Reinhold C. Mueller

Risky Business: The Financing of Mercantile Activity in Medieval and Renaissance Venice
In the 1200s, Venice, considered as the birthplace of modern capital-based enterprise, was a prosperous imperial power governed by a commerce-oriented oligarchy. The city-state's convenient marriage with the sea allowed Venetian businessmen to cultivate merchant traffic in the Eastern world, thereby paving the way for Venice to gain undisputed mercantile supremacy in the Levant. Venice's economic ascendancy was immeasurably attributable to the Republic's dynamic money market, which channeled the capital surplus of Venice's citizens into speculative ventures. From this ferment came significant financial innovations such as deposit banking, the giro payment system, and tradeable government debt. This book, with its trove of business microhistories detailing, among others, recurrent convulsions in the Venetian banking sector during medieval and Renaissance times, helps fill in the lacunae of our understanding of the economic history of the Western world. Mueller's command of the scholarship on Venetian economic history provides valuable context, and helps provide answers to questions such as: how did Venice and its economic system flourish at a time when wars and plagues continually roiled the geopolitical landscape?… (altro)