Famiglia e impresa: I Salvadori di Trento nei secoli XVII e XVIII (review)

For centuries, the Trent-Tirol regions spanning both sides of the Alps, roughly between Kufstein and Ala, were central to the commercial exchanges between Italy and the Germanic areas of Europe. This study of the economic activities of one family — the Salvadori of Trent — throws light on the nature of these activities, how they were organized, how they changed over time, and how they fit into the larger framework of European economic developments. The author bases her detailed analysis on the account books of the Salvadori family, an important family of merchant-entrepreneurs in this area for a period of several centuries. She mines these records exhaustively and to good effect.

The brothers Valentino and Isidoro Salvadori settled in Trent in the second half of the seventeenth century, when the area was beginning to recover from the economic repercussions of the Thirty Years' War. They quickly seized on the opportunities offered by the resumption of trade connecting both sides of the Alps to open up shops in Pergine, Merano, Bolzano, and elsewhere. Like most merchant-entrepreneurs of their time, they diversified by trading in many products — over 700 were listed in their inventories — and engaging in some banking activities (both currency exchange and moneylending). Yet despite this diversification, the author observes changes in the overall pattern of their activities. In the early decades of the period under study, oil from Northern Italy, salt from Hall, and, above all, acquavite and spun silk were among the most important items traded. By the 1690s oil had declined in importance and a relatively new product, tobacco, gained a larger share of the Salvadori trade. Seeing that Europeans were developing a growing taste for perfumed tobacco, the Salvadori began to manufacture the product, following a secret recipe, which turned out to be quite successful and reached markets as far away as Leipzig and Prague. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, for reasons the author does not make clear, sales across the Alps declined and finally ended in the 1780s as a result of tariffs imposed on the export of tobacco from the Trentino, which made it noncompetitive in the international market. At this point, trade in spun silk, which the Salvadori actually manufactured since the late seventeenth century, became the core of their business. Yet this too eventually came to an end as British merchants introduced water-powered silk filatures, first developed in Northern Italy, to India and China, in order to produce silk threads they could then sell in Europe at cheaper prices than those produced in the Trentino. This, in addition to war-related trade disruptions, counterproductive government tax policies, and changes in fashion with which the Salvadori could not keep up in a timely way, brought the Salvadori's silk manufacturing to an end.

In many ways, the Salvadori were a remarkable family, both traditional and innovative. Traditional in that they did not make the transition from family businesses partnerships to partnerships involving other investors, as many other families had done. Although they entered into agreements with agents who were not family members, for the Salvadori family and business were intertwined. Lorandini speculates that a benefit of their family businesses may have been that the relatively simple contractual arrangements they required reduced the transactions costs and increased the profits of their firms. The Salvadori were also traditional in the marriage and inheritance strategies they pursued — they used fideicommissum (but not primogeniture), men married women who could bring them large dowries, the women married men who could help the family rise in social and political prestige, and family members deemed superfluous entered the Church so as to minimize the fragmentation of family property.

Yet in other ways the Salvadori were innovative and flexible. They responded to opportunities and changing markets, and they learned new techniques for doing business. Although...