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This is a full-scale study that explores every aspect of money in Europe and the Middle Ages.
"[A] magnificent history of money and finance."—New York Times Book Review "Convincingly makes the case that finance is a change-maker of change-makers."—Financial Times In the aftermath of recent financial crises, it's easy to see finance as a wrecking ball: something that destroys fortunes and jobs, and undermines governments and banks. In Money Changes Everything, leading financial historian William Goetzmann argues the exact opposite—that the development of finance has made the growth of civilizations possible. Goetzmann explains that finance is a time machine, a technology that allows us to move value forward and backward through time; and that this innovation has changed the very...
Fischer has examined price records in many nations, and finds that great waves of rising prices in the 13th-, 16th-, 18th-, and 20th centuries were all marked by price swings of increasing volatility, falling wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, and an increase in violent crime, family disintegration, and cultural despair. 109 graphs & charts. 7 maps.
Teeming with merchants from all over Europe, medieval Bruges provides an early model of a great capitalist city. Bruges established a sophisticated money market and an elaborate network of agents and brokers. Moreover, it promoted co-operation between merchants of various nations. In this book James Murray explores how Bruges became the commercial capital of northern Europe in the late fourteenth century. He argues that a combination of fortuitous changes such as the shift to sea-borne commerce and the extraordinary efforts of the city's population served to shape a great commercial centre. Areas explored include the political history of Bruges, its position as a node and network, the wool, cloth and gold trade and the role of women in the market. This book serves not only as a case-study in medieval economic history, but also as a social and cultural history of medieval Bruges.
City Intelligible seeks to integrate a transcendental philosophical anthropology of commoditisation before industrialisation with a social and cultural, thus empirical anthropology of commodity production and exchange that is global, thus inter-cultural. It treats commodification as a singular and privileged evidence of the universal status of human reasoning, and one that grounds the translational character of human exchange throughout the early centuries, and yet that simultaneously founds ubiquitous cultural differentiation. The book constitutes, therefore, a refutation of the predominant tendency in the humanities to represent cultural difference as inhibiting the very possibility of eff...