西班牙统治期米兰丝绸生产：金融及组织模型 Financing silk industry in Spanish Milan

In the second half of the sixteenth century the silk 'industry' became the mainstay of Milanese manufacturing, with gold and silk fabric replacing wool cloth as the leading product in the city’s economy. It was silk processing and the associated production of gold thread that effectively boosted the duchy’s economy at the close of the Italian Wars, and made this area one of the richest and most advanced in the whole of Europe. Milan’s burgeoning silk industry found a powerful ally in the concurrent organisation of the embryonic local financing methods into a well-ordered system. While the reduction in information costs in the linkage between savings and investments increased the overall efficiency of the entire Milanese economy, the adoption of certain financial innovations – especially the widespread use of limited partnerships – was a big stimulus to the development of silk manufacturing. Under the organisational side, the consolidation of guilds represented a way for the leading city entrepreneurs to control production during the late-sixteenth century growth of silk manufacturing. But when new macroeconomic developments in the first decades of the seventeenth century shifted the fulcrum of Milanese industry towards semi-finished silk products, it was the large import-export businessmen who directly manoeuvred and ran a system of production that bypassed the guilds through a putting-out system mainly displaced in the rural areas