The Venetian Money Market

The long awaited conclusion to the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. Originally published in 1997. In 1985 Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller published the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, volume 1: Coins and Moneys of Account. Now, after ten years of further research and writing, Reinhold Mueller completes the work that he and the late Frederic Lane began. The history of money and banking in Venice is crucial to an understanding of European economic history. Because of its strategic location between East and West, Venice rapidly rose to a position of preeminence in Mediterranean trade. To keep trade moving from London to Constantinople and beyond, Venetian merchants and bankers created specialized financial institutions to serve private entrepreneurs and public administrators: deposit banks, foreign exchange banks, a grain office, and a bureau of the public debt. This new book clarifies Venice's pivotal role in Italian and international banking and finance. It also sets banking—and panics—in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets, and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.

Originally published in 1985. Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller, in the first volume of Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, discuss Venice's economic achievement in terms of the complex system the city's inhabitants developed to manage moneys of account and coins. Money merchants of Venice developed a system whereby a premium attached to moneys of account acted as a stabilizing force and allowed merchants to engage in long-term trade. This system, according to the authors, helped establish Venice as a dominant city-state in international trade and exchange. This book outlines the development and success of this system through 1508. At the time it was first published, this book made a significant contribution to the history of money and economics by underscoring the large role that Venice played in the economic history of the West and the ascendance of capitalism as a structuring force of society.

The volume explores late medieval market mechanisms and associated institutional, fiscal and monetary, organizational, decision-making, legal and ethical issues, as well as selected aspects of production, consumption and market integration. The essays span a variety of local, regional, and long-distance markets and networks.

Capitalism has lifted millions out of poverty. Under its guiding hand, living standards throughout the Western world have been transformed. Further afield, the trail blazed by Japan is being followed by other emerging market countries across the globe, creating prosperity on a breathtaking scale. And yet, capitalism is unloved. From its discontents to its outright enemies, voices compete to point out the flaws in the system that allow increasingly powerful elites to grab an ever larger share of our collective wealth. In this incisive, clear-sighted guide, award-winning Financial Times journalist John Plender explores the paradoxes and pitfalls inherent in this extraordinarily dynamic mechanism - and in our attitudes to it. Taking us on a journey from the Venetian merchants of the Renaissance to the gleaming temples of commerce in 21st-century Canary Wharf via the South Sea Bubble, Dutch tulip mania and manic-depressive gambling addicts, Plender shows us our economic creation through the eyes of philosophers, novelists, poets, artists and divines. Along the way, he delves into the ethics of debt; reveals the truth about the unashamedly materialistic artistic giants who pioneered copyrighting; and traces the path of our instinctive conviction that entrepreneurs are greedy, unethical opportunists, hell-bent on capital accumulation, while manufacturing is innately virtuous. Thoughtful, eloquent and above all compelling, Capitalism is a remarkable contribution to the enduring debate.

The analysis of original documents is a means for economists to focus on the primary text, to analyze and interpret the object and to move to interpretation and understanding of its relationship to modern financial instruments and markets. The result is a collection of interdisciplinary studies of the key innovations in finance from the Old Babylonian loan tablets, to the 1953 London Debt Agreement that span regions in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe.

In The Rise and Fall of a Public Debt Market in 16th-Century China, Wing-kin Puk explains the fate of Capitalism in late imperial China through the strange journey of a piece of paper: the Ming salt certificate.

This book provides a comprehensive picture of Venice’s shipping industry from the days of glory to its definitive decline, challenging the accepted hierarchy of the political, economic, and environmental factors impacting the history of the maritime republic.