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In this article, we address these historical questions through both statistical and textual analyses of Florentine commercial credit in the early Quattrocento. Our conclusion will be that commercial credits among Florentine companies were indeed highly correlated with a wide range of non-economic, social relationships among the partners of these companies. Correlations between economic and social relations were highest in the merchant-banking pinnacle of the Florentine economy -precisely in the industries where reliance upon advanced capitalist business techniques was greatest. New capitalist business techniques thus did not displace the oligarchic social networks of the time, but rather built upon and formalized these relationships into markets. In particular, family and neighborhood provided strong 'traditionalist' foundations to Renaissance Hence the 1427 catasto provides a high-resolution snapshot of the credits and debits of the entire Florentine economy at one specific, fleeting moment in time. Virtually all of the account books, out of which this information originally was drawn, subsequently have been lost. 9 This Florentine source therefore is remarkable: no other comparably comprehensive data set about economic transactions exists for so early in modern or premodern history. 10The details of our coding of these creditori lists were reported in a previous publication; hence that description will not be repeated here. 11 Both business and personal debts were coded, even though only business debits and credits will be analyzed 6 in this article. The main coding rules relevant to this article were these: only debts of value greater than or equal to 10 florins were coded, and only debts to other Florentines were coded. An effect of the first coding rule is mostly to exclude artisans from our dataset. An effect of the second coding rule is that trading among Florentines (even when they were resident abroad) is the focus of the data set, rather than trading betweenFlorentines and foreigners. The joint effect of both constraints is that the data describe, with great richness, the structure of the export-oriented segment 12 of the Florentine economy, as of 1427. This was the core of the Florentine economy, including both merchant-bankers and cloth manufacturers.Within these constraints, coverage is thorough. Numerous passes through the catasto were performed, in order to code a high percentage of companies' accounts or bilanci. Ultimately, 65.4% of the bilanci of active companies in our core industries were coded. Comprehensive coding was least successful for international merchant companies located abroad, 13 for small low-quality wool companies whose accounts were hardest to distinguish from the credits and debits of the household, and for a number of companies who were connected to the export-oriented sector but were not formally located within any of the key industries we targeted. For Florence-and Pisa-based banks, merchants, merchant-banks, silk manufacturing, high-quality wool manufacturing, and cloth-re...

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