“To Dispose of Wealth in Works of Charity”: Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy in Medieval England

Abstract

While entrepreneurs are increasingly recognized as important participants in the medieval economy, their philanthropic activities have received less attention than those of the gentry and nobility. This article identifies the contribution that the study of medieval entrepreneurs can make to broader business history debates surrounding the identity of philanthropists and their beneficiaries, the types of causes they supported, and their impact on wider society. Philanthropic entrepreneurs used the profits of commerce to provide infrastructure, health care, and education to their local communities. Their patterns of philanthropy differed from those of gentry, lawyers, and administrators. Support for municipal infrastructure emerges as a distinctive feature of entrepreneurial philanthropy, reflecting a belief in the importance of trade networks and civic reputation.

How Charitable Were the Elites of the Dutch Golden Age?

“…They pay their dues as newcomers to become accepted by the establishment. In line with the social capital exchange argument for the nouveaux riches, we argue that those in the Golden Age who earned their own wealth were larger donors than those who inherited that wealth—as was the case in medieval England, where merchants were more philanthropic than other elites (Casson & Casson, 2019). We formulate Hypothesis 3:…”

“… 8. These amounts have not been adjusted for inflation, to show that such amounts were common. Gifts to further education of poor children did occur in the Netherlands as they did elsewhere (Casson & Casson, 2019) but rarely among the sample of 263 elites in our database. …”

“…3 We started from wealth estimates by Zandvliet and Lesger (2006), supplementing these with information from biographical dictionaries, databases, and wills located in a number of archives in the Netherlands and, in some cases, abroad. Casson and Casson (2019) followed a similar procedure.…”

Multinational Enterprises and International Cartels: The Strategic Implications of De-globalization

“…assumed that the pursuit of profit is purely selfish, although this not necessarily the case. Medieval merchant guilds, for example, operated as cartels; but they also funded charities, and their leading members often invested in urban infrastructure that was free to all, e.g., building and repairing city walls (Casson & Casson, 2019).…”

Employing historical methods and perspectives in corporate governance

“…History, therefore, can contribute vital insights to the exploration of the foundations of corporate governance. Corporate governance was evident in the activities of merchants, guilds and the chartered companies set up in medieval Europe, and this has led to broader questions about the role of business ethics in the evolution of commerce within society (Casson and Casson, 2019). Transatlantic traders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relied heavily on socially embedded understandings of trust and propriety in their business networks (Haggerty, 2012;Popp, 2012;Barker, 2017).…”