Résumé

This paper intends to trace the evolution of the financing solutions devised by some European countries to create their infrastructure framework. Starting from some indications on the Roman Age, when the first main public works were constructed, the analysis focuses on the Middle Ages and on the Early Modern Age. The primary goal is to elaborate a taxonomy pointing out the different instruments developed over time to finance consistent works, targeted to provide services and facilities to the highest number of citizens. We concentrate specifically on “economic” infrastructures such as roads, canals, bridges, water and sewer lines. Most of the current historiography has unduly projected the successful financing of today’s leading countries onto the past, measuring only the distance between the previous specific financing means and an ideal current pattern. This stance led mostly to fictitious narratives. Highlighting the context-dependent specificities, this research conversely aims to draw a picture of how manifold and interrelated infrastructure financing ways were in the pre-industrial Europe and how highly efficient they were related to their institutional, social and political background. Our preliminary result is that the effectiveness of infrastructure financing ways is strictly correlated to a set of variables that dynamically encompass institutions, political regimes, supply-side and demand-side factors, whose interplay determines a path-dependence.