D'Amico on Lanaro, ed., _At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400-1800_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (July 2007)

Paola Lanaro, editor, _At the Centre of the Old World: Trade and 
Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400-1800_. 
Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2006. 412 
pp. $32 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-7727-2031-3.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Stefano D'Amico, Department of History, Texas 
Tech University.


The eleven essays in this volume, edited by Paola Lanaro, Professor 
of History at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, represent an 
important contribution to our knowledge of the economy of the 
Venetian State in the early modern period and, more generally, to the 
debate on the Italian economic decline in the seventeenth century. 
Traditionally, Venetian economic history focused on the capital city 
and its prosperous trading activities. In the last two decades, 
however, the argument advanced by Cessi and Luzzato that commercial 
interests and the protectionist measures supported by the great 
international merchants had hindered the development of urban 
industries, has been questioned, and the role of the industrial 
sector of the economy reevaluated. New studies have also shown the 
importance of the economic development of the lesser cities of the 
mainland and their proto-industrial districts. Following these lines, 
_At the Centre of the Old World_ calls for a reexamination of the 
economic history of Venice and Veneto from the fifteenth to the 
eighteenth centuries, focusing on the interaction between the capital 
city and its dominions, and their successful attempt to adjust to the 
changing European economy.

The volume is divided into two parts, the first analyzes the economy 
of Venice, and the second that of other centers and areas of the 
mainland. Paola Lanaro's introductory essay very clearly and 
effectively discusses the historiography on Venetian economic history 
and the new directions of research. The analysis of the Venetian 
economy is opened by an essay by Andrea Mozzato, who demonstrates 
convincingly how wool manufacturing did not develop only in the 
sixteenth century when commercial opportunities declined, but was 
already prosperous in the previous century. Mozzato argues that the 
industrial sector actually took advantage of Venice's commercial 
power, which could easily provide raw materials and sell the finished 
products on international markets. Marcello Della Valentina examines 
the organization of the urban silk industry in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, stressing a flexibility that allowed it to 
adjust to the changing market and to remain competitive. Fewer high 
quality cloths were woven and Lyons fabrics were copied and exported 
to the East where Venice still enjoyed an undisputed supremacy. At 
the same time, cheap female labor gradually replaced that of guild 
workers. Although they were unable to innovate in terms of technology 
and fashion, trade guilds never opposed the introduction of technical 
innovations or foreign technicians and weavers and were able to adapt 
to an evolving market.

Francesca Trivellato examines a similar flexibility in the Murano 
glass industry which, facing competition in crystal glass by northern 
European countries, moved to Venice and employed women in bead 
manufacturing and immigrants from Friuli in the production of 
small-size mirrors. Glass beads were shipped to the Levant and 
Western Europe for re-export to the colonies, while mirror plates 
were sold mainly to the Italian market. In a more general essay on 
the industries of Venice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 
Walter Panciera argues that the urban economy was remarkably 
resilient. In the eighteenth century, besides the glass industry, new 
manufactures, like printing, chemistry and cotton, were able to 
flourish. In the more traditional textile sector, silk replaced wool, 
which did not disappear, but was simply transferred to the 
Terraferma. Panciera stresses that, the economy of Venice cannot be 
considered separately from the economy of the rest of the Veneto, 
especially starting from the seventeenth century.

The first essay of the second section, by Edoardo Demo, examines the 
urban textile industry of the Venetian mainland between the fifteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. Demo effectively shows how this area 
represented one of the most important European industrial regions 
during this period. A growing sericulture counterbalanced the decline 
of the wool industry, and the latter still flourished in Bergamo and 
in many centers of the foothills area like Schio and Valdagno. 
Francesco Vianello explains how the crisis of the 1590s led either to 
the beginning of or to an acceleration of the processes of 
territorial diversification and specialization for rural manufactures 
in the area of Vicenza, Padova and Treviso. Carlo Marco Belfanti 
focuses on hosiery manufacturing stressing its resilience and its 
growing role in the textile market, while Giovanni Favero illustrates 
the contribution to the regional economy of the new factories of fine 
majolica in small and medium sized towns of the mainland, such as 
Bassano, since the early eighteenth century.

Luca Mocarelli studies the case of Venetian Lombardy which, in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, became one of the more lively 
European economic districts. Bergamo and Brescia could count on their 
privileged economic relations with both Venice and Milan and 
developed important wool, iron, paper and silk manufactures. At the 
end of the eighteenth century they produced 10 percent of Italian 
thrown silk.

In the conclusion to the volume, Maurice Aymard stresses not only the 
flexibility and adaptability of Venice to variations in demand, 
products and techniques, but also the creation of a new economy for 
the region, whose resources were used more effectively. The Venetian 
case clearly illustrates how in pre-modern Europe "the growth of the 
urban sector, and especially of the largest city, can no longer be 
considered ... as the only indicator of the vitality of an economy" 
(p. 369).

The eleven essays successfully synthesize the most recent trends in 
the economic history of early modern Italy. They represent an 
invitation to historians to continue the analysis of the countryside 
and the rural industries, whose role -- especially after the 
seventeenth century -- became essential; and at the same time, to 
reevaluate the role of the urban economies and their ability to 
adjust to the new trends due to a flexible productive organization 
that was not always hindered by and in some cases even favored by the 
presence of the guilds. As Francesca Trivellato writes in her essay, 
the guilds "in the hands of capable entrepreneurs ... became 
malleable tools of winning short- and medium-term economic 
strategies" (p. 145).

However, more than in the importance of the single contributions, the 
value of the volume lays in the successful attempt of providing for 
the first time an analysis of the economy of a large and important 
Italian region, and to study its development within the Italian and 
European contexts. Hopefully other regional syntheses will soon 
follow this model, allowing us to reach a better understanding of the 
characteristics and transformations of the Italian economy in the 
early modern period.


Stefano D'Amico is Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech 
University. He is the author of a book and several articles on the 
social and economic history of Milan in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries. He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled 
_A City within the Empire: Spanish Milan, 1535-1706_.

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