A galleon sails into the mouth of the Amazon river. Then it proceeds northwards, hugging the coast, until it reaches the island of Trinidad and then sails back across the Atlantic. A group of interlopers finds an agreement with some ambitious political entrepreneurs of a foreign country, in order to set up an East India Company, but their vessels are eventually captured by their Dutch competitors and brought to Batavia, nowadays Jakarta. The same investors then direct their activity to Brazil. A few years afterwards, in a palace of a European capital, a group of seasoned merchants and bureaucrats discusses whether it will be more advantageous to trade with India or with South America.
These brief, summarized vignettes look probably familiar to every scholar of the Early Modern globalization. They could be taken from the description of the beginning of many colonization ventures, and refer equally well to actors originating from different European countries, from France or England, from Portugal or Denmark: in any case, from the places on the Atlantic littoral of the continent, which played a central role in the Early Modern processes of “European expansion and indigenous response”. However, here they refer to actions made by two states of the Italian peninsula, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Republic of Genoa.
Both countries were relatively small, with a population smaller than a million inhabitants at the time. The Republic of Genoa was comprised by the rugged coastline that stretched east and west of its capital, with the exception of some foreign exclaves. It also comprised the island of Corsica, and a small strip of land that connected Genoa to the Po Valley up north. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany, with a roughly triangular form, was surrounded on almost all sides by the Appennines and the Tyrrhenian Sea, except to an area on the south where hills and malaric swamps ran along its border with the Papal States. With the notable exception of Corsica, both countries roughly correspond to the current territory of two administrative divisions of the Italian state, the regioni of Liguria and Tuscany. After the sixteenth century, both countries were bulwarks of Counter-Reformation Catholic orthodoxy, and were firmly inserted in an international order shaped by Habsburg Spain: Genoa in a more subservient position, while Tuscany occasionally pursued a more independent line. On the European scale, neither state held any significant military or political power, but things were different, as far as the economy was concerned.
Both countries had an old, strong and prestigious commercial tradition, and their capitals, Genoa and Florence, had been among the leading centers of the Mediterranean and European economy in the low Middle Ages. By the
This was not for lack of trying, however. At some moments in time, throughout the seventeenth century, both states developed and partially implemented plans, with the objective to have Tuscan and Genoese ships sail overseas. In Tuscany, the Grand Duke Ferdinand I (1587–1609) commissioned different projects, and eventually ordered an expedition to the Amazon, which arrived back to Tuscany only after his death. Some decades later, his successor Cosimo III (1670–1723) presided over some negotiations with Portugal, that had the objective of developing a Tuscan trading company overseas. Meanwhile, in Genoa, an East India Company (1647–1653), and another joint-stock company under the name of Saint George (1653–1668), had launched some trading expeditions.
These enterprises have been often viewed as little more than objects of antiquarian curiosity: an amusing aberration of a history that followed a totally divergent path. Some of them also had their share of nationalist reinterpretation, as supposedly distant origins of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian colonialism. More generally, however, they have been utterly neglected until very recently, when the “global turn” of historiography has led scholars to look for trans-national connections in environments which had been studied, until then, under a rather local perspective. They have never been the object of a comparative study, however. The present book is not only the broadest and most complete – for the moment – study of these episodes, but it is also the only one that considers both the Genoese and the Tuscan ones, as a single object of inquiry.
My objective is not simply to fill a historiographical gap. The assumption that has led my study is that minor episodes, from an unlikely environment, can offer us a perspective that might be missed in a longer and more studied history, and that the failed expansion of Genoa and Tuscany can teach us something about European expansion more generally. In this book, I will analyze how projects were drafted, discussed, and implemented, how much a trading policy was influenced by the requirements of foreign and internal politics, and how much by the needs of individual merchants. To put it briefly, how
In order to follow this story, I had to combine different kinds of sources. On the one hand, of course, Italian documents could only lead me so far, as I studied examples of processes that played out on a global scale. Even though my analysis of issues related to Asian or Atlantic history relies on secondary literature, I still had to integrate the pieces of evidence that I had collected in the Italian archives with some information that came from European countries that controlled access to overseas trade at the time, in Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. On the other hand, as I considered both private and public actors, I combined the view that I gathered from public records, which are the easiest to find and process, with documents more closely related to the business interests of some of the people I studied, in notarial records or private family archives. This approach contrasts with the existing literature on these episodes of commercial policy, which tends to focus on the role played by Tuscan and Genoese state institutions, and therefore mainly uses documents produced by those administrations. Readers will judge for themselves how aptly, or poorly, I have managed to combine all these different kinds of sources, but I think nevertheless that the idea of connecting them was sound: any shortcomings might be due to my own personal mistakes, but do not disprove the validity of the approach I have followed.
This book is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, the Introduction, I expose the state of the present scholarship on the issue of the relations between states and merchants in the contexts of trans-oceanic trade, Early Modern Genoa, and Early Modern Tuscany. I also argue why it is worthwhile to study attempts at overseas expansion that never really took off, and I frame my work as an example of comparative global microhistory. This chapter is relatively long, as the present book has been mainly written for two different categories of readers, those who are interested in Early Modern European presence overseas on the one hand, and in Early Modern Italy on the other. The two groups do not often overlap, so I inserted enough background information to make the text accessible to both.
The following three chapters have a more narrative character: they describe the different projects, discussions, and enterprises that are the object of this