ABSTRACT

The emergence of business history as a distinct discipline, first in the United States in the late 1920s, and the development of the history of commerce in late medieval and Renaissance Europe were, from the very beginning, inextricably linked. N.S.B. Gras, the “father” of business history and holder of the first chair in the discipline at Harvard Business School (Boothman 2001; Fredona and Reinert 2017), fruitfully encouraged business historical work on premodern merchants and mercantile firms both in the United States and in Europe (Ferguson 1960: 13–17). Gras believed he had discovered, in the rise of what he called the “sedentary merchant” (understood in contrast to the earlier “traveling merchant” who accompanied his own goods to market or trade fairs), the crucial moment in the development of “mercantile capitalism” in Europe, the stage of economic development in which Europe first rose to undisputed economic prominence on the global stage (Gras 1939). The articles on medieval and Renaissance merchants published in the foundational Cambridge Economic History of Europe, written by Gras’s MBA student Raymond De Roover (1963b) and by Robert S. Lopez (1952), whom Gras had helped bring to the United States from Italy, bore the clear marks of Gras’s influence. Lopez’s piece, for example, used the phrase “sedentary merchant” nine times. And the later impresario of economic history Frederic Lane’s (1944) early study of the fifteenth-century Venetian merchant Andrea Barberigo was explicitly conceived of as a case study of one such “sedentary merchant”. In Gras’s view, the sedentary merchant, freed from the demands of travel to trade fairs because he conducted his business through agents and by means of commercial correspondence, was able to develop revolutionary managerial techniques for the administration of business. And these techniques ushered in, or, more properly, developed alongside a “commercial revolution” in the later Middle Ages, focused around a long thirteenth century, a fertile conceptual nexus first coined by De Roover (1942) in response to Gras and later associated with Lopez’s (1976) widely read and debated book of that name, which presented the case for such a revolution (more broadly understood) even earlier.