INTRODUCTION

We have seen in the previous chapters that to describe late medieval Sicily as a staple grain exporter, undeveloped but for two industries (sugar and silk) linked to foreign markets, caricatures existing conditions and misrepresents the relative importance of foreign to domestic trade. Nonetheless, while I have argued that the latter was the prime cause of structural changes at the regional level, I do not intend simply to turn arguments about ‘dependence’ on their head and take refuge in purely ‘endogenist’ explanations of economic development.

In fact, the theoretical divergences between the ‘dualist’ and the ‘endogenous’ models of economic development partly reflect the empirical distinction, which prevailed before the later Middle Ages, between long-distance trade in high-value goods, and shorter-range exchange of low-value, bulk commodities. We saw in chapters 1 and 3 that both the dualist and the ‘endogenist’ model appear to rest on the assumption of peasant subsistence or of a specific ‘peasant economy’. I also suggested that the problems this raises can be solved if one assumes instead that peasants did not avoid commercialization as a matter of principle, but pursued economic strategies shaped by imperfect information and by prevailing institutional constraints on commoditization.