Suchergebnisse

Wine has held its place for centuries at the heart of social and cultural life in western Europe. This book will explain how and why this came about, providing a thematic history of wine and the wine trade in Europe in the middle ages from c.1000 to c.1500. Wine was one of the earliest commodities to be traded across the whole of western Europe. Because of its commercial importance, more is probably known about the way viticulture was undertaken and wine itself was made, than the farming methods used with most other agricultural products at the time

This volume contains innovative studies that look at various aspects of slavery and the slave trade in the Eastern Mediterranean between about 1000-1500 CE: overviews of slavery in the different religious traditions, examinations of the role of the Italian merchant cities (mainly Verona and Genoa) in this trade, the nature of Mamluk military slavery and aspects of the commerce in these so-called slave soldiers

Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power-across and within polities-was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. This book inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism, which has moulded European state formation for almost a millennium. It argues that the 'crisis of church and state' that began in the second half of the eleventh century fundamentally reshaped European patterns of state formation and regime change. It did so by doing away with the norm in historical societies-sacral monarchy-and by consolidating the two great balancing acts European state-builders have been engaged in since the eleventh century: against strong social groups and against each other. The book traces the roots of this crisis to a large-scale breakdown of public authority in the Latin West, which began in the ninth century, and which at one and the same time incentivized and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late tenth century onwards. Drawing on a unique dataset of towns, parliaments, and ecclesiastical institutions such as bishoprics and monasteries, the book documents how this church reform movement was crucial for the development and spread of self-government (the internal balancing act) and the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (the external balancing act) in the period AD 1000-1500.

Dynasties, Events, and Equivalents -- I. Dynasties and Events -- II. Weights and Capacity -- III. Units of Currencies -- Introduction -- Structure of the Book -- Part I. The Market Economy in Late Imperial China -- Chapter 1. Issues and Approaches -- Depicting Market Expansion in Preindustrial China -- Measuring Agricultural Productivity -- Chapter 2. The Nature of Song and Ming Economic Data -- The Ho Puzzle and the Reliability of Chinese Population Data -- The Poll Tax Era: 220 BC to 755 AD -- The Indirect Taxation Era: The Song Fiscal State and the Birth of Market-Based Data -- The Land Taxes Era: An Inefficient Mode of Taxation -- The Heyday of a Command Economy Era and the Early Ming Data -- The Debate over Song Population Data -- Conclusion -- Part II. The Song Era -- Chapter 3. How Large Was the Money Economy? -- Divergence in the Song and Ming Economies: Population and Price -- The Rise of a Command Economy in the Early Ming -- Reconstruction of Domestic Markets in 1077 AD and 1381 AD -- Long-Term Changes in the Money Supply -- A Tentative Conclusion -- Chapter 4. Trade and Water Transport in the Eleventh Century -- The Structure of Song Inland Water Transport -- The Decline of Transportation Costs -- Kaifeng in the Eleventh-Century National Market -- Conclusion -- Part III. The Ming Era -- Chapter 5. China after 1200: Crisis and Disintegration -- A Sharp Decline in Population and Urban Consumption -- Disappearance of Monetized Taxation during the Late Fourteenth Century -- Shrinking in Water Transports -- Limit of Sixteenth-Century Trade -- Conclusion -- Chapter 6. Prices, Real Wages, and National Incomes -- Real Wages in the Song and Ming Eras -- Inequality in the Market Economy -- The Share of State Revenue in National Income -- Conclusion.