Extensive private and public documentation was produced over the course of Venetian dominion of the island of Candia, part of which is kept at the State Archives in Venice. A number of cadastral documents have also survived. This volume provides a critical analysis and full transcription of two unpublished cadastral registers kept in the Duca di Candia collection: they are the most recent known for Venetian Candia, whose records cover a chronology from 1588 to 1605 and from 1621to 1645. The examined catastici shed light on the transfers of property, but also on places and people involved: a world populated by officials of the Venetian state, histories of properties, families, towns and villages, descriptions of buildings, urban and rural spaces and their uses. The analysis and transcription of the catastici allowed to identify elements of permanence and discontinuity in the management of urban and rural properties and to investigate the rules and practices regulating a territory as distant as crucial for Venice. At the same time, they offer a valuable snapshot of the urban and rural spatial organisation of a part of the island at the dawn of the Ottoman conquest.

What is the economy, really? Is it a “market sector,” a “general equilibrium,” or the “gross domestic product”? Economics today has become so preoccupied with methods that economists risk losing sight of the economy itself. Meanwhile, other disciplines, although often intent on criticizing the methods of economics, have failed to articulate an alternative vision of the economy. Before the ascent of postwar neoclassical economics, fierce debates raged, as many different visions of the economy circulated and competed with one another. In The Real Economy, Jonathan Levy returns to the spirit of this earlier era, which, in all its contentiousness, gave birth to the discipline of economics.  Drawing inspiration particularly from Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes, Levy proposes a theory of the economy that is open to rich empirical and historical scrutiny, covering topics that include the emergence of capitalism, the notion of radical uncertainty, the meaning of demand, the primal desire for money, the history of corporations, and contemporary globalization. Writing for anyone interested in the study of the economy, Levy provides an invaluable provocation for a broader debate in the social sciences and humanities concerning what “the economy” is.