Commercial Revolution

The expansion and transformation of European trade, finance, and markets from the late Middle Ages into the eighteenth century, marked by wider commercial networks and new financial institutions.

Joint-stock company: A business owned by shareholders who pool capital and share profits and risks. Pooled investment financed voyages and enterprises too costly for individual merchants.
Medieval trade: The exchange of goods across local, regional, and long-distance networks in medieval Europe. Late medieval markets and merchant networks provided foundations for later expansion.
Price Revolution: The prolonged rise in prices across much of Europe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Population growth and imported American silver helped alter prices during commercial expansion.
Manorialism: A system of rural social and economic organization centered on landed estates and dependent labor. It contrasts with commerce increasingly organized through markets, credit, and distant exchange.
Bills of exchange: Written orders directing payment of a specified sum to a named party, often at another place or date. They let merchants settle distant debts without transporting coins.
Italian city-states: Independent or semi-independent cities in Italy that developed powerful commercial and political institutions. Venice, Genoa, and Florence shaped early European finance and long-distance trade.
Atlantic slave trade: The forced transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic for enslavement in the Americas. Colonial commodity production tied commercial wealth to coercive labor and human trafficking.
Guild: An association of craftspeople or merchants that regulated a trade in a town. Guild rules show the older local controls that expanding markets could challenge.
Banking: The business of accepting deposits, extending credit, and facilitating payments. Expanding trade depended on institutions that moved money and extended commercial credit.
Age of Discovery: The period of European oceanic exploration and overseas expansion beginning in the fifteenth century. New sea routes redirected commerce toward the Atlantic and global markets.

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