Italy and the Origins of Capitalism
Italy and the Origins of Capitalism
This one-day workshop, which will be coordinated by the Business History Initiative, brings together scholars in the fields of medieval, Renaissance, and economic history.
Early historians of business, including N.S.B. Gras and Raymond de Roover at HBS, located the origins of modern capitalism in a commercial revolution that occurred in the late medieval Mediterranean. Before the Great Divergence which is the focus of much current scholarship on capitalism, there were earlier and smaller divergences: first Italy (perhaps as early as the eleventh century), then Holland, and then England experienced modern economic growth. Historical accounts of the global economy have been, since the very beginning, structured around “catching up”, a process we now see unfolding in China and other emerging economies. But Italy did not play catch up. It was first. Why? Why did Italy diverge first? How did Europe first develop and become rich? This workshop, bringing together internationally-renowned scholars doing vibrant work on the Italian and Mediterranean economies, seeks to answer these questions and to begin to think more broadly about why premodern economic history and business history can and should matter to us today.