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The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence. By Edwin S. Hunt * New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. x + 291 pp. Tables, charts, notes, maps, index, and bibliography. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-46156-1.
Professor Edwin Hunt in this study of what he terms the medieval "supercompanies" undertakes a re-examination of the Florentine international business enterprises of the Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli in the first half of the fourteenth century. In point of fact, however, his work focuses almost exclusively upon the Peruzzi Company, which he uses as a "model" of the "super-company" phenomenon. The fundamental source upon which the analysis is based is Armando Sapori's edition of the surviving Peruzzi books (I libri di commercio dei Peruzzi, Milan, 1934). Inevitably an overlap with Sapori's work is bound to exist but the author reads the Peruzzi accounts with the advantage of his own experience in international business and the benefit of research carried out since Sapori worked.
Professor Hunt distinguishes the "supercompanies" from other contemporary business organizations on the basis of their "heroic" involvement in commodity trading, particularly in the grain trade of the Peruzzi with Angevin Naples and the Bardi dealings in English wool. Throughout he stresses the opinion that finance was secondary to commodity trading, arguing that the big three were "required" to be big since only unusually large-scale...