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On the first landing of the staircase, there is a door with a name tag: “D. Graeber.” I am inside an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo, Ca’ Corner della Regina, which since 2011 has been turned into an exhibition space by the Fondazione Prada (the contemporary art foundation of the famous fashion brand). From 1834 to 1969 the palazzo was home to the municipal pawnshop, called Monte di pietà after the lending institutions for the poor established in the fifteenth century by Franciscan friars in various Italian cities, although not in Venice. These Franciscan lenders were partly conceived to counteract Jewish pawnbrokers. Monte di pietà is also currently the title of an immersive installation housed in the same palazzo, designed by the Swiss conceptual artist Christoph Büchel and timed to coincide with the Sixtieth Venice Art Biennale, which runs from April to November 2024.
Cet article répond aux remarques formulées par Jean-François Chauvard, Luisa Brunori et Jean-Louis Halpérin, Pierre-Cyrille Hautcœur ainsi que Maurice Kriegel sur mon livre The Promise and Peril of Credit, traduit en français sous le titre Juifs et capitalisme. Le livre examine les significations culturelles attachées à la diffusion des instruments de crédit de la finance privée à partir du xviie siècle. Il s’intéresse tout particulièrement à décrire les multiples associations avec les Juifs et l’usure suscitées par ces instruments. Ma réponse s’appuie sur une installation conçue par l’artiste suisse Christoph Büchel, Monte di pietà, présentée à la Fondation Prada au même moment que la 60e Biennale d’Art de Venise en 2024 – une installation qui privilégie les associations libres à une contextualisation analytique ou historique. Par ses allusions ambiguës aux Juifs et à l’État d’Israël en lien avec son thème principal – le rôle de l’endettement dans la guerre et dans la dégradation et l’exploitation humaine –, l’installation renvoie à une question centrale de mon livre, à savoir la persistance et la malléabilité des stéréotypes. Je saisis donc cette occasion pour passer en revue les points saillants de ma recherche sur cette question épineuse et pour parler des formes de contextualisation complémentaires développées par les contributeurs de ce forum.
This essay engages with Stephan Eich’s The Currency of Politics. It finds that the book pursues two goals at once: a minimalist goal of bringing money as a subject of inquiry back into the fold of political theory and a maximalist goal consisting in the stated ambition to ‘articulate more democratic visions of the future of money’. It interrogates Eich’s effort to harnesses a historical perspective to normative claims from the standpoint of a historian of pre-modern Europe. More specifically, it asks what role close reading, intertextuality and contextualisation play in Eich’s approach; why he recognises certain episodes from the (distant) past rather than others as relevant to current predicaments and potential future scenarios; and why he singles out the English financial revolution of the 1690s as the first relevant moment of crisis after the monetary reforms undertaken in Athens in the sixth century BCE.
This article asks a simple question that nevertheless has broad implications for historians of premodern continental Europe: What did notaries do? It answers it by applying descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, and clustering techniques to the typological distribution of all deeds preserved in the notarial collections of six French and Italian cities—Paris, Toulouse, Mende, Turin, Florence, and Livorno—for the year 1751, as well as smaller datasets for other dates and locations. The results of this analysis are surprising. In spite of a high degree of consistency in the notarial profession and terminology (a trait that facilitates our comparisons), the notarial style of each city varied greatly. Variations within a single state were sometimes greater than those across state borders. Both supply and demand of notarial services differed from city to city. Overall, our conclusions are as important as the methodology that we adopt to reach them. Our aim is to offer a replicable analysis that puts quantitative methods in the service not only of the study of a source (notarial records) that is widespread across late medieval and early modern continental Europe and its overseas empires but also of a renewed comparative social history that does not shy away from the heterogeneity of primary sources.
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.
This article engages with some of the questions raised by David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s “The Return of the longue durée: An Anglo-American Perspective” and their resonance among readers of the Annales. In particular, it challenges the authors’ classification of a variety of different historical studies of short periods of time under the rubric of “microhistory.” It also questions their argument that such studies are evidence of a “moral crisis” that supposedly dominated anglophone historiography from the cultural revolution of 1968 to the global financial crisis of 2008. Furthermore, the article contrasts the less conventional meanings that Fernand Braudel originally attributed to the longue durée with the ways that Armitage and Guldi interpret this expression. Finally, it asks how, in practice, historians are supposed to follow the authors’ invitation to move beyond specialized training and knowledge to produce sweeping new and original interpretations of millennia of human history.
The precise length of territorial waters, the swath of sea along the coast over which a state extended sovereign control, remained an object of debate during the seventeenth century. Some authors still adhered to the 100-mile boundary established by medieval glossators, whereas others embraced the so-called cannon-shot rule that set the limit to the reach of a shot fired from the land. But no one disputed the existence of territorial waters. Even Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), then Europe's greatest champion of the freedom of the sea, followed Roman law in conceding that a state could exert its sovereignty over littoral waters or inlets in a shoreline (diverticula maris). This rare point of agreement between theorists of mare liberum (the free sea) and defenders of mare clausum (the closed sea) did not eliminate all controversies concerning the governance of coastal waters. Particularly contentious were domestic and international disputes over the property rights on the cargo of sunken ships. What sources of law governed the assignment of ownership of salvaged wreckages? Who was entitled to compensation for assisting in the recovery efforts? And how did legal claims square with political maneuvering in domestic and interstate disputes over wreckages?
Cet article noue un dialogue avec certaines des questions soulevées par David Armitage et Jo Guldi dans «Le retour de la longue durée : une perspective anglo-américaine » et évalue la résonance de leur article chez les lecteurs des Annales. En particulier, il conteste le classement, sous la catégorie de micro-histoire, d’une variété d’études historiques menées sur de courtes périodes de temps. Il interroge également l’argument selon lequel ces études seraient la preuve d’une « crise morale » qui aurait dominé l’historiographie anglophone de la révolution culturelle de 1968 à la crise financière mondiale de 2008. En outre, l’article compare les significations moins conventionnelles que Fernand Braudel a attribuées à l’origine à la longue durée avec les interprétations de D. Armitage et J. Guldi. Enfin, il se demande comment, dans la pratique, les historiens sont censés suivre l’invitation des deux auteurs à aller au-delà de la formation et des connaissances spécialisées pour produire des lectures nouvelles et originales de l’histoire humaine depuis ses origines.
This chapter describes the study of the organization of trade in Europe and Asia during the early modern period. Technological innovations in ship design and navigation instruments were not the only factors that improved the safety and reliability of long-distance trade. European transoceanic navigation became more secure in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because of the institutional support that the Dutch and English made available to their vessels rather than because of dramatic technological improvements. Periodical markets where buyers and sellers could meet and inspect the merchandise were a universal solution to the weakness of information networks. Raising funds to finance long-distance trade was no less a problem than securing competent and reliable associates and agents abroad. In Europe, women's dowries commonly provided an influx of capital and shielded partners from external creditors since, in case of bankruptcy, dowries took precedence over other credits in the debt settlement.
Both the social sciences and popular sentiment tend to identify technological innovation with mechanisation, and oppose it to the protected environment of artisan craft guilds. Recent literature has begun to question this truism in favour of a more nuanced view of the attitudes of guilds towards technological change as part of broader debates on the relation between markets and institutions in pre-industrial Europe. Historians of early modern Italy have also increasingly questioned traditional, static views of craft guilds, but their revisionism has focussed less on the history of technology than on other aspects of guild life and structure. This chapter contributes new elements to this revisionist work by examining two crucial sectors of the early modern Venetian economy: silk and glass manufacturing. Both trades underwent profound changes between 1450 and 1800, largely in response to the rise of new, nearby and distant competitors. I focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when international competition was especially fierce, and I address the question, not whether craft guilds as a rule favoured or opposed technological innovation, but why different guilds at different times selected some innovations and not others, and how they reshaped their production and market strategies more generally.
To approach the relationship between guilds and technology we need to deconstruct both terms: craft guilds differed in their labour composition and in their relations with other guilds, the market, and state authorities; technological change, on the other hand, included new tools, techniques, and production processes, but also new products and organisational forms.
Cette étude entend mettre en oeuvre les outils de l’analyse réticulaire dans
l’étude des échanges interculturels à l’époque moderne. Dans ce but, elle
s’inspire (du point de vue analytique plutôt que mathématique) de la network
analysis britannique et des travaux de Fredrik Barth. Face aux débats
récents polarisés autour des diasporas négociantes et des réseaux marchands,
le recours à l’analyse de réseau présente trois avantages : il oblige
l’historien à analyser les relations entre les groupes – et non les
relations internes aux groupes – et permet ainsi de surmonter un obstacle
commun aux approches anthropologique et économique. Il réduit le fossé qui
sépare les études anthropologiques (centrées sur l’organisation interne des
diasporas négociantes et le rôle des normes culturelles) et la théorie du
choix rationnel qui voit les réseaux marchands comme le produit des intérêts
individuels. Enfin, parce qu’il s’agit d’une approche micro-analytique,
l’analyse réticulaire permet aux historiens d’examiner la formation de
réseaux informels spécifiques qui se déploient au croisement des aires
géographique, politique et culturelle communément définies. La validité de
ce type d’approche, basée sur leur correspondance d’affaires, est testée à
partir d’une étude de cas portant sur la filière indo-portugaise du commerce
du corail méditerranéen et des diamants indiens, associant Juifs de
Livourne, d’Amsterdam et de Londres, marchands italiens de Lisbonne et une
caste hindoue de Goa, réseau informel actif au moins jusqu’aux années
1730.
Comment s'établissaitétablissait le salaire dans un marché du travail corporatif et spécialisé ? Existait-il une rétribution moyenne ou modale pour chaque catégorie de travailleurs ? Quel rôle jouait la justice civile quand elle réglementait les rapports de travail et les niveaux des salaires ? Cette recherche voudrait répondre à ces questions à propos des maîtres et des compagnons des verreries de Murano entre 1638 et 1692, questions qui sont en fait récurrentes dans toute enquête sur le travail urbain pendant l'Ancien Régime.
Les caractéristiques du système de rétribution en vigueur à Murano incitent à s'éloigner des interprétations que l'historiographie propose au sujet des salaires des maçons à l'époque préindustrielle, réorientant l'attention sur la négociation salariale et ses pratiques — autant individuelles que collectives — qui gouvernaient le marché du travail artisanal. A leur tour, les initiatives des corporations et des magistrats vénitiens concernant la formation du salaire soulèvent le problème de la relation entre les ordres économique, corporatif et juridique.
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