The results of a decade-long research study by the author, in The Undevelopment of Capitalism Rebecca Jean Emigh argues that the expansion of the Florentine economic market in the fifteenth century helped to undo the development of markets of other economies, especially the rural economy of Tuscany, paradoxically slowing down the economic development of northern Italy overall. This ""undeveloping"" process, as Emigh calls it, produced an advanced economy at the time of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, but created the conditions whereby much of this area of Europe delaye