This (revised) study seeks to examine the rise, expansion, and ultimate decline of the Italian wool-based textile industries over a period of six centuries (from ca. 1100 to ca. 1730). An international trade model combining transaction costs and comparative advantage is employed to explain the...

During the hundred-year period from about 1320 to about 1420, the Florentine woollen cloth industry underwent two closely connected crises. The first crisis was the consequence, direct and indirect, of the ravages of warfare and falling population, afflicting the entire Mediterranean basin and...

This is a substantially revised version of an earlier Working Paper (posted in 2002, with a different title), based on much new data and other information. It re-examines Earl Hamilton’s famous 1929 thesis on ‘Profit Inflation’ and the ‘birth of modern industrial capitalism’: namely,...

This comparative study of money, coinages, prices, and wages in southern England and the southern Low Countries had its origins in a series of appendices and footnotes for the first twelve volumes of the Correspondence of Erasmus (1484-1527), part of the Collected Works of Erasmus, which the...

This paper explores the impact of the Count of Flanders' monetary and wage policies upon the fortunes of the Flemish woollen cloth industry in a crucial but penultimate phase of its irredeemable decline, from 1390 to 1435, when it was beginning to yield to the growing supremacy of the now...

Bedevilling the ongoing debate about changes in real-incomes in late-medieval western Europe, especially during the so-called 'Golden Age of the Labourer', is the very troubling issue of 'wage-stickiness'. The standard and long-traditional explanation for this supposed 'Golden Age' of rising...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the 'draperies' or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German Hanseatic League as the...

This paper is a necessary companion to the one entitled The West European Woollen Industries and their Struggles for International Markets, c.1000 - 1500. No one can properly comprehend that five-century history of international competition for textile markets, without some basic understanding...

This paper analyses the major changes in textile products, production costs, prices, and market orientations during the era when the �draperies� or cloth industries of the late-medieval Low Countries and England had become increasingly dependent upon northern markets and the German...

The precocious economic development, extensive urbanisation, and wealth of medieval Flanders was based largely upon producing and exporting a wide range of essentially wool-based textiles, from cheap mass consumption products (the coarse and light says, biffes, etc.) to extremely expensive and...