The bi-annual fairs of Medina del Campo, near the center of Castile, were the epicenter of commercial and financial activities in an age of difficult communications and travel. Before 1575, the crown strongly supported the regular holding of these fairs which were essential for getting new loans from bankers, selling long-term annuities and tax collection contracts. The great crisis of 1575–1577 forced their suspension, after which they never regained their central role. The description of the fairs’ work provides important insights on the financial and fiscal context in which Philip operated.

The Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the largest building in the world during the Renaissance, embodied all that was dear to Philip: the memory of the San Quentin on the feast of Saint Laurent, the hunting grounds of his youth, a basilica, a monastery, a library and the austere palace from which he would govern his worldwide empire. To ensure regular payments for this construction (from 1563 to 1584), he signed a series of contracts, factorias with mesadas.

In the last two decades of the reign, the asientos became more standardized and truly massive. The next two chapters provide a detailed analysis of two of them. In the first, the transformation of numerous small sources of royal revenue into substantial payment streams, mesadas, for military expenditures in Flanders or Portugal, and the delegation of revenue collection to the banker, thus functioning as a proxy for a royal agent, is the main objective. The details reveal numerous clauses protecting the bankers, since the sources of revenue, free of prior pledge, were not fully identified at the time of signing. The following chapter focuses on the conversion of short-term debt into long-term debt. These chapters are based on previously published articles and may also give a better idea of the archival research behind this book.

A new era began in 1578. Under the effective leadership of a new commander, Alexander Farnese, the war in Flanders consisted of retaking city after city through resource-intensive sieges. Farnese had more freedom than his predecessors to sign financial contracts in Flanders that were then validated in Madrid. One example is discussed here.

Chapter 2 SKILLS in ACTION argues that skills are keys to understanding crucial notions in action theory, such as intentional action. The idea that intentional actions are constitutively the employment of skills is an attractive thought, and yet, the view has fallen in disrepute. This chapter resuscitates it: I argue that no other capacity—from instincts to habits or talents, to innate general-purpose faculties—can figure as centrally in action theory.

Machiavelli assigns a complicated role in his political theory to the concept of the beneficium (or benefizio in Machiavelli’s Italian) in order to describe the benefits that the power of the state can bring; and this chapter focuses on one philosophical language which is used throughout the Italian Renaissance to discuss this idea and which comes to shape Machiavelli’s own thinking decisively. That language is classical in origin; and it is intimately associated with one text in particular: Seneca’s On Benefits. In the first section of the chapter, Seneca’s thinking about generosity and gratitude is explicated within the wider context of his social philosophy to show how it forms part of a theory of moral obligation, informed by a firmly Stoic notion of natural human sociability. The second section shows how Seneca’s contentions are subsequently retrieved and put to work in pre-humanist and humanist political thought to discuss the moral relationships between members of civil associations and to underline the perils of the vice of ingratitude in political society. Once the place of Seneca’s theory in Renaissance discourse is elucidated, it becomes easier to see how Machiavelli manipulates its contentions into a theory of political obligation within his account of the state.

Chapter 4 considers the conduct of business within the framework of the law and upper-class ideology in honouring debts and protecting the family name. How were contracts arranged? How did buying and selling and letting and hiring take place? What protection was there for the buyer? How did the legal process assist this? What were the rules for partnerships? Especially important to the government were tax-collecting companies. There were rules for deposits and loans, for which a stipulatio could establish interest. Banks operated with clear rules for interest, and various types of security were available for loans. One man’s business could be conducted on his behalf by others, often by his son or household slave, but in the Roman concept of agency he could be sued to a limited extent by those who had lost out in the business. In the labour market there was very limited protection for employees.

European colonial ventures in the Americas depended on Native American trading routes and economic practices, even as they transformed them. Europeans initially sought to extract valuable resources, but this endeavor always intersected with the day-to-day business of men and women alternately competing and cooperating to sustain their communities. European traders and settlers thus fit into networks crossing imperial and cultural boundaries that were simultaneously economic, familial, and political. Trading networks soon connected the violence of Indigenous land dispossession for the purposes of food cultivation and the export of staples such as sugar, tobacco, and rice with the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, which transported tens of thousands of captives each year from Africa to the Americas by the end of the seventeenth century. Over time, colonial settlers increasingly struggled against imperial governments for control over land, trade, and profits, with revolutionary political consequences in the eighteenth century.

“Political economy,” in the late eighteenth century, signified the statesman’s practice of managing the resources of a political “household.” In 1776, thirteen self-declared American states took control of their political economies. Under the Articles of Confederation, these states, in carefully delimited ways, acted as a composite body with a political economy of its own, and in 1787, the revised federal Constitution became a blueprint for a unified project of economic, political, and social ordering. Thus the history of US political economy can be seen as the story of an emerging One. During the 1790s, two opposing political economies emerged, envisioned and promoted by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Recent scholarship, however, has moved beyond visions of early American political economy either as a constitutionally defined One or as a partisan Two. It envisions, instead, a postconstitutional landscape composed of many political economies – competing, overlapping, and evolving.

This chapter outlines the history of previous institutions that created forms of capital in Europe, including land, dowries, banks, bills of exchange, and government debt. It examines the reasons why the system of informal oral credit, as it had developed over the previous 100-odd years, began to be criticised during the Commonwealth period. Many authors started to claim that it was both inefficient and an obstacle to economic growth. Many pamphlets were published containing proposals of different sorts of banks, which would issue paper currency to speed up circulation. Some of these were based on previous European examples. The nature of these proposals is examined, together with a summary of how they related to the creation of the Bank of England. Its establishment is normally seen as the successful outcome of this debate, but in fact it was not primarily created as an institution to expand the supply of credit, but to help fund the government debt. The increasing cost of the War of Spanish Succession did, however, result in the issue of things like Exchequer or Treasury bills, as well as South Sea and Bank stock to fund the war. The last part of the chapter focuses on the significant effect these multiple forms of paper currency had on liquidity within London.

The Desolate Boedelskamer was an innovative institution. It introduced a new approach to insolvency. Rather than punishing the insolvent debtor, the Desolate Boedelskamer sought to raise him up. Even though it remained firmly embedded in the early modern mental world and its communal culture of governance, the Amsterdam Desolate Boedelskamer is a clear example of how professionalization and good governance were able to provide systemic trust in a world of growing complexity. This new institution was part of the moral economy of seventeenth-century Amsterdam and relied upon it to function, but it also helped to shape that moral economy. Through a careful balancing act of trust and power, this institution was able to support the proliferation of credit, granting numerous insolvents in seventeenth-century Amsterdam a true stay of execution. In this analytical conclusion, the impact and wider implications of the book's argument will be discussed in a broader context.

This chapter analyzes the shift towards a closer involvement of the Amsterdam authorities in the lives of citizens from all layers of society that occurred through various institutional innovations after the city turned Protestant in 1578. Credit was a unifying economic phenomenon in Amsterdam, and examining the function of credit allows us to shed light on the connections between people from various classes. Focusing on the phenomenon of insolvency, essentially a breakdown of credit, makes it possible to open up broader perspectives on the early modern economy. Guilds and their civic middle-class values shaped social and economic policies of this period in important ways, clearly displaying the integration among different social groups that also came to be reflected in contemporary legal theory and practice. Religious communities also occupied an important role in financial conflict resolution between creditors and debtors. The moral dimensions of insolvency that become manifest through the acts of various Amsterdam consistories reflect important changes in the attitudes towards insolvency that are typical of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Chapter 8 considers commerce and money management, the largest category of work in the work-task database. This provides a detailed view of petty commerce, the typically small transactions that took place every day across the country, with women and men almost equally involved. Markets remained the most common locations of commerce, but transactions took place everywhere including the home, the street, and occasionally, the specialist retail shop. Evidence of administering debts and pawning goods demonstrates the significant role played by married women in these activities.