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German legal historians of nineteenth and twentieth centuries defined the main characteristics of the corporations and believed that one renaissance institution, the Casa di San Giorgio at Genoa (1407–1805), was similar to the corporations of later centuries. This paper proposes to reverse this perspective: did the founders of early modern corporations know the financial model of the fifteenth century Casa di San Giorgio? The research shows the connection between the model of the Casa di San Giorgio and the Mississippi Company of John Law (1720), the famous financial scheme and bubble. The history of the Casa di San Giorgio was mainly transmitted through a passage of Machiavelli’s History of Florence (VIII, 29). The paper offers new biographical evidence that Law had been to Genoa and introduces sources connecting the genesis of Law’s scheme for the Mississippi Company in France with the model of the Casa di San Giorgio.

In this article, we develop an understanding of racism based on a style of social control that recent writers have referred to as “symbolic violence”. Symbolic violence is novel in that agents are oppressed through their own complicity as they accept and reproduce a “reality” that is made to appear unavoidable and even beneficial. Although many sociological discussions of racism have contributed to the sort of reification that leads to symbolic violence by understanding racial identities as essential, cultural ideals as ahistorical, and market dynamics as autonomous, we make the point that symbolic violence survives even as oppressed members are understood as active agents. We discuss how symbolic violence differs from other variants of racism and address the sort of theoretical maneuver that needs to be made if a more equitable order is to be fostered. Specifically, only by restoring the praxiology of language can race cease from being an immutable social fact that normalizes racial inequalities.

Saving is essential to the health of economies and households, yet relatively little scholarship investigates saving behaviors among the urban working class in the nineteenth century. This chapter uses five surveys of industrial workers in 1880s New Jersey, an analysis of which reveals sophisticated saving behaviors consistent with life-cycle and precautionary theories. The mean saving rate was between 8% and 12% of annual income. Younger households saved less than older households. Householders with longer expected careers, on average, saved less. Life insurance and fraternal societies were the most popular saving vehicles, but workers also used savings banks and building and loan associations, alone and in combination.