The 17th century was called the Dutch 'Golden Age'. Over the course of 80 years, the tiny United Provinces of the Netherlands overthrew Spanish rule and became Europe's dominant power. In this book, Julia Adams explores the role that Holland's great families played in this dramatic history.

This fascinating study follows the fortunes of the Höchstetter family, merchant-manufacturers and financiers of Augsburg, Germany, in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, and sheds light on the economic and social history of failure and resilience in early modern Europe. Carefully tracing the chronology of the family’s rise, fall and transformation, it moves from the micro- to the macro-level, making comparisons with other mercantile families of the time to draw conclusions and suggest insights into such issues as social mobility, capitalist organization, business techniques, market practices and economic institutions. The result is a microhistory that offers macro-conclusions about the lived experience of early capitalism and capitalistic practices. This book will be valuable reading for advanced students and researchers of economic, financial and business history, legal history and early modern European history.

James tells how “iron masters“ of a classical industrial cast were succeeded by generations who wanted to shift to information-age systems technologies, and how families and firms wrestled with social and economic changes that occasionally tore them apart. The author shows how these firms illuminate a European model of “relationship capitalism.“

This volume takes stock of recent research on economic growth, as well as the development of capital and labour markets, during the centuries that preceded the Industrial Revolution. The book underlines the diversity in the economic experiences of early modern Europeans and suggests how this variety might be the foundation of a new conception of economic and social change.

As the wealthiest German merchant family of the sixteenth century, the Fuggers have attracted wide scholarly attention. In contrast to the other famous merchant family of the period, the Medici of Florence, however, no English-language work on them has been available until now. The Fuggers of Augsburg offers a concise and engaging overview that builds on the latest scholarly literature and the author’s own work on sixteenth-century merchant capitalism. Mark Häberlein traces the history of the family from the weaver Hans Fugger’s immigration to the imperial city of Augsburg in 1367 to the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. Because the Fuggers’ extensive business activities involved long-distance trade, mining, state finance, and overseas ventures, the family exemplifies the meanings of globalization at the beginning of the modern age. The book also covers the political, social, and cultural roles of the Fuggers: their patronage of Renaissance artists, the founding of the largest social housing project of its time, their support of Catholicism in a city that largely turned Protestant during the Reformation, and their rise from urban merchants to imperial counts and feudal lords. Häberlein argues that the Fuggers organized their social rise in a way that allowed them to be merchants and feudal landholders, burghers and noblemen at the same time. Their story therefore provides a window on social mobility, cultural patronage, religion, and values during the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Smith explains how France abandoned merchant capitalism for the corporate enterprise that would come to dominate its economy and project influence around the globe. Opposing the view that French economic and business development was crippled by missed opportunities and entrepreneurial failures, he presents a story of considerable achievement.

The rise of capitalism to global dominance is still largely associated – by both laypeople and Marxist historians – with the industrial capitalism that made its decisive breakthrough in 18th century Britain. Jairus Banaji’s new work reaches back centuries and traverses vast distances to argue that this leap was preceded by a long era of distinct “commercial capitalism”, which reorganised labor and production on a world scale to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated. Rather than a picture centred solely on Europe, we enter a diverse and vibrant world. Banaji reveals the cantons of Muslim merchants trading in Guangzhou since the eighth century, the 3,000 European traders recorded in Alexandria in 1216, the Genoese, Venetians and Spanish Jews battling for commercial dominance of Constantinople and later Istanbul. We are left with a rich and global portrait of a world constantly in motion, tied together and increasingly dominated by a pre-industrial capitalism. The rise of Europe to world domination, in this view, has nothing to do with any unique genius, but rather a distinct fusion of commercial capitalism with state power.

"Long-distance oceanic and overland trade along the Eurasian landmass in the 1400s was largely dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders and predominantly conducted over short trajectories by sole traders or organized around small-scale enterprises. Yet, within two centuries of Europeans' arrival in the Indian Ocean in 1498, long-distance trade throughout Eurasia was mainly taken over by them. By 1700, they had formed new, large-scale, and impersonal organizations, primarily a joint-stock business corporation between English East India Company (EIC) and Dutch East India Company (VOC). This allowed them to transform trade from an enterprise dominated by many small traders moving goods over short segments to a vertically integrated firm that was able to control goods from their origin to the end consumers. This rise of the business corporation proved essential for the economic rise of Europe. Why did the corporation arise indigenously only in Europe, and given its effective organization of long-distance trade, why wasn't it mimicked by other Eurasian civilizations for 300 years? Harris closely examines the role played by forms of organization in the transformation of Eurasian trade between 1400 and 1700, comparing the organizational forms that were used in four major civilizations: Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Western European. Through this comparative perspective, he argues that the organizational design of the EIC and VOC, the first long-lasting joint-stock corporations, enabled large-scale multilateral impersonal cooperation for the first time in human history. He also argues that this new organizational form enabled the English and Dutch to deploy more capital, more ships, more voyages, and more agents than other organizational forms"--

Later generations have sometimes found such actions perplexing, often dismissing them as evidence that business people of the late medieval and early modern worlds did not fully understand market rules.

How do changes in family form relate to changes in society as a whole? In a work which combines theoretical rigour with historical scope, Wally Seccombe provides a powerful study of the changing structure of families from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Responding to feminist critiques of ‘sex-blind’ historical materialism, Seccombe argues that family forms must be seen to be at the heart of modes of production. He takes issue with the mainstream consensus in family history which argues that capitalism did not fundamentally alter the structure of the nuclear family, and makes a controversial intervention in the long-standing debate over European marriage patterns and their relation to industrialization. Drawing on an astonishing range of studies in family history, historical demography and economic history, A Millennium of Family Change provides an integrated overview of the long transition from feudalism to capitalism, illuminating the far-reaching changes in familial relations from peasant subsistence to the making of the modern working class.