The Republic of Genoa was once a major commercial power. Following the Republic's decline in the seventeenth century, Genoese merchants adapted and thrived in the changing Atlantic market. Scholars have examined how other foreign merchant groups operated within the Spanish empire, but until now no one has examined how the Genoese adapted to the challenges of increasing competition in Atlantic trade. Here, Catia Brilli explores how Genoese intermediaries maintained a strong presence in Spanish colonial trade by establishing themselves at the port of Cadiz with its monopoly over American trade, and through gradually consolidating strong commercial ties with the Río de la Plata. Situated at the intersection of European, Atlantic, and Latin American history and making extensive use of Spanish, Italian, and Argentinian sources, Genoese Trade and Migration in the Spanish Atlantic, 1700-1830 provides a unique perspective on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transatlantic trade.

The Republic of Genoa was once a major commercial power. Following the Republic's decline in the seventeenth century, Genoese merchants adapted and thrived in the changing Atlantic market. Scholars have examined how other foreign merchant groups operated within the Spanish empire, but until now no one has examined how the Genoese adapted to the challenges of increasing competition in Atlantic trade. Here, Catia Brilli explores how Genoese intermediaries maintained a strong presence in Spanish colonial trade by establishing themselves at the port of Cadiz with its monopoly over American trade, and through gradually consolidating strong commercial ties with the Río de la Plata. Situated at the intersection of European, Atlantic, and Latin American history and making extensive use of Spanish, Italian, and Argentinian sources, Genoese Trade and Migration in the Spanish Atlantic, 1700–1830 provides a unique perspective on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transatlantic trade.

This book explains how Genoese entrepreneurs transformed the structures of global trade during the second half of the seventeenth century. The author reconstructs the business network built by the Genoese merchant Domenico Grillo between the 1650s and the 1680s. Grillo’s business interests stretched from the Mediterranean to Pacific South America, traversing and joining the Spanish, Dutch, and English Atlantics. He and his associates created a new business model that was to be emulated by Dutch, French, and English traders in subsequent decades: the monopolistic asientos for the exploitation of the trans-imperial and intra-American slave trade to Spanish America. Offering a connected history of capitalism across trans-continental geographies and different empires, this book challenges established views of a period which has traditionally been interrogated from a northern European mercantile perspective. Cutting across the histories of the slave trade in the Atlantic world, early modern capitalism, and early modern empire, this study has much to offer to students and scholars interested in the agents, economic practices, and geographies of trade that do not easily fit into and therefore disrupt the traditional narratives of the Rise of the West. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

How did free trade emerge in early-modern times? How did the Mediterranean as a specific region – with its own historical characteristics – produce a culture in which the free port appeared? What was the relation between the type of free trade created in early-modern Italy and the development of global trade and commercial competition between states for hegemony in the eighteenth century? And how did the position of the free port, originally a Mediterranean ‘invention’, develop over the course of time? The contributions to this volume address these questions and explain the institutional genealogy of the free port. Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean analyses the atypical history and conditions of the Mediterranean region in contradistinction with other regions as an explanation for how and why free ports arose there. This volume engages with the diffusion of free ports from a Mediterranean to a global phenomenon, whilst staying focused on how this diffusion was experienced in the Mediterranean itself. The contributions to this volume bring together the traditional issues of religious openness and tolerance in physically separated areas and the role of consuls and governors, via fiscal techniques, architectural and administrative aspects, with questions about geopolitical balance and primacy. The book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of historical sub-disciplines (early modern, Mediterranean, global economic, political, and institutional, just to mention a few) and to students wishing to perfect their knowledge of the Mediterranean and its global interconnections, and of the origins of free trade.

This book explores the historical evolution of a Mediterranean village that radically changed its core self-sustaining activities in less than a century, from fishing for anchovies in the Ligurian Sea to rounding Cape Horn.

Conflict Management in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, 1000-1800 offers a comparative long-term perspective on the complexity of various approaches to conflict management by those involved in long-distance trade across political and jurisdictional boundaries.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and the best ways to manage its threat. In this transnational study, Cindy Ermus focuses on the social, commercial, and diplomatic impact of the epidemic beyond French borders, examining reactions to this public health crisis from Italy to Great Britain to Spain and the overseas colonies. She reveals how a crisis in one part of the globe can transcend geographic boundaries and influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far from the epicentre of disaster.