Coping with Iberian monopolies: Genoese trade networks and formal institutions in Spain and Portugal during the second half of the eighteenth century

Abstract

This article explores Genoese trade interests in Cadiz and Lisbon, the two capitals of Iberian colonial trade at the end of the early-modern period. The author aims to explain the persisting intermediary role of a merchant community that has been largely overlooked by historians. The structure of the trade networks established in the two cities will be reconstructed by using the primary sources conserved in the archive of the Durazzos, a powerful aristocratic family of the Republic which has left a unique collection of private correspondence. This sizeable and largely unexplored documentation illuminates the different strategies used to access the Spanish and Portuguese monopolistic systems, the main actors who traded in both contexts, their relations with the local elite, and the nature of the business networks linking Genoese investors in the mother city with the expatriated agents. The author concludes with a comparative analysis of the institutional resources that Genoese used to maintain their interests, with particular attention paid to the religious institutions established by the ‘nation’ in the two port cities.     

Reply to comments on trade,towns and states: A reconsideration of early medieval economics

The aim of this paper is to discuss a specific group of stamped gold foils with human representation from the late Scandinavian Iron Age (AD 550/600–800) from the perspective of size. The article argues that the framed gold foils embed sophisticated and multi-layered transformations that capture and echo basic principles of northern cosmology and belief systems related to Odin as the god for kings and his ability as a seer.     

Concepts of citizenship in France during the long eighteenth century

François Furet famously described the French Revolution as ’the first experiment with democracy’, and modern French citizenship is often seen as having emerged during this period. Universal male suffrage was practised for the first time in 1792 and the Revolution also witnessed debate over such issues as: the rights of citizens; the extension of the franchise to poorer inhabitants and black slaves; and even whether women should be given political rights. Yet, the modern idea of citizenship did not emerge from nowhere in 1789. Rather it was the product of more than a century of debate. This article examines the different understandings of citizenship that were competing for dominance in France during the long eighteenth century: the ancient conception; the Bodinian understanding and the rights-based approach. Not only does it demonstrate the contribution of these approaches (and in particular the last) to revolutionary understandings of citizenship, but it also highlights how the tensions of the eighteenth-century debates, and the ambiguities inherent in the rights-based conception, sparked some of the key controversies of the Revolution.     

Small but powerful: networking strategies and the trade business of Habsburg-Italian merchants in Cadiz in the second half of the eighteenth century

Abstract

Lombardian merchants played an important role in long-distance trade between the Italian and the Iberian Peninsulas since the Middle Ages, in contrast to widely held beliefs and historiographical neglect. The eighteenth century witnessed the intensification of this role. Instead of being worse off after Lombardy passed from Spanish sovereignty to being ruled from Vienna, the Lombardian mercantile community in Cadiz made use of the institutional framework offered by the imperial maritime policy of the Habsburgs, which compensated for a lack of their own commercial institutional framework. Making use of different social strategies, which combined kinship, cultural and transnational co-operation, Lombardian merchants skilfully connected Spanish America with Habsburg Central Europe through the Mediterranean, despite the fact that their degree of formal integration into the Spanish trading system was limited. This occurred in the episode of growth that followed the Bourbon reforms in Spain after the 1760s. Although their business networks reached a wide geographical area, Lombardian merchants also acted as intermediaries for the incorporation of the Triestinian traders into long-distance maritime trade networks, and therefore contributed to linking both ends of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.     

Family,society and the ornamental villa on the fringes of English country towns

Ornamental villas were a significant constituent land-use of the early nineteenth-century fringe-belt of British towns. An outline of the origin and development of this innovation in middle-class house design provides a background to the detailed investigation of the villas of a typical small country town. Evidence indicates that the kinship and wider societal groupings of the country town middle classes played an important subsidiary role to the better-known factors of land-ownership structure and national economic fluctuations in the decision-making process of locating and building ornamental villas. The case study suggests that some of the unexplained residual values of Whitehand's models of fringe-belt formation, which are rooted in the theory of land economics, can be explained, in the case of ornamental villas, by reference to the life cycle of their occupying families. Marriage and the death of the head of household are the most significant parts of the family life cycle.     

21世纪中国考古学发展走向的几点思考

刚刚过去的20世纪是人类历史上发展最快,变化最大,最动荡的一个世纪。标志着人类认识世界,改造世界能力的科学研究在上一个世纪里有了空前的发展。真正意义上的中国教古学在20世纪里,随着科学,实证的呼声应运而生。从安特生到李济,从夏鼐,裴中到刘耀,苏秉琦,自20世纪初科学的考古学方法传入中国以后的80多年时间里,     

Geographies of steam: mapping the entrepreneurial activities of steam engineers in France during the second half of the eighteenth century

Entrepreneurship played a crucial role in the development and diffusion of steam technology. To account for this, we need to map the entrepreneurial activities that helped spread steam technology across Europe and beyond. Because tracing this history’s contours requires attending to local contexts, strategies and uses along with large-scale trajectories, it makes sense to speak of historical ‘geographies’ rather than of steam technology’s historical ‘geography’. Speaking of geographies in the plural also refers to the recognition that places can simultaneously be located in multiple spatial situations, their geographical identities the product of historical work, negotiation and perspective. To illustrate these points, this essay begins by reflecting on what might be called the ‘spatial turn’ in the history of technology and the role of entrepreneurship in the spread of steam technology in France during the second half of the eighteenth century, which is the historical focus of this essay. It then discusses a small number of representative cases of entrepreneurial engagement with steam technology in France and concludes by considering what this tells us about the relationship between the French state and its regions and the impact of the French Revolution in this geographically complex history.     

Post-Byzantine hermeneiai zographikes in the eighteenth century and their dissemination in the Balkans during the nineteenth century

Abstract

This article focuses on the significance of the Orthodox painters' manuals, called hermeneiai zographikes, in the development of post-Byzantine iconography and painting technology and techniques in the Balkans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a number of unpublished painters' manuals (Greek and Slavonic) as primary sources for the study of Christian and Ottoman culture in the Balkan peninsula, it is possible to examine perceptions of Europe in the Balkans, in particular the principal routes for the transmission of ideas of the European Enlightenment, as well as the role of artists as mediators in the processes of 'Europeanization'.     

New technologies applied to family history: a particular case of southern Europe in the eighteenth century

In this article, the author explains how the support of new technologies has helped historians to develop their research over the last few decades. The author, therefore, summarizes the application of both database and genealogical programs for the southern Europe family studies as a methodological tool. First, the author will establish the importance of the creation of databases using the File Maker program, after which they will explain the value of using genealogical programs such as Genopro and Heredis. The main aim of this article is to give detail about the use of these new technologies as applied to a particular study of southern Europe, specifically the Crown of Castile, during the late modern period. The use of these computer programs has helped to develop the field of social sciences and family history, in particular, social history, during the last decade.     

Increasing returns to scale in the towns of early Tudor England

Abstract

Urban agglomeration economies make cities central to theories of modern economic growth. There is historical evidence for the presence of Smithian growth and agglomeration effects in English towns c.1450-1670, but seminal assessments deny the presence of agglomeration effects and productivity gains to Early Modern English towns. This study evaluates the presence of increasing returns to scale (IRS) in aggregate urban economic outputs—the empirical signature of feedbacks between Smithian growth and agglomeration effects—among the towns of 16th century England. To do so, we test a model from settlement scaling theory against the 1524/5 Lay Subsidy returns. Analysis of these data indicates that Tudor towns exhibited IRS—a finding that is robust to alternative interpretations of the data. IRS holds even for the smallest towns in our sample, suggesting the absence of town size thresholds for the emergence of agglomeration effects. Spatial patterning of scaling residuals further suggests regional demand-side interactions with Smithian-agglomeration feedbacks. These findings suggest the presence of agglomeration effects and Smithian growth in pre-industrial English towns. This begs us to reconsider the economic performance of Early Modern English towns, and suggests that the qualitative economic dynamics of contemporary cities may be applicable to premodern settlements in general.