The title of this book uses a novel word central to its argument. Rebecca Jean Emigh, a historical sociologist, believes that capitalism was undone or unmade in Tuscany as sophisticated urban markets supplanted rural ones and caused economic development in Tuscany to “undevelop.” This argument addresses a fundamental question in European economic history: why did the precocious Florentine economy fail to lead the way to the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in Europe? As Emigh recognizes, put this way the question presupposes the inevitability and desirability of these two occurrences. It also privileges the English and Dutch models and relegates Florence to a dead end or market failure of some type. Emigh deploys two sociological tools, sector analysis and theories, and a cultural approach to markets, to investigate closely how the urban and rural markets interacted in Tuscany in the fifteenth century. The book begins with a long survey of modern development theories and leaves no theorist unmentioned. Emigh calls her stance “dialectical Weberianism” (p. 29) and seems most aligned in her discipline with Charles Tilly. Among the economic historians, Emigh has astutely engaged with the studies of Stephan R. Epstein on the economic interactions between cities and their regions. Among the many economic and social historians of Florence, Emigh has benefited the most from the pioneering work of David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber on the famous Catasto of 1427. Their research made it possible for scholars everywhere to have what was at first a machine-readable and now online data base for many thousands of Florentine and Tuscan households.

Emigh decided to employ the tools of negative case theory to explore why and how the rural economy in Tuscany stalled out and did not sustain the local markets necessary in her view to urban industrial expansion. No up-to-date account of the Florentine economy should neglect its populous and fertile rural underpinnings and opportunities for investment and profit. What is most impressive about this book is the research program Emigh devised for making a highly original and cogent response to the important questions the book raises. Emigh selected four big villages or rural communes in Tuscany, two up in the fertile Mugello region and two others out west of Volterra toward the malarial Maremma. Using the 1427 records as a baseline, Emigh followed the land markets in these four places across the other numerous catasti of the fifteenth century, all in manuscript, as well as through patient linkages of data teased from other tax records, elite family business correspondence, and notarial contracts. This formidable archival research yielded a series of impressive articles in recent years which Emigh has pulled together and extended into a sustained and fresh study of how sharecroppers, smallholders, and urban investors shaped the Tuscan agricultural economy.

The central arguments about the rural economy concern sharecropping, which Emigh sees as capitalistic but in the Tuscan regime not supporting a full transition to capitalism. Emigh's main point is that urban institutions and markets drove out tradition rural ways of consolidating and passing down plots of land. The linking of data from various sources demonstrates that smallholders sustained an active land market and were in debt locally for small sums to a variety of creditors, while in regions like the Mugello where sharecropping prevailed the land market was dominated by big urban purchasers and their tenants tended to carry one large debt to the landlord. Often a specialized manager selected from among the local people the sharecropper best suited to a particular farm and its assets. Urban landowners in the fifteenth century often knew their tenants well and above all invested in improving their farms. Emigh demonstrates from the tax declarations that sharecropping was much more productive and profitable than smallholding, and this resulted not so much from labor effort as from crop diversification, investments in better tools and stronger animals, and the flexibility still present in fifteenth-century sharecropping, which Emigh shows “in Tuscany between 1350 and 1500 was not a harsh form of land tenure” (p. 193).

Emigh's points about sharecropping and productivity are well-founded in convincing statistics. The book's conclusions look closely at Tuscan and English experiences of landholding and find that for Florence, the urban elites dominated and transformed the most productive parts of the countryside while in England a vigorous rural elite and an urban entrepreneurial class continued to thrive and interact. Emigh suggests that this combining of economic interests in effect in one type of person, a wealthy urban buyer of farms, fostered the kind of inequality in Tuscany that hindered economic development dependant on a growing class of rural consumers. One problem was that the sharecroppers, admittedly prosperous, could not save enough to buy farms at the prices urban investors were prepared to pay. Emigh's fine book suggests some future paths for research. Can measures like the Gini coefficient be derived to reveal the history of inequality in Tuscany? What exactly did the urban elites do with their rural profits—buy more farms, conspicuously consume, pay taxes for pointless, destructive warfare? Whatever they did, they apparently did not invest enough in the latest technologies to maintain a Florentine lead in wool or silk cloth production. Did the elites and their agents skim off the healthiest and most sober rural workers as tenants and leave too many feverish and inebriated smallholders to prove the case about diminished productivity? Maybe the best workers migrated to Florence and became the rural agents of the elites.