A Genoese merchant and banker in the Kingdom of Naples: Ottavio Serra and his business network in the Spanish polycentric system,c.1590–1620

Abstract

The dense Genoese commercial networks – which were present in all territories under Spanish rule, fairs, commercial emporia and battlefields – were an essential factor for the survival of the crown. This raises some doubts about the dominating influence posed, according to traditional accounts, by the court in Madrid; the court was, indeed, a point of reference for the Genoese merchant families but by no means the only one. In fact, the Genoese always took care to be present in important harbours and markets, such as Naples, where they often had correspondents to look after the family’s multiple interests.

This article revolves around the crucial role played by Ottavio Serra (1570–1639), son of Giovambattista Serra, ‘signore’ of Carovigno and an active merchant and moneychanger in the viceroyalty of Naples during the first two decades of the seventeeth century. The importance of Ottavio was not limited to his participation in the economic life of Naples. The analysis of Ottavio’s activity as financial agent for his relatives and partners in Madrid, Genoa and Piacenza, among other locations, as well as the examination of his links with a great variety of economic centres in the Mezzogiorno, presents early-modern Naples as a highly ‘internationalised’ centre in the context of the polycentric Hispanic imperial system.     

The business relations,identities and political resources of Italian merchants in the early-modern Spanish monarchy: some introductory remarks

Abstract

This article offers a preliminary approach to the special volume entitled Business Relations, Identities, and Political Resources of the Italian Merchants in the Early-Modern Spanish Monarchy. It discusses the major issues and debates addressed in the five contributions collected here about the central role played by the Genoese, Florentine and Milanese commercial networks in the framework of a polycentric imperial structure as was the Spanish Monarchy.     

Polycentricity and the Multiplexity of Urban Networks

Abstract

Empirical studies on polycentric urban regions (PURs) tend to analyse their spatial organization by examining only one type of functional linkage between cities. However, it has generally been accepted that urban networks are multiplex phenomena and that spatial interactions between cities can take many different forms, for example, commuting, shopping trips, and inter-firm trade. The spatial organization of each of these functional linkages is not necessarily identical, and, therefore, a region can appear to be polycentric and spatially integrated based on the analysis of one type of functional linkage but monocentric and loosely connected based on the analysis of another type of functional linkage. The aim of this paper is to stimulate further discussion on the multiplexity of urban networks with regard to the relational complexity of urban regions. Focusing on one PUR (Randstad Holland), we compare the geographical scope and spatial structure of different functional networks within it. Our results indicate that the spatial organization of the urban network depends on the lens through which it is assessed.     

The Swiss community in Genoa from the Old Regime to the late nineteenth century

Abstract

Drawing on extensive and original archival research, this article is the first to reconstruct the origins and historical development of the Swiss community of Genoa from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. During these four centuries, the Swiss were constant and significant agents of the Genoese economy and society. The Swiss presence in the city dates back to the mid 1500s, when Swiss soldiers were the predominant component of the army of the Republic. In the 1700s the Swiss community broadened its economic scope and varied its social configuration. It consisted of both a well-established Protestant, élite of merchant-bankers and textile entrepreneurs and a lower layer of craftsmen, confectioners, street vendors and servants. By the end of the 1700s the Swiss élite was such a thriving and well-integrated group that in 1799 Genoa was selected to be the seat of the first Swiss consulate of the Italian peninsula, the second in Europe after Bordeaux (1798). From the Restoration (1815) to Italian Unification (1861), the Swiss merchant-bankers and textile industrialists continued to be active promoters of the city's economic and trading system. In the decades after Unification (1861–80s), Swiss capital investments moved into new economic sectors (steam-shipping and maritime insurance) that contributed to the modernization of the Genoese and Italian merchant fleet. During the nineteenth century the Swiss community created its own social spaces and identity within the city – a church, a cemetery, a school, and a charitable foundation. As in many other northern Italian cities, the consolidation of the community's external image did not weaken the Swiss élite's integration with the local Genoese upper class.     

Secular history in twelfth-century Italy: Caffaro of Genoa

Caffaro of Genoa is distinguished among medieval writers of history in being the earliest urban chronicler and the earliest secular historian in western Europe. However, his works and career remain relatively unknown to a remarkable number of contemporary medievalists in the English-speaking world. Caffaro was the originator of the Genoese Annals and remained their sole author for more than half a century. In addition he wrote at least two other historical works of great value. Throughout his long life he played a prominent role in the affairs of his city. He served repeatedly as a consul, ambassador, and diplomat for the Genoese Republic, and he was as well a crusader and a successful military commander. In his writing and in his career Caffaro consistently displays that uniquely secular and urban temperament we too readily associate only with the historians of Antiquity and the Renaissance.     

Florentine alum mining in the Hospitaller islands: the appalto of 1442

This article publishes a document from the archives of the Order of Saint John recording the Hospitallers’ concession of an alum exploration and mining monopoly, an appalto, to a group of Florentines in 1442, and examines the implications of this agreement for the economic development of the Latin East in this period. This enterprise forms part of a pattern showing Florentine merchants attempting to extend their activities further up the alum supply chain and so to gain increasing control over a commodity of vital importance to their city’s economy, for which they had been dependent on the Genoese who dominated the trade. This development in turn forms part of a wider fifteenth-century trend of the Florentines interloping in areas of activity previously the preserve of other communities, principally the Venetians and Genoese, with a long-established maritime, territorial, diplomatic and commercial position in the eastern Mediterranean. It also forms part of a pattern of new speculative alum mining enterprises in the Aegean in the mid-fifteenth century, calling into question the traditional view that the alum trade was afflicted by a glut at this time, and thus also the traditional explanation of the ensuing consolidation of alum firms. The article also compares this document with a previously published contract issued the preceding year, concluding that the differences between them reflect the developing familiarity of the Hospitaller leadership with the mining business, while their common characteristics confirm the currency of the term appalto in the mining business of this period as denoting a monopoly. It tentatively concludes that this effort to establish an alum mining industry in Hospitaller territory was probably ultimately unsuccessful.     

What is this bird? The quest to identify parrot remains from the Heyward-Washington House,Charleston, South Carolina

ABSTRACT

Excavations in the 1970s at the ca. 1772 Heyward-Washington House in Charleston, South Carolina, produced a rich and diverse archaeological assemblage spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among the vertebrate remains are four bones from a large member of the parrot family. We now believe the bird was a blue-fronted or turquoise-fronted amazon parrot (Psittacidae: Amazona aestiva), an animal originating in South America. Over the decades, we have studied the zooarchaeological signature of social identity in Charleston, the evolving urban environment, and the vast trade networks of the colonial port city, all of which are embodied in the remains of this single bird. The parrot leads to a discussion of social roles of captive birds in early Charleston, the eclectic interests of city residents, and the city’s global trade networks.     

Looking through the mirrors: materiality and intimacy at Domenico Grillo’s mansion in Baroque Madrid

Abstract

In 1662, the Spanish crown granted Genoese banker Domenico Grillo an incredibly generous monopoly contract aiming at reactivating the slave trade to the Spanish colonies in the New World. Yet despite the fundamental role Grillo’s slaving business played in the transformation of the geopolitics of the Atlantic, his fleeting incursion into the field of human traffic has so far received limited historiographical attention. This paradox may result from the little information that, beyond the records of his commercial transactions, colonial archives appear to have retained about the complex personality of this Ligurian financier. Seeking to bypass this frustrating documentary gap, this work draws on alternative historical, genealogical and archaeological approaches in order to explore the social and cultural meaning of the various materialities once populating Domenico Grillo’s intimate lived spaces in Baroque Madrid.     

Slingsby Bethel's Analysis of State Interests

Summary

Seventeenth-century thinking on the relationship between trade and state power was routinely conducted using the concept of state interests, which enabled users to conceive a Europe of competing states that managed the balance of power through trade and war. Poor interest management could arise from ignorance, error, or the divergence between the private interests of rulers and a state's true interests. The stakes of pursuing or neglecting true interest were high: the survival and prosperity of the state. The dominance of ‘mercantilism’ as a historiographical category has obscured the role of interest in early modern thought. This paper examines the work of one of England's most prolific interest writers, Slingsby Bethel, to demonstrate the importance of reading interest writings without recourse to mercantilism. The two focuses are, first, how the rhetoric of counsel was used to defend an ordinary subject's presumption to comment on state affairs and, second, the capacity for interest writers to construe the rise and fall of state power in terms of good laws and statesmanship.     

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.     

Free Trade Agreements and the Neo-Liberal Economic Paradigm: Economic,Ecological, and Moral Consequences

Abstract

Since signing and implementing the North American Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in the early 1990s, the United States has pursued other free trade agreements with nations in Latin America and Asia. The premise undergirding FTAs is that trade liberalization within the neo-liberal global economy produces economic growth and development among all parties, and reduces poverty in poor nations. We examine arguments of proponents of free trade and the neo-liberal economy— particularly those of Martin Wolf, author of Why Globalization Works— to test these claims. We explore alternatives that center on norms of ecological sustainability and social justice, holding these two as inseparable. The central moral question of how to achieve needed socioeconomic development in the Global South in ways that are both ecologically sustainable and socially just frames our analysis. We conclude by proposing five principles for an alternative, more sustainable and equitable economic paradigm.     

Women in Genoese commenda contracts, 1155–1216

An examination of the earliest notarial documents preserved in the State Archive of Genoa reveals that Genoese women were regular and active participants in their city's commercial operations through the use of the popular commenda partnership contract. In fact, women recorded investments in nearly one-quarter of over 4000 surviving contracts dating from 1155 to 1216. Nearly three-quarters of all women named in commenda contracts were investing their own property within the act and most of the remainder were proctoring investments for someone else. Women's individual investments were, on the average, less than half as large as men's, and women tended to concentrate their commercial involvement into long-distance trade rather than local or regional ventures. Study of family investment patterns reveals two especially important connections involving women. Women married to travelling merchants invested their husbands' property during their spouses' long periods of absence, and widows sought to increase both their own property and the patrimony left to their sons by putting capital from both sources into trading ventures.     

Montpellier and Genoa: The dilemma of dominance

During the high and late middle ages, Genoa was a dominant force in Mediterranean commerce. This study examines the relationship between Genoa and the Southern French town of Montpellier in three historical eras: the twelfth century to about 1180; from the 1180s to about 1270; and from 1270 through the mid-fourteenth century. In the first era Genoa, along with Pisa, exercised economic hegemony over the coast of Southern France. In the second period, Montpellier gradually emancipated itself from Genoese commercial control. In the third era interaction between Montpellier and Genoa became increasingly complex because of the growth of French influence in Languedoc. The French monarchy sought to control southern French commerce with a requirement in 1278 that Italian merchants reside in Nimes and trade through Aigues-Mortes, and later in the 1330s with the offer of a transport monopoly over goods from southern France to Genoese admirals Doria and Grimaldi. Montpellier resisted these French efforts, invoking its commercial independence and political allegiance to the Majorcan king. By the mid-fourteenth century Genoese pretensions to commercial dominance over Montpellier were hollow reminders of the past, but the Genoese legacy of business technology remained strong.     

Trade and culture: the ongoing debate

ABSTRACT

The debate over how to reconcile trade liberalization with cultural policy is a long-standing one. There is great variation in how countries have navigated this debate. Furthermore, evolving individual policy approaches show noteworthy dynamism, largely in response to domestic politics, shifts in the international trading system and technological developments. This special issue explores different approaches to the trade and culture debate across geographic space, as well as the evolution across time through analysis of six cases – Canada, the European Union, South Africa, Latin America, the United States and China.     

England’s trade with the Continent in the early thirteenth century: customs and the port of Dover

ABSTRACT

This article identifies and prints the earliest detailed customs list from northern Europe, which was prepared for the port of Dover in 1233 or soon after, and it gives fuller and more detailed information about trade than for any other northern European port at this date. The list shows a remarkable diversity of trade, including some of the earliest references to particular goods in English documents, and widespread sources of trade including Flanders, Germany and Italy. The depiction of such trading links prompts questions about the ‘commercial revolution’ and the development of European trade, for it shows how varied trade and consumption could be in the era of the fairs of the Champagne towns, before the establishment of direct maritime links from the Italian cities to northern Europe. The appearance of commodities and trading links in the Dover list suggest that commercial development was earlier and more evolutionary.     

Florentine networks in the Middle East in the early Renaissance

By crossing data from Florentine collections with notarial records produced in Egypt and Syria, this article focuses on the Florentine trading networks operating in the eastern Mediterranean during the fifteenth century. It highlights two factors influencing Florence’s long-distance trade in the area: political unrest characteristic of Italian Renaissance cities, and the scant interest of the Florentine government in building diplomatic and commercial institutions. Initially woven by exiled merchant-bankers and offshore companies, the network reconfigured towards the middle of the century around a group of entrepreneurs based in Rhodes, who were deeply entrenched in local finance and in business with the Islamic cities. The article provides a more complex view of relations between government institutions and Mediterranean long-distance trade by approaching the rise of the Medici in Florentine politics and their handling of the network.     

Geopolitics of landlocked states in South Asia: a comparative analysis of Afghanistan and Nepal

ABSTRACT

Foreign policies of landlocked states have been a topic of interest for scholarship on international relations but the landlocked states in South Asia have received negligible attention. Due to their geographical realities, South Asian landlocked states that include Afghanistan, Bhutan and Nepal, depend on their neighbours for trade with the outside world. A range of factors place landlocked states in an unequal relationship with their coastal neighbours. While these factors include the superiority of coastal neighbours in terms of economy, population size, and military strength, we argue that their landlockedness plays a crucial role. To further investigate the role of landlockedness, this study compares the foreign policy decisions that guide India-Nepal and Afghanistan–Pakistan relations. Based on the assessment of historical, economic and geopolitical factors, we argue that India and Pakistan exploit their landlocked neighbours to achieve their national interests. Frustrated by the treatment of their coastal neighbours and the presence of new trade opportunities have compelled Afghanistan to use its closeness with India to counter over-dependence on Pakistan and Nepal has enhanced cooperation with China to overcome its reliance on India, thereby creating a new geopolitical dynamic within South Asia.     

The Antiquities Market: News and Commentary on the Illicit Traffic in Antiquities

Abstract

Wind God Foils Smuggler's Breeze through Customs

Laura Scanlan's article describing the seizure at U.S. Customs and the eventual return to Mexico of several important Precolumbian artifacts is reprinted here with permission from Customs Today, 17:2 (1982) 2–3. Both the story itself and the act of reprinting emphasize the growing cooperation between archaeologists and the U.S. Customs Bureau in cases involving antiquities. Karen Bruhns and Connie Fenchel (see below) have been an effective team in pursuing cases involving antiquities smuggling in the San Francisco area. In the Bernstein case (see below “A Lawyer Looks at U.S. Antiquities Laws”) archaeologists also provided professional evaluations and consultation to customs officials. Both the Mexican case described here by Scanlan and the Bernstein case were initiated through improper customs declarations, which were recognized by alert customs inspectors familiar with the value of antiquities and the significance of the illicit trade.

These cases suggest a way for many archaeologists who have said they would like to help curb the illicit trade but did not know how to do so. There are customs offices in most large U.S. cities. They are the places where antiquities enter this country. Special Agent Fenchel pointed out, during her presentation at the Legislative Session of the AIA in San Francisco, that most antiquities cases in this country have begun with an improper customs declaration. If this is so, the effectiveness of existing law governing the antiquities trade depends largely on the ability of customs inspectors to recognize antiquities and to evaluate their accompanying declarations. Even when/if the UNESCO Convention is implemented, its enforcement will be largely in the hands of customs inspectors. Thus, professional archaeologists could make a substantive contribution toward curbing import of illicit antiquities by introducing themselves at their local customs office and offering to make available their professional advice on cases involving antiquities. Local archaeological societies might consider offering seminars for their local customs inspectors on ancient art and archaeology and the pertinent laws and market values, to help increase the ability of customs inspectors to recognize antiquities in the course of their work. Just knowing that there is expert help available locally to identify and evaluate antiquities, or to find another expert who might be able to do so, could make local customs inspectors more sensitive to the issues involved and more likely to catch violations.     

Commercial conflict resolution across the religious divide in the thirteenth-century Mediterranean

Commercial conflict resolution in the medieval Mediterranean has been treated by a number of scholars in recent years, notably through the use of documents from the Cairo Geniza and the archives of the Italian port of Genoa. Recent research on this subject, and more specifically on contract enforcement, has focused on contract reinforcement within the Mediterranean Jewish community, largely because of the sources available. Parallels drawn with medieval Italian mechanisms of conflict resolution emphasize differences between public- vs. private-order responses, that is, the reliance on personalized groups in the Islamic world rather than on public institutions typical of the Italian port-cities. These studies do not, however, examine how commercial conflicts were resolved across religious and political lines, despite the growing role of Italian merchants in the trade networks of Islamic North Africa, a role that inevitably led to trade disputes and occasional uncollected payments. Through close textual analysis of 14 Latin and Arabic letters exchanged between Islamic Almohad Tunis and Christian Italian Pisa, this article explores how Almohad commercial agents and governmental authorities sought to maintain positive trade relations across the religious divide while protecting the interests of their own clients and citizens when disputes arose over commercial payments and debt collection. Rather than relying on commercial conflict resolution methods specific to one culture or the other, these documents reveal a middle ground of borrowed vocabulary and procedures. Through these letters, Almohad merchants and officials attempted to negotiate through the bonds of personal trust and reputation established with their Italian counterparts. However, they also appealed to Italian sensibilities with hybridized methods recognizable by the legal and public institutions of both cultures.     

From the editors

From a background in documenting traditional Sami knowledge of major predators, the author discusses the conflict of interests between Sami reindeer herding and Swedish environmental policy on the matter of governmental administration of predators. The author argues that a recognition of the fact that different cultures see and relate to nature and the countryside from different standpoints and within different frames of reference is missing in today's debate in Sweden. According to the author this could lead to a situation of eco‐colonialism if Sami experiences and apprehensions are not taken into account in Swedish environmental policy.