An Ancient Scheme: The Mississippi Company, Machiavelli, and the Casa di San Giorgio (1407–1720) ^☆

This article is part of a broader project. It was presented at seminars at Tulane University (2012), at McGill University (2013), at Duke University (2013), at the University of Utrecht (2014) and at the conference of the Economic History Society in a panel organized by Larry Neal (2014). I wish to thank the colleagues of these institutions for the invitations, the discussions, the criticisms and the support.

Abstract

German legal historians of nineteenth and twentieth centuries defined the main characteristics of the corporations and believed that one renaissance institution, the Casa di San Giorgio at Genoa (1407–1805), was similar to the corporations of later centuries. This paper proposes to reverse this perspective: did the founders of early modern corporations know the financial model of the fifteenth century Casa di San Giorgio? The research shows the connection between the model of the Casa di San Giorgio and the Mississippi Company of John Law (1720), the famous financial scheme and bubble. The history of the Casa di San Giorgio was mainly transmitted through a passage of Machiavelli’s History of Florence (VIII, 29). The paper offers new biographical evidence that Law had been to Genoa and introduces sources connecting the genesis of Law’s scheme for the Mississippi Company in France with the model of the Casa di San Giorgio.

Citation

Taviani, C. (2015), "An Ancient Scheme: The Mississippi Company, Machiavelli, and the Casa di San Giorgio (1407–1720) ^☆

This article is part of a broader project. It was presented at seminars at Tulane University (2012), at McGill University (2013), at Duke University (2013), at the University of Utrecht (2014) and at the conference of the Economic History Society in a panel organized by Larry Neal (2014). I wish to thank the colleagues of these institutions for the invitations, the discussions, the criticisms and the support.

", Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics (Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 29), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 239-256. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-871920150000029010