Description

American Philosophical Society, Published 1975. Hardcover, xiv, 189 pp.; 24 cm; illustrated with black-and-white photographs and figures. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 106. In Acceptable+ condition with a Good dust jacket. Pale gray cloth-covered boards with maroon lettering on the front and spine, mild bumping to the edges and light shelf wear. Binding is tight. All four pages of the preface have yellow and/or purple highlighting and red and blue underlining in ink, and page one of the text has a few sentences underlined in red ink. Otherwise, pages are clean and unmarked. Pale cream dust jacket with maroon lettering and a black-and-white engraving of a Venetian palazzo on the front, price clipped, with a 1 inch tear to the paper over the top edge of the front cover at the spine and a few smaller nicks and tears along the edges. Mild shelf wear and soiling. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. A scholarly study of the patrician Dona dalle Rose family of Venice, tracing how they preserved their fortune from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century and what their history reveals about the strategies wealthy European families used to conserve their wealth. [From front flap] Until little more than a century ago, the wealthy family was a major economic force in Western civilization. To show how this institution functioned, Professor James C. Davis of the University of Pennsylvania has followed the history of the patrician Dona dalle Rose family of Venice from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. His well-written and well-illustrated study shows why families like the Dona viewed the conservation of family wealth almost a sacred duty. Venetian nobles, like many wealthy Europeans, entailed their estates, excluded some of their children from inheritances, and limited marriages so as to avoid the dispersal of their fortunes. Davis offers evidence that the Venetian nobility, like some other wealthy European groups, began early in the eighteenth century to limit, by some form of birth control, the number of their children. From roughly 1750 to 1900 the rising forces of industrialization and democratic revolution compelled such families as the Dona to abandon the wealth-conserving customs. Many of them lost their fortunes as a result. This book throws light upon an unfamiliar aspect of the social and economic transformation of Europe from the age of Machiavelli to the age of Marx. Contents: Part One: The Conservation of Wealth in an Economy of Scarcity (1500-1750). The Dona Family as They Saw Themselves; A Fortune Earned on Sea and on Land; Motives for Conserving Wealth; Could One Conserve a Fortune by Limiting Births?; Entailing Land and Excluding Daughters; Restricting Marriages. Part Two: An Age of Industrialization and Revolution (1750-1900). An Old Family in a World of "New Men"; The Older Methods Discarded; Birth Control Begins; And Afterward?; Archival Collections; Books and Articles Cited; Index.