the environs which extend two or three leagues around their walls
and, in exchange for the manufactured articles which the city furnishes
to them, attend to the food supply of the urban inhabitants. Other
towns, on the contrary, less closely set together but also more
powerful, develop chiefly by means of an export industry, producing, as
did the cloth industry of great Flemish or Italian cities, not for their
local market,[16] but for the European market, constantly extensible.
Others still, profiting by the advantages of nearness to the sea, give
themselves up to navigation and to transportation, as did so many ports
of Italy, of France, of England, and especially of North Germany.

Of these two types of towns, the one sufficient to themselves, the other
living upon the outside world, it is unquestionably the first to which
the theory of the urban economy applies. Direct trade between purchaser
and consumer, strict protectionism excluding the foreigner from the
local market and reserving it to the bourgeoisie alone, minute
regulations confining within narrow limits the industry of the merchant
and the artisan; in a word, all the traits of an organization evidently
designed to preserve and safeguard the various members of the community
by assigning to each his place and his role, are all found and all
explained without difficulty in those towns which are confined to a
clientage limited by the extent of their suburban dependencies. In these
one can rightly speak of an anti-capitalistic economy. In these we find
neither great _entrepreneurs_ nor great merchants. It is true that the
necessity of stocking the town with commodities which it does not
produce or cannot find in its environs--groceries, fine cloths, wines in
northern countries--brings into existence a group of exporters whose
condition is superior to that of their fellow-citizens. But on
inspection they cannot be regarded as a class of great professional
merchants. If they buy at wholesale in foreign markets, it is to sell at
retail to their fellow-citizens. They dispose of their goods piecemeal,
and like the _Gewandschneider_ of the German towns, they do not rise
above the level of large shopkeepers.[17]

In the towns of the second category we find a quite different condition.
Here capitalism not only exists but develops toward perfection.
Instruments of credit, such as the _lettre de foire,_ make their
appearance; a traffic in money takes its place alongside