English Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Italy

An account of how England's merchants came to dominate trade at Italy's expense in the Mediterranean.

Gigliola Pagano De Divitiis (Author), Stephen Parkin (Translated by)

9780521580311, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 March 1998

220 pages, 24 tables
23.5 x 16 x 2.1 cm, 0.49 kg

"...moderately advanced students as well as specialists in economic history will find in English Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Italy a useful compendium of data and an often though-provoking case study in that remarkable amplification of English commerical range and power which laid the basis for Britain's later global pre-eminence." Geoffrey Clark, Canadian Journal of History

This book shows how England's conquest of Mediterranean trade proved to be the first step in building its future economic and commercial hegemony, and how Italy lay at the heart of that process. In the seventeenth century the Mediterranean was the largest market for the colonial products which were exported by English merchants, as well as being a source of raw materials which were indispensable for the growing and increasingly aggressive domestic textile industry. The new free port of Livorno became the linchpin of English trade with the Mediterranean and, together with ports in southern Italy, formed part of a system which enabled the English merchant fleet to take control of the region's trade from the Italians. In her extensive use of English and Italian archival sources, the author looks well beyond Braudel's influential picture of a Spanish-dominated Mediterranean world. In doing so she demonstrates some of the causes of Italy's decline and its subsequent relegation as a dominant force in world trade.

List of tables
Preface
1. Times and places
2. The ships
3. Routes and ports
4. Imported goods
5. Exported goods
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]