Migration and the Medieval Transition to Capitalist Production in Florence

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  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 8. Race, Ethnicity, and Migration

Abstract

This paper addresses the transition to capitalist production in the woolen industry controlled by the Arte Della Lana (the Wood Guild) in Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Given that this development occurred hundreds of years before the rise of Protestantism, which some analysts see as a pre-requisite of capitalism, the paper begins by focusing on the Weberian thesis of the spirit of capitalism. The sections that follow the Weberian discussion describe and analysis how as tax collectors for the pope, Italian merchant-bankers dominated a major part of the inter-regional wool trade in Europe. With the accumulation of wool wealth, merchant-bankers in the Arte restructured woolen production in Florence from the putting-out system to a fully-developed capitalist mode of production for many of the woolen occupations. The migration of merchant-bankers across European wool areas, and the migration of workers, many of whom were runaway serfs, supported an inter-regional system of woolen-wealth accumulation that produced a capitalist class structure in the woolen economy of Florence in the trecento.

Author

• Nestor P. Rodriguez, University of Texas at Austin