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Quantitative Studies of the Renaissance Florentine Economy and Society is a collection of nine quantitative studies probing aspects of Renaissance Florentine economy and society. The collection, organized by topic, source material and analysis methods, discusses risk and return, specifically the population’s responses to the plague and also the measurement of interest rates. The work analyzes the population’s wealth distribution, the impact of taxes and subsidies on art and architecture, the level of neighborhood segregation and the accumulation of wealth. Additionally, this study assesses the competitiveness of Florentine markets and the level of monopoly power, the nature of women’s work and the impact of business risk on the organization of industrial production.
This book explores the role of capital and labor migration in the expansion of the capitalist world-system. It presents comprehensive case studies on various historical periods of hegemony recognized by world-system theory: the Dutch hegemony (1625-1675), British hegemony (1815-1873), and US hegemony (1945-1970). Moreover, the book identifies an earlier period of economic dominance in Western Europe when merchant-bankers from Florence dominated the regional wool trade in the early thirteenth century. In these four intervals of dominance, i.e., from the medieval period to the late twentieth century, capital and labor migration formed the basis of capitalist development in the hegemonic core states as well as in peripheral regions under their economic and political influence. In turn, the book analyzes the migration patterns associated with the rise of hegemony from the perspectives of class relations between employers and workers, technological advances at the workplace, economic cycles, and state policies on labor migration. It concludes with a projection that heightened migration will continue to characterize the capitalist world system, especially as many poor and displaced populations in peripheral regions resort to migration for survival. Accordingly, it appeals to scholars in the fields of politics, sociology, history, anthropology, and economics who are interested in globalization and world-system analysis.
Drawing on a wide range of literature and adopting a macroeconomic approach, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the Italian economy during the Renaissance, focusing on the period between 1348, the year of the Black Death, and 1630. The Italian Renaissance played a crucial role in the formation of the modern world, with developments in culture, art, politics, philosophy, and science sitting alongside, and overlapping with, significant changes in production, forms of organization, trades, finance, agriculture, and population. Yet, it is usually argued that splendour in culture coexisted with economic depression and that the modernity of Renaissance culture coincided with an epoch of epidemics, famines, economic crisis, poverty, and destitution. This book examines both faces of the Italian economy during the Renaissance, showing that capital per worker was plentiful and productive capacity and incomes were relatively high. The endemic presence of the plague, curbing population growth, played an important role in this. It is also shown that the organization of production in industry and finance, consumerism, human capital, and mercantile rationality were the forerunners of modern-day capitalism. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of the Renaissance and Italian economic history.
Before the late sixteenth century, the churches of Florence were internally divided by monumental screens that separated the laity in the nave from the clergy in the choir precinct. Enabling both separation and mediation, these screens were impressive artistic structures that controlled social interactions, facilitated liturgical performances, and variably framed or obscured religious ritual and imagery. In the 1560s and 70s, screens were routinely destroyed in a period of religious reforms, irreversibly transforming the function, meaning, and spatial dynamics of the church interior. In this volume, Joanne Allen explores the widespread presence of screens and their role in Florentine social and religious life prior to the Counter-Reformation. She presents unpublished documentation and new reconstructions of screens and the choir precincts which they delimited. Elucidating issues such as gender, patronage, and class, her study makes these vanished structures comprehensible and deepens our understanding of the impact of religious reform on church architecture.
A fascinating blend of history and ecological economics that uncovers the medieval precedents for modern concepts of sustainable living. In The Green Ages, historian Annette Kehnel explores sustainability initiatives from the Middle Ages, highlighting communities that operated a barter trade system on the Monte Subiaco in Italy, sustainable fishing at Lake Constance, common lands in the United Kingdom, transient grazing among Alpine shepherds in the south of France, and bridges built by crowdfunding in Avignon. Kehnel takes these medieval examples and applies their practical lessons to the modern world to prove that we can live sustainably—we’ve done it before! From the garden economy in the mythical-sounding City of Ladies to early microcredit banks, Kehnel uncovers a world at odds with our understanding of the typical medieval existence. Premodern history is full of inspiring examples and concepts ripe for rediscovery, and we urgently need them as today’s challenges—finite resources, the twilight of consumerism, and growing inequality—threaten what we have come to think of as a modern way of living sustainably. This is a stimulating and revelatory look at a past that has the power to change our future.
Jurists and Jurisprudence in Medieval Italy is an original collection of texts exemplifying medieval Italian jurisprudence, known as the ius commune. Translated for the first time into English, many of the texts exist only in early printed editions and manuscripts. Featuring commentaries by leading medieval civil law jurists, notably Azo Portius, Accursius, Albertus Gandinus, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, and Baldus de Ubaldis, this book covers a wide range of topics, including how to teach and study law, the production of legal texts, the ethical norms guiding practitioners, civil and criminal procedures, and family matters. The translations, together with context-setting introductions, highlight fundamental legal concepts and practices and the milieu in which jurists operated. They offer entry points for exploring perennial subjects such as the professionalization of lawyers, the tangled relationship between law and morality, the role of gender in the socio-legal order, and the extent to which the ius commune can be considered an autonomous system of law.
"In this masterly book, [Alfani] offers an insightful long-run perspective and fascinating lessons for the future. A must-read!"—Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century A sweeping narrative that shows how the rich historically justified themselves by helping their societies in times of crisis, why they no longer do, and what that may mean for social stability The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval thinkers feared that the super-rich would act 'as gods among men’; much more recently Thomas Piketty made wealth central to discussions of inequality. In this book, Guido Alfani offers a history of the rich and super-rich in the West, examining who they were, how they accumulated their wealth and what role they played in society. Covering the last thousand years, with frequent incursions into antiquity, and integrating recent research on economic inequality, Alfani finds—despite the different paths to wealth in different eras—fundamental continuities in the behaviour of the rich and public attitudes towards wealth across Western history. His account offers a novel perspective on current debates about wealth and income disparity. Alfani argues that the position of the rich and super-rich in Western society has always been intrinsically fragile; their very presence has inspired social unease. In the Middle Ages, an excessive accumulation of wealth was considered sinful; the rich were expected not to appear to be wealthy. Eventually, the rich were deemed useful when they used their wealth to help their communities in times of crisis. Yet in the twenty-first century, Alfani points out, the rich and the super-rich—their wealth largely preserved through the Great Recession and COVID-19—have been exceptionally reluctant to contribute to the common good in times of crisis, rejecting even such stopgap measures as temporary tax increases. History suggests that this is a troubling development—for the rich, and for everyone else.
The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence offers the first synthetic interpretation of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence in more than fifty years.
"In the 20th and 21st century revolutions have become more urban, often less violent, but also more frequent and more transformative of the international order. Whether it is the revolutions against Communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR; the "color revolutions" across Asia, Europe and North Africa; or the religious revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria; today's revolutions are quite different from those of the past. Modern theories of revolution have therefore replaced the older class-based theories with more varied, dynamic, and contingent models of social and political change. This new edition updates the history of revolutions, from Classical Greece and Rome to the Revolution of Dignity in the Ukraine, with attention to the changing types and outcomes of revolutionary struggles. It also presents the latest advances in the theory of revolutions, including the issues of revolutionary waves, revolutionary leadership, international influences, and the likelihood of revolutions to come. This volume provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the nature of revolutions and their role in global history"--