ABSTRACT
Networks and Markets In his recently published Economy of Renaissance Florence, Richard Goldthwaite describes how the Florentine economy and its position in later medieval and early modern or pre-capitalist Europe were developed by the Florentine network outside Florence:
In short, many more Florentines must have taken their chances in foreign trade, and numbers alone can explain greater geographical di usion and growth of a more extensive, denser trade network abroad than merchants from small places could possibly have formed among themselves … By their sheer numbers, not to mention the density of the network they built up among themselves, Florentines eventually shoved the other Tuscans out of the markets where they did business.1
