Producing the City-State: Production and Power in Medieval Lucca

This book examines rural producers as active agents in the economic and political transformations of medieval Lucca, Italy, between 1000 and 1300. It challenges traditional top-down narratives of state formation by foregrounding the choices and agency of non-elites. Rather than treating commercial growth, urban expansion, and regional integration as processes driven solely by urban authorities and elites, the study argues that these developments were made possible in part by a transformatio...