The grain trade and minorities in the early modern Italian Peninsula and beyond: An introduction

Abstract

This paper introduces the Special Issue ‘Minorities and Grain Trade in Early Modern Europe’. While an area’s traditional supply circuits benefitted from satisfactory harvests and a stable food demand, minorities’ contribution became crucial during crisis. Due to their commercial networks, facilities, and capital, minorities and their agents were able to cope with market disruption, especially when inflation and the reconfiguration of supply areas rendered ‘traditional’ grain merchants unable to face the emergency. The papers included in the Special Issue focus on the geographical and financial scope of legal grain-trading minorities’ businesses and their degree of specialisation and analyse how political authorities’ reliance on minorities to face food scarcity not only represented an economic opportunity for minorities but also contributed to shaping their relationship with public authorities.

Keywords:

• Economic history
• history of minorities
• grain market
• early modern history
• Mediterranean history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 State Archives of Venice, Duke of Candia, b. 73, f. 3v. On the siege of Candia, see Ongaro (2017). On the grain trade in Acri, see Philipp (2001).

2 Above all, Steven L. Kaplan’s research, especially his well-known 1984 work. See also Braudel (1982), Meuvret (1956, 1977), Romano (1956), and Aymard (1966).

3 On the specific characterization of ports in the context of the international grain market and especially on the fact of being part of a far more integrated market in comparison with inland cities, see Chilosi et al. (2013, p. 47).

4 The research on the role of economic information is extensive, but here, we limit ourselves to recalling, with reference to the territory this special issue considers, Jeannin (2001), Baghdiantz McCabe (2005), Buti and Kaiser (2007), Salvemini and Kaiser (2007), and Margairaz and Minard (2008).

5 On ‘crooked’ commercial transactions, see Salvemini and Kaiser (2007), Salvemini (2006), and Monge and Muchnik (2022, pp. 213–252).

6 On Abravanel, who later moved to Ferrara, see Leoni (1997, 2011, pp. 116–118, 329–356).

7 For example, Duarte Vargas, in 1552, chartered a ship anchored in the port of Ancona to transport a large quantity of grain to Ferrara, 78 salme (Leoni, 2011, p. 887).

8 Jews in the Republic of San Marino, another area bordering the Papal States, also seemed to be involved in the grain trade (Gasperoni, 2010, p. 42).

9 Particular attention was paid to those foods in the preparation of which the Jewish culture was the most prominent, thus creating the danger, according to the religious authorities, of physical and religious contact (milk and dairy products, unleavened bread, meat); see Toaff (1996, pp. 84–87; 2000, pp. 145–147). The idea of contagiousness and danger regarding the Jews, with an overlap between theology and materiality, has medieval origins (Coulet, 1978; Kriegel, 1976; Soussen, 2017).

10 According to Cohen (2008), we can identify five types of diasporas: trade and business diasporas (probably the most interesting in our case), (classical) victim diasporas, cultural diasporas, labour and imperial diasporas, and global de-territorialized diasporas.

11 On the importance of trust in and the risks associated with the construction of commercial networks, see Hancock’s (2005).

12 Specifically, on the relationship between the creation of free ports and the functioning of the grain market in the eighteenth century, see Ongaro (2022).

13 On the use of the term ‘Levantiner’, see Rothman (2012) and Schmitt (2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luca Andreoni

Giulio Ongaro is a researcher in economic history at the University of Milan – Bicocca. He obtained a PhD in economic history at the University of Verona with a thesis on the construction of the Venetian military structure in the Mainland Dominion and the effects on local public budgets. His current researches focus on the functioning of the grain market in Eighteenth century Italy and Europe, especially in terms of market integration and behaviour of the economic players (merchants, producers and public institutions). His interests involve also Early Modern rural history, agrarian history, and labour history. His latest publications include Managing Abundance: Victualing Offices and Cereal Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Ferrara, in L. Clerici (ed.), Italian victualling systems in the Early Modern Age, 16th to 18th century (2021) and The 19th century in the Lombard Alps: The unfulfilled promise of industrialization, (with Luca Mocarelli and Paolo Tedeschi), «Journal of Agrarian Change», 21/3 (2021).

David Do Paço

Luca Andreoni is a researcher in Economic History at the Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona. He holds a PhD from the Scuola Superiore di Studi Storici of the Università di San Marino. His interests involve rural history and social and economic history of minorities. His publications include “Una nazione in commercio”. Ebrei di Ancona, traffici adriatici e pratiche mercantili in età moderna (Milan 2019); Oilseed Cakes in Italy and France: Opportunities and Difficulties of a Market (late 19th and first half of the 20th Century), «Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte», 62/1 (2021).

Luca Mocarelli

David Do Paço is a visiting scholar at the Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, and a British Library’s Eccles Centre fellow. He earned his PhD in history in 2012 from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne after researching the Ottoman commercial-cumpolitical milieu in 18th-­century Vienna. In 2015 he published his first monograph L’Orient à Vienne au dix-huitième siècle within the “Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment”. Do Paço successively served at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the EUI, Sciences Po, and Columbia University, where, in 2021 he was the István Deák Visiting Professor in East-Central European Studies. He was also a CEU-IAS (2016) and a NEC (2022) fellow. He developed research in urban studies, trans-imperial history, international history, and the history of material culture. He contributed to putting the history of Muslims in Europe on the early modern historical research agenda. He ran the Sciences Po departmental seminar in European history (2019-21), published in high-profile journals such as The Historical Journal, or Urban History, and now contributes to collective projects like the Cambridge History of the Habsburg Monarchy (vol. 1) and the Cambridge History of the Mediterranean (vol. 3). He cocreated and now co-edits the Brepols Publishers series “Histories in Motion: People, Images, Objects, Ideas (15th-19th centuries)”. He is currently working on a second monograph that explores the history of 18th-century Trieste and investigates the governance of trans-imperial societies.

Giulio Ongaro

Luca Mocarelli full Professor of Economic History at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where since 2018 he is also the President of the School of Economics. He is a member of the Management Committee of the International Association for Alpine History and of the Italian Association for Urban History. He is also a founding member of the association “RESPro Rete di storici per i paesaggi della produzione”. He published more than 150 scientific publications, including seven books and edited books with top Italian and international publishers. He collaborates with numerous national and international research teams, being also the reviewer of research projects for the Italian Ministry of University, the Swiss National Research Fund, and the Dutch Research Fundation. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of many reviews of economic and social history, besides reviewing articles for the top journals in the field. Finally, he founded and he is the Director of the Master “Food and Society” at the University of Milano-Bicocca, he is a founding member of the research center “Urban genoma” and he collaborates with the “Fondazione Feltrinelli” also for the curatorship of the exhibition “Il progresso inconsapevole. Gli impatti sociali delle rivoluzioni industriali”.