This book explores the history of natural resources in Continental Europe presenting research on how resources were traded, collected and depleted between the fifteenth and nineteenth century. It is helpful for students of Environmental Studies and those with an interest in Environmental History.

Natural Resources in European History pulls together several papers from the Bellagio Conference on Natural Resources and Economic Development which took place in 1977. Originally published in 1978, this report focuses on papers exploring the history of natural resources in Continental Europe presenting research on how resources were traded, collected and depleted between the fifteenth and nineteenth century. This title will be of interest to students of Environmental Studies or with an interest in Environmental History.

The first articles in this volume focus on sources for the history of Baltic commerce and the evaluation of their data on prices. In most cases, though, surviving data is hardly adequate for any extensive quantitative analysis of Polish economic history, and many of these articles endeavour in different ways to use comparitive approaches to help overcome this lack of substantial statistical base - hence the set of studies on the economy of travelling and the observations of travellers. Professor MaAzak then turns to the structures of power in Poland and elsewhere in late renaissance Europe, looking in particular at informal power relationships and patterns of patronage. In terms of the Polish-Lithunaian state, he would hold that centralized government was already critically weakened in the late 15th century, and the 16th century saw the creation of a new power structure, based on local self-government, and dominated by the nobility.

This book analyzes the patron-client relationship over both space and time. It covers such areas of the globe as Europe, Africa and Latin America, and such periods in time as ancient Rome, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Poland, as well as twentieth-century America. It also analyzes clientelism in U.S. policy toward the Vietnam War and in Richard J. Daley's mayoral rule over Chicago. In his comparative approach the author makes broad use of theories from such fields as history, sociology, anthropology and linguistics while considering the global scale of the patron-client relationship and the immense role that clientelism has played in world history.