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3 - Trust in the Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2021

Nicholas Scott Baker
Nicholas Scott Baker
Affiliation:
Macquarie University
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Summary

After gamblers, merchants in Renaissance Italy had the deepest professional familiarity with experiencing the unknown future, in all its risks and potential. This chapter examines how the well-established notion that trust was crucial to the functioning of the premodern economy connected to ideas about temporality and the future. It argues that the experience of trusting strangers and distant agents or business partners was fundamentally a temporal one. The chapter traces the institutions and mechanisms used by sixteenth-century merchants to manage the temporal problems of trust. It also demonstrates the continuing persistence of a providential understanding of the future, based on Christian faith, in mercantile culture, revealing the complex multiplicity of Italian attitudes toward the future.

Keywords

history of commercetrustriskletters and letter writingfuturereligious faith
Type
Chapter
Information
In Fortune's Theater
Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy
 , pp. 70 - 88
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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