Filippo Sassetti on Trade, Institutions and Empire
Filippo Sassetti on Trade, Institutions and Empire

Author: Corey Tazzara

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-23

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1000901297

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The Florentine traveler, merchant, and academician Filippo Sassetti was one of the premier economic thinkers of the late Renaissance. Well known for his ethnographic observations, Sassetti was also a commercial writer of the highest caliber—at once an original thinker and a remarkable witness to how Europeans even at the margins of empire were beginning to reconceptualize power and wealth. Unique among commercial theorists of the period, Sassetti offers a first-hand perspective on commerce in both the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. This volume translates (for the first time) the Discourse on Mediterranean Trade and a selection of the principal Indian Letters, with extensive historical notes. These are preceded by a lengthy essay positioning Sassetti as a figure in late Renaissance political economy. It makes the case that Sassetti was an early theorist of what might be termed the pragmatic tradition of free trade—in his case, a project linked to his analysis of commercial institutions in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Provoking an invaluable overview of trade in the Indian Ocean in the late sixteenth century, this volume is an excellent specialist text for postgraduate students and professional historians.

Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean
Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean

Author: Giulia Delogu

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-12

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1040093493

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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.

A Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1613)
A Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1613)

Author: Antonio Serra

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 085728973X

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Although no less an authority than Joseph A. Schumpeter proclaimed that Antonio Serra was the world's first economist, he remains something of a dark horse of economic historiography. 'A 'Short Treatise' on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations' presents, for the first time, an English translation of Serra's 'Breve Trattato' (1613), one of the most famous tracts in the history of political economy. The treatise is accompanied by Sophus A. Reinert's illuminating introduction which explores its historical context, reception, and relevance for current concerns.

The Ottoman Age of Exploration
The Ottoman Age of Exploration

Author: Giancarlo Casale

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-02-25

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0199798796

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In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim "the Grim" conquered Egypt and brought his empire for the first time in history into direct contact with the trading world of the Indian Ocean. During the decades that followed, the Ottomans became progressively more engaged in the affairs of this vast and previously unfamiliar region, eventually to the point of launching a systematic ideological, military and commercial challenge to the Portuguese Empire, their main rival for control of the lucrative trade routes of maritime Asia. The Ottoman Age of Exploration is the first comprehensive historical account of this century-long struggle for global dominance, a struggle that raged from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Malacca, and from the interior of Africa to the steppes of Central Asia. Based on extensive research in the archives of Turkey and Portugal, as well as materials written on three continents and in a half dozen languages, it presents an unprecedented picture of the global reach of the Ottoman state during the sixteenth century. It does so through a dramatic recounting of the lives of sultans and viziers, spies, corsairs, soldiers-of-fortune, and women from the imperial harem. Challenging traditional narratives of Western dominance, it argues that the Ottomans were not only active participants in the Age of Exploration, but ultimately bested the Portuguese in the game of global politics by using sea power, dynastic prestige, and commercial savoir faire to create their own imperial dominion throughout the Indian Ocean.

Assembling the Tropics
Assembling the Tropics

Author: Hugh Cagle

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-09-06

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1107196639

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This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.

Commercial Cosmopolitanism?
Commercial Cosmopolitanism?

Author: Felicia Gottmann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 100035380X

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This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period. Cosmopolitanism is not only a philosophical ideal: for many centuries it has also been an everyday practice across the globe. The early modern era saw hitherto unprecedented levels of economic interconnectedness. States, societies, and individuals reacted with a mixture of commercial idealism and commercial anxiety, seeking at once to exploit new opportunities for growth whilst limiting its disruptive effects. In highlighting the range of commercial cosmopolitan practices that grew out of early modern globalisation, the book demonstrates that it provided robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, the kind of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ that Ulrich Beck has called for, chapters provide agency-centred evaluations of the risks and opportunities inherent in the ambiguous role of the cosmopolitan, who, often playing on and mobilising a number of identities, operated in between and outside of different established legal, social, and cultural systems. The book will be important reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of economic, global, and cultural history.

Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800
Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800

Author: Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2018-12-27

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 1438474350

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A wide-ranging consideration of early modern Muslim and Christian empires, covering the Iberian, Ottoman, and Mughal worlds, including questions of political economy, images and representations, and historiography. Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800 uses the innovative approach of “connected histories” to address a series of questions regarding the early modern world in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. The period between 1500 and 1800 was one of intense inter-imperial competition involving the Iberians, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the British, and other actors. Rather than understand these imperial entities separately, Sanjay Subrahmanyam reads their archives and texts together to show unexpected connections and refractions. He further proposes, in this set of closely argued studies, that these empires often borrowed from each other, or built their projects with knowledge of other competing visions of empire. The emphasis on connections is also crucial for an understanding of how a variety of genres of imperial and global history writing developed in the early modern world. The book moves creatively between political, economic, intellectual, and cultural themes to suggest a fresh geographical conception for the epoch. “Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the preeminent practitioner of ‘connected histories,’ offers yet another set of fascinating encounters of peoples, objects, ideas, and practices between the Ottoman, Mughal, and British empires. As always, he stays close to the archive, but is nonetheless able to spin a wonderfully imaginative web of pictures and stories. A delightful read.” — Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University

Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World
Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World

Author: Taylor & Francis Group

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-16

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780367901226

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This volume historicizes the use of the notion of self-interest that at least since Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith's theories is considered a central component of economic theory. Having in the twentieth century become one of the key-features of rational choice models, and thus is seen as an idealized trait of human behavior, self-interest has, despite Albert O. Hirschman's pivotal analysis of self-interest, only marginally been historicized. A historicization(s) of self-interest, however, offers new insights into the concept by asking why, when, for what reason and in which contexts the notion was discussed or referred to, how it was employed by contemporaries, and how the different usages developed and changed over time. This helps us to appreciate the various transformations in the perception of the notion, and also to explore how and in what ways different people at different times and in different regions reflected on or realized the act of considering what was in their best interest. The volume focuses on those different usages, knowledges, and practices concerned with self-interest in the modern Atlantic World from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, by using different approaches, including political and economic theory, actuarial science, anthropology, or the history of emotions. Offering a new perspective on a key component of Western capitalism, this is the ideal resource for researches and scholars of intellectual, political and economic history in the modern Atlantic World.