Early modern European economic development seen through the interaction of two major players in the Mediterranean economy: Venice and England.

In English Trade and Adventure to Russia in the Early Modern Era, Maria Salomon Arel revisits Anglo-Russian trade in first half of the seventeenth century. Drawing on largely neglected Russian and English sources, she reconstructs the history of the Muscovy Company in a period of expanding opportunities for foreigners in Russia and of tightening links between regional markets across the globe. In her strongly revisionist telling, the Company successfully rebuilt in the aftermath of the devastating Time of Troubles, securing its uniquely privileged position in the Russian market at the hands of a newly installed tsar and Romanov dynasty keen to revive the country’s decimated economy through the stimulus of foreign trade. Meanwhile, on the London end of a trade clearly deemed relevant to commercial and shipping interests increasingly dependent on Russian naval stores and invested in the Russian re-export trades to and from the Mediterranean and Asia, the Company restructured its organization and finances with crucial royal support in furtherance of the ‘public good’ and early Stuart dynastic honor. As Arel documents, by the 1630s-40s, English trade to Russia was flourishing, as seen in the growing number of Muscovy Company men active all along the Moscow-Archangel route, their substantial commercial infrastructure, extensive supply networks among a broad swath of Russian merchants and traders, and prominent role in the exploitation of monopoly trades established to fill the tsar’s coffers with specie. The picture drawn by Arel overturns a traditional narrative on the Russia trade that has relegated the English to the shadows, demonstrating the tenacity and continued development of their enterprise at the intersection of English commercial expansion, Russian economic growth, and advancing globalization processes. Taking the narrative even further, the book opens up new perspectives and research directions by pointing to an incipient link between the Russian and transatlantic markets, while shifting the lens on the Anglo-Dutch relationship in the Russia trade away from the time-worn dichotomy of cutthroat competition to a more nuanced understanding of mutual cooperation and business association between merchants on the ground, even in the face of commercial and territorial competition between nations.

This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.

Why was early modern Europe the starting point of the economic expansion which led to the Industrial Revolution? What was the state’s role in this momentous transformation? A History of States and Economic Policies in Early Modern Europe takes a comparative approach to answer these questions, demonstrating that wars, public finance and state intervention in the economy were the key elements underlying European economic dynamics of the era. Structured in two parts, the book begins by examining the central issues of the state–economy relationship, including military revolution, the fiscal state and public finance, mercantilism, the formation of commercial empires and the economic war between Britain and France in the 1700s. The second part presents a detailed comparison between the different economic policies of the most important European states, looking at their unique demographic, economic, military and institutional contexts. Taken as a whole, this work provides a valuable analysis of early modern economic history and a picture of Europe’s global position on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This book will be useful to students and researchers of economic history, early modern history and European history.

In the twilight of the Renaissance, the grand duke of Tuscany-a scion of the fabled Medici family of bankers-invited foreign merchants, artisans, and ship captains to settle in his port city of Livorno. The town quickly became one of the most bustling port cities in the Mediterranean, presenting a rich tableau of officials, merchants, mariners, and slaves. Nobody could have predicted in 1600 that their activities would contribute a chapter in the history of free trade. Yet by the late seventeenth century, the grand duke's invitation had evolved into a general program of hospitality towards foreign visitors, the liberal treatment of goods, and a model for the elimination of customs duties. Livorno was the earliest and most successful example of a free port in Europe. The story of Livorno shows the seeds of liberalism emerging, not from the studies of philosophers such as Adam Smith, but out of the nexus between commerce, politics, and identity in the early modern Mediterranean.

This open access book explores the history of risk management in medieval and early modern European maritime business, focusing particularly on 'General Average' – a mechanism by which extraordinary expenses regarding ship or cargo, incurred during a voyage to save the venture, are shared between all participants to protect equity. This volume traces the history of this risk management tool from its origins in the pre-Roman Mediterranean through to its use in the shipping sector today. Contributions range from the Islamic Mediterranean to the Low Countries, and taken together, provide a wide-ranging analysis of social, cultural, and political aspects of pre-modern maritime commerce in Europe.

Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law examines the connections that existed between merchants’ journeys, the languages they used and the development of commercial law in the context of late medieval and early modern trade. The book, edited by Stefania Gialdroni, Albrecht Cordes, Serge Dauchy, Dave De ruysscher and Heikki Pihlajamäki, takes advantage of the expertise of leading scholars in different fields of study, in particular historians, legal historians and linguists. Thanks to this transdisciplinary approach, the book offers a fresh point of view on the history of commercial law in different cultural and geographical contexts, including medieval Cairo, Pisa, Novgorod, Lübeck, early modern England, Venice, Bruges, nineteenth century Brazil and many other trading centers. Contributors are Cornelia Aust, Guido Cifoletti, Mark R. Cohen, Albrecht Cordes, Maria Fusaro, Stefania Gialdroni, Mark Häberlein, Uwe Israel, Bart Lambert, David von Mayenburg, Hanna Sonkajärvi, and Catherine Squires.

Florence in the Early Modern World offers new perspectives on this important city by exploring the broader global context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, within which the experience of Florence remains unique. By exploring the city’s relationship to its close and distant neighbours, this collection of interdisciplinary essays reveals the transnational history of Florence. The chapters orient the lenses of the most recent historiographical turns perfected in studies on Venice, Rome, Bologna, Naples, and elsewhere towards Florence. New techniques, such as digital mapping, alongside new comparisons of architectural theory and merchants in Eurasia, provide the latest perspectives about Florence’s cultural and political importance before, during, and after the Renaissance. From Florentine merchants in Egypt and India, through actual and idealized military ambitions in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, to Tuscan humanists in late medieval England, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume reveal the connections Florence held to early modern cities across the globe. This book steers away from the historical narrative of an insular Renaissance Europe and instead identifies the significance of other global influences. By using Florence as a case study to trace these connections, this volume of essays provides essential reading for students and scholars of early modern cities and the Renaissance.

This book explains how Genoese entrepreneurs transformed the structures of global trade during the second half of the seventeenth century. The author reconstructs the business network built by the Genoese merchant Domenico Grillo between the 1650s and the 1680s. Grillo’s business interests stretched from the Mediterranean to Pacific South America, traversing and joining the Spanish, Dutch, and English Atlantics. He and his associates created a new business model that was to be emulated by Dutch, French, and English traders in subsequent decades: the monopolistic asientos for the exploitation of the trans-imperial and intra-American slave trade to Spanish America. Offering a connected history of capitalism across trans-continental geographies and different empires, this book challenges established views of a period which has traditionally been interrogated from a northern European mercantile perspective. Cutting across the histories of the slave trade in the Atlantic world, early modern capitalism, and early modern empire, this study has much to offer to students and scholars interested in the agents, economic practices, and geographies of trade that do not easily fit into and therefore disrupt the traditional narratives of the Rise of the West. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

Introduction -- Early modern extraterritoriality -- Historical sociology, Marxism, and law -- Social property relations -- Ambassadors -- Consuls -- Colonial practices of jurisdictional accumulation -- Analytical crossroads : dominium, consuls, and extraterritoriality.