A Study of Bankruptcy in Early Modern Europe

FAIN: FA-55617-11

Thomas Max Safley
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)

Economic scholarship has long viewed failure as intrinsic to capitalism, the price of prosperity. History, including recent events, seems to agree. My project examines this connection by studying bankruptcy cases in early modern Europe, another time when economic failure became a social problem. Hundreds of legal proceedings provide documents that reveal who the capitalists were, how they conducted their businesses, what motivated their actions and why those actions sometimes failed. By including a variety of prescriptive sources, this project sets the praxis of capitalism in institutional context. The result revisits capitalism as contingent to its cultural, social and political matrices.

Associated Products

New Studies on the History of Bankruptcy and Bankruptcy in History (Book)
Title: New Studies on the History of Bankruptcy and Bankruptcy in History
Editor: Thomas Max Safley
Abstract: Bankruptcy has entered the public consciousness with astonishing force since 2008. Never mind the spectacular failures of multinational banks and corporations; the rate of personal bankruptcy in North America and Europe has reached levels not seen since the 1930s. What is more, it has ceased to be a scandal that ruined reputations and lives to become an acceptable means to right one’s financial fortunes and propel one back into business. Under these circumstances, it is surprising to realize that the history of bankruptcy as an economic, social, or cultural phenomenon has attracted almost no scholarly attention. It has occasionally been counted as a measure of economic crises present and immediately past or elevated it to the very essence of capitalism’s “creative destruction,” but it has never been examined as an important and revealing event onto itself. Yet, the records of bankruptcy proceedings offer a singular perspective on the economic, social, and cultural life of the past. Far from an abstract epiphenomenon of economic life, it involves human beings and human communities. It arises not only from the generation and distribution of wealth and the practices and ethics of business, but also from the ideas and actions, the aspirations and calculations, of persons over time. This volume takes up bankruptcy in early modern Europe, when its frequency made it not only an economic problem but the great personal and social tragedy it has become. Using legal, business and personal records, the essays in this volume examine the impact of failure on business organizations and practices, capital formation and circulation, economic institutions and ethics, and human networks and relations in the so-called “transition” to modern society.
Year: 2013
Publisher: Routledge
Type: Edited Volume

Failure at Idria: Business and Bankruptcy in a Capitalistic Age (Book)
Title: Failure at Idria: Business and Bankruptcy in a Capitalistic Age
Author: Thomas Max Safley
Abstract: It is hard to imagine a topic of greater contemporary relevance today than the history of business failure and economic crisis. My project examines the phenomenon in 16th-century Europe, taking as its focus four enterprises that one after another take control of a mercury mine, thus acquiring near-monopoly control of a crucial reagent in silver-refining and manufacturing, and that one after another exit the market and fail. The surviving business documents of the firms and the mine, as well as the legal documentation created by their bankruptcies, offer a singular vantage point from which to consider the function of capitalistic enterprises and the meaning of business failure in an increasingly capitalistic economy. By including legal statutes, moral tracts, business handbooks and other prescriptive sources, this study follows the changing definition of failure as well as the social and political responses to it over time. It brings together business organizations and practices, capital formation and circulation, economic institutions and ethics as well as human networks and relations as they were transformed by failure.
Year: 2014
Type: Single author monograph

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