IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/inrvec/v59y2012i4p459-475.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Market, civic virtues, and civic bargaining in the medieval and early modern age: some evidence from sixteenth century Italy

Author

Listed:
  • Luca Clerici

Abstract

In the last decades, historians have shown that the modern market is rooted in the institutional system created in European towns since the middle ages. This approach leads us beyond the usual opposition between market and society or between public and private market. Indeed, in the medieval and early modern age, the market was part of a wider institutional design of civil life, which had a basic conceptual frame of reference in the notion of the common good, a feature typical of such organicistic and hierarchical societies. This paper explores the process of market construction in the medieval and early modern age. I firstly analysed the role of the market in these societies and then focused on the case of foodstuff provision: a key element of the non-written, ancient pact between rulers and people, based on the assurance of subsistence. As a basis for the study, I employed sixteenth century documents regarding Vicenza, a medium-sized town in the Republic of Venice. These show very clearly that, in general, market and price regulation was not the result of arbitrary interventions by public authorities; on the contrary, it was the result of a process of negotiation, which I call civic bargaining. This process involved—to various degrees—public authorities, landowners, merchants and guilds, and the town’s people, the pursuit of the common good being, in practice, a matter of balancing various needs and interests. Present-day economic and social public policies are, in many aspects, an inheritance of the institutional system created in the medieval and early modern age: knowledge of these origins is useful in the present debate regarding economic versus social development, as discussed at the end of the paper. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2012

Suggested Citation

  • Luca Clerici, 2012. "Market, civic virtues, and civic bargaining in the medieval and early modern age: some evidence from sixteenth century Italy," International Review of Economics, Springer;Happiness Economics and Interpersonal Relations (HEIRS), vol. 59(4), pages 459-475, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:inrvec:v:59:y:2012:i:4:p:459-475
    DOI: 10.1007/s12232-012-0148-y
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s12232-012-0148-y
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s12232-012-0148-y?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James Davis, 2004. "Baking for the common good: a reassessment of the assize of bread in Medieval England," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 57(3), pages 465-502, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David Dolejší, 2022. "Feudal bargain in Prague: The rise, spread, and fall of craft guilds," Rationality and Society, , vol. 34(2), pages 237-267, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Velkar, Aashish, 2010. "‘Deep’ integration of 19th century grain markets: coordination and standardisation in a global value chain," Economic History Working Papers 28988, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Market; Medieval and early modern age; Economic ethics; Market and price regulation; Fair price; Civic bargaining; A13; B11; N70; N73; N90; N93; Z10; Z13;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
    • B11 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - Preclassical (Ancient, Medieval, Mercantilist, Physiocratic)
    • N70 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • N73 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • N90 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - General, International, or Comparative
    • N93 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • Z10 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - General
    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:inrvec:v:59:y:2012:i:4:p:459-475. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.