Ida Fazio Women and Men in Illicit Trades Between the Kingdom Of
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Ida Fazio Women and men in illicit trades between the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples during the commercial crisis of the Continental Blockade and the Napoleonic wars (Stromboli, 1808-1816) This paper focuses on men and women, given their position in the household economy, in their participation in illicit trade carried out on the small Sicilian island of Stromboli (one of the seven islands of the Aeolian Archipelago, which was part of the Kingdom of Sicily) during the years of the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815) and Continental Blockade (1806-1814). I will address some hypotheses on the impact that the ensuing international crisis in legal trade involving the warring European states in the Mediterranean had on the local economy, which combined fishing and agricultural activities on a family basis. The Blockade prohibited English ships from docking in French or allied ports, and vice versa, and trade between France and England and their respective allies was forbidden.1 This was a drastic blow to international trade2 and illicit trade developed in Europe in an attempt to circumvent the prohibitions.3 Illicit trade flourished also on Stromboli, and the island, due to its position on the border between the two fronts (the Kingdom of Sicily allied to England and the Kingdom of Naples under the domination of France), became a favored place for smuggling and illegal sale of privateer’s prize goods who, during the war, authorized by the states’ governments, attacked ships flying the enemy flag. The hypothesis here proposed is that the international trade crisis was an additional resource for Stromboli and its inhabitants (who had gradually populated the island just during the previous century) as it was a chance to integrate itself into the network of maritime traffic that up until then had been dominated by the two biggest islands of the archipelago, Lipari and Salina. The war and the Continental Blockade deeply shook international trading and the institutions which regulated and controlled it in the entire Mediterranean, thus making the island a highly strategic location between the fighting kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, the former being allied to France and governed first by Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother and then by his brother-in-law, and the latter allied to England. The English protectorate in Sicily opened the way to nearly a century of development of maritime trade for the whole archipelago, and the Blockade was an opportunity to fully integrate the relatively new economic and social fabric of Stromboli into the international commercial network, in which, according to the most recent historiography, licit and illicit trade did not contrast one another, but rather coexisted as complementary forms of trade. This paper will highlight, first of all, the importance of illegal trade during the Continental Blockade in the entire area of the lower Tyrrhenian Sea, along with the reform of the institutions which controlled them (Customs, Health, Prize Courts) in the years of the turn of the century, and at a local level. Subsequently, as there are no sources or testimonies on the economy of Stromboli before the beginning of the Nineteenth century, the roles of men and women in the island’s household economy of agriculture and fishing will be detailed as emerges from the earliest accounts from the Nineteenth century. Finally, I will analyse the differences between their roles in two different types of illegal trade which flourished in Stromboli during the international crisis of legal sea trades of the Napoleonic period: traffic in prize goods and salt smuggling. The results of two judiciary inquiries that I will be taking into consideration show how the roles of men and women, heavily integrated into, and often overlapping in household economies based on agriculture and fishing, were instead different in illegal trading. From the two judicial inquires carried out by the government to defeat salt smuggling and the illegal sale of prize goods, indeed, it emerges that the women in Stromboli were fully involved in minor traffic associated with fraudulent sale of prize goods but were excluded from large smuggling operations, in terms of quantity, value of goods and connivance with the institutions. Thus, the household economy seems to have coped with the crisis of the Continental blockade using it as an additional resource, showing however a significant asymmetry between male and female roles in illicit trades, while women had an active position in other household economic activities. The subject matter of this study, therefore, also involves the question of the position of women in the family economy in Mediterranean Europe between the early modern and modern ages. Historiographic debate has discussed and criticized the paradigm of women’s exclusion from extra-domestic work because of the “honour-shame complex”, which was a strong point of “Mediterranean anthropology” that in the years after World War II and in the 1960s undertook studies that influenced the social history of communities of southern Italy.4 Some criticisms have been raised against this interpretation by women historians and anthropologists regarding agricultural and urban work and the history of the family,5 but no analysis has been carried out yet with regard to informal trade, where sources of information are more fragmented, dispersed throughout various archives, from notarial to judiciary documentation. An analysis of the role of men and women in illegal trading during a commercial, diplomatic and military crisis in an apparently peripheral context - while actually a very important traffic intersection - may show how women’s involvement has suffered from some gender associated asymmetry in a context where in effect women’s work outside the home was important. Illicit activities and fraudulent practices in the Mediterranean between the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily: privateer prize and smuggling. Before examining the case of illicit trades on the island of Stromboli, it might to helpful to outline the geo-political context and the historiographical analyses that have set the phenomenon of illicit traffic in the period of the Napoleonic wars and the ensuing trade crisis in the maritime field which the island belongs to: the ports, the Mediterranean coasts and islands, and, in particular, the southern Tyrrhenian sea. Ports and islands are particularly suitable for illicit trade, and some of these areas even specialized in trade tied to fraud and smuggling during the Ancien Régime.6 Thus, ports and islands become excellent places to study the modalities through which local communities became part of vast commercial circuits, bypassing institutions and regulations, and connecting different strata and actors belonging to asymmetrical social, cultural and institutional spheres: labourers and ruling classes, officials and simple citizens, men and women. Events such as wars, revolutions, and institutional changes, with all the consequent radical alterations in the productive and commercial fabric, accelerate and intensify these practices,7 and this also happened on Stromboli. According to Anne Montenach,8 illicit activities and fraudulent practices arise in a significant way precisely in periods of crises, as they offer versatile solutions for most of the population. Fraud was, in fact, a factor which introduced flexibility into an economy of the Ancien Régime where the actors were forced to operate in a permanent state of uncertainty.9 Studies by Silvia Marzagalli10 have underlined how, in Europe in the years of the Continental Blockade and the Napoleonic Wars, there was a turning point when fraud and smuggling – which involved the leading players of the “great trades”, together with the informal economy of harbour, costal and island populations – intensified. Marzagalli shows that sea merchants and businessmen reacted to the crisis of legal sea trade carried out under national flags through the use of neutral ships, alternative routes and smuggling, and that this was a consolidated practice of the time in Europe. As Biagio Salvemini wrote, “active trade”, a source of ‘Public Happiness’ continued to be looked for with every means possible in times in which bureaucracy and war promoted it and at the same time hampered it.11 During the Anglo-Napoleonic war and the Continental Blockade,12 the southern Tyrrhenian Sea between Calabria (the most southern region of the Kingdom of Naples) and the Kingdom of Sicily, where the Aeolian islands, which Stromboli is part of, are located, was a geopolitical and economic area in which these dynamics played out. Fraud and smuggling intensified, carried out in different ways and with different roles by actors from various spheres of society and institutions: coastal communities, local officials, high-ranking representatives of the institutions, and merchants of different kinds and calibre. Illicit forms of economy on the borders were deeply intertwined with licit trades, in a system of negotiations between the actors of economic networks in a phase of rapidly changing rules and institutions as in times of war. Research carried out by Marc Heurgon in the 1960s on smuggling precisely in the area of the Strait of Messina and of the Aeolian islands, highlights this with great clarity. ‘To the entrance of the French into Naples, 14th February 1807, the British replied with their first landing in Sicily on the 16th. This is the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (sic) 13 which became a high stake in the Franco-British struggle; in the eight years to follow it was to be cut in two; in Naples and Palermo two rival dynasties were installed, both subject to foreign domination. Initially, the breach between the two regions was total, and economic exchanges were reduced to nothing. Once installed in Naples, Joseph Bonaparte introduced imperial decrees which closed the Continent to British products. On his part, Ferdinand I established a blockade for all ports not occupied by Anglo-Sicilians. […] From then on, the Strait of Messina lost its function as an important commercial way becoming a frontier-trench, on whose banks the opposing armies were positioned in battle array.