Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean by Junko Takeda (review)

The centrality of Marseille to France’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Levantine trade, and to the economic health of the kingdom as a whole, can hardly be overstated. In her insightful and well-researched study, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean, Junko Takeda explores the political culture of this highly commercial city with a long republican tradition during the high age of absolutism. Focused on roughly the era from Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s ministry through the Great Plague of 1720–1723, Takeda’s study demonstrates the importance of the local context in shaping political discourse and in recognizing that the discourses more commonly studied through theoretical texts have significant origins in practical political engagements.

The book divides around two central themes. In the first three chapters, Takeda develops a marvelous argument that explains how the Marseillais commercial elite formed a “commercial civic spirit” that reconciled a republican sensibility with commercial activity. Despite classical republicanism’s long distrust of commercial activity as promoting private interest to the detriment of the public good, Takeda demonstrates that within correspondence with administrative officials and within the work of city historians, the commercial elite established “favorable views of merchant public engagement expressed through the combined use of the classical republican idiom of virtue, the noble language of honor, and the new statist vocabulary of utility.” She develops this argument with a careful study of the debates and discussions over the new municipal administration and royal supervision of commercial activity early in 1660s. Through these debates and discussions, municipal merchant deputies and royal councilors of state “found ways to synchronize civic and absolutist concepts of deriving the public good.” She furthers this analysis through a study of the aristocratic acceptance of commercial expansion as evidenced in the writings of local antiquarians and historians and a study of the reaction to Colbert’s recruitment of foreign professionals to Marseille. Through these topics, Takeda adds perceptively to issues as diverse as classical Republicanism’s distrust of luxury to French Orientalism to views toward non-Christian trading partners in the Levant. As Takeda points out, the tensions between aristocrats and wholesale merchants, between municipal goals and the royal will, and between the Marseillais and those defined as others continued throughout the era, but growing trade, and with it prosperity, encouraged all parties to tolerate their differences.

The book’s second theme, which shapes the final three chapters, focuses on how the arrival of the plague in 1720 undermined the accord achieved over the previous sixty years. The effort to coordinate response to the plague led the royal state to increasingly intervene in local affairs. This extension of royal authority was justified, in part, by reviving republican discourses that viewed commercial activity as self-interested and dangerous to the public good—an argument with particular power in the face of the devastation that arrived through commercial activity. Similarly, religious explanations of the arrival of the plague were revived, focused on immorality that was inspired by commercial excesses and the religious heterodoxy practiced by foreign merchants in Marseille. Religious leaders called for the community to eliminate such evils. Through these topics, Takeda offers numerous insights into the relationship between discussions over the plague and civic republicanism, practices of quarantine, prostitution as an aspect of commercial society, and Jansenism. Takeda concludes with a final chapter that discusses the return to normalcy as the plague passed, but which asserts that the memory of the plague and the arguments developed in opposition to commerce in its wake revived an opposition to commerce that continued to serve as a restraint to those who promoted trade.

Takeda’s finely developed argument enters into numerous topics as she follows the issues and evidence wherever they lead. The focus on Marseille and its commerce with the Levant does limit consideration of the state’s broader efforts to sustain the Levantine trade during...