Moulding clay, making gold. Credit, labour and demand in ceramic businesses in late medieval Barcelona

Luis Almenar Fernández

Business History, 2025, vol. 67, issue 4, 1063-1086

Abstract: This article explores a group of ceramic businesses established in the city of Barcelona in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The main source analysed is an extraordinary book of debts, belonging to the plate maker (escudeller) Nicolau Reiner, known among historians as the Llibre de les fornades (Book of Batches). A comprehensive study of its 1,069 accounting entries makes it possible to shed light on the recourse to informal credit among the professionals in the sector, the work in the workshops, and the commercialisation of the items manufactured. The article argues that the acquisition of loans and the hierarchisation of small family businesses through indebtedness were fundamental resources for the ceramic industry of the time, in order to meet the growing demand for consumer goods in this material.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00076791.2024.2359711 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:bushst:v:67:y:2025:i:4:p:1063-1086

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FBSH20

DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2024.2359711

Access Statistics for this article

Business History is currently edited by Professor John Wilson and Professor Steven Toms

More articles in Business History from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().