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

This collection of essays seeks to "disprove old historiographic myths and open new comparative vistas" (21). The main myth is the long- debated decline of Venice as an international trading and naval power of the first rank. This problem has become entangled with other areas of research. Venice was a rich state in northeastern Italy, including fertile agricultural lands in the Po valley and important manufacturing towns like Verona and Bergamo. Prosperous local farming and handicraft production, both in Venice and on the terrafirma, might have compensated for colonial losses and increased competition in Mediterranean luxury trades. Braudel and Lane were among the first to postpone the alleged decline of commercial Venice into the later seventeenth century.¹ Students of manufacturing in Venice (eventually including Braudel) and on the mainland have been researching the glass, silk, wool, and ceramics industries for signs of economic vibrancy.

The authors of these essays are not interested in agriculture but doubt that it was the engine for Venetian economic prosperity during these centuries. If Europe were to have witnessed an industrial revolution during the fifteenth century, Venice, with its patent and copyright laws, famous Arsenal, access to capital and markets, sophisticated banking networks, and more, might have led the way. It did not happen, however, and the common aim of these scholars is to explain how various local industries ran out of steam.

This book consists of an introduction to Venetian economic history by Lanaro, four essays on manufacturing in Venice, five essays on mainland industries, and some astute conclusions by Maurice Aymard. Gaps are developing among the ways in which Italian, English, and Dutch economic historians pose major questions in their fields and then try to answer them. What they have in common is a rich archival base on which to generate statistical information, and a common access to recent theoretical work seeking to enrich economic history through game theory and other models derived from political science and psychology (to name two of the many disciplines from which economic historians are currently learning).

No reader of early modern English economic history can be unfamiliar with debates swirling around the chronology and pace of industrialization, and the effects of this development on the standard of living of those people who lived through the economic changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Modeling industrialization has depended on increasingly sophisticated data bases and econometrics used to explore connections and even to consider counterfactual models that illuminate various paths to development. These debates and issues concerning the wealth and poverty of nations and peoples, as well as the effects of colonial trade and protectionism, resulted from an interdisciplinary approach.

Some readers may lament the passing of an older style of economic history that relied on impression and anecdote, with no statistics and tables—indeed, no equation in sight. This volume will feed that nostalgia for a simpler past. Half of the essays contain no tables of any kind, and the other five essays supply eighteen tables that simply record numbers of looms, people, textile production, or other bare facts. None of these essays notes a regression analysis, Gini coefficient, or even estimates of prevailing wage rates or the cost of living in the Veneto.