The views expressed herein are entirely those of the author and are not purported to reflect those of the U.S. Department of Justice.

With Marx having laid out a trajectory along which societies evolve—a shining path extending from prehistory to an absorbing state called “communism” —historians in the late nineteenth century found themselves with a research agendum: to map the evolution of society from its feudal heritage to its capitalistic stage of development. Hence the efforts of historians to troll through the archives of Genoa, Venice, Pisa, and other sites of medieval commerce to catalogue evidence of the emergence of proto-capitalistic societies.

Quentin Van Doosselaere's book, Commercial Agreements and Social Dynamics in Medieval Genoa, picks up where the denizens of the archives left off. This is a good thing in that a lot has been left off for a long, long time. Specifically, few researchers have attempted to craft data sets of documents that (one must hope) would be representative of some body of commercial activity. In this case, the author got his hands on every document he could find that historians had transcribed from the logbooks (“cartularies”) of Genoese notaries operating between the late twelfth century and the mid-fifteenth century.

One can yet wonder how many cartularies remain buried in the State Archives of Genoa, but the author is able to use his data set of documents to tease out a number of interesting patterns.Footnote ¹ The financing of Genoese trade in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries often involved people of modest or substantial means participating on one side (as an investor) or the other (as a traveling trading agent) of a one-shot trade venture organized under the terms of a commenda contract. With one-shot alone, most of these people would disappear from the paper trail. Over time commenda (equity-like schemes) became supplanted with credit agreements (debt) as trade became “routinized.” The reach of Genoese merchants in the thirteenth century all the way to Southampton and Bruges was financed with debt. (Why?) By the fifteenth century, overseas trade appears to have become dominated by oligarchic clusters of elites, and we are further told that these elites used credit agreements and insurance contracts to entrench themselves.

Readers will, I think, find many interesting puzzles worthy of follow-on research of their own. In my mind, there are puzzles about “financial structure” —debt-versus-equity questions. Why, for example, do equity-like schemes appear to have dominated in certain environments and debt in others? Readers will surely have other questions. But, throughout the text it is suggested to us that some questions may not be appropriate and that others remain outside the purview of certain disciplines. Specifically, economics is narrowly identified with “economic optimization” and “strategic interactions” driving “competition” in “markets” (e.g., pp. 5, 7–9, 22, 45, 211–13). Better to leave the analysis of institutions and “social practices” —the stuff, we are told, without which exchange in markets would be infeasible—as well as analysis of “opportunistic” behaviors to the “economic sociologists” (p. 146).

Along the way, we learn that Douglass North (“institutions matter”) is wrong. Rather, the principal conclusion of the book seems to be something to the effect that institutions do not so much support or frustrate exchange, but rather are mechanisms that aspiring oligarchs manipulate to entrench themselves and that entrenched parties manipulate to preserve their status. We also learn that Avner Greif may or may not be wrong, but that may be because Greif offers no “falsifiable theories” (p. 7). The book, however, purportedly treats the reader to “theory,” “modeling,” and, happily, “testable results” (e.g., pp. 2, 13, 101, 144, and 209). All well and good except that the book offers neither theory nor potentially testable implications that a theory (or “model” or whatever) might indicate. There are interesting empirical regularities. While it is suggested to the reader that these regularities have either been folded into an over-arching theory or are consistent with an over-arching theory, the reader might yet find that the regularities may yet inform other theoretical development.

In what Avinash Dixit recognizes as a “multidisciplinary research area” that he labeled “Lawlessness and Economics,” there is, perhaps, too much in the way of grand narratives masquerading as grand (and untestable) theories and less in the way of finely tuned microanalyses of the many puzzles. Here are a few more puzzles. The author observes the decline of commenda in Genoese trade over the course of the thirteenth century. In a review of Venetian contracts compiled in Morozzo della Rocca and Lombardo (1940, 1953), Yadira Gonzalez de Lara observes that the proportion of commenda increased over the same period.Footnote ² In a review of those same contracts, I note that bilateral commenda (as opposed to unilateral commenda) disappear shortly after 1204, the year the Venetians engineered a change of regime in Constantinople from one favorable to Genoese interests to one favorable to Venetian interests. What was going on? In my own review of about 1,500 unpublished contracts of Venetian merchants operating out of Crete in the fourteenth century, the proportion of commenda declined before virtually disappearing by the 1340s.Footnote ³ Debt came to dominate. Again, what was going on?

Puzzles abound, which is good for research. The book provides useful background of contracting practices that prevailed in and around the Mediterranean, and readers will likely find much to inspire them.