Household-to-Company Networks as Evidence of Consumer Credit in Renaissance Florence

Paul McLean, Rutgers
Neha Gondal, Boston University

The history of consumer credit in Europe goes back several hundred years at least. Indeed, extensive evidence of widespread consumer credit exists for Florence in the fifteenth century, earlier than a good deal of economic historiography penetrates. Summary transcriptions of account books in the 1420s and 1430s document myriad credit relations between companies and shops on the one hand and Florentine households on the other. Specifically, there is copious evidence—both quantitative and qualitative—of high-quality Florentine cloth being sold on account to Florentine households, a very substantial part of the market under-examined relative to the idea that Florence exported most of its high-quality cloth abroad. We explore the social underpinnings of these consumer credit relationships, and we analyze networks of these consumer credit ties in parallel with networks of personal credit exchanges and networks of company-to-company relationships of financing, production, and distribution.

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 Presented in Session 109. Consumption, Credit, and Wealth