Peter Spufford, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe.

Spufford, Peter. Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe. London: Thames of Hudson, 2003.

Spufford's text is a much more extended endeavor than his earlier Money and its Use in Medieval Europe, and here Spufford considers merchants in a much broader sense. Going against the scholarly trend to focus on specific geographical regions and  instead considers the role of the merchant across Europe. In some ways, this approach is both the strength and weakness of this text. Taking this perspective allows Spufford to consider larger commercial trends across Europe and how international trade across regions of various economic expansion or contraction affects these commercial trends. Unsurprisingly, this approach leads Spufford to spend a significant amount of time on merchants from Lombardy and other areas of northern Italy. The downside of this overarching approach, however, is that some of these trends feel somewhat glossed over, and more specific discussion of how they work in specific geographic and cultural contexts might have been more elucidating. Regardless, the ambition and scholarship of Spufford's text is strong and seeks to provide a worthy follow up to his previous text. 

One interesting aspect of Spufford's approach is his focus on the demand side of medieval trade. Spufford comments that all too often scholars put too much weight on the supply side of trade in this period when the increased availability of currency and economic boom of the thirteenth century lead to increased buying power in medieval consumers. One of Spufford's expressed aims is therefore to shift the conversation back to demand side economics. I wonder if the scholarly conversation focuses on supply more due to the weight of more documentary evidence from producers and merchants in this period. As Spufford outlines, the growing international trade required an expansion in bookkeeping efforts from merchants, and guild records as well provide a great deal of our information about trade in general in late medieval Europe. There seems to somewhat less surviving evidence, however, documenting demand, which in many ways has to be read out of the aforementioned documents. It may be less that scholars are concerned with the wrong aspect of trade, as Spufford suggests, and more that they are concentrating on what's available.