It may seem like a recent trend, but businesses have been practising compassionate capitalism for nearly a thousand years.Based on the newly discovered historical documents on Cambridge’s sophisticated urban property market during the Commercial Revolution in the thirteenth century, this book explores how successful entrepreneurs employed the wealth they had accumulated to the benefit of the community.Cutting across disciplines, from economic and business history to entrepr...

Local enterprise, institutional quality and strategic location were of central importance in the growth of medieval towns. This book, comprising a study of 112 English towns, emphasises these key factors. Downstream locations on major rivers attracted international trade, and thereby stimulated the local processing of imports and exports, while the early establishment of richly endowed religious institutions funnelled agricultural rental income into a town, where it was spent on luxury goo...

One of the most important manuscripts surviving from thirteenth-century England, the corpus of documents known as the Hundred Rolls for Cambridge have been incomplete until the recent discovery of an additional roll.This invaluable volume replaces the previous inaccurate transcription by the record commission of 1818 and provides new translations and additional appendices.Shedding new light on important facets of business activity in thirteenth-century Cambridge, this volum...

This collection of essays brings together historians examining social and economic crises from the thirteenth century to the twenty-first. Crisis is an almost ubiquitous concept for historians, applicable across (amongst others) the histories of agriculture, disease, finance and trade. Yet there has been little attempt to compare its use as an explanatory tool between these discrete fields of research. This volume breaks down the boundaries between traditional historical time periods and s...

This ambitious collection follows the evolution of capitalism from its origins in 13th-century European towns to its 16th-century expansion into Asia, Africa and South America and on to the global capitalism of modern day.Written by distinguished historians and social scientists, the chapters examine capitalism and its critics and the level of variation and convergence in its operation across locations. The authors illuminate the aspects of capitalism that have encouraged, but also...