Giovanna Benadusi

A provincial elite in early modern Tuscany : family and power in the creation of the state

This study of the formation of the early modern state in Florence shows how local families and central rulers redefined concepts of power and domination which conditioned political evolution along social and gender lines. The Florentine state was one of the first to create new state institutions, challenge municipal powers, and develop a new centralized political system. By incorporating the families of shopkeepers, wool producers, landholders, notaries, and military officers living in the outlying town of Poppi, southwest of Florence, as integral contributors to state formation, the author provides a vivid look at the ways power and resistance operated at the everyday level of social relations, and attempts to redefine the context and the participants in state formation.

At the Margins: Minority Groups in Premodern Italy (review)

diversification strategy to spread risks as they continued to invest and make good returns on business for nearly a century and a half. Lorandini places the Salvadori in the context of scholarship on protoindustrialization, the origins of modern capitalism, and the role of entrepreneurship and accounting in it. Her book will be of interest to scholars wishing to see how these broader concepts become operational in the workings of actual firms in the early modern period. JUDITH C. BROWN Wesleyan University

La citta dei crucci: Fazioni e clientele in uno stato repubblicano del '400 (review)

public funds, of which Leroy-Ladurie’s unsa was a major beneaciary. Pronatalists embraced almost all of these changes. Social Catholics welcomed the Daladier administration’s pro-family legislation. World War II altered the balance of forces shaping welfare policy but less than might be thought. Employers, mutualists, and agricultural syndicalists had, to varying degrees, compromised themselves with the Vichy regime. Agricultural interests, however, made a speedy recovery. The unsa dissolved, replaced by the just as powerful Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles. The Fédération had the backing of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, a ChristianDemocratic Party that included an important social Catholic element. Many pronatalists had aligned with Philippe Pétain, but the movement had strong representation in the Gaullist camp as well. Such was the conaguration that the would-be universalist Laroque confronted at the Liberation. He had the political wherewithal to muscle employer, mutualist, and agricultural interests out of exclusive control of welfare caisse management. But pronatalist and pro-family forces retained sufacient clout to make Laroque back away from uniacation of the family-allowance and social-insurance systems. That agriculture carried enough weight to insist on a separate social insurance caisse weakened the emergent system’s universalist aspirations, creating an opening for small business and liberal professionals to opt out completely. Dutton makes a persuasive case that interwar events had a determining impact on postwar welfare reform. To make it, he brings into play a numerous and diverse cast, from social Catholics and Radicals to mutualists and agricultural syndicalists, trade-unionists, feminists, and doctors. He makes a number of subsidiary, but far from insigniacant, points along the way: that associational life under the Republic, contrary to much received wisdom, was varied and powerful; that the interwar decades, long regarded as years of decadence and decline, were decades of meaningful reform; that the French welfare-state was shaped as much by conservative forces (whether pronatalist, social Catholic, or rural) as by labor.