This article critiques the application of Karl Polanyi's port of trade model to the development of Livorno, which has often been ascribed to commercial brokerage across cultural, political, and ecological frontiers. Livorno's neutrality during times of war and its position in the corsair and privateering economies would appear to support just such an interpretation of Livorno's growth. Nevertheless, while such interstitial roles were real, by the 1640s they were subordinate to the larger currents of regional and long-distance trade. Livorno's development is better explained with reference to the rise of commodity markets as entrepôts for managing far-flung distribution networks. The Tuscan port's rapid rise should be understood as an integral phenomenon of early modern capitalism, more akin to places such as London or Amsterdam than to the ports of trade studied by Polanyi.

Silk manufacturing began in Lucca in the twelfth century and by the fifteenth century Italy had become the largest producer of silk textiles in Europe, nurtured by extensive domestic and foreign demand for the luxurious fabric. This essay explores the market for silk textiles, the organization of the silk industry, and the role played in it by guilds, entrepreneurs and their capital, and highly sought after artisans. Just as silk manufacturing was an important and lucrative business for entrepreneurs, this article argues, so was it a crucial strategic activity for the governments of Italy's Renaissance states, whose incentives, protections, and investments helped to start up and grow the sector with the aim of generating wealth and strengthening their respective economies.

Scholars have long linked medieval and early modern public debts to the rise of capitalism. This article considers one prominent case study in the development of permanent public debt: late medieval Genoa. Previous scholarship has focused on financial speculation and markets for shares as central to how public debts functioned. However, by considering complementary types of sources, this article demonstrates that inheritance strategies and patrimonial considerations operated in dialogue with markets in the development of urban public debts, both in Genoa and elsewhere in Europe.

Using materials from the important collection of Medici manuscripts donated to Harvard Business School by Harry Gordon Selfridge, this paper explores the geopolitics of the transformation of raw wool into finished cloth, and the role played in that process by Medici entrepreneurs, their guild, and their government. It aims to show that the history of political economy cannot truly be understood without business history. Successful business practices used by Medici entrepreneurs were first theorized by Giovanni Botero and others as what would become an “Italian model” in political economy, a model that had a profoundly wide-ranging impact, and that puts the lie to the commonplace in the history of ideas that the Italian Renaissance, so precocious in other fields, was silent on the topic of political economy.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages was a historiographical concept with considerable traction. This article revisits the literature that brought about and engaged with that concept, with specific reference to Florence. In so doing, it draws attention to the place once held by business history in the study of Europe's takeoff. It also discusses the preliminary results of an ongoing project on limited partnerships in early modern Tuscany, which reaffirms the relevance of business history for understanding preindustrial economies but steers away from a teleological search for the origins of modern capitalism.