Household-to-Company Networks and Consumer Credit in Renaissance Florence

• In Event: 240 - Section on Consumers and Consumption Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 05. Institutions & Networks of Consumption

Abstract

Recent research has documented extensive networks of commercial credit relations in Renaissance Florence (Padgett and McLean 2011). Banks financed Florentine wool and silk production and also provided the means for exporting finished goods. Amongst themselves, banks had extensive credit relations, built on an intricate (but bottom-up) architecture of current accounts held with each other. But this commercial system was also linked to Florentine households—both on the input side (via influxes of start-up capital from company partners and occasional large deposits from people other than company partners) and the output side (via the retailing of finished goods to household customers). This paper analyzes the patterns of flow in this investment and consumer credit network using a previously unanalyzed data set of person-to-company ties. We intend to show the particular ways in which this network was embedded in other kinds of social relations, such as family and neighborhood, and we bring to light the existence of consumer credit in a market long before the explosive spread of consumer credit in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Author

• Paul D. McLean, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers