VENICE INCORPORATED

For eleven hundred years a business operated out of a swamp, and for most of that time it was better run than any kingdom in Europe.
Venice had no farmland, no stone, no fresh water and no ground worth the name. What it had was a charter, a board of directors, an audit department, rotating officers, a security service, a monopoly on salt and a chief executive who was not permitted to open his own mail. The Republic did not trust its own head of state, and that distrust - formalized, notarized, filed in triplicate - is why it outlasted every rival on the continent.
This is the story of a company that acquired a population. It runs from the alder trunks driven into the mud to hold the buildings up, through the salt pans and the crusade that turned into a debt collection, past the shipyard that could launch a war galley in a day and the health office that invented quarantine, to a spring morning in 1797 when the shareholders voted the firm out of existence without a fight.
Along the way: a boy grabbed off the piazza to draw lots for the head of state, a duke burned alive in his own palace, ambassadors who filed written reports on foreign countries and complained about the food, schoolchildren taught double-entry bookkeeping instead of poetry, and a state whose greatest weapon was paperwork. Also the parts Venice preferred not to minute - the slave markets, the sacked city, the two hundred families who locked the door behind them.
Drawing on the last three decades of archaeology, timber analysis, ancient DNA and archival economics - including the computer scientists who studied the Venetian election as a security protocol and found it sound - this is Venice as its own accountants would have recognized it: brilliant, paranoid, occasionally ridiculous, and permanently under repair.
Keywords: Venice, Republic of Venice, maritime trade, medieval history, political institutions, Mediterranean empire, urban environment