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Yes, indeed, excellent book. Struck me as having to be closely read because of the casual way he'd toss off info, like his mention of cotton in just one sentence (unless I missed some others).
WI: Venetian Industrial Revolution
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Yes, indeed, excellent book. Struck me as having to be closely read because of the casual way he'd toss off info, like his mention of cotton in just one sentence (unless I missed some others).
Hmmm, well to add my bit one aspect of Venice that doesn't seem to be mentioned is its market structure. Specially that
The Venetian problem with luxuriant manufacturing is that it is relative labour intensive and hard to mechanize. This also ties in nicely with the next point:
The lack of a large internal market which skews the focus away from bulk industrial goods to harder to mechanize higher margin luxuriant goods. Not overwhelming but still a factor.
The high standard of living, which increased labour costs that increased the incentives for mechanization: but in the Venetian case it also made them less competitive. A good detailed examination of the specific industries can be found in "Moderata Fonte: Women and Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice" which offers a first hand look at the particular industries in Venice at the time.
The last one is probably the biggest, due to the lack of a hinterland the Venetian state derived most of its revenue from taxes on exports and imports severely reducing Venetian competitiveness. Furthermore the sheer amount of state "quality" bureaus stifled innovation and forced an absurd focus on quality above all else retarding the market of lower quality industrial goods.
(unfortunately these are from the personal notes of Professor J. Cuenca From Waterloo university, not exactly a public resource)
As for the Portuguese competition it was relatively insignificant:
- It is focused on luxuriant
- The lack of an internal market
- The state mostly derives revenue from trade
- The high standard of living
- The large amount of state control
The Venetian problem with luxuriant manufacturing is that it is relative labour intensive and hard to mechanize. This also ties in nicely with the next point:
The lack of a large internal market which skews the focus away from bulk industrial goods to harder to mechanize higher margin luxuriant goods. Not overwhelming but still a factor.
The high standard of living, which increased labour costs that increased the incentives for mechanization: but in the Venetian case it also made them less competitive. A good detailed examination of the specific industries can be found in "Moderata Fonte: Women and Life in Sixteenth-Century Venice" which offers a first hand look at the particular industries in Venice at the time.
The last one is probably the biggest, due to the lack of a hinterland the Venetian state derived most of its revenue from taxes on exports and imports severely reducing Venetian competitiveness. Furthermore the sheer amount of state "quality" bureaus stifled innovation and forced an absurd focus on quality above all else retarding the market of lower quality industrial goods.
(unfortunately these are from the personal notes of Professor J. Cuenca From Waterloo university, not exactly a public resource)
As for the Portuguese competition it was relatively insignificant:
The negative impact of excessive state quality regulations is discussed also in http://books.google.com.au/books?id...ge&q=traditional industries of venice&f=false
Unsurprisingly the same negative impact (and loss of non-quality markets) happened in the cotton industry too. For different but similar reasons (concentration on quality products and stifling impact of guild regulations) the cotton industry of Milan and Crema lost their dominance of the cotton market more or less in the same period ( http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/GEHN/HELSINKIMazzaoui.pdf )
I would note that Venice has quite a hinterland, and quite a lot of enemies (Milan, Austria, the Papacy) whom they quarrel over provinces with.
I've forgotten why I'm noting this, but let it be noted
Best Regards
Grey Wolf
But that depends on when in its history, I would argue that the scale never compared to England in population where the domestic market created a sufficient income for the state compared to trade.
For example take the Dutch, while they had a population of 3 million or so IRC during their golden age it was still insufficient to attract domestic investment (compared to all the Dutch investments spent in Sweden and England that eventually came to bite them in the rear later). While the context differs the general concept applies that if the internal market isn't big enough in terms of population the focus will be directed towards high margin products.
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I love this topic. Really puts things into perspective that most of the technological progress took place rather recently.
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