"Labeled as greedy and self-interested, capitalists have often suffered in historians' eyes. This book looks at merchants, entrepreneurs, and other individuals from around 1500 to 1800 - with some attention to their medieval roots - and asks how they actually saw themselves. Coming from deeply religious cultures, how did they relate their worldly activities to their beliefs and values? Did they see a conflict, as Weber might have imagined, or did they live at relative ease with the tensions between obedience to faith and the necessities of competition and striving? Drawing on personal letters and diaries, as well as handbooks, portraiture, and other pieces of material culture in general, the contributors to this volume each help to reconstruct an understanding of the people who put in place what became the dominant economic system in the Western world."--BOOK JACKET.