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 2 takes up Goethe’s distinction between a higher and a lower layer of world literature (discussed in the previous chapter) and argues that in complementing the transnational distribution of cultural mediocrity through markets, Goethe envisioned a more elevated sphere organized along a decidedly non-market form of exchange, that is, gifting. I examine Goethe’s correspondence with his translator Thomas Carlyle as a circuitry of world-literary gifting marked by the to-and-fro movement of tangible (books, journals, manuscripts, jewelry, drawings, interior decoration, etc.) and intangible gifts (tribute, reward, cooperation, guidance). Their nexus, I argue, was emblematic of the transition from the ethos of generous sharing in the republic of letters to world literature as a forum interconnecting outstanding representatives of various national literatures. Contributing to the material diffusion of texts and channelling symbolic economies of prestige, their acts of gift-giving prefigured Carlyle’s conception of hero-worship, and the “significant geography” circumscribed by the movement of gifts between Weimar and Scotland morphed into an imperialistic vision of a Teutonic (British-German) world literature.

Wetland projects were a leading example of improvement in action in early modern England, offering a counterpoint to many unrealised schemes and dreams that litter the archives. But such ventures were fraught with paradoxes: property rights were transgressed to make more certain ones, while drainage created new floods. Centring the engineers, investors, landowners, settlers, and labourers who propelled improvement on the ground, this chapter examines how their ambitions were altered and restricted by the polarised environmental politics that emerged in Hatfield Level. Improvement was a risky endeavour and the costs of conflict were high. Asking how contemporaries evaluated its ambiguous results in Hatfield Level, this chapter charts the revival of wetland improvement by the network of reformers that coalesced around the ‘intelligencer’ Samuel Hartlib in the mid seventeenth century. The experience of conflict surfaced in debate about, and experiments with, technologies of improvement, which promised to marginalise social negotiation and environmental contingencies.

This chapter focuses on the change in the law known as the equity of redemption, which took form in the late seventeenth century, and made the title to mortgaged land more secure through the provision that rents could be sequestered to pay off a loan after the due date, to avoid the title to the property reverting to the lender. This legal change led to a rapid expansion of mortgaging and associated conveyancing. It also demonstrates how interest-bearing loans, based on the security of property, became a source of both income and, more importantly, stable abstract value that could be used to increase the money supply by underpinning the creation of local notes and bills. Mortgage income could also smooth credit flows by providing capital when outgoings were greater than incomings. In the past this would have triggered the need to litigate to increase income, but now money could be borrowed. This chapter will also examine savings held in the form of bonds.

“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.

Between 1730 and 1775, the quantity of consumer goods bought and sold and the number of people purchasing them significantly expanded in British North America. This economic activity created shared tastes and habits across regional, ethnic, and racial divisions and encouraged the development of shared experiences and identities based on the emulation of British culture. Groups often marginalized in political and cultural discourses found in consumerism new ways to assert their identities and influence. During the Anglo-American crisis, the rejection of British imports became an important means of rallying support for the Patriot cause, politicizing activities formerly considered to be domestic and private. The American Revolution disrupted the economic and cultural ties that had linked American and British markets, but by the late eighteenth century Americans had resumed many of the consumer habits in which they had indulged before independence.

This chapter moves back to institutions to deal with the general decline in litigation over failed credit that began around 1690, and argues it came about largely because of changes in credit networks. It demonstrates how attorneys’ business moved away from litigation to conveyancing, and how they profited by becoming local credit. It also looks at the increasing use of local summary justice in the Courts of Requests in London, Bristol, and Newcastle to enforce the small debts of poor consumers, as well as the growing use of arrest and imprisonment in the common law courts. While the use of paper currency provided greater liquidity in credit markets, and reduced the overall level of litigation massively, those debtors who went broke began to be treated in a much harsher fashion.

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.

Eoin Flannery, in his chapter, examines what happens when the revivalist promise of the future has curdled into something else, an inevitability of history rather than the positing power of the artist. It is one thing to accept a faded ideal as the motivating trope of a latter-day revivalist novel; it is quite another thing to turn away from ideals altogether and to accept, even to embrace, a world defined less by cultural aspirations than financial schemes, debt and “ecosickness.” The refusal to adopt traditional revivalist reference points and temporal frameworks leads writers as diverse as Kevin Berry, Anne Haverty, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and Mike McCormack to offer narratives that range from financial degradation to social collapse. One result of this refusal is the effort to foreground language, style, voice, and the vitality and exuberance of storytelling that is a hallmark of revivalist art, an advancing light into a potentially dark future.

Exploring the economic ramifications of climate change, this chapter features insights from financial experts such as Sara Jane Ahmed, Managing Director and V20 Finance Advisor of the CVF-V20 Secretariat. It discusses the adverse effects on GDP growth, inflation, debt, and credit ratings, particularly in vulnerable economies. The chapter highlights the crucial role of financial markets, insurance, and climate finance in addressing these challenges. Innovative financing solutions such as Green Bonds and pre-arranged and trigger-based financing, including loss and damage finance, are explored as means to build economic resilience. The importance of sustainable economic policies and international cooperation is emphasised, with case studies from countries successfully integrating climate resilience into their economic planning. The chapter calls for increased investment in climate adaptation and mitigation to safeguard economic stability and promote sustainable development.

Chapter 1 examines the fourteenth-century emergence of problems that drove fifteenth-century developments. When necessary, this chapter places those fourteenth-century problems in their twelfth- and thirteenth-century contexts. The problems were three. Firstly, there was the diminution of the town’s population caused by bubonic plague. Secondly, there was swelling municipal debt; its existence and the measures taken to reduce it exacerbated social antagonisms that fuelled the third problem, distrust. Between the 1340s and the 1390s, suspicion and hostility between burghers and merchants, on the one hand, and tradespeople, on the other, deepened and became dangerously acute.