Inclusiveness and exclusion: trust networks at the origins of European cities

Abstract

In Western Europe, cities grew fast between 1000 and 1300. This article looks at how the migrants moving to these emerging cities melded into communities and defended their collective rights in violent and hostile environments. It discusses a number of trust networks that were developed to meet the successive collective needs of particular social layers in rapidly changing urban societies. When a trust network became well-established and too large to allow face-to-face relations among all its members, institutions were created that operated under different rules.In his last manuscript, Charles Tilly developed the concept of trust networks as organizations mediating in the long-term transformation from urban to state domination in world history. Trust networks can be defined as specific patterns of human relationships in which shared interests, values and norms facilitate communication and collaboration and thus reduce transaction costs. Trust networks are based on commitment, coordination, and recognition which often, but not always, are mutual. Membership of a trust network entails a "relation in which at least one party places a valued enterprise at risk in the hands of the other.… Prudent members of trust networks have generally tried to insulate them from predation or incorporation by cities and states (Tilly 2010)." In this article, I show how trust networks emerged and became established in the cities of Europe between about 1000 and 1600 CE. In my view, community building in the first stage of urban growth rested essentially on personal ties, formalized by oaths of loyalty. These were at the origin of the sense of belonging expressed in the first communes, the groupings that fought for their independence vis-à-vis the established feudal and ecclesiastical powers. As the European cities grew, these networks needed to organize themselves as public institutions, which allegedly changed their character Theor Soc (2010) 39:315-326

The Aru Igbo Trust Network and Slave-dealing in Igboland and the Lower Southeast Niger Basin: Assessing the Impacts and Consequences of Initial Abolitionary Efforts by Governments in the Atlantic World in the Period, 1787–1807

“…Given the absence of cities among the Igbo and their neighbors during the era in question, and the presence instead of the unique sociopolitical system of: “independent political units varying in size from several hundred to as many as 75,000 persons” (Ottenberg, 1958: 295) in the several political units that characterized rule in Igboland at the time, there was an absence of the sort of: “encounters of cities, states, and trust networks … [that] involve[d] struggles for priority among capital, coercion, and commitment” (Tilly, 2010: 272) that the Aru could contend with. This was the case in the other locations and spaces that Tilly and other scholars—including Wim Blockmans (2010), Elisabeth S. Clemens (2010), Patrick Heller and Peter Evans (2010), Peter Marcus (2010), Hwaji Shin (2010), and Edward W. Soja (2010)—who have recently applied his formulation on trust networks have focused on in their respective pieces of work.…”

The Diffusion of Protestantism in Northern Europe: Historical Embeddedness and Complex Contagions in the Adoption of the Reformation

“…Trust networks were at the origins of European cities (Blockmans 2010). Strong ties have the advantages of including trust that is important when reinforcement is necessary in complex diffusion.…”