Markets and Networks in 15th Century Florence

Over a number of years and a number of trips to the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, I collected transaction-related data pertaining to virtually every company active in the Florentine wool, silk, banking, exporting, and fine cloth retailing industries in 1427.  This data is summarized from company account books and transcribed into portate, the actual tax returns submitted by household heads to the city scribes and eventually transcribed again into the campioni that constitute the main content of the famous catasto of the city of Florence, a detailed census document drafted for purposes of increasing tax revenues and redistributing the burden of taxation more equitably.  

With this data, my co-researcher John Padgett and I have been able to construct a census of firms in the city’s major industries, to trace flows of transactions through the Florentine economy, and to gauge the kinds of business that they practiced and the volume of multiplex business they conducted with each other.

We have recently produced a chapter in the book, The Sociology of the Economy, edited by Frank Dobbin (Russell Sage, 2004), measuring the influence of patrilineage, social class and neighborhood co-residence (among other factors) on the choice of business partners and the distribution of commercial credits and debts, part of a larger project explicating Florentine society in terms of the regulated reproduction of multiple, intersecting social networks.  A new article in the American Journal of Sociology (volume 111,4; January 2006) explores changes in the structure and meaning of economic partnership in late 14th century Florence.  An early draft of work from this project is available here.

For a look at what one of these transcribed company account sheets looks like, click on this link.