The Commercial city/states of Northern Italy 1200-1500 (the series)

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I will be doing an ongoing series of Substack articles, which I call “National Profiles of Progress.” It will not be the only Substack articles that I publish, but this series should make up 30-50% of the articles that I publish each week. As always, the vast majority of the articles will be free.

The content for this series was originally supposed to be for Books #4-8 in my From Poverty to Progress book series, but I decided to publish them as separate articles on Substack instead. The focus of the series will be on how individual nations suddenly transformed from millennia of poverty to long-term self-sustained economic growth that clearly increased the material standard of living for the masses (i.e. From Poverty to Progress). In many cases, this transformation took place in just one generation.

In this series, I will apply the theories developed in my first book to each of the nations that transformed to validate that my theories are very broadly applicable to all societies over the last 1000 years, including:

• The Five Keys to Progress (the heart of my theory)

• How Progress Works

• Geographical constraints on human material progress

• The critical importance of energy, and particularly food

• How each nation copied other nations that transformed earlier

• Key technological and organizational innovations of each nation

• Specific factors that made this nation unique.

The series will include :

1. Commercial societies of Northwest Europe (roughly 1200-1830), where modern material progress started, and also

2. the later industrialization of other nations in the last 200 years from Britain to contemporary Asia.

I am starting this mega-series with where I believe modern material progress started: the city/states of Northern Italy 1200-1500.

Enjoy reading!

Table of Contents for the “Commercial City/states of Northern Italy 1200-1500” series:

1. Why Commercial societies are the most important type of society that you have never heard of

2. How Renaissance Northern Italy transformed from poverty to progress.

3. The geography of the Italian Renaissance city/states

4. The Military Origins of the Italian Commercial Republics, 1200–1500

5. The Agricultural Foundations of the Renaissance in Northern Italy

6. Key innovations from the Renaissance in Northern Italy

7. Northern Italy and the Birth of Progress: Life Beyond Subsistence, 1200–1500

8. more on this topic

If you enjoyed reading this series of articles, you might also be interested in reading my “From Poverty to Progress” book series: