Replication data for: Economic and Social Exchange in Renaissance Florence

The commercial credit system, through which the Renaissance Florentines dominated European international finance, emerged out of their particular social-network structures of family, neighborhood, and social class, with double-entry accounting providing the technical tool to increase the volume of “friends” with whom Florentines could reciprocate. Re-blending their own historically inherited logics of economic and social exchange was central to the Florentines’ generative capacity to make credit and liquidity, which in turn helped Europe to expand through trade. The particular blending generated in Florence was a crosscut of economic partnership, which was rooted in new oligarchic patterns of cross-neighborhood social-class endogamy, and commercial credit, which was rooted in new clientelist patterns of cross-class neighborhood endogamy. This layering of economic networks emerged, we believe, as an unintended by-product of the political process of repressing the Ciompi rebellion of wool workers in 1378. Constructing political elites and constructing financial markets were, in Renaissance Florence at least, two sides of the same co evolutionary process of rewiring social networks. These findings are based on statistical analyses of commercial credit data contained in the 1427 catasto, as well as on other primary sources.