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  • Commercial Agreements and Social Dynamics in Medieval Genoa
  • Jessica L. Goldberg (bio)
Quentin Van Doosselaere. Commercial Agreements and Social Dynamics in Medieval Genoa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 280 pp. ISBN 978-1107-40429-8, $34.99 (paper).

The medieval notarial cartularies of Genoa—bound registers of the notaries’ contracts held in the municipal archives—are among the most valued records in all medieval economic history. Even if the twelfth-century records are spotty, they are the earliest extant European cartularies for long-distance trade. They also neatly document most of the period that saw Genoa’s rise to a place among the dominant economic powers in the Mediterranean, a position it would maintain for centuries. More broadly, they have been foundational to two of the most important twentieth-century narratives of European economic development—Robert Lopez’s thesis of a medieval “commercial revolution,” and institutional economists’ (chiefly Douglass North and Avner Greif) thesis that modern Western European economic dominance has its roots in medieval contract development.

Quentin Van Doosselaere’s study shows how much can still be gleaned from these sources by bringing a new perspective and methodology. Van Doosselaere’s project is elegantly simple in concept and very ambitious in practice. He has compiled details from a representative sample of ten different kinds of contracts for overseas trade (about 11,000 of the 20,000 contracts examined) registered in the cartularies over the period 1154–1435, and used them to analyze the changing nature of social ties between contracting parties.

Van Doosselaere’s main findings are laid out and analyzed over the three main chapters, each of which centers on a contract form the author sees as a motor of social change. He shows first that Genoa’s initial expansion was firmly based in previous social structures of the “feudal” commune. That is, social ties between parties in long-distance trade in the twelfth-century cartularies tended to be hierarchical and the whole network segmented, fitting neatly into a pattern of clientelism in which activity occurred within a noble clan and its clients, not between clans. Over the thirteenth century, however, both the use of the commenda—a very simple “staple contract”—and the general expansion of trade allowed for increasing, perhaps all-encompassing participation of the Genoese in trade. Not only was there little repeat of partners, but people partnered with little regard to identifiable social status or affiliation—indeed, the word merchant had yet to appear as a regular label. Van Doosselaere thus shows how trade helped dissolve the old social structure through opportunities for social mobility. As the thirteenth century wore on, however, the [End Page 921] entire system began to be socially “re-wired” toward commerce within corporate groups. Professional identities become more stable and politically salient and a new mercantile elite emerged to challenge the nobles who had also self-defensively increased economic ties among themselves. These new merchants deepened ties among themselves (and increased the economic distance between themselves and the occasional artisan investors) through the use of credit instruments—i.e., they continued to partner with all comers, but limited credit instruments to professional traders and dramatically increased the proportion of capital that went into in credit contracts. Finally, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Van Doosselaere matches the emergence of alberghi, a new kind of elite clan bound by open-ended contracts of legal kinship (sometimes artificial), with the use of (generally unprofitable) third-party insurance contracts that served to bind the clans to one another, creating much greater social cohesion in among this oligarchy than in previous periods.

Van Doosselaere’s work tracks the use and social dimensions of commercial contracts and analyzes the emergence of a “merchant group,” both areas of lively current debate in institutional economics. Theorists looking for easy answers, however, will be disappointed. Indeed, perhaps the greatest contribution of an analysis with a longer timeline and narrow focus on contracts is to show how “path dependent” arguments fall apart in the face of historical complexity. If we consider the famous commenda contract, for instance, Van Doosselaere’s social network analysis confirms a long-held thesis: use of this contract promoted use...

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