Risks of all kinds could (and can) have such different effects on merchant-bankers and their companies that - in extreme cases - some benefited from them, while others became insolvent or even bankrupt. Why this was (is) so, can be answered in an innovative way from the perspective of the research paradigm of resilience, which describes the ability to master risks and cope crises. All entrepreneurial activities to strengthen, preserve and utilise the resilience potential of a particular business can be described as resilience management, which generates resilience as a result. Using merchant bankers or trading companies respectively organised in the form of family businesses from the Upper German region of the sixteenth century, the study examines which strategies and instruments merchant-bankers used to minimise the risks to their trading ventures, i.e. to make them as resilient as possible. Situated geographically in the centre of Europe, these Upper German family businesses were particularly exposed to the central economic upheaval of the sixteenth century, the commercialisation that intensified in the wake of European expansion, but also to numerous other political and economic risks. The aim of this article is to work out which strategies and instruments they used to succeed in their risk and resilience management or why they failed.
Leipzig University, Germany - ORCID: 0009-0002-7230-0312
Chapter Title
From risk management to resilience management. Strategies and instruments of Upper German merchant bankers in the ‘long’ sixteenth century to avoid insolvency and bankruptcy
Authors
Markus A. Denzel
Language
English
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0963-2.19
Peer Reviewed
Publication Year
2026
Copyright Information
© 2026 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Book Title
Gestione del rischio, insolvenza e bancarotta nel mondo premoderno (secc. XIII-XVIII) / Risk management, insolvency, and bankruptcy in the pre-modern world (13th-18th centuries)
Editors
Angela Orlandi
Peer Reviewed
Number of Pages
568
Publication Year
2026
Copyright Information
© 2026 Author(s)
Content License
Metadata License
Publisher Name
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0963-2
ISBN Print
979-12-215-0962-5
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0963-2
eISBN (xml)
979-12-215-0964-9
Series Title
Datini Studies in Economic History
Series ISSN
2975-1241
Series E-ISSN
2975-1195