In this Book
- Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City
- Book
- 1991
- Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Series: The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science
summary
Winner of the American Catholic Historical Association's Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian HistoryThe master ship builders of seventeenth-century Venice formed part of what was arguably the greatest manufacturing complex in early modern Europe. As many as three thousand masters, apprentices, and laborers regularly worked in the city's enormous shipyards. This is the social history of the men and women who helped maintain not only the city's dominion over the sea but also its stability and peace. Drawing on a variety of documents that include nearly a thousand petitions from the shipbuilders to the Venetian governments as well as on parish records, inventories, and wills, Robert C. Davis offers a vivid and compelling account of these early modern workers. He explores their mentality and describes their private and public worlds (which in some ways, he argues, prefigured the factories and company towns of a later era). He uncovers the far-reaching social and cultural role played by women in this industrial community. He shows how the Venetian government formed its shipbuilders into a militia to maintain public order. And he describes the often colorful ways in which Venetians dealt with the tensions that role provoked—including officially sanctioned community fistfights on the city's bridges.The recent decision by the Italian government to return the Venetian Arsenal to civilian control has sparked renewed interest in the subject among historians. Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal offers new evidence on the ways in which large, state-run manufacturing operations furthered the industrialization process, as well as on the extent of workers' influence on the social dynamics of the early modern European city.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- pp. vii-x
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- 2. The Arsenal Worker Managers
- pp. 47-82
- 3. The Community of the Arsenalotti
- pp. 83-117
- Appendix 1. Suppliche in Venice
- pp. 181-195
- Bibliography
- pp. 255-264
Additional Information
ISBN
9780801896095
Related ISBN(s)
9780801840951, 9780801886256
MARC Record
OCLC
648637557
Pages
280
Launched on MUSE
2013-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No