ABSTRACT
For example, aristocratic families in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries adopted increasingly conservative economic strategies, characterized by a shift of investments from commerce and manufacture to agriculture and annuities. It is argued that these families often consolidated their economic control in the countryside by asserting their feudal rights and privileges, which caused greater subjection of the peasantry. In Italy, historians disagree about what this economic conservatism represents: either a failure of the medieval “commercial revolution” to develop into a modern industrial economy, or the domination of underlying feudal structures that were little affected by the few energetic commercial centers on the peninsula. Throughout Europe, social hierarchies became more rigid and unchanging, and it became harder to move into the upper ranks of the aristocracy, as private wealth was concentrated in ever fewer hands. This is sometimes attributed to a heightened emphasis on dynastic succession to feudal titles and property, and to the use of entail to prevent future generations from alienating family property, which was a nearly universal phenomenon among early modern European elites.
