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De Roover on Business, Banking, and Economic Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Thomas W. Blomquist
Thomas W. Blomquist
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois University
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Extract

The untimely death of Raymond de Roover in March 1972 removed one of the major figures from the field of medieval economic history. Now there has appeared a collection of eleven of de Roover's articles, one of them not previously published, to remind us of the magisterial quality of their author's contributions to our knowledge of medieval business and banking techniques and the milieu in which the medieval man of business operated.

Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , December 1975 , pp. 821 - 830
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1975

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References

1 de Roover, Raymond, Business, Banking and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modem Europe: Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover. Edited by Kirshner, Julius (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974. Pp. viii, 383)Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as Business, Banking and Economic Thought.

2 The biographical material that follows is taken from the prefaces to de Roover's The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 and Money, Banking, and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges, both cited in full below; from Herlihy, David, “Raymond de Roover, Historian of Mercantile Capitalism,” The Journal of European Economic History, I (1972), 755–762Google Scholar; from Richard Goldthwaite's prefatory article and de Roover's biographical entry in American Men of Science: Social and Behavioral Sciences, (11th ed.; New York and London, 1968)Google Scholar.

3 Carmen, L. A., “Researches of Raymond de Roover in Flemish Accounting of the Fourteenth Century,” The Journal of Accountancy, LX (1935), 111–122Google Scholar.

4 Edler, Florence, Glossary of Mediaeval Terms of Business, Italian Series 1200–1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934)Google Scholar.

5 Usher, A. P., “The Origins of Banking: The Primitive Bank of Deposit, 1200–1600,” The Economic History Review, IV (1934), 399–428Google Scholar; and the later, The Early History of Deposit Banking in Mediterranean Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1943)Google Scholar.

6 de Roover, R., Money, Banking, and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges: Italian Merchant-Bankers, Lombards, and Money-Changers (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

7 Gras', views were stated fully in his Business and Capitalism: An Introduction to Business History (New York, 1939)Google Scholar.

8 De Roover, Bruges, p. viii.

9 De Roover taught at Wells College and Boston College. Not until moving to Brooklyn College in 1961 did he have a full-time appointment in history.

10 See his remarks in La pensée éconornique des scholastiques: doctrines et méthodes (Montreal and Paris: Institute d' Etudes Medievales, 1971), pp. 9–18Google Scholar.

11 Lopez, Robert S., “Italian Leadership in the Medieval Business World,” TheJournal ofEconomicHistory, VII (1948), 63Google Scholar.

12 de Roover, R., “The Commercial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, XVI (1942), 34–39Google Scholar, reprinted in Lane, F. and Riemersma, J., eds., Enterprise and Secular Change (Homewood, ill., 1953), pp. 80–85Google Scholar.

13 de Roover, R., “The Organization of Trade,” in Postan, M. M., Rich, E., and Miller, E., eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, III (Cambridge, 1963), 42–118Google Scholar.

14 Paris, 1953.

15 Roover, De, “New Interpretations of the History of Banking,” Journal of World History, II (1954), 38–76Google Scholar; Business, Banking, and Economic Thought, pp. 200–238; and “Early Banking before 1500 and the Development of Capitalism,” Revue internationale d'histoire de la banque, IV (1971), 1–16Google Scholar.

16 The Bruges Money Market around 1400, with a Statistical Supplement by Hyman Sardy, Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie (Brussels, 1968); also de Roover, R., “La balance commerciale entre Pays-Bas et l'ltalie au quinzième siècle,” Revue beige de philologie et d'histoire, XXXVII (1959), 374–386CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 An interesting, if not conclusive attempt to evaluate the impact of the usury doctrine is Nelson, B. N., “The Usurer and the Merchant Prince: Italian Businessmen and the Ecclesiastical Law of Restitution, 1100–1550,” TheJournal ofEconomicHistory (Supplement), VII (1947), 104–122Google Scholar.

18 Nelson, B. N., The Idea of Usury (Princeton, 1949)Google Scholar and Noonan, J. T., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass., 1957)Google Scholar.

19 This statement is based upon my own reading in the mass of thirteenth-century notarial contracts preserved in the Tuscan city of Lucca.

20 Fiumi, E., Storia economica e sociale di San Gimignano (Florence, 1961), p. 87, n. 286Google Scholar.

21 Lopez, R. S., La prima crisi della banca di Genova (1250–1259) (Genoa, 1956), pp. 34–35Google Scholar, and Lane, F. C., “Investment and Usury,” in Lane, F. C., Venice and History: The Collected Papers of Frederic C. Lane (Baltimore, 1966), p. 64Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., pp. 60–61.

23 See especially “The Development of Accounting Prior to Luca Paccioli according to the Account-books of Medieval Merchants,” in Littleton, A. C. and Yamey, B. S., eds., Studies in the History of Accounting (Homewood, Ill., 1956), pp. 114–174Google Scholar; also Business, Banking, and Economic Thought, pp. 119–180.

24 de Roover, R., “A Florentine Firm of Cloth Manufacturers: Management and Organization of a Sixteenth-Century Business,” Speculum, XVI (1941), 3–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Business, Banking, and Economic Thought, pp. 85–118.

26 Doren, A., Studien aus der Florentiner Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol. I, Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1901)Google Scholar and Storia economica dell'Italia nel Medio Evo, trans. Luzzatto, Gino (Bologna, 1936), pp. 485–495Google Scholar.

26 de Roover, R., The Medici Bank (New York, 1948)Google Scholar.

27 Cambridge, Mass., 1963; paper edition, New York, 1966; Italian translation, II Banco Medici dalle origini al declino, 1397–1494 (Florence, 1970)Google Scholar.

28 See “Monopoly Theory prior to Adam Smith,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXV (1951), 492–524Google Scholar; Business, Banking and Economic Thought, pp. 273–305; reprinted in Mulcahy, R. E., Readings in Economics (Westminster, Md., 1959), pp. 168–190Google Scholar; “Scholastic Economics: Survival and Lasting Influence from the Sixteenth Century to Adam Smith,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXVIII (1955), 161–190Google Scholar; Business, Banking and Economic Thought, pp. 306–335; “Joseph A. Schumpeter and Scholastic Economics,” Kyklos, X (1957), 115–146Google Scholar; “The Concept of the Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy,” TheJournal ofEconomicHistory, XVIII (1958), 418–434Google Scholar; reprinted in Gherity, James A., ed., Economic Thought: A Historical Anthology (New York, 1965), pp. 23–41Google Scholar and Rima, I. H., ed., Readings in the History of Economic Theory (New York, 1970), pp. 9–21Google Scholar; “The Scholastic Attitude toward Trade and Entrepreneurship,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 2nd. ser., I (1963), 76–87Google Scholar; Business, Banking and Economic Thought, pp. 336–345; reprinted in Kitch, M. J., ed., Capitalism and the Reformation (London, 1967), pp. 95–103Google Scholar; and La pensée économique des scholastiques.

29 De Roover considered the economics of the mercantilists inferior to both the Schoolmen and the liberal economists. In addition to the works cited above, see de Roover, R., Thomas Gresham on Foreign Exchange (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), pp. 278–287Google Scholar, and the posthumous article “Gerard de Malynes as an Economic Writer,” in Business, Banking and Economic Thought, pp. 346–366.

30 Schumpeter, Joseph A., A History of Economic Analysis, ed. Schumpeter, Elizabeth Boody (New York, 1954)Google Scholar.

31 See the remarks of Guy Fourquin, “Raymond de Roover, historien de la pensée économique,” Revue historique, DVII (1973), 19–34Google Scholar.

32 De Roover, La pensée économique scholastique, n. 9.

33 San, Bernardino of Siena and Sant'Antonino of Florence: The Two Great Economic Thinkers of the Middle Ages (Boston, 1967)Google Scholar.

34 de Roover, R., “La doctrine scholastique en matiere de monopole et son application a la politique économique des communes italiennes,” in Studi in onore di Amintore Fanfani, I (Milan, 1962), 151–179Google Scholar, and “The Scholastics, Usury and Foreign Exchange,” Business History Review, XLI (1967), 257–271Google Scholar.

35 Rubinstein, N., ed., Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence (Evanston, Ill., 1968), pp. 277–313Google Scholar.

36 Stephenson, C., “In Praise of Medieval Thinkers,” TheJournal ofEconomicHistory, VIII (1948), 29Google Scholar.

37 For a discussion of recent trends in medieval economic history, see the bibliographical essay by Herlihy, David, “The Economy of Traditional Europe,” TheJournal ofEconomicHistory, XXXI (March 1971), 153–163Google Scholar.