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Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe. By Peter Spufford. London: Thames and Hudson, 2003. 432 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $29.95. ISBN: cloth, 0-500-25118-5; paper, 0-500-28594-2.
Reviewed by Margaret B. W. Graham
Academic historians have justly faulted themselves for contributing too little to the current understanding of globalization (see, for example, Globalization in World History, edited by A. G. Hopkins [2002]). When the interpretation of globalization's effects is left to economists and experts in international finance, wider concerns about the consequences for society at large, and especially for the sustainability of development, are overlooked. Movements of financial capital over the Internet may be tracked very carefully, but movements of people-pilgrims, migrants, and slaves-as well as of ideas and diseases are generally ignored. It may seem strange to propose that a book on medieval European commerce could contribute to a deeper understanding of globalization in the twenty-first century, but in my view Peter Spufford's book, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe, does just that. Spufford traces the origins of important economic and financial institutions to what is known as the commercial revolution of the thirteenth century, in which merchant role specialization combined with the new merchant techniques of accounting, credit, and insurance. He adds his own definitive scholarship on the history of money and mining to the accepted interpretation of the commercial revolution in the Italian city states, and he also traces their broader implications for patterns of trade and economic development into the early modern period. Looking at these themes from a distance of more than five hundred years, we can gain much needed perspective-"a distant mirror," as it were, on globalization.
I adopted Power and Profit as one of the central resources for my undergraduate course in international business history, which I subtitled "A Distant Mirror on Globalization." I focus on the period before the Industrial Revolution because, given our expectations for the diminishing importance of the nation state, I want students to study the history of economic development in societies that were not "nations." In addition to the Italian city states, these included the Hanseatic...