Suchergebnisse

Venetian military structure -- Military costs and rural public economy -- Construction of the military structure -- The changing character of military costs -- War, demographics and markets -- Management -- Redistribution -- Recipients -- Containment of costs -- A republic among monarchies -- Venice and the European military structures -- Conclusions

Early-modern Venice is predominantly remembered as a maritime power, yet historians have become increasingly interested in its political and military aspirations within the Italian mainland. Adding to the growing literature on this subject, Giulio Ongaro's book addresses the practical management of the Venetian military apparatus in this period. Focusing on two provinces - Vicenza and Brescia - he interrogates a broad spectrum of primary source documents produced by these rural communities that illuminate Venetian military activities between the mid-sixteenth century and the end of the War of Candia in 1670. From the production of the saltpeter, the construction of the fortresses, the supplying and the training of the rural militia and the quartering of troops, this book shows how essential military activities were managed and overseen at the local level. In so doing, it demonstrates how local autonomy over the management of Venetian military apparatus - particularly from an economic point of view - did not necessarily conflict with wider, ongoing processes of state building or moves towards the centralization of particular public functions. Indeed the state appeared to encourage local élites (initially urban, then rural) to take a leading role in overseeing the localised management of military tasks. The result was a system that both supported the resilience of the local economy (both public and private), and which strengthened and improved the Republic's military assets, allowing it to remain the only Italian state free from the domination of European monarchies.--

ABSTRACTThis article provides an overview of the evolution of the commons in the Italian peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on the connection between the phenomenon of growing community debt, the loss of property held in common and the evolution of the institutions appointed to govern such properties. The later sections of the article will discuss the situation found in each of the Italian States: Venice, Spanish Lombardy, the Kingdom of Naples and the Papal States. Two models will be used for reference; one characterised by state intervention; the second by the growth of institutions of self-governance.

This article analyses the increasing socio-economic segmentation of rural society in Northern Italy in the early modern era. With a synthesis of the historiography on the Italian countryside plus original archival research, we reconstruct the political role and the socioeconomic basis of rural elites in the State of Milan and in the Republic of Venice. We argue that, in general, the growing importance and the establishment of the rural elites were the result of more and more exclusive management of the commons, the concentration of landed property, and a near monopoly in local manufacturing and the local credit market.

Abstract
This study estimates the cost of living in three cities – Florence, Bologna and Milan – in eighteenth-century northern Italy. Although they do not allow an understanding of the differences between social groups or seasonal consumption patterns, the calculation of living costs and the implied modelling have a twofold aim. First, they allow the calculation of real wages, which are obtained by dividing nominal wages by the cost of a consumption basket; therefore, broadly, they allow the Italian case to be put into great debates of economic history, such as the one on the Little Divergence between northern and southern Europe at the end of the early modern period. In this regard, we will show that the existing calculations used for this purpose have many criticalities, and we will solve them. Second, determining the cost of consumption baskets allows us to observe the role played by urban public institutions in mediating between the market and consumers, with relevant effects on price trends and, therefore, on the purchasing power of the urban population.

AbstractThe extended mind thesis states that the mind is not brain-bound but extends into the physical world. The philosophical debate around the thesis has mostly focused on extension towards epistemic artefacts, treating the phenomenon as a special capacity of the human organism to recruit external physical resources to solve individual tasks. This paper argues that if the mind extends to artefacts in the pursuit of individual tasks, it extends to other humans in the pursuit of collective tasks. Mind extension to other humans corresponds essentially to the 'we-mode' of cognition, the unique power of human minds to be jointly directed at goals, intentions, states of affairs, or values (which, importantly, differs from having a 'group mind'). Because the capacity for collective intentionality holds evolutionary and developmental primacy over human-epistemic artefacts relations, the extended mind should not be seen as a special phenomenon, but as a central aspect of the human condition. The original extended mind thesis carried important implications for how the cognitive sciences should proceed. In a version of the thesis that accommodates collective intentionality, these implications would go far deeper than originally assumed.