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Renaissance Florence and the Origins of Capitalism: A Business History Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2020

Francesca Trivellato
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Abstract

From the 1940s to the 1970s, the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages was a historiographical concept with considerable traction. This article revisits the literature that brought about and engaged with that concept, with specific reference to Florence. In so doing, it draws attention to the place once held by business history in the study of Europe's takeoff. It also discusses the preliminary results of an ongoing project on limited partnerships in early modern Tuscany, which reaffirms the relevance of business history for understanding preindustrial economies but steers away from a teleological search for the origins of modern capitalism.

Keywords

commercial revolution of the Middle Agesenterprise formslimited partnershipsFlorenceTuscany
Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 94 , Issue 1: Italy and the Origins of Capitalism , Spring 2020 , pp. 229 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Footnotes

I wish to acknowledge the valuable comments made on an earlier draft by Ron Harris, Naomi Lamoreaux, Anthony Molho, and Reinhold Mueller as well as by the participants in the workshop held at the Harvard Business School in March 2019 that led to this special issue, and by Robert Fredona and Daniel Smail in particular.

References

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2 Ashton, T. S., The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (London, 1948), 58Google Scholar. No single gradualist school can be identified—some of its advocates stress demographic transformations, others privilege the role of overseas trade; some emphasize an increase in agricultural productivity, others superior legal and political institutions; some regard the process as driven by high wages, others by consumption. A highly selective bibliography of contributions published before and after Pomeranz's study would include Douglass C. North and Thomas, Robert Paul, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, U.K., 1973)Google Scholar; Wrigley, E. A., Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, U.K., 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, U.K., 2008); and Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, U.K., 2009).

3 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, 2 vols., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, 1968), esp. 375–80, 635–40. On the preeminence of individualism among other influential social theorists, see Caferro, William, “Premodern European Capitalism, Christianity, and Florence,” Business History Review 94, no. 1 (2020): 39–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (1860; London, 1898). I discuss the different meanings attributed to individualism by Burckhardt and by most economic and business historians of Renaissance Florence in Trivellato, Francesca, “Economic and Business History as Cultural History: Pitfalls and Possibilities,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 22, no. 2 (2019): 402–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 The boundaries separating economic from business history were more porous in the past than they are today. Here, for the sake of simplicity and mirroring disciplinary trends, I refer to economic history as the study of macro phenomena and business history as the study of the forms of organization of economic enterprises, with an emphasis on the private sector and the firm in particular. Oscar Gelderblom and I recently made a case for the continued importance of business history in debates about the so-called Rise of the West in Gelderblom and Trivellato, “The Business History of the Preindustrial World: Towards a Comparative Historical Analysis,” Business History 61, no. 2 (2019): 225–59.

6 Felix Gilbert to John H. Elliott, 25 Oct. 1985, box 61, Felix Gilbert papers, Hoover Library and Archives, Stanford University.

7 Federigo Melis estimated that some 30,000 account books dating from 1300 to 1500 are kept in archives across Tuscany. Melis, “Banche, trasporti e assicurazioni,” in Nuovi metodi della ricerca storica: Atti del II Congresso nazionale di scienze storiche (Salerno, 23–27 aprile 1972) (Milan, 1975), 171–88, reprinted in Melis, L'azienda nel Medioevo, ed. Marco Spallanzani (Florence, 1991), 108–25, at 111. More recently, Sergio Tognetti counted some 2,500 of them from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Florence and Prato alone and many more from the sixteenth century onward. Tognetti, “Mercanti e libri di conto nella Toscana del basso medioevo: Le edizioni di registri aziendali dai primi del Novecento a oggi,” Anuario de estudios medievales 42 (2012): 867–80. Richard A. Goldthwaite lists the secondary literature that has mined the account books of fifteenth-century Florentine firms. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 2009), 58n30.

8 Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Fowkes, Ben, vol. 1 (1867; London, 1976), 873–940Google Scholar (Book 1, Part 8: “So-called Primitive Accumulation”).

9 Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1902); Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Munich, 1916–1928). Only an abridged English edition of this major work exists: Sombart, Economic Life in the Modern Age, ed. Nico Stehr and Reiner Grundmann (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001).

10 Max Weber, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages, ed. Lutz Kaelber (1889; Lanham, 2003); Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, with a foreword by R. H. Tawney (1904–1905; New York, 1958).

11 Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein (1911; London, 1913).

12 Among Pirenne's predecessors was Heinrich Sieveking, who wrote on the late medieval commercial expansion in both northern and southern Europe and who was equally known at the time. See, for example, Sieveking, Die rheinischen Gemeinden Erpel und Unkel und ihre Entwickelung im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1895); and Genueser finanzwesen mit besonderer berücksichtigung der Casa di S. Giorgio, 2 vols. (Frieburg im Breisgau, 1898–1899). Alfred Doren, a contemporary of Pirenne, must also be mentioned here given his enormous influence on subsequent controversies about the size and hierarchical organization of the Florentine woolen industry before and after the Black Death. Doren, Entwicklung und Organisation der Florentiner Zünfte im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1897); and Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie vom vierzehnten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1901–1908).

13 Henri Pirenne, “The Stages in the History of Capitalism,” American Historical Review 19 (1914): 494–515, at 495–96. See also Pirenne, “Les periodes de l'histoire sociale du capitalisme,” Bulletin de la classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, 6 May 1914, 258–299, reprinted in Pirenne, Histoire économique de l'Occident médieval, ed. E. Coornert (Bruges, 1951), 1–50.

14 Pirenne, Henri, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Halsey, Frank D. (Princeton, 1925)Google Scholar. Pirenne also linked explicitly modern democracy to the medieval urban tradition of the Low Countries in his Belgian Democracy, Its Early History, trans. J. V. Saunders (1910; Manchester, 1915).

15 Lujo Brentano, Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus: Festrede gehalten in der öffentlichen Sitzung der K. Akademie der Wissenschaften am 15. März 1913 (Munich, 1916); Fritz Rörig, Hansische Beiträge zur deutschen Wirtschaftsgeschichte, mit einem Plan des Marktes von Lübeck (Breslau, 1928); Jacob Strieder, “Origin and Evolution of Early European Capitalism,” Journal of Economic and Business History 2 (1929): 1–19.

16 Hauser, Henri, “Les origines du capitalisme moderne en France,” Revue d’économie politique 16 (1902): 193–205Google Scholar, 313–33; Hauser, Les débuts du capitalisme (Paris, 1927); Sée, Henri, “Dans quelle mesure puritans et juifs ont-ils contribué aux progrès du capitalisme moderne?” Revue historique 52 (1927): 57–68Google Scholar; Sée, Modern Capitalism: Its Origin and Evolution, trans. Homer B. Vanderblue and Georges F. Doriot (1926; New York, 1928).

17 Sayous, André E., “‘Der moderne Kapitalismus’ de W. Sombart et Gênes aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” Revue d'histoire économique et sociale 18 (1931): 427–44Google Scholar, esp. 431, 436–38. See also Sayous, Le commerce des européens à Tunis depuis le XIIe siècle jusqu'à la find fu XVIe: Exposé et documents (Paris, 1929); and Structure et évolution du capitalisme européen, XVIe–XVIIe siècles, ed. Mark Steele (London, 1989).

18 Werner Sombart, Il capitalismo moderno: Esposizione storico-sistematica della vita economica di tutta l'Europa dai suoi inizi fino all'età contemporanea, trans. Gino Luzzatto (Florence, 1925); Luzzatto, Gino, “L'origine e gli albori del capitalismo: A proposito della seconda edizione del ‘Capitalismo moderno’ di Werner Sombart,” Nuova rivista storica 6, no. 1 (1922): 39–66Google Scholar, reprinted in Luzzatto, Dai servi della gleba agli albori del capitalismo: Saggi di storia economica (Bari, 1966), 485–527.

19 Luzzatto, Gino, “The Study of Medieval Economic History: Recent Literature and Tendencies,” Journal of Economic and Business History 4 (1931–1932): 708–27Google Scholar. See, for example, Enrico Besta, Il contratto di assicurazione nel medio evo (Genoa, 1884); and Alessandro Lattes, Il diritto consuetudinario nelle città lombarde (Milan, 1899).

20 Amintore Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism (1934; New York, 1935); Sapori, Armando, The Italian Merchant in the Middle Ages, trans. Kennen, Patricia Ann (1952; New York, 1979)Google Scholar.

21 In 1936 de Roover, a Belgian accountant, went to the Harvard Business School (then Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration) to do a master's degree with Gras and also worked with A. P. Usher at Harvard University. Richard Goldthwaite, “Raymond de Roover on Late Medieval and Early Modern Economic History,” in de Roover, Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover, ed. Julius Kirshner (Chicago, 1974), 3–14.

22 See de Roover's, Raymond “Discussion” of Gras's paper “Capitalism—Concepts and History,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 16, no. 2 (1942): 34–39Google Scholar, at 34, reprinted as “The Commercial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century,” in Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History, ed. Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma (Homewood, IL, 1953), 80–85.

23 Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), vii. It is worth noting that Lopez, once expelled from Italian academia because of the 1938 so-called Racial Laws, was welcomed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then the hub of North American scholarship on late medieval Genoa, Lopez's specialty upon leaving Italy. There in the 1920s Eugene H. Byrne had collected photostatic copies of the earliest surviving Genoese notarial cartularies from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and trained Robert L. Reynolds (who welcomed Lopez) and Hilmar C. Krueger. Although the Wisconsin School, as it is sometimes referred to, did not produce a slogan as successful as the “commercial revolution,” its scholarship on Genoese maritime history has been of considerable significance for medievalists and economic historians, especially in studies of commenda contracts, a topic to which I return in the body of the text below.

24 De Roover, “Discussion,” 36. De Roover gives a fuller account of these business techniques in his “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.

25 Michael Postan, “The Trade of Medieval Europe: The North,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 2, Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, ed. M. M. Postan and E. E. Rich (Cambridge, U.K., 1952), 119–256; Robert S. Lopez, “The Trade of Medieval Europe: The South,” in Cambridge Economic History, 2:257–354.

26 Armando Sapori, “Il Rinascimento economico [1952],” in Sapori, Studi di storia economica (secoli XIII–XIV–XV), vol. 1 (Florence, 1955), 619–56.

27 Robert S. Lopez, “Hard Times and Investment in Culture,” in The Renaissance: A Symposium, February 8–10, 1952 (New York, 1953), 19–33, reprinted in The Renaissance: Six Essays, ed. Wallace K. Ferguson (New York, 1962), 29–54.

28 Robert S. Lopez and Harry A. Miskimin, “The Economic Depression of the Renaissance,” Economic History Review 14, no. 3 (1962): 408–26.

29 Carlo M. Cipolla, “Economic Depression of the Renaissance?” Economic History Review 16, no. 3 (1964): 519–24.

30 Judith C. Brown, “Prosperity or Hard Times in Renaissance Italy?” Renaissance Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1989): 761–80; Franco Franceschi and Luca Molà, “L'economia del Rinascimento: Dalle teorie della crisi alla ‘preistoria del consumo,’” in Il Rinascimento italiano e l'Europa, vol. 1, Storia e storiografia, ed. Marcello Fantoni (Treviso, 2005), 185–200. On the basis of the largest-to-date compilation of data on population, urbanization, prices, wages, and GDP from central and northern Italy, Paolo Malanima recently sided with Cipolla but proposed a more precise periodization, with the post-plague upward macroeconomic trend ending around 1450. Malanima, “Italy in the Renaissance: A Leading Economy in the European Context, 1350–1550,” Economic History Review 71, no. 1 (2018): 3–30.

31 Judith C. Brown and Jordan Goodman, “Women and Industry in Florence,” Journal of Economic History 40, no. 1 (1980): 73–80; Paolo Malanima, La decadenza di un'economia cittadina: L'industria di Firenze nei secoli XVI–XVIII (Bologna, 1982).

32 Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993). For an acerbic criticism of this interpretation as the projection of trickle-down economics onto fifteenth-century Florence, see Lauro Martines, “The Renaissance and the Birth of Consumer Society,” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1998): 193–203.

33 Most notably, Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven, 2005).

34 Federigo Melis, “Considerations of Some Aspects of the Rise of Capitalist Enterprise,” in Studies in Economic History: Essays in Honour of Professor H. M. Robertson, ed. Marcelle Kooy, with a foreword by H. F. Oppenheimer (London, 1972), 153–186, at 163; Melis, “Industria commercio credito (secoli XIV–XVI),” in Un'altra Firenze: Riscontri tra cultura e società nella storia Fiorentina; L'epoca di Cosimo il Vecchio (Florence, 1971), 141–280, reprinted in Melis, L'economia fiorentina del Rinascimento, ed. Bruno Dini (Florence, 1984), 31–186, at 60. Melis devoted massive volumes to the history of accounting and marine insurance, including his Storia della ragioneria: Contributo alla conoscenza e interpretazione delle fonti più significative della storia economica (Bologna, 1950) and Origini e sviluppi delle assicurazioni in Italia (secoli XIV–XVI), ed. Bruno Dini (Rome, 1975).

35 Melis, “Industria commercio credito,” 184.

36 Melis, 180.

37 Weber, History of Commercial Partnerships.

38 Abraham L. Udovitch, “At the Origins of the Western Commenda: Islam, Israel, Byzantium?” Speculum 37, no. 2 (1962): 198–207; Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (New York, 1955), 24–27; Murat Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution of Business Partnerships: The Islamic World and Europe, with Specific Reference to the Ottoman Archives (Leiden, 1996).

39 In 1310, the Bardi partnership had sixteen partners, ten of whom were related to the Bardi via the male line. In 1331, eight more partners were added, among whom this time only two carried the Bardi surname. A few months later, the partnership was reconstituted with only ten partners at the helm, six of whom were Bardi. Among the factors and salaried employees, of course, the vast majority were not family members. Armando Sapori, La crisi delle compagnie mercantili dei Bardi e dei Peruzzi (Florence, 1926), 243–81. See also Edwin S. Hunt, The Medieval Supercompanies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence (Cambridge, U.K., 1994).

40 Federigo Melis, “Le società commerciali a Firenze dalla seconda metà del XIV al XVI secolo,” in Troisième conférence internationale d'histoire économique (Munich, 1965) (Paris, 1974), 47–62, reprinted in Melis, L'azienda, 161–78.

41 Federigo Melis, Aspetti della vita economica medievale (Studi nell'Archivio Datini di Prato) (Siena, 1962); Melis, Documenti per la storia economica dei secoli XIII–XVI (Florence, 1972). Melis authored scores of articles and book chapters whose content is not condensed in monographs. A full bibliography can be found online: “Federigo Melis’ Bibliography,” Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini” website, n.d., accessed 18 Feb. 2020, http://www.istitutodatini.it/schede/melis/eng/melis2.htm.

42 Raymond de Roover, The Medici Bank: Its Organization, Management, Operations, and Decline (New York, 1948), 6–7; de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 81.

43 For some, Melis and de Roover, by focusing on entrepreneurs and their business choices, eschewed the question of class conflict, which was hard to miss given the prominence of the rebellion of the poorest workers in the woolen industry (ciompi) in 1378. A Soviet historian accused Melis of assuming that “the owner of capital in the past (and naturally in the present in which he mentally transfers his hero [i.e., Datini]) is the source of all economic and cultural goods that benefit all of his contemporaries.” Victor Rutenburg, “Tre volumi sul Datini: Rassegna bibliografica sulle origini del capitalismo in Italia,” Nuova rivista storica 50 (1966): 666–81, at 679. On the Ciompi Revolt in a social and economic perspective, see Alessandro Stella, La révolte des Ciompi: Les hommes, les lieux, le travail (Paris, 1993); and Franco Franceschi, Oltre il “Tumulto”: I lavoratori fiorentini dell'Arte della lana fra il Tre e Quattrocento (Florence, 1993).

44 Richard A. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families (Princeton, 1968), 253. In support of the importance of limited partnership, Goldthwaite referenced one of the rare studies available at the time: Maurice Carmona, “Aspects du capitalisme toscan aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: Les sociétés en commandite à Florence et à Lucques,” Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 11, no. 2 (1964): 81–108. Francis William Kent took issue with Goldthwaite's emphasis on the rise of the nuclear family in his study of three Florentine elite families (one of them, the Capponi, also covered by Goldthwaite), but his analysis disregarded those families’ business organization. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai (Princeton, 1977). In the 1480s, the Capponi ran their principal businesses together with non-kin but always controlled the majority of the capital. In the mid-sixteenth century, Giuliano Capponi invested in accomandite of other Florentines abroad. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, 200–1, 229.

45 John F. Padgett and Paul D. McLean, “Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 5 (2006): 1463–568, at 1516, 1473. In a subsequent contribution, the same authors stress the continued importance of family and neighborhood ties, even as they repeat that elite merchant families participated in networks that included fewer kin. Padgett and McLean, “Economic Credit in Renaissance Florence,” Journal of Modern History 83, no. 1 (2011): 1–47.

46 Florence Edler de Roover, “Andrea Banchi, Florentine Silk Manufacturer and Merchant in the Fifteenth Century,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 2 (1966): 223–85; William Caferro, “The Silk Business of Tommaso Spinelli, Fifteenth-Century Florentine Merchant and Papal Banker,” Renaissance Studies 10, no. 4 (1996): 417–39.

47 Gregorio Fierli, Della società chiamata accomandita (Florence, 1803), 4–5.

48 Fierli, Della società chiamata accomandita, 6.

49 For some early and recent criticism by legal historians of their discipline's tendency to frame limited partnerships in terms of genealogical and classificatory schemes, see Henri Lévy-Bruhl, Histoire juridique des sociétés de commerce en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1939), 33–40; and Umberto Santarelli, Mercanti e società tra mercanti (Turin, 1998), 115–17—although even Santarelli treats accomandite as the point of origin of a “genetic process” that led to the creation of joint-stock companies (pp. 182–83).

50 Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), 127.

51 Walter Panciera, Fiducia e affari nella società veneziana del Settecento (Padua, 2001), 36–38; Mauro Carboni and Massimo Fornasari, “Finanziare l'impresa: Innovazioni societarie nella Bologna d'antico regime,” in Reti di crediti: Circuiti informali, impropri, nascosti (secoli XIII–XIX), ed. Carboni and Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli (Bologna, 2014), 125–47; Cinzia Lorandini, “Financing Trade through Limited Partnerships: Evidence from Silk Firms in Eighteenth-Century Trentino,” in Financing in Europe: Evolution, Coexistence and Complementarity of Lending Practices from the Middle Ages to Modern Times, ed. Marcella Lorenzini, Lorandini, and D'Maris Coffman (Cham, Switzerland, 2018), 73–103.

52 The law is reproduced in Fierli, Della società chiamata accomandita, 14–18. According to Melis, it only established the legal validity of limited liability; it did not speak of limited partnerships in the sense of firms designated by the name of “& Co.,” an innovation that can be observed only in the sixteenth century. Melis, “Le società commerciali a Firenze,” 170–73; Melis, “Industria commercio credito,” 43. Melis's distinction, however, is fictitious. Limited liability had long been used in Tuscany (in commenda contracts, for example) and did not demand official recognition. Moreover, not all limited partnerships after the sixteenth century had a collective firm name, nor did the absence of such a name prior to that time affect the obligations of active and passive partners.

53 José-Gentil Da Silva and Maurice Carmona were the first to compile summary statistics on the basis of the contracts kept in the Mercanzia, but their results are limited in scope, sometimes imprecise, and omit any discussion of the partial view given by their source. Carmona, “Aspects du capitalisme toscan”; Da Silva, “Au XVIIe siècle: La stratégie du capital florentin,” Annales: ESC 19, no. 3 (1964): 480–91; Da Silva, Banque et crédit en Italie au XVIIe siècle, vol. 1 (Paris, 1969), 97–109; Da Silva, “Fructification du capital et dynamique sociale dans les sociétés commerciales (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles),” in Troisième conférence internationale d'histoire économique (Munich, 1965), vol. 5 (Paris, 1974), 63–132, esp. 124–30. R. Burr Litchfield used the same records for a more rigorous study of aristocratic investments in the eighteenth century. Litchfield, “Les investissements commerciaux des patriciens florentins au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: ESC 24, no. 3 (1969): 685–721. Others have drawn from the registers of the Mercanzia to assess the expansion of the silk manufacturing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but with no ability to determine the fraction of the market that was organized in limited partnerships. See Jordan Goodman, “Financing Pre-modern European Industry: An Example from Florence, 1580–1660,” Journal of European Economic History 10, no. 2 (1981): 415–35; and Malanima, La decadenza di un'economia cittadina, 130–48.

54 I designed a relational database to input the information contained in each contract using the following volumes: Mercanzia, 10831, 10832, 10833, 10835, 10838, 10839, 10842, 10843, 10845, 10846, 10848, 10850, 10852, 10854, 10856, 10858, 10859, Archivio di Stato, Florence (hereafter, ASF); Dipartimento esecutivo della Camera di Commercio, 1262, 1263, 1263bis, ASF. The database is presently hosted in a password-protected website but, when completed, I plan to make it publicly available.

55 Andrea Banchi's accomandita of 1455, for example, appears in both his private records and the public registers. Edler de Roover, “Andrea Banchi,” 232; Mercanzia, 10831, f. 34r, ASF. Melis wrote that most, but not all, limited partnerships are included in the public registers of the Mercanzia. Federigo Melis, “Il commercio transatlantico di una compagnia fiorentina stabilita a Siviglia a pochi anni dalle imprese di Cortés,” in Estudios del V Congreso de Historia de la Corona de Aragon, vol. 3 (Zaragoza, 1954), 131–206; Melis, “Industria commercio credito,” 53–54; Melis, “Le società commerciali a Firenze,” 175. For an example of noncompliance in the 1570s, see Sergio Tognetti, “L'industria conciaria nella Firenze del Cinquecento: Uno studio sulla contabilità aziendale,” Archivio storico italiano 170, no. 2 (2012): 61–110, at 72. Conversely, Ilario Mosca finds that no copy of a privately drawn agreement registered in the Mercanzia in 1572 survives among the extant business archives of that limited partnership's passive investors. Mosca, “La genèse d'une compagnie en commandite hispano-florentine de Marseille, entre écritures publiques et écritures privées,” in Les actes de sociétés commerciales, ed. Christian Borde and Eric Roulet (Aix-la-Chapelle, in press).

56 Specialists have long noted that, after the thirteenth century, Tuscan merchants used notaries only rarely to register their business transactions and even more infrequently for their partnership agreements. Goldthwaite, Economy of Renaissance Florence, xv, 67. To put any doubt to rest, I checked all surviving notarial deeds for Florence in 1751 and for Livorno in 1674–1675, 1751, and 1761. I found a total of two partnership agreements, both in Livorno and neither a limited partnership. Notarile Moderno: Protocolli, 19942, notaio Giovanni Alessandro di Francesco Catelani, ff. 160r–v (1674), ASF; Notarile Moderno: Protocolli, 20037, notaio Pier Antonio di Francesco Mutti, ff. 72r–73v (1675), ASF. A similar pattern can be observed elsewhere. In Antwerp, scholars have identified only 141 partnership agreements in the city's notaries for the period from 1480 to 1620 and 69 for the period from 1794 to 1814. See Bram van Hofstraeten, “Limited Partnerships in Early Modern Antwerp (1480–1620),” Forum Historiae Iuris (2015), https://forhistiur.de/2015-11-van-hofstraeten/; and Fred Stevens, Revolutie en notariaat: Antwerpen, 1794–1814 (Leuven, 1994), 281. Slightly different figures are given in van Hofstraeten, “The Organization of Mercantile Capitalism in the Low Countries: Private Partnerships in Early Modern Antwerp (1480–1620),” Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 13, no. 2 (2016): 1–24.

57 Historians commonly cite three to five years as the duration of most private businesses in early modern Europe. Rarely did family partnerships survive beyond the third generation. Cinzia Lorandini, “Looking beyond the Buddenbrooks Syndrome: The Salvadori Firm of Trento, 1660s–1880s,” Business History 57, no. 7 (2015): 1005–19. At present, I am not able to illustrate the role of non-kin or the patterns of capitalization by economic sectors in this series of contracts, which ranged from small firms (such as a bakery or a bricklaying business) to banking companies active abroad.

58 Lopez and Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World, 198; Sergio Tognetti, Il banco Cambini: Affari e mercanti di una compagnia mercantile-bancaria nella Firenze del XV secolo (Florence, 1999), 148, 219. In the absence of any serial records of general partnerships, account books are the principal source in which we can identify these deposits. This also means that it is difficult to determine their frequency.

59 Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009), 142–44.

60 For an early criticism of macroeconomic growth measures as metrics of economic welfare, see William D. Nordhaus and James Tobin, “Is Growth Obsolete?” in Economic Research: Retrospect and Prospect, vol. 5, Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 1–80, available online at https://www.nber.org/books/nord72-1. For a more accessible discussion, see Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton, 2014).

61 Angus Maddison, The World Economy, 2 vols. (Paris, 2006). For further data and analysis, see “Maddison Historical Statistics,” Groningen Growth and Development Centre, University of Groningen, last modified 11 Jan. 2020, https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/.

62 Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, 2011). For an opposite view, see Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 166–86. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong also downplay the difference between European and Chinese organization of long-distance trade. Rosenthal and Wong, Before and beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in Europe and China (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 67–98.

63 On the dearth of recent studies of pre-1800 business history, see Gelderblom and Trivellato, “Business History of the Preindustrial World,” 4–5; Ojala, Jari, Eloranta, Jari, Ojala, Anu, and Valtonen, Heli, “Let the Best Story Win: Evaluation of the Most Cited Business History Articles,” Management and Organization History 12, no. 4 (2017): 305–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. Appendix.

64 Avner Greif, “On the Interrelations and Economic Implications of Economic, Social, Political, and Normative Factors: Reflections from Two Late Medieval Societies,” in The Frontiers of the New Institutional Economics, ed. John N. Drobak and John V. C. Nye (New York, 1997), 57–94, esp. 73; Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge, U.K., 2006), esp. 269–93. Weber's influence is more readily acknowledged in Ron Harris, “The Institutional Dynamics of Early Modern Eurasian Trade: The Commenda and the Corporation,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 71, no. 3 (2009): 606–22; and Harris, Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400–1700 (Princeton, 2000), 17, 130–47.

65 Goldthwaite, Economy of Renaissance Florence, 67.

66 For Tognetti, limited partnerships represented “a more elastic and less risky” form of investment but also coincided with the most aggressive phase of the expansion of the fifteenth-century firm he studied. Tognetti, Il banco Cambini, 193, 203. Relevant sources also survive outside of Florence. The Tuscan city of Lucca remained an independent republic throughout the early modern period. A series of registers with summary contracts of partnerships operating both locally and abroad lists 635 partnerships for the period from 1579 to 1770 (obviously only a fraction of the total in operation), of which 248 (39 percent) had at least one limited partner. Corte dei Mercanti, Libro delle Date, 88–92, Archivio di Stato, Lucca. These registers demand further investigation. For preliminary considerations on how to compare enterprise forms in different Italian towns and what generalizations to draw from such an exercise, see Edoardo Grendi, “Associazioni familiari e associazioni d'affari: I Balbi a Genova tra Cinquecento e Seicento,” Quaderni storici, n.s., 31, 91(1) (1996): 23–39.

67 On eighteenth-century England, see Ron Harris, Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720–1844 (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), 29–31. Of the 141 partnership agreements that survive in the Antwerp notarial registers from 1480 to 1620, fewer than 25 can be categorized as limited partnerships. Van Hofstraeten, “Limited Partnerships in Early Modern Antwerp.” The author rightly insists on the ambiguity of certain clauses and the need to ascertain the obligations of active and silent partners specified in each agreement. In another set of 26 partnership contracts from Antwerp registered between 1526 and 1588, only 4 include liability clauses. Joroen Puttevils, Merchants and Trading in the Sixteenth Century: The Golden Age of Antwerp (London, 2015), 96. In Bilbao, the 21 limited partnerships that Carlos Petit identified in the years 1737–1829 are estimated to represent no more than 8 percent of all partnerships operating in the period. Petit, Compañias mercantiles en Bilbao (1737–1829) (Seville, 1979), 50. On China, see Kenneth Pomeranz, “‘Traditional’ Chinese Business Forms Revisited: Family, Firm, and Financing in the History of the Yutang Company of Jining, 1779–1956,” Late Imperial China 18, no. 1 (1997): 1–38.

68 Kessler, Amalia, “Limited Liability in Context: Lessons from the French Origins of the American Limited Partnerships,” Journal of Legal Studies 32, no. 2 (2003): 511–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Hilt, Eric and O'Banion, Katharine E., “The Limited Partnership in New York, 1822–1858: Partners without Kinship,” Journal of Economic History 69, no. 3 (2009): 615–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.