The employment of mercenaries by Italian states between the 15th and 16th century stands at the inception of a military transformation, away from the medieval organization of military power, feudalism, to the emergence of standing armies. The transition from a free to a mediated market of force is observable in the fact that contracts between mercenaries and states tend to stabilise over time,...
The intense economic growth, both commercial and financial, of Castile in the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern period had different causes. One of them concerns the increase in the connection between markets, a process promoted by the growing connection between merchants and financiers at regional, peninsular and European level. This paper aims to provide a first insight...
This paper investigates the private credit market intermediated by notaries in Milan in mid eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. The research is based on a dataset of loan contracts drawn up by the city’s leading notaries in a period in which the city was undergoing a remarkable economic modernization. New ventures both in manufacturing and infrastructure...
This paper discusses the application of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to corporate networks in a long-term and historical perspective. Starting with the basic concepts of corporate networks and the main research themes it has addressed in business history, the paper then introduces how historical quantitative archival data can be played with and turned into excel data suitable for the study of...
The aim of this work is to investigate how deep are the historical roots of the business familism in the South of Italy. Within the framework of the social network analysis and exploiting the logic of surname, we define three measures of familism. Descriptive analysis and Difference-in-Differences models show different trends by economic sectors, and provide some empirical evidence of the...
The present paper is the first step to investigate the diffusion of rural and agricultural credit in the South of Italy over the 19th century in the form of cooperative and mutual credit institutions.
Through the specific case study of a micro-reality like Procida, using the approach of the Social Network Analysis, we study the relationships that linked the poor island’s credit environment to...
