Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean

Giulia Delogu, Koen Stapelbroek, Antonio Trampus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032069289
• eBook ISBN: 9781040093542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• List of figures
• 1 The history of Mediterranean free ports as the invention of free trade?
• 2 Ports and free ports in the Old World: political economy in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (1500–1750)
• 3 What is a free port? The shaping of the concept in dictionaries, edicts, and governance
• 4 Free ports in a controlled market: Ancona, Livorno, Genoa, and Trieste in the eighteenth-century Italian grain trade
• 5 Territorial control, economic provision, and republican order: the free port of Genoa from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century
• 6 English perspectives on Genova and Livorno: rivalry and complementarity between two eighteenth-century free ports
• 7 The free port of Nice-Villefranche and Savoy maritime politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• 8 ‘Dire straits’: the free ports of Tangier and Gibraltar in the English Mediterranean
• 9 The British debate on Mediterranean free ports: Livorno, Gibraltar, and Port Mahon (1712–1783)
• 10 A ‘source of gold and prosperity’? The Neapolitan free-port debate from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century
• 11 The free port of Messina in the ancien régime: spaces, institutions, and practices
• 12 Free trade and the ghost story of the Bourbon alliance: Spain, free ports, and the Mediterranean Sea (1648–1765)
• 13 The evils of ‘beguiling Liberty’: a comparative perspective on free ports in a manuscript by Manuel María Gutiérrez (1830)
• 14 The Habsburg portchain: a decentralised empire in the eighteenth century
• 15 The evolution of the free port of Trieste from 1717 to the present
• Index