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623 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
Smelting was achieved for the first time with the installation of enormous water-powered leather bellows and tunnels in the blast furnaces; which virtually means that cast iron was ‘discovered’ in the fourteenth century. Iron or steel could thereafter be obtained as required from cast iron, their common starting point, by extensive decarbonization (iron) or incomplete decarbonization (steel)” (p. 378)
In the financial sphere, the towns organized taxation, finances, public credit, customs and excise. They invented public loans...One after another, they reinvented gold money, following Genoa which may have minted the genovino as early as the late twelfth century. They organized industry and the guilds; they invented long-distance trade, bills of exchange, the first forms of trading companies and accountancy. They also quickly became the scene of class struggles. For if the towns were ‘communities’ as has been said, there were also ‘societies’ in the modern sense of the word, with their tensions and civil struggles: nobles against bourgeois; poor against rich (‘thin people’ popolo magro against ‘fat people’ popolo grosso). The struggles in Florence were already more deeply akin to those of the industrial early nineteenth century than to the faction-fights of ancient Rome. (p. 512)
Is fashion in fact such a trifling thing? Or is it, as I prefer to think, rather an indication of deeper phenomena - of the energies, possibilities, demands and joie de vivre of a given society, economy and civilization?. . . . I do not regard these as idle remarks. Can it have been merely by coincidence that the future was to belong to the societies fickle enough to care about changing the colours, materials and shapes of costume, as well as the social order and the map of the world - societies, that is, which were ready to break with their traditions? There is a connection. Did not Chardin also say of the Persians, who 'are not anxious for new discoveries and inventions,' that 'they believe they possess all that is required in the way of necessities and conveniences for living, and are content to remain so'. Tradition was both a strength and a straitjacket. Perhaps if the door is to be opened to innovation, the source of all progress, there must be first some restlessness which may express itself in such trifles as dress, the shape of shoes and hairstyles? Perhaps too, a degree of prosperity is needed to foster any innovating movement? (p. 323-324)