Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction
- Part I Approaches
- Part II Merchants
- 3 Creating Networks through Languages: Italian Merchants in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
- 4 Networks and Commercial Penetration Models in the Late Medieval Mediterranean: Revisiting the Datini
- 5 Networks and Merchant Diasporas: Florentine Bankers in Lyon and Antwerp in the Sixteenth Century
- 6 The Astudillo Partnership and the Spanish ‘Nation’ in Sixteenth-Century Florence
- Part III Markets and Institutions
- Part IV Products
- Notes
- Index
5 - Networks and Merchant Diasporas: Florentine Bankers in Lyon and Antwerp in the Sixteenth Century
from Part II - Merchants
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction
- Part I Approaches
- Part II Merchants
- 3 Creating Networks through Languages: Italian Merchants in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
- 4 Networks and Commercial Penetration Models in the Late Medieval Mediterranean: Revisiting the Datini
- 5 Networks and Merchant Diasporas: Florentine Bankers in Lyon and Antwerp in the Sixteenth Century
- 6 The Astudillo Partnership and the Spanish ‘Nation’ in Sixteenth-Century Florence
- Part III Markets and Institutions
- Part IV Products
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Networks and Markets
In his recently published Economy of Renaissance Florence, Richard Goldthwaite describes how the Florentine economy and its position in later medieval and early modern or pre-capitalist Europe were developed by the Florentine network outside Florence:
In short, many more Florentines must have taken their chances in foreign trade, and numbers alone can explain greater geographical diffusion and growth of a more extensive, denser trade network abroad than merchants from small places could possibly have formed among themselves … By their sheer numbers, not to mention the density of the network they built up among themselves, Florentines eventually shoved the other Tuscans out of the markets where they did business.
Goldthwaite refers to expanding social and commercial relations, which he calls without any further definition a ‘network’. This ‘network’ came into existence from the thirteenth century onwards and reached its greatest extent during the 1330s in England, and again in fifteenth-century Bruges and early sixteenth-century Lyon. With regard to any of these Florentine communities, we observe a varying situation in terms of numbers of merchants from Florence and a significantly changing density of network indicators. In the later sixteenth century it tended towards a gradual constriction which marks a slow decline in the performance of the Florentine trans-regional economy.
The dimensions of Goldthwaite's network are to be understood geographically.
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- Commercial Networks and European Cities, 1400–1800 , pp. 107 - 120Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014