This book analyzes the ways in which Amsterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg developed dual identities as 'communities of commerce' and republics.

This work examines the economic agents, institutions, incentives, competences and other forces that forged a Lebanese economic model known as the "Merchant Republic" in the aftermath of World War II. The author identifies the broad concept of outward-orientation to describe the Lebanese economy. Dominant economic and political agents sought to develop the economy on the basis of its intermediary role, regional comparative advantage and competitive position in offshore service operations - all of which were viewed as essential to the viability of the small Lebanese state. Supporting an open and tertiary-oriented economy that serviced rapidly-growing Middle East economies, these forces shaped Lebanon's economic order until 1958; and in a modified form, they influenced it's political economy until 1975. Lebanon's model of outward-orientation, however, can be usefully contrasted with the explorer-oriented industrialization model followed in East Asia. This book integrates a theoretical and empirical examination of the Lebanese model and provides data and analysis about its effect on economic growth and structural change during its golden age.

A history of Venice from the earliest times - Crusades - Ships and navigation - Byzantine and Gothics - Humanism - Renaissance - Merchant shipping - Scuole.

A Socratic dialogue set in the court of King Mattias Corvinus of Hungary (the book was written ca. 1490), the work depicts a debate between the king himself and a Florentine merchant. This is the first critical edition and the first translation into any language. --publisher's description.

The Dutch Republic was an important hub in the early modern world-economy, a place where hundreds of monies were used alongside each other. Sebastian Felten explores regional, European and global circuits of exchange by analysing everyday practices in Dutch cities and villages in the period 1600-1850. He reveals how for peasants and craftsmen, stewards and churchmen, merchants and metallurgists, money was an everyday social technology that helped them to carve out a livelihood. With vivid examples of accounting and assaying practices, Felten offers a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money. This book uses new archival evidence and an approach informed by the history of technology to show how plural currencies gave early modern users considerable agency. It explores how the move to uniform national currency limited this agency in the nineteenth century and thus helps us make sense of the new plurality of payments systems today.

Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people. The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life men who, for a couple hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company, whose narrow-minded approach lost Manhattan to the British; Robert Clive, who rose from company clerk to become head of the British East India Company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain; Alexandr Baranov of the Russian American Company; Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia; and George Simpson, the "Little Emperor" of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was chauffeured about his vast fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so he could set speed records. Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed responsibility for their commercial enterprises. A blend of biography, corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a panoramic, new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered globalization.

Based on thesis--Harvard University. Includes bibliographical references.