Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300-900
Cambridge University Press, 1/17/2002
EAN 9780521661027, ISBN10: 0521661021
Hardcover, 1130 pages, 24.6 x 17.8 x 6.6 cm
Language: English
For fifty years debate has raged about early European commerce during the period between antiquity and the middle ages. Was there trade? If so, in what - and with whom? New evidence and new ways of looking at old evidence are now breaking the stalemate. Analysis of communications - the movements of people, ideas and things - is transforming our vision of Europe and the Mediterranean in the age of Charlemagne and Harun al Rashid. This is the first comprehensive analysis of the economic transition during this period for over sixty years. Using new materials and new methodology, it will attract all social and economic historians of antiquity and the middle ages, and anyone concerned with the origins of Europe, the history of the slave trade, medicine and disease, cross-cultural contacts, and the Muslim and Byzantine worlds.
Commerce, communications and the origins of the European economy
Part I. The End of the World
1. The end of the ancient world
2. Late Roman industry
case studies in decline
3. Land and river communications in late antiquity
4. Sea change in late antiquity
The end of the ancient economy
a provisional balance sheet
Part II. People on the Move
5. A few western faces
6. Two hundred more envoys and pilgrims
group portrait
7. Byzantine faces
8. Easterners heading west
group portrait
9. Traders, slaves, and exiles
People on the move
Part III. Things that Travelled
10. Hagiographical horizons
collecting exotic relics in early medieval France
11. 'Virtual' coins and communications
12. 'Real money'
Arab and Byzantine coins around Carolingian Europe
Things on the move
Part IV. The Patterns of Change
13. The experience of travel
14. Secular rhythms
communications over time
15. Seasonal rhythms
16. Time under way
17. 'Spaces of sea'
Europe's western Mediterranean communications
18. Venetian breakthrough
Europe's central Mediterranean communications
19. New overland routes
The patterns of change
Part V. Commerce
20. Early medieval trading worlds
21. Where are the merchants?
Italy
22. Merchants and markets of Frankland
23. Connections
24. Where are the wares?
eastern imports to Europe
25. European exports to Africa and Asia
At the origins of the European economy
Appendices
Bibliography.
'Cambridge University Press is to be congratulated on a polished and well-edited production ... This is a noble addition to the school inspired by Pirenne, and will no doubt still be around in another sixty years' time.' Economic History Services