Writings on the Tributary Stateand Commercial Capitalism

These sixteen essays present a systematic and informed discussion of the literature researching the economic trajectories of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The thrust of Tedesco's argument in this collection is to reaffirm the presence of economic complexity in the pre-industrial world. His principal ambition is to show how early medieval societies functioned at a given time while contesting the narrative that history has been flowing in a specific direction, towards modernity and capitalism.