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Port of Trade or Commodity Market? Livorno and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2020

Abstract

This article critiques the application of Karl Polanyi's port of trade model to the development of Livorno, which has often been ascribed to commercial brokerage across cultural, political, and ecological frontiers. Livorno's neutrality during times of war and its position in the corsair and privateering economies would appear to support just such an interpretation of Livorno's growth. Nevertheless, while such interstitial roles were real, by the 1640s they were subordinate to the larger currents of regional and long-distance trade. Livorno's development is better explained with reference to the rise of commodity markets as entrepôts for managing far-flung distribution networks. The Tuscan port's rapid rise should be understood as an integral phenomenon of early modern capitalism, more akin to places such as London or Amsterdam than to the ports of trade studied by Polanyi.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Footnotes

For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, I would like to thank the participants of the workshop Italy and the Origins of Capitalism held at Harvard Business School in March 2019, especially Sophus Reinert and Bob Fredona, Gillian Weiss, and the anonymous reviewer.

References

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2 Honoré-Antoine Mossony de Verrayon, quoted in Charles Carrière and Marcel Cordurié, “Les grandes heures de Livourne au XVIIIe siècle: L'exemple de la guerre de Sept ans,” Revue historique 515 (1975): 43. Stallage taxes were fees levied on the use of warehouses or other storage facilities within the port.

3 On the development of the free port, see Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, “Livorno 1676: La città e il porto franco,” in La Toscana nell'età di Cosimo III, ed. Franco Angiolini, Vieri Becagli, and Marcello Verga (Florence, 1993), 45–66; Jean-Pierre Filippini, Il porto di Livorno e la Toscana (1676–1814), 3 vols. (Naples, 1998); Andrea Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra: Il mercato delle assicurazioni marittime di Livorno (1694–1795) (Rome, 2007), 51–108; Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, 2009), chap. 3; Tazzara, Corey, “Managing Free Trade in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Information, and the Free Port of Livorno,” Journal of Modern History 86, no. 3 (2014): 500–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Samuel Fettah, Les limites de la cité: Espace, pouvoir et société à Livourne au temps du port franc (XVIIe–XIXe siècle) (Rome, 2017).

4 Giuseppe Francesco Pierallini in 1789, quoted in Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, 72.

5 The difference between these approaches has never been posed in such starkly antagonistic terms; scholars tend to emphasize one perspective or the other according to the question at hand. For an overview of the issues, see de Divitiis, Gigliola Pagano, English Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, U.K., 1997)Google Scholar; Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, 51–108; and especially Addobbati, “Espace de la guerre et du commerce: Réflexions sur le Port of Trade polanyien à partir du cas de Livourne,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 85, no. 2 (2012): 233–49.

6 Leeds, Anthony, “The Port-of-Trade in Pre-European India as an Ecological and Evolutionary Type,” in The Annual Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. Garfield, Viola E. (Seattle, 1961), 2648Google Scholar; Gallaway, Terrel, “Life on the Edge: A Look at Ports of Trade and Other Ecotones,” Journal of Economic Issues 39, no. 3 (2005): 707–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seidman, Pearl, “Vitality at the Edges: Ecotones and Boundaries in Ecological and Social Systems,” World Future Review 1, no. 5 (2009): 3147CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of identifying ports of trade by enumerating their characteristics, see Addobbati, “Espace de la guerre,” 239–40; he sees Livorno as having a set of institutions (and circumstances) that enabled it to exploit the conjunctural interstices of Mediterranean trade.

7 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944; Boston, 2001); Polanyi, “Ports of Trade in Early Societies,” Journal of Economic History 23, no. 1 (1963): 30–45; Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man, ed. Harry W. Pearson (New York, 1977), 95; Polanyi and Abraham Rotstein, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle, 1966), part 3. See also Robert B. Revere, “‘No Man's Coast’: Ports of Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, ed. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Pearson (New York, 1957), 38–63.

8 Braudel, Fernand, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, 3 vols. (Berkeley, 1982), 2:227Google Scholar; cf. Cangiani, Michele, “Karl Polanyi's Institutional Theory: Market Society and Its ‘Disembedded’ Economy,” Journal of Economic Issues 45, no. 1 (2011): 179–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The article that economists cite most commonly in critiques of Polanyi is North, Douglass C., “Markets and Other Allocation Systems in History: The Challenge of Karl Polanyi,” Journal of European Economic History 6, no. 3 (1977): 703–16Google Scholar. North's criticism is theoretical rather than historical, contending that a transaction-costs approach explains the facts better than Polanyi's schema of reciprocity and redistribution (in particular, the transaction costs associated with inadequate property rights).

9 On interpreting Braudel, see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000), 15, 18–19, chap. 4; and Prak, Maarten, “Introduction,” in Early Modern Capitalism, ed. Prak, Maarten (London, 2005), 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 2:93–97, 3:236–39.

11 Pandolfo Attavanti to Domenico Pandolfini, 19 Feb. 1644 from the incarnation (1645 annus domini), folio 187, box 2160, Mediceo del Principato (hereafter MP), Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Florence (hereafter ASF). Foreign hospitality and its limits are topics of ongoing investigation. Contributions include Stefano Villani, “‘Una piccola epitome di Inghilterra’: La comunità inglese di Livorno negli anni di Ferdinando II: Questioni religiose e politici,” Cromohs 8 (2003): 1–23; Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, Vivere fuori dal ghetto: Ebrei a Pisa e Livorno (secoli XVI–XVIII) (Turin, 2008); Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers; and Guillaume Calafat and Cesare Santus, “Les avatars du ‘Turc’: Esclaves et commerçants musulmans à Livourne (1600–1750),” in Les Musulmans en Europe occidentale au Moyen Âge et à l’époque moderne, vol. 1, Une intégration invisible, ed. Jocelyne Dakhlia and Bernard Vincent (Paris, 2011), 471–522. The atmosphere for Muslim traders in Livorno improved after the 1747–1748 peace treaties between the grand duchy of Tuscany and various Islamicate powers. See Antonella Alimento, “Carlo Ginori and the Modernization of the Tuscan Economy,” in Florence after the Medici: Tuscan Enlightenment, 1737–1790, ed. Corey Tazzara, Paula Findlen, and Jacob Soll (London, 2019), 159–60.

12 Mario Baruchello, Livorno e il suo porto: Origini, caratteristiche e vicende dei traffici livornesi (Livorno, 1932), 320–42; Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, 2:207–14; Filippini, “La graduelle affirmation de la souveraineté du Grand-Duc de Toscane sur le port de Livourne: Les edits de neutralité de la période des Habsbourg-Lorraine,” Nuovi studi livornesi 16 (2009): 23–31; Guillaume Calafat, “Une mer jalousée: Juridictions maritimes, ports francs et régulation du commerce en Méditerranée (1590–1740)” (PhD diss., Université Paris 1, 2013), 472–89.

13 Fernand Braudel and Ruggiero Romano, Navires et marchandises à l'entrée du port de Livourne (1547–1611) (Paris, 1951), 24.

14 Quoted in Mori, Giorgio, “Linee e momenti dello sviluppo della città, del porto e dei traffici di Livorno,” La Regione: Rivista dell'unione regionale delle provincie toscane 3, no. 12 (1956): 10Google Scholar. The logic of the commerce was explored more fully by the Venetian dragoman Giovanni Battista Salvago. See Masi, Corrado, “Relazioni fra Livorno ed Algeri nei secoli XVII–XIX,” Bollettino Storico Livornese 2 (1938): 183–93Google Scholar. In general, see Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean (Princeton, 2010); and the work in progress by Guillaume Calafat on Corsican merchant networks.

15 That figure was much smaller for Tunis (10 percent) and Tripoli (1 percent).

16 Marie-Christine Engels, Merchants, Interlopers, Seamen and Corsairs: The “Flemish” Community in Livorno and Genoa (1615–1635) (Hilversum, Netherlands, 1997), 78; Vittorio Salvadorini, “Traffici e schiavi fra Livorno e Algeria nella prima decade del Seicento,” Bollettino storico pisano 51 (1982): 67–104; Salvadorini, “Traffici con i paesi islamici e schiavi a Livorno nel XVII secolo: problemi e suggestioni,” in Livorno e il Mediterraneo nell'età medicea (Livorno, 1978), 206–55; see Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (New York, 2003), 13–15, 23. See, in general, Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford, 2011); and Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia, 2018).

17 The number of corsairs is taken from a 1674 report cited by Salvatore Bono, Corsari nel Mediterraneo: Cristiani e musulmani fra guerra, schiavitù e commercio (Milan, 1997), 61. The number of commercial houses is from Jean Mathiex, “Trafic et prix de l'homme en Méditerranée aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 9, no. 2 (1954): 160.

18 In 1604 the slave population was 1,304 (out of 8,863), in 1616 it was about 3,000 (out of 11,109), and in 1689 it was only 886 (out of about 20,654). The total population in the first case represents combined civil, unfree, and military; in the last case, only civil, thus overstating the proportion of slaves. See Giuseppe Gino Guarnieri, I cavalieri di Santo Stefano (1562–1859) (Pisa, 1960), 302; Salvadorini, “Traffici con i paesi Islamici,” 222; and Francesco Pera, Curiosità livornesi inedite o rare (Livorno, 1888), 140. The figures for the military population in 1604 (300 people) come from Ugolino Barisoni to Marcello Accolti (presumably), 20 Dec. 1606, folios 13–14, box 2140, MP, ASF. See, in general, Calafat and Santus, “Les avatars du ‘Turc,’” esp. 479–80. Note that slave prices, unlike those for other commodities, were set by administrative fiat rather than market forces.

19 Reported in Calafat and Santus, “Les avatars du ‘Turc,’” 479, 482.

20 Hershenzon, Captive Sea, chap. 7.

21 Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, 2:224. The figures are calculated by taking the value of goods sold at the public auction by his estimates for the overall value of commerce during the war periods.

22 Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, 1:45.

23 See Carrière and Cordurié, “Les grandes heures”; and Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, 2:207–14; cf. Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, 82–85. On neutrality and commerce in the Austrian Netherlands, see Ann Coenen, Carriers of Growth? International Trade and Economic Development in the Austrian Netherlands (Leiden, 2015), 258–59.

24 Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, 152–54.

25 Anonymous official quoted in Addobbati, 92.

26 Carrière and Cordurié, “Les grandes heures,” 61–65.

27 The quote is from the leading legal official of eighteenth-century Livorno, Giuseppe Francesco Pierallini. See Calogero Piazza, Schiavitù e guerra dei barbareschi: Orientamenti toscani di politica transmarina (1747–1768) (Milan, 1983), 37.

28 Pierre Jean de Bertellet (1757) quoted in Carrière and Cordurié, “Les grandes heures,” 52–53.

29 Corey Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World (Oxford, 2017), 234–44.

30 Carlo Antonio Broggia, Trattato de’ tributi, delle monete, e del governo politico della sanità (Naples, 1743), 507.

31 Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, 71–77. In general, see Cesare Ciano, La sanità marittima nell'età medicea (Pisa, 1976); and Carlo M. Cipolla, Il burocrate e il marinaio: La “Sanità” toscana e le tribolazioni degli inglesi a Livorno nel XVII secolo (Bologna, 1992).

32 Quoting John Dick on the state of Livorno's commerce, 11 July 1765, 388/95, Colonial Office (hereafter CO), National Archives, Kew, England (hereafter NA). See also the complaints of Thomas Baker in Piracy and Diplomacy in Seventeenth-Century North Africa: The Journal of Thomas Baker, English Consul in Tripoli, 1677–1685, ed. C. R. Pennell (London, 1989), 88, 100. See the reflections in Cipolla, Il burocrate e il marinaio, chaps. 3 and 6.

33 Guillaume Calafat, “La contagion des rumeurs: Information consulaire, santé et rivalité commerciale des ports francs (Livourne, Marseille et Gênes, 1670–1690),” in Les consuls en Méditerranée, agents d'information (XVI–XXe siècle), ed. Silvia Marzagalli (Paris, 2015), 99–119.

34 The term is used by Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, 81, quoting Louis Dermigny, “Escales, échelles et ports francs au moyen âge et aux temps moderns,” in Les grandes escales (Brussels, 1974), 537. See also Braudel and Romano, Navires et marchandises, 24–26.

35 As Fernand Braudel did at times in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley, 1995), e.g., 2:759. Against the oppositional view—and Braudel also saw many signs of “fraternization” as well as opposition—we must adduce a host of scholarship that emphasizes the systemic interactions among diverse polities, as well as the fluid religious boundaries, that made cross-cultural contact a reality of life throughout the Mediterranean. In addition to the work of Piazza, Calafat, Weiss, and Hershenzon cited above, one might look at Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, 2006); and Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, 2012).

36 See Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers, chaps. 6 and 7; Regina Grafe and Oscar Gelderblom, “The Rise and Fall of Merchant Guilds: Re-Thinking the Comparative Study of Commercial Institutions in Premodern Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40, no. 4 (2010): 477–511; and Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, 2011), 99–102, 119. Note that my explanation differs from the one that most neo-institutionalists, such as Douglass North himself, would embrace: in North's view, the neutrality of a port was linked to the absence of enforceable property rights between political units; my point is that neutrality was a function of foreign hospitality, which in turn was a function of a common mode of organizing trade. See North, “Markets and Other Allocation Systems,” 714.

37 K. N. Chaudhuri likewise rejects the port-of-trade thesis for commerce in the Indian Ocean, the geographic area most frequently compared to the Mediterranean. See Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge, U.K., 1985), 202, 224.

38 Jacob Viner, “Early Attitudes towards Trade and the Merchant,” in Essays on the Intellectual History of Economics, ed. Douglas A. Irwin (Princeton, 1991), 39–44.

39 Quoting John Dick, CO, NA.

40 Braudel and Romano, Navires et marchandises, 117; Renato Ghezzi, Livorno e l'Atlantico: I commerci olandesi nel Mediterraneo del Seicento (Bari, 2012), 107–18.

41 The French consul Riencourt on 29 Apr. 1710, quoted in Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, 2:345.

42 Giuseppe Parenti, Prezzi e mercato del grano a Siena (1546–1765) (Florence, 1942), 238–56, 262–63; Anna Maria Pult Quaglia, “Per provvedere ai popoli”: Il sistema annonario nella Toscana dei Medici (Florence, 1990), 123–27.

43 The link between a high Italian population and imports of grain from the Baltic region is very clear, and when Italy's population declined by as much as 20 percent in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, imports of such Baltic grains almost disappeared. See Ghezzi, Livorno e l'Atlantico, 115; Paolo Malanima, La fine del primato: Crisi e riconversione nell'Italia del Seicento (Milan, 1998), 157.

44 Carlo Poni, La Seta in Italia: Una Grande Industria Prima Della Rivoluzione Industriale (Bologna, 2009); Francesco Battistini, Gelsi, bozzoli e caldaie: L'industria della seta in Toscana tra città, borghi e campagne (sec. XVI–XVIII) (Florence, 1998); Tazzara, Free Port of Livorno, table 6.2.

45 Braudel and Romano, Navires et marchandises, 115; Renato Ghezzi, Livorno e il mondo islamico nel XVII secolo: Naviglio e commercio di importazione (Bari, 2007), appendices; Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, 2:128–29. See Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui, “The First European Cotton Industry: Italy and Germany, 1100–1800,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford, 2009), 63–88.

46 For a classic formulation, see Braudel, The Mediterranean, 1:103–8.

47 Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, “Merci e mercanti nella Livorno seicentesca, ‘Magazzino d'Italia e del Mediterraneo,’” in Merci e monete a Livorno in età granducale, ed. Silvana Balbi De Caro (Milan, 1997), 65–90.

48 Lewes Roberts, The Marchants Mappe of Commerce (London, 1638), 47. On capital accumulation in Tuscany before the seventeenth century, see Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 2009).

49 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Malden, MA, 2000). For criticism, see James Fentress and Elizabeth Fentress, “The Hole in the Doughnut,” review of Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, Past & Present 173 (Nov. 2001): 203–19; and Jessica Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World (Cambridge, U.K., 2012), 23, 364–65.

50 Tazzara, Free Port of Livorno, chaps. 6 and 8.

51 See Pagano de Divitiis, “Porti italiani nel Seicento e traffici mediterranei,” in La popolazione italiana nel Seicento (Bologna, 1999), 357–85.

52 Camillo Capponi to Ferdinando Bardi, 9 Dec. 1675, box 2198, MP, ASF. See Anna Mangiarotti, “Il Porto Franco (1565–1676),” in Balbi De Caro, Merci e monete a Livorno, 54.

53 Francesco Maria Gianni, “Discorso sopra a Livorno,” in Scritti di pubblica economia e storico-politici del senatore Francesco Maria Gianni, vol. 2 (Florence, 1849), 295. On the difficulty in gathering commercial statistics, see Bourbon del Monte to Francesco Pecci, 30 Dec. 1767, folios 342–43, box 963, Governo civile e militare (hereafter GCM), Archivio di Stato di Livorno (hereafter ASL), quoted in Marcella Aglietti, I governatori di Livorno dai Medici all'Unità d'Italia. Gli uomini, le istituzioni, la città (Pisa, 2009), 134; Bourbon del Monte to the Deputati della Camera Granducale, 20 Feb. 1771, folios 38–39, box 966, ASL, GCM; Bourbon del Monte to the Count of Rosenberg, 30 Jan. 1767, folios 154–56, box 963, ASL, GCM; Luigi Dal Pane, I lavori preparatori per la grande inchiesta del 1766 sull'economia toscana (Florence, 1958), 278–80; and Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, 2:332. For the grand duke's views, see Botta Adorno to Bourbon del Monte, 14 Sept. 1765, folio 498, box 1, ASL, GCM, analyzed by Andrea Addobbati, “‘La frugalità e l'economia sono ottime altrove’: Lusso e incentivazione dei consumi nella Livorno del Settecento,” Nuovi studi livornesi 15 (2008): 139–52.

54 See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975); Pincus, Steve, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998): 703–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jurdjevic, Mark, “Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 4 (2001): 721–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the marriage between civic humanism and absolutism, see Eric W. Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800 (Chicago, 1973), book 2.

55 For an introduction to these issues, see Biagio Salvemini, “Virtù, mercantilismi, e mercanti dell'Europa Settecentesca: Qualche considerazione introduttiva,” Storia economica 19, no. 2 (2016): 369–84; on the Italian Enlightenment in Naples and Milan, respectively, see Koen Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit, and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (Toronto, 2008); and Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy (Cambridge, MA, 2018); on Tuscany during the mid-eighteenth century, see Alimento, “Carlo Ginori.” The language of civic virtue did not disappear after the advent of Peter Leopold (r. 1765–1790), but economic discourse became more complicated under his regime, especially through the influence of physiocracy and natural rights theory. See Renato Pasta, “The Enlightenment at Work: Ideology, Reform, and a Blueprint for a Constitution,” in Tazzara, Findlen, and Soll, Florence after the Medici, 47–48, 52; and Corey Tazzara, “Commercial Crisis in Livorno and the Remaking of the Tuscan Hinterland,” in Tazzara, Findlen, and Soll, Florence after the Medici, 186–91.

56 Edward P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (Feb. 1971): 76–136.

57 See Paolo Malanima, Il lusso dei contadini: Consumi e industrie nelle campagne toscane del Sei e Settecento (Bologna, 1990).

58 See Rebecca Jean Emigh, The Undevelopment of Capitalism: Sectors and Markets in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany (Philadelphia, 2008).

59 Vries, Jan De, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 140–42Google Scholar; see also Philip T. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815 (Princeton, 1996), 170–84. Among nonport and noncapital cities that grew, many (such as Augsburg and Lyons) still sat on rivers. Road networks could also alleviate transport costs, but rivers or canals were certainly better.

60 On the Netherlands, see Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, U.K., 1997). On England, the literature is vast. See Dan Bogart, “The Transport Revolution in Industrializing Britain: A Survey” (Working Paper No. 121306, Department of Economics, University of California-Irvine, 2012). More generally, on the problem of exploiting near rather than distant hinterlands, see Ormrod, David, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge, U.K., 2003)Google Scholar.

61 William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1992), part 2. Cronon ignores the earlier history of the commodity, however. On interpreting the history of seventeenth-century markets in Polanyian terms, see Tazzara, Free Port of Livorno, esp. 8–13.

62 See T. H. Ashton and C. H. E. Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, U.K., 1985); for a survey of the Italian material, see Stephan R. Epstein, “Cities, Regions and the Late Medieval Crisis: Sicily and Tuscany Compared,” Past & Present 130 (Feb. 1991): 3–50.

63 Vries, Jan De, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, U.K., 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Smith, Adam, “Report Dated 1766,” in Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. Meek, R. L., Raphael, D. D., and Stein, P. G. (Oxford, 1978), 514Google Scholar; see also Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776; Indianapolis, 1981), 4.3.14, 250.

65 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1.10.12, 138.