In the interstices of the empires: Flemish and Italian traders in the seventeenth-century Iberian Atlantic world

• Applicant: Giorgio-Giòrs Tosco, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 549993860

In the Early Modern Age, for the first time in history, a transatlantic economy came into being. It was a violent process, ultimately predicated on conquest and slavery, which shaped the development of the world we live in today. European colonial empires have been traditionally assumed as the obvious units of analysis for the study of this phenomenon: however, as recent studies have stressed, the boundaries of these empires were extremely porous, and transnational merchant networks not only managed to cross them, but played also an essential role in their establishment and management. Even actors who came from areas outside the colonial motherlands managed to adapt to these structures, by connecting their own homelands with these imperial spaces. Their success was predicated on their successful integration in the environment in which they operated. Yet, this integration was a double-edged sword: when the imperial structures in which they had thrived were faced with economic crisis and political turmoil, these merchants were affected as well: they had to adapt to new conditions, and to face new competitors. In an international economy shaped by war and mercantilism, those actors who were not supported by a strong state were apparently doomed to fail. However, some of them managed to reinvent themselves, showing that economic and political power do not always go hand in hand: how did they do it? This project aims to answer this question by looking at the merchants from the Southern Netherlands and the Italian peninsula who operated in the Iberian Atlantic during the seventeenth century. Both groups had political and religious connections with Castille and Portugal, and they could provide those countries with capital, products and areas of expertise the latter lacked, along with a wide market for colonial products. These conditions had fostered their ascendance, but in the seventeenth century the Habsburg dominance on overseas trade was challenged by new European competitors, and both the American and the European economies underwent profound changes. I will look at different cases of merchant firms and merchant families, who operated in this sector, to see which strategies they used to adapt. My analysis will consider their forms of business organization as well as the market niches they specialized in. Its results will lead to a new view of the functioning of the Early Modern trade, less squeezed within the imperial framework, and that will reflect the actual interaction between money and power in the Early Modern world. It will also show how deeply many different regions of Europe, and not just the political cores of the colonial empires, were affected by the Atlantic economy. In addition, it will challenge the narrative of a generalized decline of Italy and the Southern Netherlands, that were not simply overtaken by their mercantilist neighbors, but found a way to adapt to the rise of a global economy even without an empire of their own.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants