Entrepreneurship and Social Mobility
Two Cosmopolitan Lives in Renaissance Genoa
Summary
framework also takes into account the dualism and transactional focus of the Genoese polity with the aim of reassessing the historical reasoning on entrepreneurship proposed by business historians who responded to the “Schumpeter’s plea” in this regard.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One Introduction
- Chapter Two The city-state: A polity with a transactional focus
- Chapter Three Bartolomeo da Framura: Manager on the alum fields
- 3.1. Merchant within a trading and ecclesiastical network
- 3.2. Contractor and trader in the Papal quarries (1460–1466)
- Chapter Four Gioachino da Passano: Trusted men of King Francis I
- 4.1. Merchant and commander of the galleys
- 4.2. Geopolitical strategist on the French side
- Chapter Five Entrepreneurship and institutions: Lessons from the case
- 5.1. Notes on oligarchic closure and social mobility in early modern Genoa
- Chapter Six Giving a historical face to entrepreneurship: Issues for debate
- 6.1. Historical thinking on entrepreneurship within the cultural turn
- 6.2. Another way of reasoning
- Chapter Seven Summary and concluding remarks
- Synopsis
- References
Acknowledgments
At the origin of this study lies a collective research on the history of a Genoese podesteria which, in its four centuries of existence, always had a quite large group of nobles, merchants and navigators who made their careers in Genoa and beyond. Among the most notable of them, are the two characters depicted here with biographical sketches that benefited from the research skills of several scholars in different times and places. My thanks go in particular to Andrea Lercari, Ivana Ait and Diego Pizzorno. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer who provided very helpful comments and suggestions for my attempt to turn a descriptive case study into an interpretive one.
Chapter One Introduction
The archival research from which the present study originates is a multi-themed description of a Genoese podesteria,1 from its documented existence in 1368 through the fall of the Republic of Genoa in 1797. A significant element of interest in that collective work is the theoretical potential that transpires from descriptions of the local socio-economic structure and its intersections with the capital city, the hegemonic role a noble family one of our actors belonged to exerted in the local community and other parts of the Genoese dominio and finally, the business of a bunch of local merchants in Genoa and beyond.2
←11 | 12→In fact, such a descriptive case outlined a set of micro-level dynamics of a macro-process that got completed in late-medieval Genoa: the turning of its economic elite into a ruling class. That élite includes Bartolomeo da Framura and Gioachino da Passano, two cosmopolitan actors who will go from the role of merchants to that of “specialists” engaged in the implementations of strategic policies of princes and popes.3 This is the reason why references in the literature may be found ←12 | 13→on these characters within the backdrop of two critical junctures in Genoese history. First, the withdrawal from the colonies in the Levant as a result of the Ottoman advance in the second half of the 15th century. Second, the positioning of the city-state within the Spanish imperial framework after Admiral Andrea Doria changed sides soon after his takeover of Genoa with the French support in 1528.4
The global lives of these upwardly mobile cosmopolitan actors seem a well-suited subject for reasoning on how “biography interacts with the history of [the subject’s] era.”5 In the present work, the issue is defined and delimited by using the biography-history framework as a backdrop for reassessing the historical reasoning on entrepreneurship proposed by business historians who responded to the “Schumpeter’s plea” in this regard.6
Details
- Pages
- 134
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631884980
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631884997
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9783631885000
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783631884874
- DOI
- 10.3726/b19989
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2022 (September)
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2022. 134 pp.
