At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and on the Venetian Mainland, 1400-1800 (review)

A distinguished economic historian, at his retirement, remarked to me that his field was all but extinct. An age of giants had passed, he said, and the young — seduced by more flashy and less technically demanding topics — were moving into other specialties. It is a pleasure to report that he was wrong. The archives are filling with a new generation of young, superbly skilled researchers. This volume both makes a strong case for the renewed vitality of economic history and introduces some of its leading practitioners to the extra-Italian world.

The title of the collection is, I think, provocative, or at least tongue-in-cheek. It is reminiscent of the recent White House dismissal of opposing nations as the "Old Europe": left behind, unable to keep up with the times. This, in turn, would appear to raise a traditional historiography that relegated early modern Italy — with Venice and the Veneto as emblematic of the whole — to a condition of stagnation or even decline when faced with more vigorous Atlantic economies. It is precisely that historiography which the current volume, as is the case with much revisionist economic history, seeks to refute. The position is put bluntly by Paola Lanaro in her opening essay on the state of the question, referring to recent works generally but applicable also to those included here: "Far from being conditioned by tedious historiographic myths, such as that of the rigidity of the corporative system and of the abandonment of traditional mercantile or industrial activity by the government elite, these studies have brought to light Venetian businessmen's innovative ability to look for new products, new technologies, new professionally organised systems, and new markets" (21).

Several articles presented here amply apply that argument to the businessmen, government leaders, and artisans of the Veneto and Venetian Lombardy as well. Taken as a whole, the scholars recruited by Lanaro cover most sectors of trade and manufacturing. The volume, that is, constitutes a nearly comprehensive study of the region's economy over the four centuries in question. For Venice, there are essays on wool (Andrea Mozzato), silk (Marcello Della Valentina), and glass (Francesca Trivellato), with Walter Panciera providing an overview of Venice's response to European- and worldwide economic developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the mainland, there are further essays on wool and silk (Edoardo Demo), on specialized production such as hosiery (Carlo Marco Belfanti) and ceramics (Giovanni Favero), on Venetian Lombardy (Luca Mocarelli), and on the vibrant sector of rural manufacturing (Francesco Vianello).

The authors are invariably polite and respectful of their predecessors. One does not, after all, savage such masters as Roberto Cessi, Gino Luzzatto, or Frederic Lane. But the authors are also insistent, and they bring a vast quantity of data to bear in support of their theses. Where once the vocabulary was dreary and gray (stagnation, decay, marginalization, inflexibility, resistence to change, sclerosis, obsolescence), they offer a resolutely more positive reading: "flexibility and open-mindedness" (45), "industrial vitality" (46), "considerable freedom" (117), "dynamic craft" (144), "extraordinary increase" (319). Certainly the challenges from other European economies were grave; and it is admitted from the outset that Venice had indeed lost its all-important edge as primary mediator between the West and the Levant. But the story presented here is one of successful adaptation in the face of adversity. Entrepreneurs moved out of unprofitable older industries into newer and lucrative ones, specialized in order to develop strength in niche areas, deployed new technologies to increase efficiency and keep up with changes in taste, and moved into new markets when the old ones were no longer viable. Lanaro proves the most forthright: while Venice certainly lost political influence, it did not suffer decline or even relative decline, and "remained a great city...