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
Titolo del capitolo
From risk management to resilience management. Strategies and instruments of Upper German merchant bankers in the ‘long’ sixteenth century to avoid insolvency and bankruptcy
Autori
Markus A. Denzel
Lingua
Inglese
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0963-2.19
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2026
Copyright
© 2026 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
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)
Curatori
Angela Orlandi
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
568
Anno di pubblicazione
2026
Copyright
© 2026 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
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
Collana
Datini Studies in Economic History
ISSN della collana
2975-1241
e-ISSN della collana
2975-1195