sociology was finally formed. On Parsons and Schumpeter, see Swedberg, Richard, “Schumpeter and Talcott Parsons,” Journal of Evolutionary Economics 25, no. 1 (2015): 215–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his latter years, Parsons reminisced: “Another very important figure, for me, was the economic historian Edwin F. Gay. Gay had been trained in Germany. He got his doctorate with [Gustav] Schmoller in Berlin and he knew the background that I had been exposed to in Germany, whereas most of the Harvard economists hadn't the slightest idea of what that stuff was all about. And most of them, not knowing anything about it, knew it was bad!” See “A Seminar with Talcott Parsons at Brown University: ‘My Life and Work’ (in Two Parts), Saturday, March 10, 1973,” in “Talcott Parsons: Economic Sociologist of the 20th Century,” ed. Laurence S. Moss and Andrew Savchenko, special issue, American Journal of Economics and Sociology 65, no. 1 (2006): 1–58, quotation at 8.

4 Lane, “Introductory Note,” 3.

5 On Cole in the years of this entrepreneurial insurgency, see Fredona, Robert and Reinert, Sophus A., “The Harvard Research Center in Entrepreneurial History and the Daimonic Entrepreneur,” History of Political Economy 49, no. 2 (2017): 267–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Lane, “Meanings of Capitalism,” 12, quoting Cole's comment on the memorandum.

7 Schumpeter, Joseph A., A History of Economic Analysis, ed. Schumpeter, Elizabeth Boody (Oxford, 1954), 468Google Scholar.

8 Louis Uchitelle, “Robert Heilbroner: An Economic Pioneer Decries the Modern Field's Narrow Focus,” New York Times, 23 Jan. 1999; Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 7th ed. (New York, 1999).

9 Jennifer Schuessler, “In History Departments, It's Up with Capitalism,” New York Times, 6 Apr. 2013. For a foundational example of this recent trend, see Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, eds., American Capitalism: New Histories (New York, 2018) and the historiographical tradition to which it speaks. For an insightful definitional discussion, see Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (Cambridge, U.K., 2018). The so-called new history of capitalism is only one strand in this story, but for an enlightening discussion of one of its predominant themes, see John J. Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2015): 281–304, 282n2 (which also identifies finance as the field's other main theme). For a more critical approach, see Eric Hilt, “Economic History, Historical Analysis, and the ‘New History’ of Capitalism,” Journal of Economic History 77, no. 2 (2017): 511–36. And for a broader picture, from a different and salutary perspective, see Walter A. Friedman, “Recent Trends in Business History Research: Capitalism, Democracy, and Innovation,” Enterprise & Society 18, no. 4 (2017): 748–71.

10 On Bergier as historian, see the introductory material in François Walter and Martin H. Körner, eds., Quand la montagne aussi a une histoire: Mélanges offerts à Jean-François Bergier (Bern, 1996), 1–24.

11 Lane, “Meanings of Capitalism,” 11–12, quoting Bergier's comment (here translated from the French). As Werner Sombart once argued, “nothing could be more absurd than populating the Middle Ages with economically sophisticated merchants, imbued with a capitalist mentality.” Sombart, “Medieval and Modern Commercial Enterprise,” in Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History, ed. Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma (Homewood, IL, 1953), 25–40, at 27.

12 Steven L. Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade during the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, 1984), 23–40. See also, for the intellectual reverberations of this transition, Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert, “The Economic Turn in Enlightenment Europe,” in The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kaplan and Reinert (London, 2019), 1–35. On the absurd extremes to which the “market principle” has been taken today, see Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York, 2012).

13 See, for example, the analysis of “institutional voids” in Krishna G. Palepu and Tarun Khanna, Winning in Emerging Markets: A Road Map for Strategy and Execution (Boston, 2010), 13–26; and Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 393.

14 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York, 1984). On the books’ timeliness, see, among others, Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London, 2005), 93. Though others may have expressed similar formulations before, Gibson, in conversation with David Brin, described this as something he has often said. Gibson and Brin, “The Science in Science Fiction,” Talk of the Town, National Public Radio, 30 Nov. 1999, https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/1067220/the-science-in-science-fiction.

15 Gustav Bang, Kapitalismens gennembrud (Copenhagen, 1902), 1–6.

16 Michael Löwy, “Le concept d'affinité élective chez Max Weber,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 127 (2004): 93–103.

17 Weber's reply to Rachfahl appeared in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 30 (1910): 176–202; it has since been translated by Austin Harrington and Mary Shields in David Chalcraft and Austin Harrington, eds., The Protestant Ethic Debate: Max Weber's Replies to His Critics, 1907–1910 (Liverpool, 2001), 61–88, quotations at 69, 73–74. Weber's thoughts on this controversy were partly incorporated in his revised edition of The Protestant Ethic (the edition translated into English by Parsons), especially in the famous footnote on Leon Battista Alberti, which also served as a response to Sombart (pp. 194–98). On the restitution of usury in medieval and Renaissance Italy, which remains a vibrant area of research, see the classic articles of Armando Sapori, “L'interesse del denaro a Firenze nel Trecento (dal un testamento di un usuraio),” in Studi di storia economica (secoli XIII, XIV, XV), 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Florence, 1955), 223–43; and Florence Edler de Roover, “Restitution in Renaissance Florence,” in Studi in onore di Armando Sapori, vol. 1 (Milan, 1957), 773–90, which is based on material in the Selfridge Collection of Medici business records at Baker Library; Giovanna Petti Balbi, “Fenomeni usurari e restituzioni: La situazione ligure (secoli XII–XIV),” Archivio storico italiano 169 (2011): 199–220; and Sylvie Duval, “L'argent des pauvres: L'institution de l’executor testamentorum et procurator pauperum à Pise entre 1350 et 1424,” Mélanges de l'École française de Rome – Moyen Âge 125, no. 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.4000/mefrm.1157. For a larger legal-philosophical-theological background, see the important work of Lawrin Armstrong on usury and restitution, especially The Idea of a Moral Economy: Gerard of Siena on Usury, Restitution, and Prescription (Toronto, 2016).

18 For a similar debate, see also Sophus A. Reinert, “The Way to Wealth around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism,” American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (2015): 61–97.

19 It was also cited in Gratian's extraordinarily influential compilation, Decretum Gratiani, p.1, d.88. c.11, which lay at the heart of medieval canon law.

20 On the contours of guild-based office holding in medieval Florence, see John M. Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280–1400 (Chapel Hill, 1982).

21 Vito Piergiovanni, “Un trattatello sui mercanti di Baldo degli Ubaldi,” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria n.s. 52 (2012): 987–1003, 997 and 999n31. See also, on Baldo and merchant writings, Maura Fortunati, Scrittura e prova: I libri di commercio nel diritto medievale e moderno (Rome, 1996), 29–41.

22 Weber, “Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum” (1909), reprinted in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, ed. Marianne Weber (Tübingen, 1924), 1–288. On Weber's own perceived development on this point, see The Protestant Ethic Debate, 75n34.

23 Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus (Munich, 1916), xx, 1, 327–30, 327. Erik S. Reinert kindly provided this translation from an in-progress translation of the 1916 edition of Modern Capitalism. On Sombart, see the important three-volume collection edited by Jürgen G. Backhaus, Werner Sombart (1863–1941): Social Scientist (Marburg, 1996).

24 Hugo Reinert and Erik S. Reinert, “Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter,” in Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): Economy and Society, ed. Jürgen G. Backhaus and Wolfgang Drechsler (Dordrecht, 2006), 55–85.

25 Lujo Brentano, “Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus,” read in 1913 but published in Brentano, Der wirtschaftende Mensch in der Geschichte (Leipzig, 1923), 204–60, quotes from 204, 209–13, 259. On Brentano, see James J. Sheehan, The Career of Lujo Brentano: A Study of Liberalism and Social Reform in Germany (Chicago, 1966). Brentano is, curiously, sometimes falsely said to have been awarded the 1927 Nobel Peace Prize for his antimilitarism. See, for an example, Antonio Giolitti, “Avvertenza,” in Lujo Brentano, Le origini del capitalismo, ed. Antonio Giolitti (Florence, 1968).

26 Lujo Brentano, “Handel und Kapitalismus,” in Der wirtschaftende Mensch, 301–62, esp. 353n, 358–60.

27 Brentano, “Handel und Kapitalismus,” 361, citing the Catholic theologian Franz Xaver von Funk, “Über die ökonomischen Anschauungen der mittelalterlichen Theologen: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Nationalökonomie,” Tübinger Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 25 (1869): 125–175, 151n1, in turn citing Antonino's Summa. For the original version of the quotation, see Sancti Antonini archiepiscopi Florentini ordinis praedicatorum Summa theologica in quattuor partes distributa, Pars seconda (Verona, 1740), facsimile reprint, ed. Pietro Ballerini (Graz, 1959), tit.1, cap.7, par.16, at col.99: “Pecunia ex se sola minime est lucrosa, nec valet seipsam multiplicare: sed ex industria mercantium fit per eorum negotiationes lucrosa.” The text quoted by Xaver and Brentano has “mercantiones” instead of “negotiationes” with minimal or no change of sense. The sentiments of Antonino, the sterility of money in itself and the value of merchants in producing both profit and socially useful goods, were already commonplace a century earlier. When Brentano was writing, the economic thought of Antonino and his contemporaries was becoming a more and more popular subject. See, for example, the work of Carl Ilgner, In S. Antonini Archiepiscopi Florentini sententias de Valore et de Pecunia Commentarius (Breslau, 1902). Raymond de Roover, who is discussed below, declared St. Antonino to be one of the “two great economic thinkers of the Middle Ages” in a small volume in a series overseen by Arthur H. Cole. De Roover, San Bernardino of Siena and Sant'Antonino of Florence: The Two Great Economic Thinkers of the Middle Ages, Kress Library of Business and Economics Publication No. 19 (Boston, 1967). In his recent dissertation, working from autograph manuscripts of the Summa held at the Convent of San Marco in Florence, Jason Brown has prepared a critical edition of Antonino's section “On merchants” (Summa 3.8.1, De merchatoribus et artificibus per modum predicationis). See Brown, “St Antonin of Florence on Justice in Buying and Selling Introduction, Critical Edition, and Translation” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2019), 304–18. On Antonino, see David S. Peterson, “Archbishop Antoninus: Florence and the Church in the Earlier Fifteenth Century” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1985).

28 See, for an example that also highlights the group's surprisingly broad influence, Julius Kirshner to Frederic C. Lane, 8 Mar. 1971, 1r, series 2, box 7, Lane Papers. Kirshner notes, “Five years ago I was a fellow in economic history at the Harvard Business School and discussed this problem with Redlich and Coles [sic]. In many ways, they argued in the same vein as you have—that is, one must view the businessman in the context of his own operation—in order to appreciate the rhythm of entrepreneurial development. I have kept that lesson in mind.”

29 For context, see Fredona and Reinert, “Harvard Research Center”; Barry E. C. Boothman, “A Theme Worthy of Epic Treatment: N. S. B. Gras and the Emergence of American Business History,” Journal of Marketing 21, no. 1 (2001): 61–73; and Gras, Development of Business History up to 1950: Selections from the Unpublished Work of Norman Scott Brien Gras, ed. Ethel C. Gras (Ann Arbor, 1962), 185–87. Gay and Gras clashed over the editorship of the short-lived HBS Journal of Economic and Business History, because of Gras's increasingly proselytic devotion to “business history” as a discipline distinct from economic history, but they also disagreed about stadial models in economic history. Already in 1907, Gay was very critical of Karl Bücher's stages of economic development, stressing that all generalizations must be approached with caution: “My attitude with regard to stages,” he said, “may perhaps be summed up in what Meredith somewhere says of a proverb. A proverb is like an inn; an excellent halting place for the night but a poor dwelling.” Gay, “Some Recent Theories Regarding the Stages of Economic Development,” and, responding to points raised by others at the 1906 meeting of the AEA, “Stages of Economic Development: A Discussion,” Publications of the American Economic Association 8, no. 1 (1907): 125–136, quotation at 136. Gras, on the other hand was deeply informed by the theory of stages. Henrietta Larson, Gras's protégée, who perhaps knew his vision for business history better than anyone, noted that Gras took “the early inspiration for his concept of economic stages” from “the theorist Von Thünen and the genetic economist Bücher,” though as he turned toward business history explicitly and away from economic history, it was the “writings of Werner Sombart and of George Unwin [that] made a deep impression on him.” Larson, “Business History: Retrospect and Prospect,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 21, no. 6 (1947): 173–99.

30 Wallace K. Ferguson, “Recent Trends in the Economic Historiography of the Renaissance,” Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1960): 7–26, 13–14. On Raymond de Roover, see Paola Ortelli, “Vita e opere di Raymond de Roover,” in “La Società,” special section, Etica ed economia 1 (2011): 9–51; see also Richard A. Goldthwaite, “Raymond de Roover on Late Medieval and Early Modern Economic History,” and Julius Kirshner, “Raymond de Roover on Scholastic Economic Thought,” both in Raymond de Roover, Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Julius Kirshner (Chicago, 1974), 1–14, 15–35; a full list of Raymond de Roover's works appears on pp. 367–75. A list of works by his wife and scholarly partner, Florence Edler de Roover, may be found in Edler de Roover, L'arte della seta a Firenze nei secoli XIV e XV, ed. Sergio Tognetti (Florence, 1999), xxi–xxiii.

31 Of Gras's sedentary/traveling merchant, Wallace K. Ferguson noted that the distinction “has since been generally accepted” in Renaissance economic history. Ferguson, “Recent Trends,” 17. Shortly after Gras's 1939 book Business and Capitalism came out, his protégée Florence Edler de Roover wrote Gras from Paris: “Your book should make the use of the differentiating terms, ‘petty capitalism,’ ‘mercantile capitalism,’ etc., common. . . . I can now classify my merchants better and fit them into the picture of mercantile capitalism. . . . Last summer we spent a good part of our evening with Marc Bloch trying to find French expressions for many of your business terms that are well expressed by one or two words in English, but have no short equivalents in French or Italian.” Edler de Roover to Gras, 13 Aug. 1939, box 1, Florence Edler de Roover Papers, University of Chicago Library. Frederic Lane's book Andrea Barbarigo, Merchant of Venice, 1418–1449 (Baltimore, 1944) was explicitly described as a study of a “sedentary merchant” in Gras's mold. Reinhold C. Mueller has also, more generally, noted the influence of Gras's business history group on Lane. See Mueller's entry “Lane, Frederic Chapin” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, vol. 3, ed. Joel Mokyr (Oxford, 2003), 277–78. Raymond de Roover called attention to the “sedentary merchant,” expressly invoking Gras, throughout his chapter in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe and Robert S. Lopez, in his chapter, used the term some nine times. De Roover, “The Organization of Trade,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 3, Economic Organisation and Policies in the Middle Ages, ed. M. M. Postan, E. E. Rich, and Edward Miller (Cambridge, U.K., 1963), 42–118, esp. 74; Lopez, “The Trade of Medieval Europe: The South,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 2, Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, ed. M. M. Postan and E. E. Rich, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K., 1952), 306–401. De Roover, who received his HBS MBA in 1938 under Gras's guidance, dedicated his first book on the subject, The Medici Bank: Its Organization, Management, Operations, and Decline (New York, 1948), “to N. S. B. Gras, whose teaching inspired this study of one of the most famous business firms in history” (p. v; see also xiv). We are currently completing a biography of Florence Edler de Roover, which will address in detail the de Roovers’ debts to Gras. Not everyone, of course, was convinced about the “sedentary merchant”: Shepard B. Clough, for example, found “extravagant” Gras's claim “that economic history for the period 1200–1800 has to be rewritten because of his discovery of the sedentary merchant.” Clough, review of Business and Capitalism, by Gras, and Casebook in American Business History, by Gras and Larson, Political Science Quarterly 55, no. 2 (1940): 273–75.

32 N. S. B. Gras, “Capitalism—Concepts and History,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 16, no. 2 (1942): 21–34, at 68; Raymond de Roover, “Discussion by Raymond de Roover,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 16, no. 2 (1942): 34–39. Of course, the idea of a “commercial revolution” was not new. Lane, for example, had published “Venetian Shipping during the Commercial Revolution,” American Historical Review 38, no. 2 (1933): 219–39, but this revolution occurred in the transition from the fifteenth to sixteenth century, or around then (p. 219). Ed Muir has described this article as “the earliest example of extensive research by an American in an Italian archive.” Muir, “The Italian Renaissance in America,” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (1995): 1095–1118, 1106n45. De Roover expressly rejects a sixteenth-century “commercial revolution” in his discussion, in a section boldly titled “No Commercial Revolution in the Sixteenth Century” (p. 37), directed not at Lane but at those who associated this revolution with England's rise to prominence on the global commercial stage.

33 Though Sombart had argued that “medieval trade” was “instrumental in the development of capitalist forms of organization,” he nonetheless maintained that it “had nothing in common with modern capitalism.” See Sombart, “Medieval and Modern Commercial Enterprise,” 34–35.

34 Robert Lopez's The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 was published by Prentice-Hall in 1971 and by Cambridge University Press in 1976 and subsequently reprinted many times. In 1945, when Lopez was hired by Yale University, he wrote Gras to thank him: “I think with both remorse and deep gratitude of the amount of letters you must have had to write on my behalf before my pilgrimage could end.” Lopez to Gras, 20 Nov. 1945, box 3, folder 2, Norman S. B. Gras Papers, Baker Library Special Collections, HBS (hereafter BLSC). Lopez's library contained a number of Gras's works, including at least one autographed offprint; see box 23, folder 13, Robert S. Lopez Collection, Arizona State University, Tempe. Unsurprisingly, Lopez himself favored the longue durée. As he wrote to Eric Cochrane upon hearing Cochrane had embarked on his Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1537–1800 (Chicago, 1973), “Best of luck on your history of Florence from 1530 on, a much needed job, for on the whole the history of Tuscany falls into the doldrums after 1530. . . . I am glad that at long last the Society for Italian Historical Studies faces up to the fact that the history of Italy begins somewhat before 1815, but even so, I think it would be bolder and more useful to give admission to the whole run of Italian history, from Neanderthal to Neanderthal (Mussolini). Surely there are problems that run through the history of the country.” Lopez to Cochrane, 15 Feb. 1963, MS 1459, series 1, box 3, folder 50, Robert Sabatino Lopez Papers, Yale University Archives (hereafter RSLP). For a very brief sketch of Lopez's career, see Archibald R. Lewis, Jaroslav Pelikan, and David Herlihy, “Robert Sabatino Lopez,” Speculum 63, no. 3 (1988): 763–65. Lopez's publications are listed in Harry A. Miskimin, David Herlihy, and A. L. Udovitch, The Medieval City: In Honor of Robert S. Lopez (New Haven, 1977), 329–34.

35 N. I. [Nathan Isaacs], “Memorandum for Mr. Eaton re. The Medici Collection,” 25 Apr. 1928, 4; the memo was revised on May 16, 1928, and incorporated into “The Florentine Merchant and the Law's Delays,” Harvard Business School Arch GA41, box 1, folder “Medici Collection at Baker Library 1928,” Nathan Isaacs Papers, 1915–1941, BLSC. On the Selfridge collection of Medici manuscripts donated to HBS, which inspired Isaacs's musings, see, for now, the entry in Seymour De’ Ricci, Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, vol. 1 (New York, 1935), 1052–53.

36 Alfred D. Chandler, “The Rise of Large-Scale Business Enterprise” (lecture, Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, Turin, Italy, 14 Mar. 1974), box 150, folder 15, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Papers, BLSC.

37 The comparison of the scale of the Medici and BayBank is in Chandler, “The Beginnings of the Modern Industrial Corporation,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 130, no. 4 (1986): 382n1. For Chandler's interest in the scale and scope of business, see, of course, his Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA, 1994).

38 See, generally, C. Roland Christensen, David A. Garvin, and Ann Sweet, eds., Education for Judgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership (Boston, 1992); and Reinert, “Historical Political Economy.”

39 Gras, The Development of Business History up to 1950, 180–81.

40 N. S. B. Gras to Wallace B. Donham, 19 Oct. 1929, in series I (Correspondence), carton 1, folder 53 (Donham, Wallace, 1927–1947), Norman S. B. Gras Papers, BLSC.

41 Raymond de Roover, “The Story of the Alberti Company of Florence, 1302–1348, as Revealed in Its Account Books,” Business History Review 32, no. 1 (1958): 17–18n15.

42 For Viner and his thoughts, see Jacob Viner, Essays on the Intellectual History of Economics, ed. Douglas A. Irwin (Princeton, 1991).

43 Raymond de Roover to Jacob Viner, 15 June 1956, 1r, Jacob Viner Papers (MC #138), box 8, folder 12 (de Roover, Raymond, 1940–1967), Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton, NJ (hereafter Viner Papers). The editio princeps of Cotrugli's Della mercatura et del mercante perfetto (Venice, 1573) to which de Roover refers actually includes a chapter entitled “Dell'huomo Economo,” rather than “economico,” but the shorthand economico for uomo economico appears repeatedly in the text (e.g., pp. 85–86). The recent critical edition based on the earliest known manuscript of 1475 (ms. 15, National Library of Malta, Valletta) and others refers to the chapter in question as “De lo yconomo” and uses the phrases “yconomo,” “homo yconomo,” “vivere yconomico,” and even “virtù icognomiche.” See Benedetto Cotrugli, Libro de l'arte de la mercatura, ed. Vera Ribaudo, with an introduction by Tiziano Zanato (Venice, 2016), 157, 162. The recent English edition conservatively translates the chapter title as “On Man as Administrator of His Household,” discussing “the administration of the life of a household” by an ideal “administrator.” See Benedetto Cotrugli, The Book of the Art of Trade, trans. John Francis Phillimore, ed. Carlo Carrraro and Giovanni Favero (Cham, Switzerland, 2017), 145–46. For Xenophon's work and the tradition it took part in, see Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary, ed. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Oxford, 1994). On the relationship between micro and macro in this tradition, see Sophus A. Reinert, “Authority and Expertise at the Origins of Macro-Economics,” in Antonio Serra and the Economics of Good Government, ed. Rosario Patalano and Sophus A. Reinert (Basingstoke, 2016), 119.

44 Jacob Viner to Raymond de Roover, 3 June 1957, 1r, box 8, folder 12, Viner Papers. The book in question, Kress Catalogue No. 464, is Bartolomeo Frigerio, L'economo prudente: Nel quale con l'autorità della sacra scrittura, d'Aristotile, e d'altri graui scrittori si mostra l'arte infallibile d'acquistar, e conseruar la robba, e la riputatione d'vna famiglia, e d'vne corte (Rome, 1621). As the full subtitle suggests, the work is indicative of the transition from the economy of families to that of courts and eventually states; see Reinert, “Authority and Expertise.”

45 Raymond de Roover to Viner, 5 June 1957, 1r, box 8, folder 12, Viner Papers.

46 Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 2. See also, earlier, Armando Sapori, “The Culture of the Medieval Italian Merchant” (1937), trans. Raymond de Roover and Florence Edler de Roover, in Lane and Riemersma, Enterprise and Secular Change, 65. For a similar notion of when “modernity” began, chosen from among many possible examples, see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 1–9, drawing on David Hume's meditation on when “trade” first became “an affair of state,” in Hume, “Of Civil Liberty,” in Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 52.

47 Henrietta M. Larson, “Discussion by Henrietta M. Larson,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 16, no. 2 (1942): 39–42, at 41.

48 Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York, 1953), 3.

49 Marc Bloch, “Nouvelles scientifiques. De Florence à Boston: Les vicissitudes d'un fonds d'archives commerciales,” in Annales d'histoire économique et sociale 1, no. 3 (1929): 418.

50 Robert Sabatino Lopez to Gino Luzzatto, 22 Sept. 1947, 1r, MS 1459, series 1, box 7, folder 148, RSLP (translation ours). Lopez himself spoke of “Florentine capitalists” and was transparent in wishing to understand “the slow process by which the small, isolated, self-sufficient economies of the late Middle Ages evolved into the modern world economy”; see Lopez, “Small and Great Merchants in the Italian Cities of the Renaissance” (1931), in Lane and Riemersma, Enterprise and Secular Change, 4, 45. Over time, however, he came to feel more wary about such strong statements, admitting that “I have lost, by force of habit, the courage of making a generalization without many qualifications, a probable statement without the warning that it is a mere conjecture, a personal judgment without some hint that it may be wrong and it is open to challenge.” The cost, for Lopez, was ironically high even in terms of historical understanding, as “too many footnotes and ‘perhapses’”—for example, in a new biography of Benedetto Zaccaria, the Venetian “admiral, merchant, industrialist, writer, diplomat, crusader, [and] pirate”—would ultimately fail “to bring out the incredible maverick he was while the Middle Ages was at its peak.” See Lopez to Eric Cochrane, 17 Nov. 1978, MS 1459, series 1, box 3, folder 50, RSLP. A final irony, of course, is that Lopez gained fame not as a meticulous scholar but as a great generalizer, associated with major revisionist claims.

51 Frederic C. Lane, “At the Roots of Republicanism,” American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (1966): 403–42; Lopez to Lane, 31 Jan. 1966, and Lopez to Lane, n.d. [1973], both in series 2, box 7, Lane Papers. Lane and Lopez alike almost certainly had in mind an imperial republic and not a benign Ciceronian one.

52 Eric Cochrane and Julius Kirshner, “Deconstructing Lane's Venice,” review of Venice: A Maritime Republic, by Frederic C. Lane, Journal of Modern History 47, no. 2 (1975): 334, emphasis added. Albeit from a different ideological stance, Renzo Pecchioli made a similar and wider case about Venice and America in his Dal “mito” di Venezia all’“ideologia americana”: Itinerari e modelli della storiografia sul repubblicanesimo dell'età moderna (Venice, 1983). J. G. A. Pocock replied, noting that Pecchioli “describes [him], along with Hans Baron, William J. Bouwsma, and the late Frederic C. Lane, as conducting an offensive against Marxist historiography which must necessarily serve the interests of American ruling classes, and in which the thesis of a continuity of republican political values passing from Italy to England and the United States plays a leading part.” Pocock, “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 2 (1987): 325; for further discussion of Lane and Cochrane and Kirshner's critique, see pp. 328, 332. See also Pocock's fascinating retrospective, “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,” Journal of Modern History 53, no. 1 (1981): 49–72, which discusses “Deconstructing Lane's Venice” on p. 55; at the time, Kirshner was one of the editors of the Journal of Modern History. For a different argument about the role of American ideology at work in Italian Renaissance historiography, see Anthony Molho, “The Italian Renaissance, Made in the USA,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, 1998), 263–94. We do not wish to judge here the merits of the Cochrane-Kirshner-Pecchioli criticisms of Lane, but the following should be noted: friends of Lane describe him as having been a “left liberal”; he firmly defended his Hopkins colleague Owen Lattimore against Joseph McCarthy's charge that he was a Soviet agent, writing that “[Lattimore] has not followed the Communist line . . . [and] I never had any reason to think him a Communist or to doubt his good faith and loyalty”; and, during his long tenure as editor of the Journal of Economic History, Lane regularly acted as an intermediary between, as it were, both sides of the Iron Curtain and had many productive contacts among Marxist historians. Lionel Stanley Lewis, The Cold War and Academic Governance: The Lattimore Case at Johns Hopkins (Albany, 1993), 101, 295n6.

53 Stephan R. Epstein, “Lane and Theory,” in Bullard et al., “Where History and Theory Interact,” 97–106, esp. 103–4.

54 Kirshner, “Raymond de Roover,” 36. Incidentally, Lane himself once asked, “Is there no way in which to draw the line, then, between history and antiquarianism?” He ultimately concluded, “I do not think there is any general universally valid answer.” Lane, “Conclusion,” in Lane and Riemersma, Enterprise and Secular Change, 534.

55 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, U.K., 1997), 107.

56 Michael Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (Oxford, 1941), 100, 304; Rostovtzeff, “Presidential Address Delivered before the American Historical Association at Chattanooga on December 28, 1935,” American Historical Review 41, no. 2 (1936): 231–52, at 252. For a critique, see Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000), 31–32. The debate over whether the “ancient economy” was “modern” or “primitive” continues unabated, but see, for powerful contrasting views, M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy, with a foreword by Ian Morris (Berkeley, 1999); and Edward Cohen, Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (Princeton, 1992). For one of the earliest salvos in the debate, see August Böckh, Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener, 4 vols. in 2 bks. (Berlin, 1817). The debate really took on a life of its own during the controversy between Eduard Meyer, a “modernist” who saw in Ancient Greece the womb of modern capitalism, and the “primitivist” Karl Bücher, who did not. See Paul Cartledge, “‘Trade and Politics’ Revisited: Archaic Greece,” in Trade in the Ancient Economy, ed. Peter Garnsey, Keith Hopkins, and C. R. Whittaker (Berkeley, 1983), 1–15, at 1.

57 Keith Luria and Romulo Gandolfo, “Carlo Ginzburg: An Interview,” Radical History Review 35 (1986): 89–111, at 105. The phrase “totally forgotten and completely irrelevant to the present” appears in Edward Muir, “Introduction: Observing Trifles,” in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore, 1991), vii–xxviii, at xii. This is, of course, not the only way of writing a microhistory; Francesca Trivellato's self-described “global history on a small scale” is the most important example. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009), 7; see also Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0z94n9hq. For other, very different studies that establish the global import of the small scale, see Paul Cheney, Cul-de-Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (Chicago, 2017); and Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, MA, 2014). John Brewer has elegantly sketched some of the differences between different national microhistorical traditions, in “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 1 (2010): 87–109.

58 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago, 1977), 183.

59 On the importance of adding legal history to this mix, see Robert Fredona, “Angelo degli Ubaldi and the Gulf of the Venetians: Custom, Commerce, and the Control of the Sea,” in New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy, ed. Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert (London, 2018), 29–74.

60 See, for example, Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, U.K., 1997).

61 Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300–900 (Cambridge, U.K., 2002), 780, 794, 797.

62 Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abissinia, originally published as The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale (London, 1759), quote at 73. The character Imlac's original answer to the question was, for the record, “because they are wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance.” The quote plays a significant role in Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London, 2011). For a parallel, see Yali's question—“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”—which inspired Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Modern Societies (New York, 1999), 14.

63 This is hardly a new observation; see R. H. Hilton, “Capitalism—What's in a Name?” Past & Present 1, no. 1 (1952): 32–43, at 32. See also Reinert, Academy of Fisticuffs, 400–1.

64 Frederic C. Lane, “Economic Growth in Wallerstein's Social Systems: A Review Article,” in Profits from Power: Readings in Protection Rent and Violence-Controlling Enterprises (Albany, 1979), 66–71, at 70. This is not to say that Lane and de Roover always shared common interests. See, for example, Lane's statement that “in medieval bookkeeping we met on common ground, but his [de Roover's] concern with the scholastics grew out of elements of his background which are not part of mine.” Frederic C. Lane to Julius Kirshner, 21 Jan. 1974, 1r, series 2, box 6, Lane Papers.

65 However, it may be best to separate the productivity of this heuristic from the ideologies and insecurities that brought it about. It was in their search for disciplinary purpose and pertinence, as Daniel Lord Smail shows, that medievalists over the last century have found in the European Middle Ages the “origins” of a wide range of phenomena with more or less unquestionable present-day relevance, including “civil society, the state, commerce and trade, banking, cities, individualism, universities, the modern nuclear family, scientific method, law and justice, human rights, citizenship, colonialism, fashion, and . . . even persecution.” Smail, “Genealogy, Ontogeny, and the Narrative Arc of Origins,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 21–35, at 31–32, esp. 32n33. As Tim Carter and Richard Goldthwaite rightly observe, “All history is about continuity and change, and which dynamics gets emphasized depends on the objective of the historian.” Carter and Goldthwaite, Orpheus in the Marketplace: Jacopo Peri and the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 348.

66 Larry Neal, “Introduction” to The Cambridge History of Capitalism, vol. 1, ed. Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson (Cambridge, U.K., 2014), 1–23, at 2–4. This extraordinary anthology opens with a chapter on Babylonia in the first millennium BCE.

67 Lane, “Economic Growth in Wallerstein's Social Systems,” 99. The review is largely even handed, as evident also in a letter from Goldthwaite to Lane: “I also want to thank you for the review of Wallerstein's book. I thought you were remarkably generous and restrained in your criticisms. Personally, the book enraged me, for its style, for its shoddy use of materials, for its simplistic schematicization of things. . . . I learned more from your review than I learned from the book”—to which Lane added the laconic marginal note “Problem of syntheses.” Goldthwaite to Lane, 9 Mar. 1977, 1v, series 2, box 6, Lane Papers. For Kuznets's definition, see Simon Kuznets, Economic Growth and Structure (London, 1965), 18; on this, see, among others, Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, and Nathaniel Grotte, Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics (Chicago, 2013). For a similar (though not explicit) emphasis on discovering the sources of growth rather than the definitions of “capitalism,” see Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton, 2016).

68 Deirdre McCloskey, “‘You Know, Ernest, the Rich Are Different from You and Me’: A Comment on Clark's A Farewell to Alms,” European Review of Economic History 12, no. 2 (2008): 138–148, at 141. For overviews of these debates, see Peer Vries, The Escape from Poverty (Vienna, 2013); and Sophus A. Reinert, “The Great Divergence: Europe and Modern Economic Growth” (Harvard Business School Case 715-039, Boston, 2015). On the “Malthusian trap,” see Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, 2007), 19–40. For a critique of Clark, see Karl Gunnar Persson, “The Malthus Delusion,” European Review of Economic History 12, no. 2 (2008): 165–73. Note that even the causes and contexts of the Industrial Revolution remain uncertain. See, for example, recent salvos in the important and continuing debate about Allen's “high wage” thesis: Robert C. Allen, “Real Wages Once More: A Response to Judy Stephenson,” Economic History Review 72, no. 2 (2019): 738–54; Judy Z. Stephenson, “Mistaken Wages: The Cost of Labour in the Early Modern English Economy: A Reply to Robert C. Allen,” Economic History Review 72, no. 2 (2019): 755–69. Its world-changing importance, though, is undeniable.

69 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000).

70 See Maddison Project Database, version 2018, by Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Rebasing ‘Maddison’: New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic Development” (Maddison Project Working Paper 10, Groningen Growth and Development Centre, University of Groningen, Jan. 2018), https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/releases/maddison-project-database-2018. Again, this basic argument has a long pedigree; see, for example, the literature surveyed in Michael Postan, “Bibliography: Studies in Bibliography,” Economic History Review 4, no. 2 (1933): 212–27 (“I. Mediaeval Capitalism”). On the sustainability of this moment, see Sophus A. Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (2010): 1395–425.

71 Martha C. Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge, U.K., 2010), 300–2.

72 Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 287. For a useful meditation on this problem, see Geoffrey M. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (London, 2001).

73 See, importantly, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2007); and Moses Abramovitz, “Catching Up, Forging Ahead, and Falling Behind,” Journal of Economic History 46, no. 2 (1986): 386–406.

74 For different yet (in important matters) aligned perspectives on this issue, see, among others, Alice H. Amsden, The Rise of “the Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies (Oxford, 2003); Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, 2003); and Erik S. Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich . . . and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (London, 2008).

75 For just how far back this is true, see Tim Flannery with Luigi Boitani, Europe: The First 100 Million Years (London, 2018), 1–2, 28.

76 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 571.

77 Douglas Irwin has dismissed this line of argument on the grounds that it suffers from “selection bias” by cherry-picking examples of development that coincided with purposeful industrial policy. See his review of Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective, by Ha-Joon Chang, EH.net (Apr. 2004), https://eh.net/book_reviews/kicking-away-the-ladder-development-strategy-in-historical-perspective/. Milton Friedman, in Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York, 1990), 33–34, forwarded the shibboleth of Hong Kong as a capitalist paradise, but see, for a corrective, Manuel Castells, “Four Asian Tigers with a Dragon Head: A Comparative Analysis of the State, Economy, and Society in the Asian Pacific Rim,” in States and Development in the Asian Pacific Rim, ed. Richard P. Appelbaum and Jeffrey William Henderson (Newbury Park, CA, 2012), 33–70. More generally on this point, see Sophus A. Reinert, “State Capitalisms Past and Present: The European Origins of the Developmental State,” in The Oxford Handbook of State Capitalism, ed. Geoffrey T. Wood, Anna Grosman, and Mike Wright (Oxford, forthcoming).

78 See also Bernard Harcourt's essential The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, MA, 2011). As libertarian Peter T. Leeson has shown, after all, anarchy may be preferable to certain kinds of predatory regulatory regimes. See Leeson, “Better Off Stateless,” in Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think (Cambridge, U.K., 2014), 170–196, at 194. More specifically, the fact that similar but not identical import-substitution policies in Nigeria and South Korea in the 1960s had such incredibly divergent consequences for the respective countries suggests that it may be more enlightening to evaluate policies in their contexts than to pass judgment on policies as such. Compare, say, M. Daly, Development Planning in Nigeria (Ibadan, 1977), and Adejugbe, Michael Adebayo, “Industrialization, Distortions and Economic Development in Nigeria since 1950,” in Industrialization, Urbanization and Development in Nigeria: 1950–99, ed. Adejugbe, Michael Adebayo (Lagos, 2004), 325–54Google Scholar, esp. 334–35, to Alice H. Amsden, Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (Oxford, 1989).

79 Gras, Development of Business History, 180–81. For a related recent argument for the “relevance” of a “historical dimension,” see Umberto Eco, “C'era una volta Churchill,” in Pape Satàn Aleppe: Cronache di una società liquida (Milan, 2016), 60–62.

80 Caferro, William, Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (Cambridge, U.K., 2018), 178CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Robert Fredona's review of this work in Business History Review 92, no. 4 (2018): 749–53.

81 On the relationship between economic crises and historically informed economic inquiries, see Reinert, “Historical Political Economy.” For a history of this most recent crisis, see Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York, 2018).

82 For the lattermost, see, among many possible works, the essays in Fredona and Reinert, eds., New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy, as well as the volume's introductory essay, Fredona and Reinert, “Introduction: History and Political Economy,” xi–xxxii.

83 Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, ed. Dirk Kaesler (Munich, 2013); on this, see Peter Ghosh, Max Weber and “The Protestant Ethic”: Twin Histories (Oxford, 2014).

84 Smail, Daniel Lord, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is not to say that no new explanations have been proposed. As Richard Goldthwaite wrote to Frederic C. Lane, “Conspicuous consumption did lead to investment—investment in crafts and in taste, and I think that this may be a much neglected aspect of the economic history of Europe.” Goldthwaite to Lane, 12 Nov. 1973, series 2, box 6, Lane Papers. Goldthwaite might be read in relation to Lopez's infamous 1952 lecture (published in 1953) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Hard Times and Investment in Culture.” Goldthwaite himself later developed this theme in Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993).

85 Stigler, George J., “Do Economists Matter?” in The Economist as Preacher and Other Essays (Chicago, 1982), 57–67Google Scholar, at 67.