When The World Changed

Elite Self-Interest and Economic Decline in Early Modern Europe 

Richard Lachmann 

Why does the leading economic power of its time lose its dominance? Competing theories are tested through a comparison of four historical cases-the Florentine city-state, the Spanish empire, and the Dutch and British nation-states. Institutional context determined social actors' capacities to apply their polities' human and material resources to foreign economic competition. Specifically, the dominant elites in each polity established the social relations and institutions that protected them from domestic challenges from rival elites and classes. But these relations and institutions had the effect of limiting elites' capacities to adapt to foreign economic rivals: Elites acting locally determined their capacities to act globally. From comparative historical analysis to “local theory”: The Italian city-state route to the modern state Many explanations have been offered for why the dominant city-states of Italy declined, giving way to the larger, national states of Western Europe. Some, like World Systems theorists, have seen the decline of the Italian city-states as the result of the shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, while others, like Richard Lachmann, have focused on institutional arrangements that rendered these systems less resilient when faced by external threats. This article focuses on the relations of local institutions with the interests of capital, and on the role of contentious politics within the city-state that developed as a result of this interaction. Taking as my starting point the comparative historical analysis of statebuilding in the work of Charles Tilly, in Coercion, Capital and European States, the article places contentious politics as a bridge between the Tillian categories of capital-domination and statebuilding, using the case of Florence in the late 14th and early 15th centuries to etch the skeleton of that bridge. With Tilly, I argue that the class interests of the urban elites that were built directly into the mechanisms of city-state politics worked at cross-purposes to the collective requirements of statebuilding. Next, I argue that Tilly pays too little attention to the specificities of the Italian case and gives short shrift to its internal political processes. Finally, I argue that class domination working through institutional conflicts led to periodic outbursts of conflict and built a lack of trust into the structure of governance. I conclude by suggesting why the Italian city-states, at least, were inhibited from taking the nation-state route to the modern world until quite late in their histories. 

Historicizing the Secularization Debate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1300 to 1700 

Philip S. Gorski

 In recent years, the sociology of religion has been consumed by a debate over secularization that pits advocates of a new, rational-choice paradigm (the so-called religious economies model) against defenders of classical secularization theory. According to the old paradigm, the Western world has become increasingly secular since the Middle Ages; according to the new paradigm, it has become increasingly religious. I put these two images of religious development to the test through a detailed examination of religious life in Western Europe before and after the Reformation. I conclude that the changes in social structure and religious experience that occurred during this period were considerably more complex than either the old or new paradigms suggest and, indeed, that the two paradigms are neither so opposed nor so irreconcilable as many of their defenders contend. It is possible, indeed probable, that Western society has become more secular without becoming less religious. I discuss the limitations of the two competing paradigms and sketch the outlines of a more adequate theory of religious change. Medievalists for some time now have been about the business of questioning the traditional boundaries between the medieval and early modern periods. What these scholars have wrought in the areas of cultural, political, technological, and religious history,the eminent historian Christopher Dyer (University of Leicester) has accomplished in the area of English socio-economic history. Originally delivered as the Ford Lectures (University of Oxford, Hilary Term 2001), this book's fundamental thesis is"that many of the tendencies of the end of the Middle Ages had their roots in a much earlier period ... [and that] the advance of commercialization, as towns grew and markets multiplied in the thirteenth century, has led to doubts about whether the changes of the long fifteenth century were of much significance" (p. 3). He continues on to assert that "Just as the commercial growth of the thirteenth century prepared the way for the structural changes of the fifteenth, so developments before 1500 can be connected with the trends of the early modern period" (p. 3). Prosperous rural yeomen, wage laborers, innovative farming techniques, occupational specialization, and the rise of a consumer economy were not the turning points of the early modern period but rather quite typical of England before 1500. These scholars have produced ground-breaking evidence of a rapidly commercializing economy in thirteenth-century England -- a trend overlooked in the past because it was hidden in the local and regional economies of towns rather than documented in multiple metropolitan areas as one finds on the continent. Based on this relatively recent scholarship, the picture of England's socio-economic development looks much more matured before 1500 than previously believed and the crisis of the fourteenth century proved to be a period of economic innovation and advancement by the lower ranks of society even though the aristocracy experienced decline

Cities, Constitutions, and Sovereign Borrowing in Europe, 1274–1785

This article investigates the politics of sovereign borrowing in Europe over the very long run. I consider three alternative hypotheses regarding the sources of borrower credibility. According to the first, European states with constitutional checks on executive authority found it easier to obtain credit at low interest rates than did states that lacked such constraints. My second hypothesis focuses on state type (city-state versus territorial state) and the way in which this may have influenced the balance of political power between owners of land and owners of capital in a society. This hypothesis suggests that after controlling for other factors, one should observe that city-states in Europe found it easier to borrow than did larger territorial states, and that these city-states paid lower interest rates on their debt. Finally, my third hypothesis suggests that borrower credibility depended on the simultaneous presence of both constitutional checks and balances and a city-state. When one considers a broad sample of cases over a long time span there is strong support for the proposition involving city-states and merchant power, but less support for the argument that constitutional checks influenced credibility regardless of state type (city-state or territorial state). There is, however, some empirical evidence of an interaction effect whereby constitutional constraints on rulers made city-states particularly credible as borrowers.

'Republics by Contract': Civil Society, Social Capital, and the 'Putnam Thesis' in the Papal State

In the decades after 1506, and building largely on pre-existing institutions, Bologna developed what was arguably the most extensive network of social service institutions in Italy. Some of its benefits were similar to what we find emerging elsewhere in 15th and 16th century Europe, and have been described in studies by Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Gianna Pomata, Lucia Ferrante, Luisa Ciammitti, Massimo Fornasari, Gabriela Zarri, myself and others: extensive organized food distribution to poor on the basis of a preliminary census of need; a large foundling home; 7 orphanages for girls and boys that work actively to educate, train, and return orphaned and abandoned children to society as workers and parents; shelters for battered women and for prostitutes seeking to leave the profession; 2 major hospitals; a shelter for the mentally ill, a syphilitics hospital; a large centralized shelter and workhouse for the poor; a large public pawn bank, the Monte della Pietà, giving low cost loans to the poor; and a system of city doctors who are paid only upon completion of a course of treatment, and then only if there is a cure.

These institutions are not all unique, though I would argue that the level of benefits seems higher here than elsewhere in Italy. Beyond these institutions, there are other elements as well, particularly services for the working poor who constituted such a large part of the urban community. A key area of need for this group was dowries, and here we see that Bologna developed an innovative dowry fund from 1583 that was unlike any other in Italy. It was open only to small investors and gradually developed into something like a credit union or savings bank; deposits doubled in about 10 years. Here again, Mauro Carboni’s work provides relevant statistics and analysis.

Whereas Florence's Monte delle Dote was a public enterprise, run by its oligarchy and offering an attractive investment to wealthy families, Bologna's Monte was privately operated by the investors themselves, and attracted mostly small deposits. Families of modest and moderate means accounted for about 1/3rd of all deposits. The remaining 2/3rds were employers, private benefactors, and institutions that offered dowries to servants, or to needy girls out of charity.

Bologna’s Monte actively discouraged investments by wealthy families by imposing a relatively low ceiling on deposits. Only Bolognese residents could own Monte credits. The minimum amount to open an account was set at 25 lire, a sum equal to about two-month’s salary of a menial worker, and the maximum deposit was 500 lire, raised to 800 lire in 1627. From 1583 and 1620, 847 accounts were opened on behalf of young girls belonging to 649 families. We know the father’s profession for 182 of those families. None represented leading aristocratic families, 21 were urban professionals (notaries, doctors); 157 represented modest mechanical trades (hemp weavers, silk weavers, carpenters, tailors, porters, bricklayers and so on); 4 were sharecroppers.

Beyond the scope and level of benefits, what was significant about Bologna’s system of civic charity was how it balanced broad administration with close ties to the civic government to create an interconnected network that focused deliberately on the urban population. All of the charitable institutions were run by large confraternities or companies who cycled scores of volunteers through administrative positions for limited terms. Moreover, some of the key charitable institutions deliberately aimed to recruit their boards across representative categories, ensuring that these include nobles, gentlemen, merchants, and superior artisans. The senatorial oligarchy promoted this. It kept its finger on charitable institutions in a period of reforms of the 1550s, when most of the key institutions wrote or rewrote their statutes along a roughly uniform model that other charitable institutions subsequently adopted in the decades that follow. A key feature in the new statutes is that these charitable confraternities all chose their governing Rector from the Senate. There emerged a core of Senators who rotated from one institution to another, giving it an informal co-ordination. This was precisely the period when the Senate was establishing its assunterie to expand its administrative capacities, and when it was bleeding power from the Anziani. At the same time, the Monte della Pietà became the financial administrator of a number of the key charitable institutions.

These two factors – Senatorial rectors and centralized financial administration – took the plethora of individual charitable institutions and consolidated them into a working civic network of charity: Bologna deliberately chose not to follow other cities like Florence that entrusted these social charities to smaller and often hand-picked administrative boards serving life terms. Power was shared and decentralized though a broader mass of the citizens who rotated through appointments, increasing the level of civil engagement. A further key characteristic is that benefits were largely for citizens only – not for transients or visitors. This was commonly found in statutes elsewhere, but seems to have been policed more rigorously here.

Moving from charity to employment, we find that Bologna’s guilds retained more authority in regulating professional behaviour and directing the local economy. An earlier economic historiography saw guilds as brakes on early modern economy, but this is being revised by the current generation of Italian economic historians. Alberto Guenzi finds that guilds certainly defend their interests, but also often push innovation in methods and production techniques. Raffaella Sarti has shown that the guild model was so strong locally that it moved beyond productive industries into the service sector: in the 17th century, servants formed a guild to defend their interests, and managed to keep it operative into the 18th century. This suggests that the model of collective organization and a regulated economy was still compelling locally.

Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam.

By Anne E. C. McCants (Urban, University of Illinois Press, 1997)

From Civilitas To Civility: Codes Of Manners In Medieval And Early Modern England Argues that to see the contrasts between late medieval `courtesy books' and early modern manuals of manners as markers of changing ideals of social conduct in England is an interpretation too narrowly based on works written in English. Examination of Latin and Anglo-Norman literature shows that the ideal of the urbane gentleman can be traced back at least as far as the most comprehensive of all courtesy books, the twelfth-century Liber Urbani of Daniel of Beccles, and was itself underpinned by the commonplace secular morality of the much older Distichs of Cato.

Peter Scott: Ethics “in” and “for” Higher Education

The university first developed as a distinctive institution in Southern and Western Europe in the high Middle Ages. The qualifier ‘distinctive’ is important in two senses. First, there had been ‘academic’ institutions in Europe before the emergence of the university (or stadium general) - in 7^th century North Umbria (Bead) or at the court of Charlemagne (Albumin). But they had been monastic or court schools, organizational elements within much larger configurations. Second, ‘academic’ institutions also flourished in the Byzantine east, where institutions close to universities did emerge, and in the Islamic world, where the unity of religion and state made it more difficult for distinctive institutions to emerge. So, although the structural differentiation of the medieval university was decisive in terms of future evolution, its significance can be exaggerated in intellectual and normative terms. The university did provide a separate organizational basis for the emergence of a distinctive value system, scholasticism. But the degree to which scholasticism could really be distinguished from the wider culture of medieval Catholicism and feudal society was limited.

Only with the coming of the Renaissance - and especially the Reformation - did the organizational (semi) independence of the universities become significant. Once the unity of medieval Europe had been shattered, universities played a crucial role in state-building. They educated new (and more secular) bureaucratic elites, bridged or brokered between mercantile and court cultures, and promoted new intellectual values by providing ideological justifications for the new politico-religious order and proto-scientific culture. Many universities, of course, were founded between 1500 and 1700. One indicator of the importance of universities during this period is their social penetration. In England the so-called ‘Long Parliament’, which was first elected in 1641 and went on to wage war against King Charles I, contained more graduates than any English (by then United Kingdom) Parliament before 1945.

Yet in some respects this second flourishing of the European university was a false dawn. From the mid 17th to the late 18th centuries universities stagnated both in terms of student numbers and of intellectual engagement (- this statement remains broadly valid despite recent studies that suggest universities were not as stagnant during this period as was once supposed) (Porter 1996). In fact the new Academies of Science, ‘practical’ engineers, Enlightenment illuminati, the first stirrings of the dominant media and publishing industries, radical thought and revolutionary politics - these were the channels through which intellectual and scientific innovation flowed for more than a century. While the university played some part in the scientific revolution, its role in the Enlightenment was tangential, even accidental and value systems evolved independently. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that by 1800 the university had become a threatened species, at risk of being superseded by other more ‘modern’ academic institutions (de Ridder-Symeons 1996).