Commercial Networks in the Early Modern World
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EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE, FLORENCE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION EUI Working Paper HEC No. 2002/2 Commercial Networks in the Early Modern World editied by DIOGO RAMADA CURTO and ANTHONY MOLHO BADIA FIESOLANA, SAN DOMENICO (FI) All rights reserved. No part of this paper may be reproduced in any form without permission of the authors. © 2002 Diogo Ramada Curto, Anthony Molho and individual authors Printed in Italy in October 2002 European University Institute Badia Fiesolana I – 50016 San Domenico (FI) Italy CONTENTS Diogo Ramada Curto and Anthony Molho Introduction p. 3 David Hancock The Emergence of an Atlantic Network Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Case of Madeira p. 18 Francesca Trivellato Jews of Leghorn, Italians of Lisbon, and Hindus of Goa: Merchant Networks and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period p. 59 Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert Interdependence and the Collective Pursuit of Profits: Portuguese Commercial Networks in the Early Modern Atlantic p. 90 Maria Fusaro Commercial Networks of Cooperation in the Venetian Mediterranean: The English and the Greeks, a Case Study p. 121 Lucia Frattarelli Fischer Reti locali e reti internazionali degli ebrei di Livorno nel Seicento p. 148 EUI WP HEC 2002/2 Commercial Networks in the Early Modern World Introduction DIOGO RAMADA CURTO AND ANTHONY MOLHO European University Institute “Circuits et réseaux se trouvent dominés régulièrement par des groupes tenaces qui se les approprient et en interdisent l’exploitation aux autres, le cas écheant.”1 Fernand Braudel’s insight was at the heart of a small workshop on commercial networks in the early modern world that was held at the European University Institute in Florence in late October 2001. In turn, the workshop itself was part of a year-long seminar whose object was to read and reflect upon, along side a group of young researchers, Fernand Braudel’s two great works, La Méditerranée et le monde méditérranéen a l’époque de Phlippe II (1949), and Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme XVe-XVIIIe siècle (1979). The starting point of the seminar was simple enough. How can we, today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, read Braudel? What ideas, suggestions, hypotheses is it still possible to find in these two classic works that might serve as useful points of reference for an investigation of topics that were central to Braudel’s own interests? And how can this exercise contribute to a fresh approach to the study of early modern European history? For an historian engaged in the study of the Mediterranean in the late medieval and early modern centuries, and another in that of European expansion and colonial imperialism from the fifteenth century onwards, Braudel’s works appeared as a kind of vade mecum, from which, time and again, we drew the most varied themes of collaboration. From the very beginning, we thought that the seminar could proceed along two basic axes, one geographic and conceptual, the other methodological. The first was to place at the center of our inquiries the history of the Mediterranean Sea, but, along side it, to extend our discussions to the histories of other oceans in the early modern era. A comparative agenda, and the research interests of several seminar participants dictated such a widening of geographic scope. From our perspective, the history of the Mediterranean offered a splendid case for the study of the circulation of products, and people (particularly of merchants involved in long-distance trade), the encounters/confrontations of 1 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle économie et capitalisme XVe-XVIIIe siècle, tome II – Les jeux de l’échange (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979), ed. “Le Livre de Poche”, p. 165. 3 EUI WP HEC 2002/2 different cultures, and the collision of empires, most especially those of Philip II and Süleyman the Magnificent. Anyone familiar with Braudel’s works will recognize that these were central themes in his history of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. Yet, from the start it was also evident that the same topics could also be used to understand the histories of the Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, of the Indonesian Archipelago, and of the China Sea. This ambition to use the Mediterranean as a starting point to think comparatively about other intercontinental spaces was already expressed by two scholarly series published by the “Centre de Recherches Historiques” of the old “VIe Section de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes”. In fact, since the 1950’s a series entitled “Affaires et gens d’affaires” had started to illuminate attitudes, techniques, and the role of merchants, giving particularly emphasis to Italian groups, but also covering non Italian families like the Fugger, the Ruiz, or French and Portuguese houses. The imposing publication of merchant letters, dating from the last decades of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, clearly established the contrast between Genoese circuits of banking operating in Madrid and the Portuguese networks extending from India to South America.2 In another series on “Ports, routes, trafics”, Braudel and his collaborators also attempted to place the Mediterranean in a large comparative context, which encompassed the Atlantic and even went as far as the Philippines.3 In our case, it would be fairer to say that this perspective, that extended our inquiries from the Mediterranean to other Oceans and Seas, was more of a working hypothesis. It stressed the importance of a larger comparative agenda, that was formulated slowly, thanks to the works of many scholars, but that was, initially at least, inspired by “cette histoire comparée du monde qui, seule, pourrait résoudre ou, pour le moins, poser correctement nos problèmes”.4 Repeatedly we turned to the studies of Jacob van Leur, Bernard Bailyn, Irfan Habib, Kirti Chaudhuri, Ashin Das Gupta, Michael N. Pearson, Philip Curtin, Joseph Miller, Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, Denys Lombard, Christopher Bayly, Sanjay Subrahmaniam, Leonard Blussé, and others, in order to analyse their approaches, hypotheses and 2 Henri Lapeyre, Simon Ruiz et les “asientos” de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953); Idem, Une famille de marchands, les Ruiz; contribution à l’étude du commerc entre la France et l’Espagne (Paris: Armand Colin, 1955); José Gentil da Silva, Stratégie des Affaires à Lisbonne entre 1595 et 1607. Lettres marchandes des Rodrigues d’Evora et Veiga (Paris: Armand Colin, 1956); Idem, Marchandises et finances, vol. II – Lettres de Lisbonne (1563- 1578) (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1959); Idem, idem, vol. III (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1961); Felipe Ruíz Martín, Lettres marchandes échangées entre Florence et Medina del Campo (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1965). 3 Huguette and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, 1504-1650, 8 tomes (Paris: Armand Colin, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1955-1960); Frédéric Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570-1670). Etude économique (Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1960). 4 Braudel, op. cit., II, p. 146. 4 EUI WP HEC 2002/2 conclusions, to understand the vocabulary they used to convey their ideas, and to measure their findings against those of Braudel.5 The second axis of our discussions was more methodological, perhaps even epistemological. In our weekly sessions we were repeatedly struck by what seemed, at once, our proximity to and distance from Braudel’s ideas and conclusions. Surely, today, we stand rather far removed from the conceptual contexts of economic history within which Braudel had cast his own inquiry. Although today’s researchagendas have distanced themselves from these positions, they cannot avoid issues raised by cultural anthropology, and by the linguistic or cultural turn, and these, naturally, do not figure at all in Braudel’s works.6 Yet, concurrently and soon following the opening of our discussions, it became clear to everyone that one of the key insights available in our inquiries was Braudel’s idea that there is no simple linear history in the development of markets. Here was a firmly non teleological view of the relationship between the past and the present that brought Braudel very close to the sorts of historical 5 Jacob Cornelis van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: essays in Asian social and economic history, translation by James S. Holmes and A. van Marle (The Hague: W. Van Hoeve, 1955); Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979, 1st. ed. 1955); Blair B. King and Michael N. Pearson, eds., The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia before dominion (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979); Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra, eds., Companies and Trade : essays on overseas trading companies during the Ancien Régime (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1981); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean : an economic history from the rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson, eds., India and the Indian Ocean 1500-1800 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987); Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death : Merchant capitalism and the Angolan slave trade, 1730-1830 (Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Irfan Habib, “Merchant Communities in Precolonial India”, in James Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: long-distance trade in the early modern world, 1350-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 371-399; Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais: Essai d’histoire globale, 2 vols. (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1990); Christopher Bayly and S. Subrahmanyam, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India”, in Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 242-265; Roderich Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c.