The Global History of the Free Port

ABSTRACT

This article sketches a new, integrated history of the free port from the late sixteenth to the mid twentieth century. It lays out the historiographical problems associated with the free port, ranging from how to conceptualise the form and function of the institution and the uses to which it has been put, to situating its place within liberal political economy. The starting point for making sense of the free port is to trace the history of its paradigmatic cases, studying not only key models such as Livorno, Hamburg, or Singapore; but also how contemporaries discussed, appropriated, and adapted them. It then turns to do just that, reconstructing the defining moments in the history of the free port: from the Mediterranean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Caribbean in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century; Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; East Asia during the nineteenth century; and the entire globe in the twentieth century, when the free port was increasingly subsumed by a host of other spatial arrangements, such as the special economic zone. The conclusion considers what the free port indicates about the history of global capitalism and its relationship to European history and imperialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Free ports
• free trade zones
• special economic zones
• decolonisation
• imperialism
• liberalism

1. Introduction: A Fit of Absence of Mind

‘Do you know what a freeport is?’ asks the heroine Kat in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020). The scene shifts to a sleek, hypermodernist facility at the Oslo airport while a voice-over explains that a freeport is a kind of tax-haven in which clients can house their artistic investments without paying import or export dues. ‘Sort of a transit lounge for art?’ one of the characters suggests. ‘Art, antiques, anything of value’, replies Kat, ‘anything legal … ’. In fact, the freeport is more than a transit lounge: it is a place where deposited items may be left to appreciate indefinitely and eventually sold without paying the dues that ordinarily attend the sale and movement of goods. It thus figures in a logic of global capitalism that Tenet captures through its depiction of exotic locales (Kyiv, Naples, Vietnam, Mumbai), posh modes of transport (private planes, helicopters, yachts), and temporal inversions in which the manipulation of time becomes a means of exercising power. As a form of capital accumulation available only to the ultrarich and involving peculiar policy arrangements, the freeport bears an uneasy relationship with the egalitarian norms of democracies as well as with the uniformity of space in the modern state. The heroes of Tenet must use the freeport to save the world from the freeport – and from a future that is constantly threatening to invade the present.¹

The freeport is a kind of special economic zone, although it is not always classified as such. As a catchall term, the SEZ encompasses well-known types such as free trade zones and export processing zones as well as more specialised variants, such as zones geared toward real estate development; it also encompasses a wide variety of spatial and locational variants, from vast industrial parks to miniscule duty-free shops. SEZs are found all over the world, in countries at every level of economic development, although they are especially abundant in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.² The ubiquity as well as the sheer number of SEZs indicates that they are a critical part of the infrastructure of modern-day global capitalism. At a systemic level, therefore, the exceptionalism that the language implies is nothing of the sort. Instead, the exceptional character resides in the fact that both the freeport and the SEZ create a spatial abstraction from the fiscal and administrative framework governing the host territory; they are deployed not only because firms seek exemptions from burdensome rules, but also because states have embraced them as pathways of development and control. The SEZ is the public face of capital accumulation in comparison to the private face represented by the freeport, but both exploit a similar logic.

For all their undeniable air of contemporaneity, both the freeport and the SEZ have a longer and more complex place within political economy than potted histories of neoliberalism would allow. The word freeport is itself a descendant of an older term, free port, which in its various incarnations (ranging from the Italian porto franco to the Spanish puerto libre) has been a term of art in political economy since the seventeenth century. Some ports, such as Marseille, were called free ports by their creators, but did not function as such in the eyes of most observers. Other paradigmatic free ports never got the official label, but their policies and practices were recognised as such. The language surrounding the free port is as complex as the institution itself and constitutes a historiographical problem in its own right, as we shall see. Rather than dwell prematurely on this diversity, however, the approach taken here examines the free ports that served as models to contemporaries. The paradigmatic free ports were not intended to store peculiar assets such as artwork but the main commodities of international trade; they did not cater to wealthy individuals so much as to firms aiming to minimise overhead costs while managing far-flung trading networks; far from being a policy oddball, free ports were integral to national and transnational political economy. That is why the free port is sometimes seen as the ancestor of the SEZ rather than of the modern-day freeport. Despite the profound differences in structure and purpose, however, the terminological resemblance between the free port and the freeport betrays a shared genealogical history. Both institutions entail a manipulation of space. In addition, both the trade-oriented entrepôt and the asset-storing tax haven exploit variations in prices over time to yield greater profits, suggesting a durable link between space, fiscal structures, and capital accumulation. The main purpose of this special issue is to ask, paraphrasing Kat, What is a free port? How can we best understand its historical development? What is the relationship of the free port to such processes as colonialisation, decolonisation, and the proliferation of novel zone types over the past century? It is best to approach these questions not by positing a priori definitions but by revisiting key moments in the history of the free port.

For most of the twentieth century, the paradigmatic free port was the Freihafen of Hamburg, an extensive zone of warehouses and light manufacturing beyond the bounds of the German customs line, bisecting the port of Hamburg in two. The port of Hamburg served as a model for free ports throughout the West. In a colonial register – seldom put into dialogue with its Western cousins – Singapore and Hong Kong served as paradigms, whose open-door and low-tax policies extended to the entire port. A century earlier, in Europe the model free port was the Tuscan port of Livorno, and the model colonial free port might have been St. Thomas in the Caribbean. Throughout this early period, the term typically referred to a port open for settlement and trade to individuals of any ethno-religious or citizenship status, as well as the absence of trade duties such as import, export, and excise taxes.³ Meanwhile, an alternative paradigm, invoked increasingly in the early nineteenth century, was the ‘porto franco’ of bonded warehouses and the English dock system that was in part modelled on it (and that was itself indebted to earlier Genoese and Dutch models). Political economists debated the relative merits of bonded warehouses, a warehouse zone, and a spatially extensive free port. Distinct though they were, these policies were usually seen as variants of a general free port project, to be more or less tailored to the local situation. For some, the free port even represented a particular avatar of free trade. Like the SEZ, though in smaller numbers, the free port could be found throughout Europe and in many other parts of the globe – albeit almost always under the auspices of European colonial powers. Like such places as the Suez Canal and Shanghai in the twentieth century, these free ports were ‘colonial in-between zones’ in which internationalism was intricately intertwined with colonialism.⁴ The question of why the institution of the free port was from its mediaeval origins so very European, and why it was tied up with evolving patterns of imperial capitalism, is addressed in the third and fourth sections below.

Despite its long and rich history, there is no integrated understanding of the development of the free port from the establishment of the franchise privileges of Livorno to today. Unlike other institutions of modern history, ranging from the mental asylum to the state, free ports have rarely been examined as part of a coherent developmental process. Some observers deny that the free port even has a history. For instance, Bruno Minoletti in 1939 argued that the criticisms that have been levelled by opponents of free ports have remained virtually unchanged and always repeat the same points.⁵ His argument assumes that the functions of the free ports are clear, straightforward, and unchanged over time; Minoletti himself relied heavily on a few pages in Melchiorre Gioja’s Nuovo Prospetto delle scienze economiche (1816) devoted to the economic functions of free ports.⁶ Apart from such economistic or juridical works, there exists a large if scattered historical literature focusing on individual free ports. The many free ports of Italy have attracted scholars who have studied shipping data, decrees, merchant communities, and cultural exchange. Their studies reveal that free port policies did change over time; negotiations, debates, and decision-making processes took place against the political and economic backgrounds of the day. This scholarship, however, tends to limit itself to one specific free port, or compares a few contexts on a limited basis. The focus on localities has not inspired a more comprehensive understanding of the development of the free port over time; rather, the history of free ports is fragmented into a multiplicity of geographical and chronological coordinates that bear little relationship with one another.

This issue proposes an integral examination of the global development of the free port. It examines the origin of free ports in north-central Italy; their spread throughout Europe; their proliferation in the Americas during the mid-eighteenth century; their employment in the colonial spheres of the nineteenth century; and their relationship with the special economic zone. To avoid a disjointed geographic and chronological approach, the contributors pay careful attention to the lines of transmission connecting these disparate trajectories. Yet in no situation may the free port be reduced solely to the diffusion of a model. It was a dynamic phenomenon intertwined with the development of state, capitalism, and economic thought in the modern world. The study of globalisation has emphasised interconnectedness, focusing on the mobility of individuals, the movement of goods, and the flow of information; often aiming to decentre European agency and sometimes decentering the territorial state as well, highlighting direct ties between the local and the supranational.⁷ Yet states played a critical role in erecting the institutional infrastructure that facilitated interconnectedness – and, during the age of European empire, no states were more active in deploying such devices than European ones, although they could seldom control the uses to which indigenous actors put such institutions. Insofar as European imperialism had a guiding light in this enterprise – or directing demon – it was the discipline of political economy, which taught states how to transmute wealth into power.

Never, neither in the long seventeenth century nor in the long nineteenth century, was European imperialism a frictionless exactor of rents. The exploitation of resources, the manipulation of prices, and the accumulation of capital were all institutionally mediated processes. The joint-stock company has attracted the lion’s share of attention as a uniquely predatory capitalist institution – at least until the state undertook active protection of its commercial affairs abroad – although neither companies nor family firms operated within an institutional vacuum.⁸ Many such institutions, ranging from the political dispensation to the legal regime, were essentially exogenous to political economy, however important an effect they may have exerted on commercial affairs.⁹ Free ports were different. They were preeminently creatures of political economy, in this sense analogous to trading companies, stock exchanges, and the other institutions associated with the rise of capitalism in Europe. As an object of political economy, the free port must be understood not only as a set of practices but also as a set of debates, discussions, and commentary: in short, as an object of intellectual analysis. The nexus between ideas and practice is the special focus of this volume.

2. Historiographical Problems

Paul Masson began his 1904 volume on free ports by lamenting the ‘superficial and theoretical’ nature of most discussions of free ports.¹⁰ Through a detailed series of comparisons, he sought to resolve such questions as under what conditions free port policies promoted maritime trade and aided a state’s economic development. He furnished rather sobering answers to these queries, arguing that free port policies generally aided development, but not as much as prime factors such as infrastructure, rail connections, location, and the economic stature of the host region. More interesting for our present purposes are the historical conclusions that Masson drew. He argued that ‘true’ free ports flourished in Europe only under the Ancien Regime, benefitting not only from the spatial extent of privileges (which typically extended to the entire city) but especially from the matrix of mercantilist-style protectionism in which they were nested. These free ports were suppressed over the course of the nineteenth century, to be replaced late in the century by a model of free zones exemplified by Hamburg’s Freihafen. The demise of the classic free port had many causes, from the development of the steamship to the revolutionary discourse against privilege, but the most important factor was the end of mercantilism and the liberalisation of the international trading regime.¹¹ It was replaced largely by various Freihafen-like zones situated beyond the customs frontier, uninhabited but offering a range of port services and light industry. To the extent that the classic free port still existed in the early twentieth century, Masson located it in the colonial sphere, where places such as Singapore were extraneous European trading enclaves within otherwise alien space, facilitating access to societies that were otherwise off-limits. If Masson’s assumptions about history no longer command respect, the divisions that structure his account – between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, between the metropolitan and the colonial spheres – continue to demarcate fields of study. A monograph on Livorno might examine nearby ports in the Mediterranean in the early modern period, for instance, but it will pay very cursory glances to the Caribbean in the same period, let alone to the free ports of a later age.

Dermigny ends his classic article on the subject with a laundry list of free ports that bear little analytic relationship with one another, in a segment aptly (if helplessly) entitled ‘The Diversity of Free Ports’.¹² If the diversity of free ports has frustrated a coherent approach to the subject, it is because scholars have been too preoccupied with relating the free port to an ideal type to which most port cities bore little relationship. Diversity is more tractable if scholarship instead focuses on the paradigmatic free ports, which served contemporaries as the main models to be debated, imitated, or modified as the case may be. This approach allows scholars to access the central tendencies of political economy during a period while directing attention to the limits of a paradigm as well as to paths not taken. When such lines of transmission grow tenuous, as they did in the early nineteenth century and again in the mid-twentieth century, they also direct our attention to important caesuras that themselves demand examination.

Much more rigorously than his predecessor, Dermigny tethered the development of the free port to the process of the centralising state.¹³ In his formulation, endorsed by other historians of the mid-twentieth century, the free port represented the triumph of the state over the fragmented jurisdictional politics of the late Middle Ages. A city’s mediaeval privileges were irrelevant before the imperatives of princely initiative, which sought to subordinate ports to central direction.¹⁴ Thanks to several decades of research into the nature of Ancien Regime states, more recent historiography has reformulated these assertions to emphasise state weakness and the negotiated nature of power in early modern Europe. Free ports in this optic may be seen as expressions of port autonomy vis-a-vis the state or testimony to the influence that merchants enjoyed in negotiations with state authorities. However, in certain contexts, such as the Caribbean in the mid-eighteenth century or East Asia in the mid-nineteenth, the notion that free ports are best understood as a function of the centralising state is patently untenable. Whatever metropolitan ambition might have aimed at, power in the European periphery remained exceptionally multidirectional.

Rather than impose a criterion of state centralisation, it is more promising to emphasise the development of European political economy in both its intellectual and practical dimensions. The flexibility of the free port offers a vivid reminder that a free port was a tool, a kind of cultural artefact that was the product of a particular historical context; once produced, however, the model could be transferred and adapted elsewhere.¹⁵ And like any tool, its users had in mind different purposes, ranging from the most liberal (Adam Smith’s desire to turn Britain into a free port) to the most discriminatory (Colbert’s proclamation for Marseille). This process of transmission is a red thread connecting distant times and places. Emulation, imitation, and modification link the privileges of Livorno and Genoa to the free ports of the twentieth century, even if these links are obscure and sometimes deliberately neglected. Dermigny’s account encodes a state-centred approach to free ports, emphasising the internal political contexts of their elaboration; it assumes that decision-makers unproblematically knew what a free port was and what it was to be used for. By contrast, our emphasis on lines of transmission and on systematic factors – the economic and political context – offers a more promising avenue for relating state power to the development of free ports.

A history of the free port must present more than the list of free port ‘beads’ strung together on the thread of time. The invention, spread, and transformation of free ports was intimately related to the development of capitalism and the international state system. The second historiographical problem thus concerns the relationship between form, function, and context. The most influential contextual approach in this vein has been World Systems Theory.¹⁶ Ultimately of Marxist-Leninst derivation, this body of research treats free ports as formal or informal instruments of colonial domination, whether instantiated in Braudel’s ‘northern invasion’ of the Italian Mediterranean in the late sixteenth century, the creation of free ports in the Caribbean in the eighteenth century, or the use of free ports in East Asia in the nineteenth century. It is true that the leading commercial powers of the early modern period, England and Holland, never established free ports on their home territory; and yet even in England and the Netherlands, free port policies were debated in the context of customs restructuring, and analogous solutions (such as the dock system) were enacted. In addition, during the long nineteenth century, the major economies of Europe established free ports, as did the United States in the early twentieth century. Clearly, not all free ports were a function of economic subordination; many other factors were at play in determining the diffusion of the free port, in addition to commercial power – not least, matters having to do with geography, international affairs, and fiscalism.

Taken less dogmatically, the World Systems perspective suggests that the nature of a free port depends on a state's position in the international political and economic order – with political stature no less important than economic stature in accounting for the form and function of a port. Thus formulated, this view of free ports recalls the political histories of commerce developed during the Enlightenment and to an extent current into the twentieth century. As Masson put it, ‘la franchise est une arme pour les faibles les forts peuvent s'en passer’.¹⁷ Weapons of the weak: the phrase seems to encapsulate the status of Italian free ports during the seventeenth century, even if places like Tuscany or Genoa were ‘weak’ only in a geopolitical sense, and it later surfaced in discussions of possible free ports in kingdoms like Portugal or Spain. At a different scale, such geopolitical differentiation seems to structure the division between colonial and European space during the nineteenth century for Masson, who contrasted the free port zones of modern Europe with the classic free ports that prevailed in the colonial sphere; mutatis mutandis, a similar view is often canvased to explain the difference between SEZs in the rich world and those in the developing world.¹⁸

To appreciate the limitations of such a geopolitical perspective, it is helpful to return to the major change that Masson detected between the free ports of the Ancien Regime and those prevailing in modern Europe. According to Masson, the classic free ports of Europe were marked by city-wide privileges and a general appeal to groups of diverse ethno-religious or citizenship status. With some exceptions, these free ports withered during the course of the nineteenth century, to be replaced by more specialised zones typified by the Freihafen of Hamburg: ‘Au protectionnisme atténué et mitigé d'aujourd'hui correspondent des franchises plus restreintes qu'autrefois’.¹⁹ In Masson’s account, the partial dismantling of mercantilist trade regimes obviated the functions associated with the classic free port, in particular its role as a transit and storage depot beyond the bounds of a highly protected national economy. To be sure, Masson also highlights transformations in transportation technology such as the development of the railroad (with its agglomeration effects) and the steamship (which facilitated more direct routes). To Masson’s catalogue of factors one may also add the enhanced possibilities of state control, which also facilitated ‘miniaturisation’. One may debate the extent to which countries in Western Europe actually embraced free trade policies: this was, after all, also the century of Gustav von Schmoller and Friedrich List.²⁰ Yet the broader point is clear: changes in free port policy were fundamentally related to changes in customs policy in general.

The inadequacy of this perspective becomes apparent as soon as one turns to the extra-European world. There, the polarity between mercantilism and free trade seems tendentiously Eurocentric; rather than treat Asian regimes such as China and Japan as mercantilist, it is better to treat them as societies (and economies) attempting to control the terms of access to the international marketplace. In addition, even if free ports in the extra-European world may be seen as vehicles for penetrating otherwise off-limits space, nothing obvious in this function explains the form of this free port. Why should the classic free port have remained so vibrant in the age of steam and free(er) trade? What other forms were viable, both in the colonial world as well as in the metropole? There is a potential tension between the ‘local’ and the ‘systemic’ perspectives, since by definition all ports mediate between the local and the supralocal. We shall attempt to answer these questions by paying nuanced attention to local political economy, as well as to the more supranational elements that have dominated in the historiography. Our focus on lines of transmission restores an element of contingency and agency to a phenomenon that (in the form/function debate) all too often adopts a deterministic bent.

Transmission itself constitutes a third historiographical problem. There occurs a peculiar caesura in debates about free ports after 1815. Nineteenth-century discussions of free ports often occurred without reference to their prior histories, becoming increasingly abstract and ahistorical. These works – often pamphlets for or against the free port – understand the nineteenth century itself as the heyday of discussion about free ports. Surprisingly, the old commercial rivalries of the previous century had no function in nineteenth-century debates. This trend continued into the twentieth century: there are works that focus on the phenomenon of the free port from a contemporary perspective of maritime law, economics, or otherwise that almost completely ignore the history of free ports and its original or evolved functions. The voluminous literature on special economic zones shares this ahistorical bent.²¹

Why and how this anachronistic treatment of free ports developed is not totally clear. Many studies focusing on early modern free ports ignore the post-Napoleonic Era, with its geopolitical interruptions, changes in the state system, and reorganisation of the old state archives. But why did nineteenth-century writers ignore historical precedents? A provisional answer might have to do with the naturalisation of the national state as the ‘inevitable’ mode of political organisation, and the way classical economics exalted the state as a central category for organising knowledge about economic processes; this was the assumption that led Masson to posit a problematic equivalency between the classical free ports of Europe and the colonial ports of his own day. In addition, the rise of a certain kind of economic ideology tended to replace the historical specificity of prior reflections on free ports with a universalist trajectory that tended to abstract institutional forms from their historical development. Our study, by taking seriously the intellectual debates that authorise policies, promises to historicise the process of thinking about free ports – even when contemporary writers neglected history.

Issues about anachronism, form and function, and centralisation cluster around the central problem of the free port: the extent to which it may be seen as a liberalising institution. Like other aspects of the free port, this question has often resisted historical treatment. Minoletti observed that the camps of ‘protectionists’ and ‘free traders’ each have accused the other of defending through their theories about free ports their ideas about the organisation of international trade.²² Among historians, particularly those of the early twentieth century, the case for a liberal interpretation of the free port was sometimes made with a degree of naivete. Giacchero, for instance, proposed to show how the study of the free port of Genoa was a reflection of the development of commercial sociability in humankind, but he offered a simplistic teleological account of the gradual ‘enlightenment’ towards freeing trade in Genoa.²³ In this optic, the free port becomes a privileged locus of liberty vis-à-vis the pretensions of the state. However, most historians have emphasised the link between mercantilism (or jealousy of trade) and the phenomenon of the free port.²⁴ That is, free ports were instituted by states to capture their rivals’ commerce. Quotations from contemporaries to this effect abound, and such an argument has been deployed most doggedly for Europe and the Caribbean. While the view is undeniable from the standpoint of many policymakers, though, it rests on the same statist and Eurocentric assumptions critiqued above. Not all free ports were instituted to beggar the neighbour, even if power considerations were seldom absent. It is necessary to take the phenomenon out of the hands of privileged policymakers and place it in the larger system in which they were embedded.

Rather than treating free ports as intrinsically liberal or illiberal, it is better to see them as controlled breaches in the prevailing political economy, whether that be of a state or of an entire trading system. With respect to national political economy the breach is obvious, since by definition a free port policy entailed a relaxation of ordinary controls over trade and often other parameters such as immigration. The extent of control varied for reasons ranging from technology to the fiscal trade-offs unavoidable in any customs policy. The underlying strategy varied, too – in some cases, free ports served to stabilise a state’s political economy (as in Genoa), in other cases as a forerunner to transform the interior economy (as in the Caribbean). The free port shows that the modern state has never endorsed homogeneous space: there have always been breaches, sometimes of great importance. The state has often found it expedient to permit controlled derogations from the uniform juridical, fiscal, and administrative framework that it otherwise purports to enforce within its territory.

Yet to appreciate how free ports are entangled in wider circuits of power it is helpful to move beyond a state-centred approach. Although he does not fully explore the metaphor, Masson aptly terms free ports a kind of safety valve: ‘ils sont le correctif nécessaire et comme la soupape de sûreté de ce système de compression qu'est le protectionnisme’.²⁵ Free ports offered essential services that the prevailing system of political economy scarcely allowed. During the age of mercantilism, when protectionist measures threatened to reduce trade between neighbours, the free port facilitated contact between adjacent economies. For instance, although Jean-Baptiste Colbert in his free port of 1669 (a ‘disguised navigation act’²⁶) imposed a twenty percent duty on Levantine goods arriving in Marseilles from ports in Italy or Spain, this measure proved to be unworkable due to the activity of traders intent on exploiting the entrepot of Livorno, then the main broker between the Levant and Western Europe; accordingly, the de facto commerce between Livorno and Marseille was legitimated in 1688 when Marseille’s exemptions were extended to include such indirect trade so long as it took place aboard French ships.²⁷ For inland regions like Lombardy, the proliferation of free ports in Italy lowered shipping costs from industrial centres such as Milan, giving merchants several options as to which port to employ.²⁸ Such relations probably promoted, however modestly, economic integration and productive specialisation. Despite the mercantilist discourse of many state officials, in other words, free ports actually exerted a kind of liberalising effect of trade.

The safety valve became critical during times of war, when belligerents were supposed to cease to do business with one another – with what would have been catastrophic results, had not trade through neutral places such as free ports been possible. Initially, state officials by no means anticipated the need for a safety valve, although by the eighteenth century some diplomats and pamphleteers became increasingly conscious of this goal. Most officials enacted free ports to draw trade from their rivals or otherwise engross commerce for their own nation. It was the business decisions of actual merchants – and their relentless pressure to uphold or extend free port privileges – that made free ports into crucial nodes of maritime commerce, intensifying connections between states whose general policy tended to reduce them. Merchants and other non-state actors were crucial for the articulation of free port regimes.

Neutrality was not an attribute of all free ports, but it was a hallmark of some of the most famous. Neutrality became a desideratum to relieve commercial pressures as well as to relieve more nakedly political problems. Already in the early eighteenth century, the neutrality of certain free ports was incorporated into international multilateral treaties, effectively depoliticising some kinds of commercial relations.²⁹ The rise of nationalism only intensified this dynamic. Suddenly, the neutralisation of a port such as Trieste could also be urged on the grounds of removing it from the claims of nationalists whose pretensions might unleash a destabilising war. The free port, a consummately political act, often implied depoliticisation. In a collated set of pamphlet and newspaper contributions by Adriano Colocci from 1917, for instance, the terms ‘right to the sea’ and ‘right to trade’ are discussed with references to Woodrow Wilson’s ‘neutralisation’ policy for an eventual European peace. It identifies a free port as a solution for both returning Trieste to Italy, and giving Austria the possibility to trade – essentially what took place with the internationalisation of Trieste in 1947, where the city was to be ruled by a joint commission representing some twelve states (this provision was abrogated in 1954, when responsibility for the free zone was assigned to Italy); by then, with the onset of the Cold War, Trieste was a complex borderland not only between two nationalisms (Italian versus Slavic) but also between two blocs of alliances. Although the Italian state has frequently derogated from its treaty obligations regarding Trieste, there has been little international outrage: ultimately, the European Union proves to be a more effective guarantor of neutrality and the free movement of goods than a free port ever could.³⁰ Likewise, the political use of free ports to prevent global trade from coming to a halt as a result of general protectionism was discussed in various places after World War I, as well as in the late 1920s in Britain, which had traded in its free trade principles and adopted a European style fiscal policy in 1918. Until then the use of free ports had been alien to Britain and was considered a continental phenomenon. Unlike the proposal for the internationalisation of Trieste, this political vision did not catch on with the many consulted parties and stakeholders, raised endless technical questions and confusions and was never realised.³¹

Free ports thus represented both depoliticised space as well as a regime of exception. That is why they were often treated as avatars of free trade, places where the removal of intrusive administrative structures permitted the ‘natural’ intercourse of merchants from across political and cultural frontiers. From the seventeenth century right up until the early twentieth, advocates of free ports signalled the institution’s role in facilitating trade liberalisation; in this guise free ports were also drafted into the more utopian projects associated with liberalism. As we have seen, free ports really were trade-promoting institutions even if they were set within a protectionist frame and enacted for reasons of imperial or commercial rivalry. To observe only their impact on the prevailing political economy is to miss one of their most important legacies, however, as a discursive field for defending and extending free trade. They testify to the placed-ness of the discourse of free trade; for all that economics has abstracted particularity in its pursuit of theorems, for many commentators, free trade was embodied within certain places, free ports, which were defined against a context of restriction, rules, and bureaucracy. Free ports (and the wider discourse about free trade) emerged alongside and in dialogue with a discourse about protection. The age of mercantilism was much more imbricated with the age of free trade than our historical schema acknowledges. Relating local debates to political visions, legal shifts and economic patterns, opens up a more general political history of trade and of the modalities of port systems.

2.1. Capsule History of the Free Port

2.1.1. Inventing the Free Port from Renaissance to Enlightenment

The ‘free port’ is a term of European political economy. Nevertheless, it emerged in a world where port cities across the Old World evinced broad commonalities in their manner of treating the movement of goods and people. Trade was organised along ethno-religious networks. Groups were concentrated in certain hub cities, but their operations (and settlement) extended across much wider arcs. Agency relations among merchants were common throughout the trading sphere. Merchant coalitions negotiated particularist arrangements with local rulers, who in turn were responsible for administering facilities such as caravansaries, fondacos, and khans, as well as ports. Various informal practices helped merchant groups maintain their identities and upheld intra-group sanctions; in some places, as in the millet system of the Ottoman Empire or the Safavid Empire’s relations with the Armenian merchants of New Julfa, more formal arrangements were also employed.³² Most merchants were free to come and go as they pleased; while different groups sometimes benefited from particularist customs favours, dues throughout the system were relatively moderate, typically ranging from about five to fifteen percent.³³ Nevertheless, neither the traditional ports of the Mediterranean nor those of the Indian Ocean were free ports. This judgement has to do with political structures in the hinterland: while the relationship between free ports and hinterland economies has varied widely, free ports by definition enjoy distinctive political, juridical, and administrative arrangements with respect to their hinterlands, which imply a degree of ordinary territorial uniformity. State development is thus crucial to the history of free ports. In addition, for all their similarities, polities in the Indian Ocean did not develop a language of political economy that would make terms such as ‘free ports’ legible to economic policy; Europeans themselves, in the decades around 1600, were just beginning to invent that most curious of sciences. The free port is linked not only to changes in state organisation, in other words, but also to how actors began to conceptualise state power in terms of wealth.³⁴

If late mediaeval polities drew on a shared repertoire of techniques for managing mobility, some distinctive aspects of political and intellectual life in late Renaissance Italy promoted the emergence of free ports as objects of political economy. Fundamental was the development of a state system with reciprocal representation, defined boundaries, and incipient notion of balance of power. The system began to operate in Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century and was exported throughout Europe during the sixteenth century.³⁵ The process was messier than this declarative sentence suggests, and it was complicated by transnational religious allegiances that were also imbricated in war-making and state-building. States inhabited an intensely competitive system. Despite the absolutist language in which they were dressed, however, these states were not authoritarian titans, instead relying on forms of delegation to achieve their ends. In addition, the fiscal-military state was a confessional one that attempted to regulate the behaviour as well as convictions of subjects – which had implications for who was permitted to trade within its boundaries. New institutions were erected and old ones coopted to meet the demands of competition. Some touchstones include the unprecedented extent of military mobilisation, the development of joint-stock companies, the deepening of public debt arrangements – and free ports, which contemporaries understood as tools of commercial competition, despite a sometimes liberal veneer.³⁶

The link between power and wealth emerged with special clarity in one of the key figures of early political economy, Giovanni Botero. Botero’s Della ragion di stato (1591) offered an early programme for promoting commercial competitiveness, and his Relazioni universali offered the first sustained geopolitical analysis in print.³⁷ Such writing became increasingly common during the seventeenth century by theorists who were often merchants, administrators, courtiers, or projectors of more or less dubious antecedents. They frequently exaggerated the power of princes and have sometimes misled historians into the same error. Nevertheless, such figures sometimes did succeed in persuading rulers to devote resources to their schemes, or fiascos as the case may be: among which the Darien project of colonisation is perhaps the most notorious.³⁸ In the case of free ports, outlays included physical infrastructure such as dockyards and warehouses as well as intangible commitments such as diplomatic efforts, reworking customs procedures, and protecting vulnerable foreign merchants: a potentially substantial mobilisation of resources, in other words.

Late Renaissance Italy was fragmented into several small states, dominated politically by the Spanish Habsburgs. Comparatively small polities like Genoa and Tuscany were in no position to exploit the colonial opportunities developing in the Atlantic World. Yet the Italian states, though small, were wealthy by the standards of the day and were situated on important commercial routes that linked Europe, North Africa, and the Levant. There were opportunities in the Mediterranean, too. Italian regimes experimented with novel ways to attract merchants and their wares, and to insert themselves into an increasingly global trading network. Among the most effective means of doing so was to persuade merchants who already had far-flung operations to settle in one’s port. Accordingly, early free port legislation often took the form of privileges extended to ethno-religious minorities. The Tuscan port of Livorno became the exemplar of this model of free port as it developed from the late sixteenth onward.³⁹ Later measures simplified trade regulations while accentuating the difference between the customs cordon between the free port and the host territory. In 1676, for instance, customs duties were eliminated in Livorno, as was bureaucratic oversight over trading activities; henceforth wares paid a simple stallage fee for warehousing. These measures were widely imitated, and by 1730 or so, had appreciably lowered trading costs in the region. A kind of maritime free trade zone was in existence in the Italian Mediterranean – although it had been created by rulers who, far from liberal principles, had been actuated by the same jealousy of trade that inspired imperialists in Paris or London.

The political consequences of free ports were a lively topic of debate during the Enlightenment. Did free ports promote commercial servitude? Did they help or hinder a state’s economic development? The eighteenth-century debate on free ports connected questions on economic production to moral philosophy, much like the luxury debate of the time did. The starting point might be located in François Fénelon’s Aventures de Télémaque (1699), which portrayed an imaginary ancient society that focused on agriculture and population growth while aiming to control the corrupting effects of inequality and luxury consumption; to channel the interactions of such a society with the outside world, a Phoenician trade settlement where surplus goods were given away was permitted.⁴⁰ A Neapolitan follower of some of Fénelon’s ideas, Paolo Mattia Doria, recommended in 1710 the establishment of three regional ports where trade would be allowed to flourish freely, but where the import of goods was to be heavily regulated. These free ports functioned as safety valves to monitor the moral ‘pressure’ on the national economy and keep human passions from overheating. According to Doria, Naples was in a better situation than France, where morals had already been corrupted, whereas Neapolitan manners remained relatively natural and unaffected by trade and luxury. However, when another Neapolitan, Carlantonio Broggia, revived this moral outlook on economic development three decades later, he inverted Doria’s take on ports and wrote that free ports were destined to work against their intended purpose, sucking the country dry of its own resources for economic development.⁴¹ Although Broggia’s work was very much of its moment – to be framed with reference to Neapolitan debates around independence and economic development, as well as to debates within and beyond Italy about the use of free ports – it became a reference point for Europe-wide discussion into the early nineteenth century. For a century, the key question was whether the goods free ports attracted and the trade they engendered ultimately promoted or hindered development in the hinterland.

Few Enlightenment thinkers were uncritical observers of the free port. For instance, Montesquieu (using the term to mean entrepôt) only thought it compatible with cities that maintained an active carrying trade, such as mediaeval Venice or contemporary Marseille.⁴² Isaac de Pinto, in the opening lines of his Essai sur le Luxe, alluded to how a certain Mediterranean port, probably Livorno, ‘where everything conspired to the advantage of those who were invested in it’, benefitted not the Tuscan economy but the Northern nations whose consuls and trade houses co-determined the fiscal regimes of the free port.⁴³ Others, notably Matthew Decker and Adam Smith, saw in them exemplars of free trade that needed to be extended to the wider nation, but which were incomplete or inadequate of themselves.⁴⁴

The Italian free ports constituted an essential model for free port deliberations throughout Europe from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Some legislation directly copied Livorno’s legislation, as far afield as Marstrand (Sweden) and even the Caribbean: more often, Livorno served as a point of departure for policies more inflected by the local situation.⁴⁵ For the Dutch Republic of the mid eighteenth century, the example of the Italian free ports was adapted to an entirely new, state-wide context to mitigate the decline of the staple market and revive the commercial foundations of the state through a programme of fiscal reforms.⁴⁶ On the whole, free ports helped stabilise Italian states and economies, even as they brought home to Enlightenment-era thinkers their weakness relative to the national states that were the great powers of the day. But even to pose the question in these terms gets to the heart of what had changed in Europe between 1550 and 1750: commerce had become an affair of state, a crucial component of state power and a field of imperial and inter-imperial competition.

2.1.2. Contraband and Free Port Trade in the Caribbean

While the free port was entering the purview of Enlightenment political thought, the imperial powers had begun to erect free ports throughout the Caribbean. One key function of free ports in this region was to facilitate the exchange of plantation commodities such as sugar, cotton, coffee, and tobacco, all of whose production was predicated on the use of slave labour; a second was to connect or intrude upon imperial (and post-imperial) polities throughout the Spanish Americas and the Caribbean. These processes began in 1670 with the Dutch establishment of Willemstad (Curaçao), followed shortly thereafter by Charlotte Amalie (St. Thomas) by the Danes and St. Eustatius again by the Dutch. Loosely inspired by the British practice of engaging in illicit trade with Spanish and Portuguese territories from places like Kingston (before Britain obtained easier access via the Asiento at the Peace of Utrecht in 1713), these early free ports aimed at tapping into mainland Latin American markets. Although such trade was regarded by Iberian authorities as contraband, it was crucial for supplying the market with enslaved Africans and manufactured goods. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, such dynamics intensified with the proliferation of French and British free ports in the Caribbean beginning in 1763, followed by the establishment of French free ports on Martinique and Guadeloupe, followed again by the British Free Port Act of 1766 and French free ports on St Lucia and St Domingue in 1767. Also in 1763, the Danish created Caribbean free ports in St Thomas and St John; Sweden established the free port of Gustavia on St Barthélemy in 1784. The expansion of the institution did not relent until after the Napoleonic era and involved states other than the main rivals for global hegemony. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was another golden age of the free port.⁴⁷

While free ports were proliferating in the region, inaugurating a new moment of intra-imperial trade, in 1765 Spain began to reform its internal trading regime by liberalising commerce between its Caribbean possessions and ports in Iberia. A later decree expanded comercio libre to encompass twenty-four Spanish American ports, excluding only Venezuela and New Spain; in 1789, these territories were also incorporated into the system of comercio libre – just in time for the upheavals of the Napoleonic era. The Spanish crown opted for internal liberalisation because its ministers believed that its vast, diverse possessions were capable of providing all the commodities its subjects required. The liberalisation of port policy was intended to foster growth while binding Spain’s American possessions more closely to the metropole. The project of comercio libre thus resembled the visions of free port trade as national free trade being mooted by thinkers during and after the Enlightenment. And it was a success: Spain’s intra-imperial trade grew rapidly during the late eighteenth century.⁴⁸

The Mediterranean example exerted some influence over Caribbean free ports. Dutch, Danish, and Swedish policies (which promoted the long-term settlement of merchants) recalled the Livorno model, for instance, complete with consular representation. Yet free ports in the Americas functioned rather differently than in Europe. French and British free ports constituted controlled breaches in an otherwise exclusionary colonial system, often specifying which goods were to benefit from particular exemptions, while the larger matrix of controls remained in place. Some free ports represented a form of discount imperialism; the Danes, for instance, aimed to ‘create a Colonial power using foreign capital’;⁴⁹ the British used them to foster relations of economic dependency, anticipating the free-trade imperialism of a later age: one official remarked that free ports were a means of penetrating the Spanish main, ‘whereby we might enjoy to the extent of the trade, all the advantage of the foreign colonies without being exposed to the expense of establishing or protecting them’.⁵⁰ The Caribbean example thus underscores the extent to which free ports readily slotted into an imperial situation, where intense colonial rivalries were closely connected with rivalries back in Europe. Criss-crossing these rivalries were complex requirements surrounding the trade of raw materials, provisions, manufactured goods, and labour in the form of mariners and slaves. Smaller powers in the region had to accommodate themselves opportunistically to this situation as transit ports. Neutrality could be especially lucrative during wartime, when free ports served as intermediary markets for belligerents and furnished flags of convenience. Such places helped stabilise the underlying economic regime during times of disruption as well as to minimise the risk of war during times of peace.⁵¹

If free ports in the Mediterranean implied a controlled intrusion of the global marketplace by relatively wealthy host states, the Caribbean region was borne of and implicated in the capitalist order. Yet the system was characterised by the comparative weakness of state power, not only because of distance from the metropole, but also because of the complex racial order that put a premium on whiteness and was underpinned by more or less naked violence. The novelist Anthony Trollope complained that St. Thomas was a ‘Niggery-Hispano-Dano-Yankee-Doodle place’ (he also lamented the presence of Jews).⁵² The most famous enslaved individual to exploit the opportunities of the free port was Oloudah Equiano, but free ports were an integral part of the plantation complex, especially after the 1760s.⁵³ The British free port system increased transhipment of enslaved people after the end of the Seven Years’ War, effectively legalising the inter-imperial slave trade in the region. These arrangements may have improved shipboard conditions for enslaved people while simultaneously intensifying the level of cultural isolation by scrambling traditional links between sources and destinations. The proliferation of Caribbean free ports represented an intensification rather than an invention of the Atlantic triangle trade and the productive systems on which it rested: such a facilitating role has often been the scope of the free port.⁵⁴ They probably attenuated overall trade costs in a region where mercantilist restrictions and intra-imperial conflict tended to raise them. As in Europe, free ports in the Caribbean were a safety-valve – but the systems they mediated bore little resemblance to those in the metropole.⁵⁵

The coming of independence for Spanish America had a transformative effect on political economy in the greater Caribbean even as some trading patterns not only persisted but even intensified. Already, many Spanish ports had enjoyed some comparative liberalisation following the 1778 decree noted above. During and after independence, ports engaged in a veritable ‘guerra de aduanas internas’ in an effort to defeat their rivals.⁵⁶ Another index of this change was the opening of Puerto Rican ports to outside trade, first on an ad hoc basis, later permanently. In the 1830s direct shipping between Puerto Rico and Hanseatic cities like Hamburg and Bremen became significant.⁵⁷ Yet, though direct connections between Caribbean ports and North America and Europe proliferated in the mid-nineteenth century, St. Thomas remained a crucial intermediary, functioning somewhat like the free port of Livorno had during an earlier era, as an entrepot-cum-emporium where goods could be stockpiled, exchanged, and transhipped to markets downstream. Probably the need for a central market was determined less by policy choices (the period saw efforts to build free ports throughout the region) than by the small and fragmented markets in the region following the dissolution of the old colonial regime.⁵⁸

To the extent that free ports played a role in successive waves of American revolutions, they had done so according to the traditional dictates of military alliances and neutral trade during wartime. The demise of the European colonial system gave rise to another regime that was simultaneously political and economic. In part, the new dispensation fits easily into the framework of free trade imperialism by which Britain intensified its involvement in Latin America as the pre-eminent trading partner, investor, and creditor of newly independent Latin American states.⁵⁹ Yet the War of American Independence also produced its own articulation of the colonial system, rearranging the elements of slavery, commodity production, financial investment and trade, and shifting the geopolitical balance in the Atlantic. The new regime took shape alongside ongoing British dominance in the region, but it was configured according to a different logic, one that comprised free port trade but was also connected to a fenced-off American national economy by means of tariffs that aspired to constitute a regional customs union. This form of globalisation had a distinctly un-Britannic and often anti-Britannic flavour, what one scholar has called ‘counter-hegemonic globalisation’, nicely encapsulating how Anglo-Americans were both rivals as well as co-creators (with others) of the world market.⁶⁰

The American regime entailed a linkage between free ports throughout the circum-Caribbean basin and bonded warehouses in North America. Recent research into early American diplomacy, consular reporting, and business initiatives demonstrates the extent to which the new state inserted itself among the newly independent republics of Latin America and the Caribbean as a post-revolutionary regional colonial agent, ahead of and along with the expression of the Monroe doctrine. Recognising the role of commercial institutions such as free ports in the piecemeal construction of an American customs territory pushes the origins of American informal or commercial empire back to the early decades of the nineteenth century and places it firmly on the foundations of European colonial capitalism, Caribbean free port trade, and slave-based commodity production. Between the 1810s and the 1860s, new free ports were established in numerous Latin American republics, starting with Colombia, Haiti, Mexico and Venezuela and gradually expanding into ‘an archipelago of free ports [that] dotted the Americas’. These outposts were fiscally joined into a nascent political economic system that revolved around North American investments and the industrial development of North American cities, which made liberal use of bonded warehouse – the latch-gates, as it were, into the tariff wall that has attracted the lion’s share of attention. Specialised zonal space at one end of the commodity chain was now linked to a different zonal space at the other end.⁶¹

2.1.3. Aligning Global Trade and the National Economy

From the 1820s onwards, a number of local European proposals emerged about the pros and cons of creating new free ports in southern Europe, from Naples to Lisbon.⁶² Simultaneously, the eighteenth-century debate to turn the Dutch Republic into a free port resurfaced.⁶³ Two elements help us understand debates about free ports in the early nineteenth century, which have seldom been put in their context or placed in a wider history. First, that free ports no longer primarily served to attract goods and trade in relation to territorial management, as in early modern Italy, but served as connecting points to calibrate the alignment of the national economy with global markets: compared to an earlier era, the fiscal room for manoeuvre had been dramatically reduced. Secondly, against this challenging background, that Broggia’s eighteenth-century question about whether free ports created effects contrary to their design and benefitted the host state continued to be asked.

If the Congress of Vienna provided a formal diplomatic solution for maintaining global peace, even deploying the language of free trade for the post-war arrangements, the practical institutions for upholding the settlement were not included in the peace. It was soon apparent that Europe’s imperial states faced new challenges in finetuning their domestic economies to remain viable in an increasingly integrated economic system. Under these circumstances, the free port provided one possible avenue for institutional renewal, though not so much as a vehicle for ideology as through a sceptical engagement with the historical record and available comparative cases. The Dutchman Engelen, for one, with an eye on the Dutch economy, concluded that Sismondi was right in rejecting Broggia and affirming that the free port was ‘l’expédient employé par les gouvernements de l'Europe pour favoriser le commerce qui n'ait pas agi à fins contraires, de ce que ces gouvernements s'étaient proposés’.⁶⁴ By no means was Engelen’s view universally shared, however.

The status, and also the ambivalence, of metropolitan free ports in the early nineteenth century is best captured by the work of Spanish political economist Manuel María Gutiérrez (1775–1850), who chose Broggia’s famous statement about the contradictory outcomes of free port policies as the epigraph to his analysis of whether a free port should be established in Cadiz.⁶⁵ Gutiérrez, a committed liberal in his early career, adopted a more eclectic approach to development with the collapse of Spain’s traditional trading arrangements in the wake of the Napoleonic upheavals. Building upon the eighteenth-century debate about the effects of free ports, he cautioned his countrymen against ‘this beguiling Liberty, in the matter of free ports, can produce in a people that is not ready to receive it’.⁶⁶ To make his case, Gutiérrez conducted a comparative analysis of some twenty-six ports, of which only ten qualified as ‘true’ free ports: the others were identified as transit ports for foreign trade or well-regulated domestic ports. Gutiérrez focused on tariff policy; he devoted little attention to hospitality towards people, ignoring one of the main axes of free port policy during the early modern period. He reserved his most sustained criticism for Livorno, which he (like his predecessors) took as the paradigmatic free port. For him the Tuscan haven embodied the perils of the free port, delivering commerce ‘into the hands of villains’ and hollowing out the country’s productive capacity. He emphasised the political control over mercantile institutions, praising Livorno’s rival, Genoa, for the prudence with which it governed trade and its carefully structured warehouse regime. Never mind that Gutiérrez’s portrait of policies in places such as Livorno, Genoa, and elsewhere was often based on inaccurate information; the important thing is that political economy was in search of a new paradigm for the free port.

Most European free ports were suppressed or modified in the years following national unification for reasons analogous to the critiques levied by Gutiérrez. The customs union between Austria and Hungary, for instance, envisioned the end of port privileges, and the old free port was duly suppressed in 1891. Larger transformations were also at play. Small states like Tuscany increasingly had a preference for bilateral trade agreements which included most-favoured nation clauses: the unilateral tendency represented by the free ports of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was being replaced by the bilateral arrangements typical of modern diplomacy.⁶⁷ In addition, contemporaries themselves often signalled changes in transportation and communication technology that favoured direct over indirect ties between port cities, thereby diminishing the deposit-and-transit function of the classic free port. No less a writer than Karl Marx (commenting on internal communications in the Austrian Empire) proposed as much: ‘The prosperity of Trieste […] has no limits but the development of the productive forces and means of communication of the enormous complex of countries now under Austrian rule’.⁶⁸ A new kind of entrepôt for the modern state was needed.

If Gutiérrez represented the view of hard-nosed political economy, a broader ideology typical of early liberalism was also at play in repudiating the freewheeling free ports of yesteryear. Even Livorno, once the paradigmatic free port, illustrates this turn. In 1837, one of the leading merchant voices did not hesitate to condemn the city’s founding privileges, known as the Livornina, which aimed to attract immigrants to the city by protecting them from prosecution for crimes (and bankruptcies) committed elsewhere:

The Livornina had done nothing but draw to Livorno men despicable in their habits and morals and without capital resources […] Such men live at the expense of society like little fish on the vast bodies of whales, who remain unaware of their presence. Rarely, if ever, do they render any effective succor to the society that they are disfiguring … The abolition of the Livornina served to save one of the great Italian cities from the blight of being an asylum for the bankrupt of Europe.⁶⁹

Clearly, modern free ports would have to embody modern bourgeois standards of order, control, and respectability.

It took the nineteenth century quite some time to settle on a new paradigm. The pathway begins in Genoa, whose free port functioned rather differently than Livorno’s. The maritime republic that was famed for its prowess during the Middle Ages was in decline by the late sixteenth century. In the 1590s, in response to the same grain crisis that launched Livorno’s fortunes, the city pioneered a system of bonded warehouses known as the porto franco. Initially aimed at making Genoa an entrepot for grain, the law was renewed and expanded over the subsequent two centuries to encompass a wider range of commodities. In essence, the porto franco aimed to attract the duty-free deposit and transit of wares, ensuring that international shipping did not pass Genoa by. Yet the portofranco policy was not very successful in comparison to Livorno’s policy, and it was not widely imitated during the early modern period; Genoese officials themselves saw it as a second-best alternative to Livorno’s more extensive free port. For an increasingly marginal port like Genoa, the transaction costs associated with a bonded warehouse system proved too burdensome to be useful for merchants who did not have direct business to conduct in Liguria (hostility to foreign merchants settling in Genoa also did the porto franco no favours).⁷⁰

The prospects of the porto franco appeared rather different in a port that already served as an active entrepot. After all, ‘the payment of duty before the ultimate destination of the taxed commodities is known, involves an unnecessary expenditure of time and money in the case of goods intended for a foreign market, or of goods received for transhipment merely’.⁷¹ Whether the English bonded warehouse is indebted to the Genoese model is not clear; if so, such a connection was quickly forgotten. The more proximate link had to do with the warehouses associated with the English East India Company’s trade monopoly, with articles aimed primarily toward an export market such as Oriental silks in the early seventeenth century or pepper in the early eighteenth being subject to a bond regime: in England, as in Genoa, the early bonded warehouse took its departure not from a general programme of political economy but rather from tariff policy surrounding a specific set of trade goods. The possibility of moving from an ad hoc basis to a general policy was canvassed by Sir Robert Walpole in the 1730s, who sought to make London ‘a free port, and by consequence, the market of the world’ by taking over the staple market function of Amsterdam.⁷² Curiously, discussion in England revolved not around navigation acts and protective tariffs but the excise regime, underscoring the unavoidable link between tariff policy and fiscal policy. Though it failed to win much support at the time, a version of the English dock system (as the policy became known) was implemented in 1803 and generalised in 1833, permitting the stockpiling of any commodity in one of several wharf zones. Originally, the docks were enclosed within high walls and moats and continuously policed; authorities hoped that the system would not only reduce transaction costs, but also put a damper on customs fraud, which had expanded in lockstep with British trade and the articulation of mechanisms for regulating and taxing it. The dock system worked well: nineteenth century English officials did not have to wage the endless war against smuggling that their eighteenth-century predecessors had had to wage.

The dock system became an important model for port boosters seeking an alternative to the classic free port policy. ‘These immense structures, stretching along their fine docks and mighty basins, a single warehouse often covering many acres of ground, and storing throughout the year assorted cargoes of several hundred million dollars in value, invite to these marts the merchant and commerce of the world’.⁷³ Observers in the United States and in Europe debated whether the bonded warehouse served protectionist or liberalising ends, loosely echoing the earlier debate over the effects of free ports; to its advocates, the central fact was that it increased the overall circulation of capital. ‘It gave our merchants the advantage of storing on this side instead of the other, and making our cities (instead of foreign ports) the great storehouse of the country's goods’.⁷⁴ The bonded warehouse had a long future ahead of it and is still very much with us today, with intricacies of control and logistical complexities that its initial advocates could not have dreamt of. ‘An emerging political economy had once again become embedded in the architecture and geography of the world’, comments one scholar.⁷⁵

The dock system, for all that it was indebted to the porto franco and was seen as an alternative to the free port, was presented in terms of the warehouse, not the zone. Yet the two are really different scalar levels, the former of which may be nested into the latter. This was the achievement of the Hamburg Freihafen after a tortuous process of debate and negotiation. Hamburg had been a free port along the classic model since the early eighteenth century. However, the creation of the German customs union (Zollverein) under Prussian sponsorship posed a dilemma for the port: to integrate into the union and potentially suffer a collapse in traffic owing to protectionist policies; or to remain outside the union, severed from its largest market. Initially, observers advocated bonded warehouses modelled along the English dock system: ‘which, so far as regards the great bulk of foreign trade … has all the advantages which free ports alone possessed in former times’.⁷⁶ Before and after incorporation into the North German Confederation in 1867 (the Reich in 1871), Hamburg’s commerce benefited from German unification and industrialisation, which amounted to an increase in the size, extent, and dynamism of the city’s hinterland. Nevertheless, the process of negotiation between the old Hanseatic city and the new Reich took longer than anybody anticipated, and it was not until a moderate tariff was implemented in 1879 that action on a new dispensation for the port was initiated. The solution that was finally reached entailed the creation of a warehouse zone within the city’s harbour but beyond the limit of the customs cordon. The district was known as the Speicherstadt and comprised a zone of warehouses, offices, factories, and markets: it thus amounted to an arena for production, storage, and trade beyond the German tariff line.

This new kind of free port was linked to the transformation of Germany into an industrial nation and the search for raw materials and export markets. It proceeded alongside the expansion of overseas empire both formal and informal (with the latter, in places such as Latin America, no less important than the former); and the conversion of the Hamburg bourgeoise into advocates of liberal imperialism and the militant protection of German commercial interests abroad. Key political economists and policymakers had intimate ties with the Hamburg merchant elite; and the city patriciate took an active interest in colonial ventures through domestic institutions such as the Hamburg Colonial Institute as well as through its steamer lines and company branches abroad. Such merchants served as the ‘foot-soldiers of free trade’ wherever in the world they settled.⁷⁷ The Freihafen linked low production costs abroad (for instance on coffee and cacao plantations in Latin America) to low storage and transaction costs in Hamburg. In the long dialectic between city and nation, the new bargain seemed to square the circle – liberty in the service of national political economy. It was precisely the ‘Synthese zwischen Merkantilismus und Freihandel’ that Gustav von Schmoller urged.⁷⁸

The Freihafen quickly became the paradigmatic free port for Europe and North America. In Trieste (after bonded warehouses had been aired and rejected) a free zone called the punto franco was created, similar to the Freihafen. The ‘Foreign Trade Zones’ that proliferated in the United States were modelled on the example of Hamburg and were frequently referred to by contemporaries simply as free ports. As Edwin J. Clapp remarked, ‘Bonded warehouses do not offer the same opportunity for unhindered movement of merchandise within a port: everything must be done under the harassing control of customs men’.⁷⁹ Nor could bonded warehouses provide the same facilities for manipulating goods for consumers or for the ‘rapid, frictionless discharging of ships’.⁸⁰ Such places offered the possibility of reducing transaction costs without sacrificing control or otherwise altering national tariff policy. Even as astute an observer as Paul Masson (who founded the distinction between contemporary and obsolete free ports upon Hamburg) nonetheless treated the Freihafen as a liberalising institution, even though he was well aware of the intense amount of state control it implied as well as the larger programme of national protection in which it was embedded. If the word ‘liberty’ symbolised the classic free port, the new free port was symbolised by the lock-and-key and the barbed-wire fence.

The case of Hamburg suggests that it was possible to find a compromise between the city and the nation. In other contexts, the rise of nationalism cut against the logic of empire. In the sprawling Russian empire, such a tension oriented (or disoriented) debate on the free port in the Far East. To its boosters, Vladivostok was profoundly Russian, in spite of its influential community of international traders and the prevalence of foreign-managed trade; these same boosters contrasted their city with ‘alien’ Dal’nii, just recently acquired and yet to be Russified. The debate would seem to have been hijacked by the tsarist project of nationalisation – except that the actual discourse about Russian national interests continued to be more flexible than one might suppose. The place of a free port in a nationalising project, as so often in the history of the institution, was a process of negotiation rather than a priori presumption about the foreign and the domestic. Yet a tension remained right up until the dissolution of empire, in Russia as in other imperial systems.⁸¹

For rival empires, free ports at places like Vladivostok and earlier Odessa promised commercial access to regions which might otherwise precipitate direct conflict. The free port offered a model of commercial neutralisation that readily graded into political neutralisation. Tangiers, the most famous instance, was administered by a joint commission of British, French, and Spanish officials as a means of facilitating commerce while diffusing political tensions in a process aptly termed collaborative colonialism.⁸² This scheme’s similarity to other spatial forms is illustrated by a quote from one of the project’s original boosters, the Greek-American Ion Perdicaris: ‘Let Tangier be neutralised, let it be made a free port under joint guaranty of the Great Powers, let it be put under an administrative commission modelled upon that organised for the protection of the mouth of the Danube, or better still upon the scheme now advocated for the neutralisation of the Suez Canal territory’.⁸³ The creation of the International Zone were linked to the process of negotiating Spanish and French protectorates in Morocco in 1912, although the zone itself was not implemented until 1923; unlike its analogues in Europe or the Americas, this ‘free port’ was administered by an international commission rather than the host state, underscoring a colonial situation similar to the Suez Canal. Yet the free zone was not a means of opening Morocco to European trade, which had already been achieved in prior years via trade agreements. The main impetus was geopolitical. The zone envisioned the neutrality of the city as well as the Straits of Gibraltar; the trade of Tangier as a percentage of Moroccan imports actually declined under the international zone as France and Spain imported goods directly into their zones. In fact, the International Zone was plagued by chronic-underinvestment in port facilities, exacerbated by the intricacies of a joint political administration. While the legislative assembly had long advocated for a commercial free port, it was not until 1945 when an entrepôt fictif was finally created within the Free Zone for the duty-free processing or the storage and reexport of certain goods such as precious metals.⁸⁴ Elsewhere, too, the project of political neutrality rivalled commercial negotiations in importance. The many calls to make Istanbul a free port aimed not only at preserving open shipping lanes in the Black Sea but also at preventing the city from becoming the jealous preserve of either Greek or Turkish nationalists – at forestalling irredentism through a mutually accommodating arrangement.

2.1.4. Free Port Imperialism? Singapore, Hong Kong and the Treaty Port System

The free port was an especially felicitous graft in southeast Asia, with its diverse mercantile networks and long tradition of merchant hospitality. One beneficiary of this heritage was Singapore, established in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the restitution of Dutch colonial territories by Britain; formally, it emerged from an illegal treaty with Malay rulers and a series of Anglo-Dutch negotiations. As colonial caretakers during Napoleonic times, the British experience of Dutch mismanagement throughout the East Indies instilled a drive in the chief champion of the free port, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, to outcompete the Dutch. While the Dutch Republic was overrun by France and mired in war and occupation, British officials in the Dutch East Indies had developed their own plans for commerce in the region. As the British in the 1820s progressively excluded indigenous rulers from control over policy, Singapore became the focal point of a strategy to undermine Dutch trade in southeast Asia. Raffles was an advocate not of free trade but of British imperialism. The perch in Singapore ‘might enable us to watch the march of [Dutch] policy, and when necessary to counteract its influence’.⁸⁵ The prize in such a strategy was access to mainland Chinese markets, but it is important to remember that Chinese merchants were themselves major visitors in Singapore; Europeans did not create the trading systems in East Asia, whose most important markets remained outside their control. While neither Raffles nor his Dutch counterparts held elaborate ideas about free ports as a tool for channelling trade, both sides attempted to outmanoeuvre one another by waiving the payment of duties. The Dutch establishment of a free port opposite Singapore and several other free ports across the archipelago, as well as the associated Dutch and British exploratory voyages in Australia (to establish an ‘Australian Singapore’), were knock-on effects of the Anglo-Dutch rivalry around Singapore in the 1820s and 1830s.⁸⁶

The history of the other paradigmatic free port in the region, Hong Kong – which emerged alongside the Treaty Ports of China, Japan, and Korea – is rather different and must be seen in the context of the history of Chinese Treaty Ports. While the historiography on Treaty Ports is extensive, its focus has been on international politics and the unequal nature of the treaties concluded between Asian and Western states.⁸⁷ To grasp how the original Treaty Ports developed in the course of the nineteenth century (and beyond) into free ports with warehouses and industrial functions, it is helpful to revisit the developments in the Caribbean sketched above. During the eighteenth-century, free ports were instituted throughout that region of acute imperial rivalry; in the early nineteenth century, they were integrated into fiscally aligned parts of global imperial constellations and transformed in the process. The development of such national trading systems has often been associated with the phenomenon known as the ‘Imperialism of Free Trade’, whereby states (under the aegis of the British Empire) forcibly dismantled tariff regimes in the Latin American republics in the 1820s, the Ottoman Empire in 1838, China in 1842, Siam in 1855, and Japan in 1858 to benefit from trade and investments in these places.⁸⁸ Emblematic of the move toward free trade imperialism is The Economist’s turn in the 1850s from a laissez-faire hostility towards empire, to full-throttled advocacy of using imperial power to force open markets to British trade and capital: ‘since then, the Economist has rarely wavered from the view that laissez-faire may best be furthered through the barrel of a gun’.⁸⁹ Treaty arrangements between states were sustained by outright force, when need be – as well as by institutions like free ports. Yet the case of the free port, as we shall see, shows that free trade imperialism is too imprecise a lens for understanding developments in East Asia, in part because it oversimplifies the real policy differences between Britain and powers such as Germany or the United States, in part because it inadequately represents the agency of Qing China: that is, the use it made of treaty ports and free ports.⁹⁰

The elements of foreign banking and treaty ports reinforced one another in a process of Chinese integration into global markets, creating possibilities for sovereign borrowing along with accelerated industralisation and financialisation. China, around the middle of the nineteenth century, did not yet have its own banking system, and foreign institutions found their way into the Chinese economy through treaty ports. Contrary to the standard understanding of Treaty ports, foreign finance acted upon the institutional environment of the Chinese economy, not in a pseudo-colonial manner borne from the unequal nature of the treaties, but in a pragmatic union with Qing financial and development priorities.⁹¹ According to German political economist Hermann Schumacher, a student of Schmoller, concessionary zones were intended for investment in sectors such as railroads and mining, whereas the Open Door Policy (and the existence of free ports such as Hong Kong) was bound up with trade flows.⁹² What ultimately allowed the ‘unequal’ Treaty Ports to expand into concessionary regimes and warehouses and help accelerate Chinese industrialisation was a restoration of equality between Western powers and Chinese policies in the field of finance: ‘frontier banks on the Chinese frontier and China’s financial internationalization rested on common interests and the cooperation of foreign and Chinese actors in financially connecting China to the global economy, and providing Chinese actors with access to foreign financial institutions and capital’.⁹³

The process that took Treaty Ports beyond their original functions and connected them to financialisation took off in the 1890s and proceeded alongside new commercial treaties between China and Western powers (notably the United States and Germany) that included provisions for foreign-owned warehouses that connected Treaty Ports to industrial spaces in American cities or to the Hamburg Freihafen.⁹⁴ Ironically, it was the financial weakness of China – in contrast to Japan, which had created its own financial sector by the late nineteenth century – that created a precondition for the match between foreign banking capital – institutionally linked to the Treaty Ports – and Chinese financial institutions.⁹⁵ However political and imperial the Treaty Port system itself was, in other words, it produced a culture of ‘cosmopolitan finance’ in China that endured until World War I. Then, despite efforts to preserve neutrality, pressure to enter the conflict and break ties with Germany disrupted the function of German banks in China, which in its turn created incentives for the subsequent development of a Chinese financial sector from the 1920s that affected the role of the Treaty Ports as places where foreign investments, finance, commodity production and warehouse functions had been merged.⁹⁶

It is tempting, in concluding our discussion of nineteenth-century China, to recall the eighteenth-century debate on free ports that began with Fénelon and Doria. As we have seen, these thinkers articulated a programme for regulating contact between a closed state (and hence a closed national economy) and the world market, with all its morally dangerous entanglement in alien social and property regimes. If the Opium Wars and Open Door incursions to ‘open up’ China were foreign interventions that destabilised a closed agricultural economy, the outcome was ultimately a regained sense of control over China’s economic development that ran through a limited number of ports – not unlike how early eighteenth-century writers imagined successful free ports might operate.

2.1.5. From the Free Port to the Special Economic Zone

By the early twentieth century, the remaining free ports in Europe no longer functioned as nodes of deposit and transit in the international carrying trade. Rather, they served as duty-free warehouse zones for goods awaiting sale in the domestic market. Were free ports, as instruments of commercial capitalism, destined for extinction in the age of industry? In the postwar period, a new policy instrument appeared on the scene: the special economic zone, of which about 6,000 are in existence today. ‘Some qualify as major tourist attractions in their own right, while others seem to have been installed on a whim’: what this journalist wrote about duty-free shops in 1963 would be true of many a zone sixty years later.⁹⁷ Some zones echoed the bonded warehouse zone perfected by Hamburg while others resemble the free trade zone exemplified by Livorno; the most numerous focus on light industry and are notorious for relaxing environmental and labour protections, while still others serve financial purposes. Such zones figure prominently in the export-led development schemes for a whole host of developing countries (although in various guises they are not absent from the rich world, either). The diversity and number of such zones suggests that the link between free ports and the special economic zone is rather tenuous. Internal deliberations in places like Puerto Rico or India show that government officials were scarcely informed by the prior tradition of free ports in crafting their zones.⁹⁸ While business journalists in the 1950s and 1960s sometimes applied the term ‘free port’ indiscriminately to the new zones, moreover, the eclipse of the term suggests that it was not adequate for capturing contemporary realities. After all, many modern zones are noted for industry rather than trade, and they are more often situated in labour-rich developing countries as in the old heartland of capitalism. Nor does geopolitics play the role in modern zone dynamics that it did in the earlier spread of free ports. To that extent, the special economic zone appears to be an invention of postwar capitalism, rather than a legacy of the eighteenth century.

Even so, the recourse to zones points to an underlying continuity in the history of capitalism: the tendency toward spatialization. Not only is economic space distinguished by function, as a stylised model of core and periphery would predict; zones are endowed with distinct juridical, administrative, and political arrangements.⁹⁹ This was true in 1700 and remains so three centuries later. Zones are deployed within all kinds of economies, rich and poor; and while they often conformed in the past to a geopolitical logic that is more muted nowadays, they have also often conformed to a functional logic that remains inescapable today, mediating between the peculiarities of a host country and the demands of the international marketplace. They confirm moreover that the uniformities of the modern state are a myth, and that a regime of exceptionalism continues to structure economic life, at least in certain sectors and for certain segments of the market: firms that operate within zones face different fiscal, labour, and environmental rules than other firms (to say nothing of the merchants, investors, or tax-evaders who park their capital in such places). For some, this situation is mooted in the form of a dilemma, state versus capitalism, as if the latter were hollowing out the former. While there are some places where that may appear to be true, on the whole, the relationship is much more collaborative. Capitalism requires both the state and the state of exception to thrive.

That zones do require the state is not to be doubted. Long ago, Louis Dermigny wrote that ‘the free port is a modern reality, created by and imprinted with centralising states and the mercantilist orientation of their policies’.¹⁰⁰ Dermigny’s point was that the creation of national economies as the fundamental unit of economic development also required places where the ordinary rules did not apply. These were places where disparate economies could be linked and managed; thus, on the one hand, where the state could deploy extraordinary controls to ensure that the marketplace did not alter social or political relations in the hinterland; or, conversely, where the state could make extraordinary investments to ensure that a country had a toehold on the international marketplace. In the last resort, they were places where an imperialist power could insert itself into an economy that could not be dominated by other means. In practice, more for pragmatic than for ideological reasons, the state often resorted to delegation, conceding a substantial amount of autonomy to people and firms operating within a free port. The practice of delegation still occurs in the guise of privatising hitherto public functions, underscoring the negotiating power that capital enjoys vis-a-vis state power. The proliferation of special economic zones (and tax havens) enhances the position of capital and, to an extent, insulates capital from democratic control. Who is really in control of the special economic zone? Observers of free ports used to raise the same question, and if different answers have been tendered in reply, it is because state capacity differs widely across time and space, to say nothing of practical politics.

3. Conclusion: The Inverted History of Europe and Global Trade

In Book III of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith teaches that in the natural course of economic development, urban growth is strictly linked to the expansion of agriculture. Cities develop to service the surrounding countryside in an arrangement of reciprocal benefit; foreign commerce is the last sector for investment, after agriculture and the local manufacturing that sustains it. Foreign commerce was therefore not the path to national wealth that most mercantilists had imagined, as the example of Asian economies indicated. ‘The wealth of ancient Egypt, that of China and Indostan, sufficiently demonstrate that a nation may attain a very high degree of opulence, though the greater part of its exportation trade be carried on by foreigners’.¹⁰¹ By contrast there was something unnatural, even inverted about European economic history.¹⁰² The collapse of the Roman Empire led to chronic underinvestment in agriculture and domestic trade. Long-distance commerce and luxury manufacturing became the engine for the commercialisation of society. Europe’s feudal lords exchanged their power and authority ‘for a pair of diamond buckles perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless’, converting dues owed in kind and labour into fees.¹⁰³ Cities became the prime engine for economic development as well as responsible for such pathologies as European colonialism. Mercantilism was urban rent-seeking translated onto the national sphere – supercharged by the size and power of the territorial state. Thus was born jealousy of trade, the term David Hume used to describe the political process of commercial rivalry that sparked ever evolving practices of colonial rule, exploitation, and global war.¹⁰⁴

For historians, free ports emerged out of the system of privileges and franchises that Adam Smith denounced throughout the Wealth of Nations, but that also lay behind the growth of production and wealth that Europe’s upside-down, inside-out economies and monarchical political folly had unleashed onto the world. For the Scottish thinker, however, the free port represented a politically structured return to natural commercial relations, in which the state does not exact more than its due, and where merchants, whatever their origin, are permitted to do business on equal terms.¹⁰⁵ The free port offered an attractive model for the national economy: ‘Brittain should by all means be made a free port, that there should be no interruptions of any kind made to forreign trade […] free commerce and liberty of exchange should be allowed with all nations and for all things’.¹⁰⁶ This injunction (which came with significant fiscal caveats) was an effort to restore the natural order of commerce – to uninvert the British economy, putting investment into foreign trade behind domestic trade, manufacturing, and agriculture. The free port, a thoroughly European institution in a formal sense, was a tool that could leverage Europe’s peculiar historical trajectory and create alignment with the natural order of trade that Smith thought prevailed in Asia. It could make the natural progress of opulence on a global scale work for Britain.

Interestingly, contemporaries from the sixteenth century sometimes spoke of Asian ports in language reminiscent of free ports. For instance, according to one Venetian traveller, the king of Orissa, Mukunda Deva (r. 1559–68), ‘greatly loved foreigners and merchants, who could enter and leave his kingdom with their goods without paying duties or any other imposition: only their ships according to their cargo paid a slight thing’.¹⁰⁷ Modern historians have likewise denominated several key ports in the Indian Ocean and beyond as free ports.¹⁰⁸ Apart from the anachronism which is inevitable in all social-scientific inquiry, such language recapitulates in a modern idiom the naturalness that Smith detected in Asian trade and contrasted with European commercial policy. And yet there is something more at play than a projection of European categories. As Peter Borschberg observes in his contribution to this volume, the practical norms associated with the British-sponsored free port of Singapore were consonant with the commercial traditions of indigenous society. Clearly, many Asian merchants enjoyed a freer trading environment in Asia than their compeers in Europe. Why, then, bother to establish free ports?

Part of the answer has to do with wresting political control out of the hands of Asian rulers, who were content to do business with European merchants, but who also treated trade as part of a larger framework of political and military negotiations – leaving European enterprises in a potentially vulnerable situation; relatedly, the kind of infrastructural investments on which big enterprises depended also favoured the long-term internalisation of political risk. ‘Colonial in-between zones are particularly effective at illustrating the complexities of colonial rule […] colonialism and internationalism were not contradictory projects but rather intricately intertwined’.¹⁰⁹ (Canal projects such as Suez and Panama bear more than a casual resemblance to free ports in Asia.¹¹⁰) Yet places such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch free ports were not ends in themselves. The biggest Asian market of all, mainland China, remained comparatively closed to Europeans, who for practical and ideological reasons were unwilling to conform to the model of tribute trade; much of the jockeying in the region had to do with looping into the China trade. One need not be a Marxist to see why European capitalism found it difficult to abide any limitation on its expansion beyond Europe. The history of the free port in Asia underscores the fundamentally political nature of trading institutions.

It is in this light that the difference between the free port and the ‘port of trade’ becomes particularly clear. The port of trade represents an institution for regulating commerce across political or cultural frontiers, with an aim of preserving local society from the destabilising effects of international trade.¹¹¹ By contrast, the free port represents an agent, if not of empire (though it was often that), certainly of incorporation into an increasingly global system of trade and production. The importance of indigenous patterns and customs of trade should not be minimised, since it is clear that many actors co-created the world of the free port wherever one took root, or ‘resisted’ it alongside resistance to European empire.¹¹² Indeed, free ports could manifest themselves as a ‘middle ground’ where colonial and indigenous actors, or the worlds of trade and of society, met on deceptively equal terms.¹¹³ In this way, they functioned as hinge points of difference where quick inversions, conversions, exchanges and translations were executed away from any direct political authority or legitimacy and where mutual advantage was not the objective. Until relatively recently, the institution was everywhere authorised by a European (or Euro-American) agent. Far from ‘uninverting’ European history, in other words, the free port exported a model of European capitalism to the rest of the world, with the ultimate aim of remaking hinterland economies as well. The extent to which the free port alone achieved this aim is doubtful. European states also exerted military and political pressure in the same direction, resorting to outright imperial control whenever possible. If the formal imperialism that was a concomitant of this commercial project has ended, the remit of the zone has not only not abated but in fact intensified over the past century.

Smith’s inverted history of Europe, expressed in similar terms by eighteenth-century commentators on global trade and politics, is profoundly out of step with a historiographical turn that has emphasised the similarity between European and Asian history, as well as with Marxist perspectives and World Systems Theory. From state and market institutions to ideologies of court and empire, Europe has come to resemble one province in a conglomerate of Eurasian societies. And yet, for all the similarity, there remains something peculiar – pathological, even – about the system of political economy that emerged in early modern Europe. At the heart of the inverted history was the peculiar historical creation of jealousy of trade by which each polity aspired to engross commerce for itself, depriving its rivals of markets, of industries, and ultimately of power. The free port occupied a unique place in this scheme, at once locus where policies of protectionism were compromised as well as buttressed. The protagonists of Tenet fought with inverted weapons, travelling backwards through time; Europe fought with inverted history. In both cases the manipulation of chronology serves as a synecdoche for the manipulation of capital, population, and much else besides.

Acknowledgements

This special volume has been many years in the making. Originally, we had envisioned a series of five workshops on different continents. Such a series would not only have helped harness the expertise that a global institution like the free port demanded, both chronologically and geographically, but would also have facilitated contact with a diverse set of scholarly audiences from different disciplines. The irruption of the Covid pandemic interrupted these ambitions. In the end, we were able to hold meetings in Venice, Helsinki, and Sydney, but had to cancel the ones planned for Seoul and Harvard. Even so, we hope to have done our due diligence in reaching out to our colleagues across the usual barriers of time and place; and we have benefited from generous counsel all along the way.

Inevitably, a project of this scope has acquired many debts, intellectual and practical. The editors would like first to thank those who participated in the workshops: Marcella Aglietti, Mike Beggs, Jesus Bohorquez, Ed Jones Corredera, Ida Fazio, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Rita Foti, Stella Ghervas, Lasse Heerten, Nicholas Hoare, Ben Huf, Antonio Iodice, Toby Nash, Giulio Ongaro, David Do Paço, Francesca Savoldi and Sophie Loy-Wilson. Needless to say, very special thanks to our contributors, who have been patiently stuck with us through a long process.

In addition, we would also like to thank those who have read drafts or otherwise discussed the project with the editors: Doohwan Ahn, Antonella Alimento, Guillaume Calafat, Manuel Covo, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Bob Fredona, Jeffrey Miner, Dara Orenstein, Gabe Paquette, Sophus Reinert, Thibault Serlet, John Shovlin, Glenda Sluga, Antonio Trampus, Francesca Trivellato, Richard Whatmore, and again, our contributors, many of whom have gone beyond the call of duty in helping shepherd this project to completion. And finally, special thanks to the editor of Global Intellectual History, Rosario Lopez.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the tensions between capitalist institutions like zones and tax havens and (global) democracy, see Easterling, Extrastatecraft; Ogle, ‘Archipelago Capitalism’; Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism. Much of this literature focuses on the recent past and has an eye as much on public policy as on historical interpretation. For broader historical perspectives, see Tazzara, ‘Capitalism and the Special Economic Zone’; Neveling, ‘Export Processing Zones’; Maruschke, Portals of Globalization; and Orenstein, Out of Stock; and the article-length review of Slobodian by Fredona and Reinert, ‘In the Zone’.

2 See https://www.openzonemap.com/map. We thank Robert Fredona for bringing this map to our attention and Thibault Serlet (of Adrianople Group) for making the underlying data available to scholars.

3 See the classic definition in Savary, Dictionnaire universel de commerce, vol. 3, 962.

4 Huber, ‘Connecting Colonial Seas,’ 156.

5 Minoletti, I porti franchi, 62. Minoletti proferred almost nothing about the free port’s history. With regard to Livorno, for instance, he merely stated that ‘Livorno was a famous free port’, after referring to Sismondi (who was cited by Gioja) on the abundance of capital in Livorno compared with the rest of Tuscany (ibid., 52). Likewise, Paul Masson emphasises that critics of the free port recapitulated the same criticisms as their eighteenth-century predecessors, despite the immense differences between the two periods: Masson, Ports francs, 61.

6 Gioja, Nuovo Prospetto delle scienze economiche, vol. V, 218–22.

7 See Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization, with perspectives further developed in Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World. Economists privilege price integration as the measure for globalisation, although most historians have found this too narrow a definition: see O’Rourke and Williamson, ‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’ For ports as sites for global history, see Maruschke, ‘Spatial Frameworks of Comparison,’ in this volume.

8 For a recent overview, see Pettigrew and Veevers, eds., The Corporation as a Protagonist.

9 A volume like this must be agnostic about the extent to which European institutions explain its economic trajectory vis-à-vis elsewhere in Eurasia; it is worth noting only that an older strand of scholarship, exemplified by such figures as Fernand Braudel and Douglass North, emphasised the distinctiveness of European institutions. Kenneth Pomeranz (in The Great Divergence) argued against attributing European economic success to its institutional makeup; perhaps that is one reason why many historians have treated empire as a system of territorial exploitation. Even so, many scholars both of a liberal and a Marxist bent continue to argue for the importance of Europe’s peculiar institutions.

10 Masson, Ports francs, xvi. Masson (1863–1938), chair of history and economic geography at the University of Aix-Marseille, is best known for his work on the commercial history of Marseille. His volume on free ports emerged out of university lectures, although it also involved original archival research and extensive correspondence throughout western Europe. Masson traced the topicality to an 1896 conference among commercial and industrial groups advocating the conversion of key ports into free ports and a commission instituted the following year by the minister of commerce to study the merchant marine. Following a publicity campaign sustained by Marseillais interests, Parliament itself undertook the question in 1899; and a delegation was sent to examine free port policies in Hamburg, Bremen Copenhagen, Genoa, Trieste, and Fiume. The issue languished in Parliament over the following years. Meanwhile, critics of the free port emerged to endanger the project, representing protected sectors of the French economy; and many other voices, pro-and-con, entered the arena (e.g. colonial elites in Algeria and Indochina also sought the establishment of free ports). Masson summarised these debates in his preface and vowed to examine the question with special clarity and rigour. If his was the first work of modern historiography upon the free port, it was also the last in a long line of scientific communiques that bore the imprint of policy debates.

11 Masson, Ports francs, 221.

12 Dermigny, ‘Escales, échelles et ports francs,’ 566–626.

13 Masson begins his history of the free port with the mediaeval privileges of Marseilles – thereby eliding the crucial caesura between the Middle Ages and early modernity. For all that the juridical form of the privilege remained crucial to the free port throughout the Ancien Regime, few scholars have followed Masson in locating the free port as such in mediaeval port policies; and Dermigny more properly begins his history in the late Renaissance.

14 This approach was heavily indebted to the examples of Ancona and Marseille, to which ports such as Livorno and Trieste (to name a few examples) were readily assimilated: see Caracciolo, Le port franc d’Ancône, 50; Dermigny, ‘Escales, échelles et ports francs,’ 522.

15 See Anderson’s formulation Imagined Communities, 4.

16 Braudel, The Mediterranean, v. I, 615–642; in general, see Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. Braudel seemed to have endorsed World Systems Theory by volume 3 of his Civilization and Capitalism; in addition, his formulation of the Northern Invasion was formalised by theorists such as Giovanni Arrighi and Faruk Tabak: see Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century and Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean. It is difficult to overstate the impact of the Braudelian perspective on the study of the Italian Mediterranean; see e.g. the work of Kirk, Genoa and the Sea; and Costantini, Porto navi e traffici a Venezia. World Systems Theory has more directly shaped critical scholarship on the Special Economic Zone, most notably in the work of Patrick Neveling.

17 Masson, Ports francs, 201.

18 World Systems Theory was formulated to account for the stark divisions between developed and undeveloped economies in the mid twentieth century; the theory's capacity to explain economic change in the world before the Industrial Revolution has come under criticism, for instance, by Pomeranz in The Great Divergence. It should also be said that, among economists rather than historians, World Systems Theory has never commanded much allegiance: the New Economic Geography pioneered by Paul Krugman as well as the Neoinstitutionalism of Douglass North offer alternative accounts of economic inequality. From a different critical perspective, Megan Maruschke in this volume as well as in her monograph Portals of Globalization also argues against its blanket application to zonal institutions.

19 Masson, Ports francs, 221.

20 The claim may also be doubted from the perspective of early modernists. The consolidation of national states is a critical context for the transformation of the free port. By converting a patchwork of internal tolls and duties into a single space, territorial unification created internal markets much larger than had previously existed; it also accentuated the exceptionality of the free port vis-a-vis the ordinary fiscal and regulatory environment of the state.

21 E.g. Trampus, Free Ports of the World. Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism locates the rise of the zone in places such as late-twentieth century Hong Kong and the activism of the Mont Pelerin Society, all but ignoring the earlier history. Much of the SEZ literature reviewed in Tazzara, ‘Capitalism and the Special Economic Zone’ pays lip-service to prior zonal organisation; see the comments in this volume by Maruschke, ‘Spatial Frameworks of Comparison’.

22 Minoletti, I porti franchi, 62–3.

23 Giacchero, Origini e sviluppo del portofranco genovese, 10–3.

24 On the phrase (coined by David Hume) ‘jealousy of trade’ in its wider intellectual context, see Hont, Jealousy of Trade.

25 Masson, Ports francs, 143; see also 420.

26 Dermigny, ‘Escales, échelles et ports francs,’ 556.

27 Bergasse and Rambert, Histoire du commerce, 39–44; Paris, Histoire du commerce, 8 n. 31, 11, 122–3, 160–1.

28 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, 245–6.

29 For instance, Livorno’s neutrality was encoded in the treaty that would eventually end the War of Polish Succession: more generally, see Alimento and Stapelbroek, The Politics of Commercial Treaties; and Shovlin, Trading with the Enemy.

30 Colocci, I porti marittimi; Trampus, Free Ports of the World, 146–57; Querci et al., Internazionalità e storicità del porto franco di Trieste. The tension between political affiliation and economic hinterland was especially palpable during the interwar period: Bresciani and Richter, ‘Trieste and Danzig after the Great War’.

31 Minoletti, Porti franchi in Inghilterra.

32 See Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade; Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers; and Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. Merchant hospitality was common in the Malaysian trading world as well: see Borschberg, ‘Three Questions,’ in this volume.

33 See Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean; and for a sustained comparison, Tazzara, ‘Ports and Free Ports in the Old World', published in a companion volume that focuses on the Mediterranean origins and development of the free port: Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean, edited by Giulia Delogu, Koen Stapelbroek, and Antonio Trampus.

34 There are notable commonalities between political discourse in Europe and that elsewhere in Eurasia, as for instance argued by Darling, ‘Political Change and Political Discourse’; and Subrahmanyam, ‘On World Historians’; nevertheless, although such discourse touched on matters we would construe as economistic, no discipline of political economy developed within the Islamicate or Indian spheres during this period. See Ermiş, A History of Ottoman Economic Thought; and the remarks in Subrahmanyam, Political Economy, 343–4.

35 The classic is Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy; for a recent review of Renaissance political life, see Osborne, ‘Diplomatic Culture’.

36 The literature on state development is vast: for key revisions, see Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France; Brewer, The Sinews of Power; Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’; see also ‘t hart, The Making of a Bourgeois State, Braddick, State Formation, Kirshner, ed., The Origins of the State in Italy, and Ashworth, Customs and Excise. More recently, scholarship has focused less on fiscal-military structures than on the articulation of networks, discursive production, and court politics, which further underscore the extent of fragmented, negotiated, and contingent power in early modern Europe.

37 On Renaissance economic thought, see Reinert, A ‘Short Treatise’ on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations; and Tazzara, Filippo Sassetti on Trade, Institutions, and Empire; on Botero, see Descendre, L’état du monde; and Andretta, Descendre, and Romano, Un mondo di Relazioni.

38 From a scattered literature, see e.g. Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects and Wakefield, The Disordered Police State; on the Darien venture, see Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 90–2, 164–6.

39 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno; see too Braudel, The Mediterranean, as well as the revisions in Greene, ‘Beyond the Northern Invasion’. Readers surprised not to find Venice in this discussion will consult Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire. Concurrently, Livorno’s rival Genoa pursued an alternative path of bonded warehouses (discussed below) that was a response to the same factors that shaped decisions in Venice, Livorno, and other ports in the region.

40 For Fénelon and the luxury debate, see Hont, ‘The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury’; on the place of Naples in this debate, see Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit, and Money.

41 Broggia, Trattato de' tributi, 97–121, famously 99: ‘the institution of the free port has not caused anything other than the complete opposite of what it was intended and supposed to’.

42 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 345 [Bk XX, chap. 11].

43 Pinto, Essai sur le luxe, 19; see, too, the arguments of Carli, ‘Saggio economico e politico sulla Toscana’.

44 Shovlin, Trading with the Enemy, 52–53, 221–2.

45 On Livorno as model, see Frattarelli Fischer, L’Arcano del mare, 166–7; Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, chap. 8; as well as Victor Wilson’s remarks in this volume.

46 Stapelbroek, ‘Dutch Commercial Decline Revisited’.

47 See Kleiser and Røge, ‘Emulating Empires’; and Wilson, ‘Enclaves of Exception,’ both in this volume.

48 See Tavarez, ‘Free Ports within Empire,’ in this volume.

49 Quoted by Wilson, ‘Enclaves of Exception’.

50 Quoted by Armytage, The Free Port System in the British West Indies, 58: for a similar quotation, see Kleiser and Røge, ‘Emulating Empire’.

51 Shovlin, Trading with the Enemy.

52 Trollope (The West Indies), as quoted by Wilson, ‘Enclaves of Exception’.

53 Kleiser and Røge, ‘Emulating Empire’.

54 O’Malley, Final Passages, 301–16. In addition to the literature cited above, see Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea; Karras, ‘Transgressive Exchange’; Díaz, Relaciones Comerciales, chap. 1; Hunt, ‘Contraband, Free Ports, and British Merchants’; Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine; Mulich, In a Sea of Empires; Kleiser, ‘An empire of free ports’.

55 On neutrality as a means of mitigating costs, see Müller, Consuls, Corsairs, and Commerce, 165–6, cited by Wilson, ‘Enclaves of Exception’: see Lane, ‘Economic Consequences of Organized Violence’; and, for a classic application of the theory, Steensgaard, Carracks, Caravans and Companies.

56 Christiane Laffite, as quoted by Joaquín, ‘Actividades económicas,’ 74. According to James Dixon, there were analogous concerns in the US before the federal constitution: see Tazzara and Hinshelwood, ‘Free Ports in the Liberal Imagination’ in this volume.

57 Díaz, Relaciones comerciales, 67–9, 76.

58 Elías-Caro, ‘Relaciones comerciales,’ 100–14.

59 Cunha and Suprinyak, ‘Political Economy and Latin American Independence,’ 12; Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade, 100–1; see Gallagher and Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’.

60 Peter Evans, as quoted by Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade, xxxv; and see e.g. 100–1; 103, 128,133, 193–4, 241, 251.

61 Orenstein, Out of Stock, 111–6 (quote from 112–3); see also Chambers, No God But Gain; Mareite, ‘‘An Unlawful and Contemptible Adventure’.

62 Anonymous, Reflexões a favor do estabelecimento de um porto franco; Palyart, Segunda memoria que sobre a instituicao dos portos francos; Augustinis, Memorie sopra i porti-franchi. While the context of the Portuguese debate was the post-imperial reform challenge, in Naples the coming to power of Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies inspired new economic thinking: see Iodice, ‘A “Source of Gold and Prosperity”?’.

63 Stapelbroek, ‘The Failure of the Dutch Free Ports,’ in this volume.

64 Engelen, Dissertatio historico oeconomico politico, 58.

65 Memoria sobre puertos francos aplicada al puerto franco de Cádiz, original de Manuel María Gutiérrez (1830), Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, MSS/12333, f. 10: see Aglietti, ‘The Evils of “Beguiling Liberty”’.

66 As quoted in Aglietti, ‘The Evils of “Beguiling Liberty”’. Gutiérrez’s work remains in manuscript, although some portions of it were reworked for publication in his Nuevas consideraciones sobre libertad absoluta de comercio y puertos francos (1839).

67 Di Giacomo, Dall’Atlantico al Mediterraneo, 27. On the difference between unconditional most-favoured nation clauses (which tended to promote freer trade) and conditional clauses (which were perfectly consonant with protectionist strategies), see Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade, xxiv, 276.

68 Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 9 January 1857, also quoted (in a slightly different form) by Botteri, A European History of Free Trading, 153. The politics of railroad construction and pricing became an essential aspect of the management of free ports such as Trieste in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

69 Giuliano Ricci, as quoted by LoRomer, Merchants and Reform in Livorno, 128–9. See in general Mori, ‘Linee e momenti’; and Fettah, Les limites de la cité.

70 Giacchero, Origini e sviluppo del portofranco genovese; Kirk, Genoa and the Sea, 154–80.

71 ‘Bonded Warehouse,’ in R. H. Inglis Palgrave, Dictionary of Political Economy, 3 vols. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1894), vol. 1, 163; see also the articles ‘Docks’ and ‘Warehousing System’.

72 Langford, The Excise Crisis, 32; see ‘bonded warehouse’, in Palgrave, Dictionary of Political Economy; and Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 37, 231, 300–1, 307–8.

73 Robert J. Walker, as quoted by Orenstein, Out of Stock, 78.

74 ‘Warehousing System, United States’, in Palgrave, Dictionary of Political Economy, v. 3, 658.

75 Ashworth, Customs and Excise, 302. Orenstein, Out of Stock retraces this history in the United States and offers numerous clues for reconstructing the global history of the phenomenon.

76 The Economist in 1849, as quoted by Tazzara and Hinshelwood, ‘Free Ports in the Liberal Imagination’.

77 Ferguson, Paper and Iron, 37; see too Böhm, Überseehandel und Flottenbau; and Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire; Wagner, ‘Nicht mehr als eine ferne Bekannte?’. Important political economists with ties to the Hamburg bourgeoisie included Karl Rathgen, Ernst von Halle, and Bernard Bülow.

78 Schmoller, ‘Die Wandlungen in der europäischen Handelspolitk,’ 378; see Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire, 268 on this programmatic paper.

79 Clapp, The Port of Hamburg, 48; for the influence of the Freihafen on American debates see, Orenstein, Out of Stock, 121. Clapp himself emerged as a proponent of foreign trade zones in the United States.

80 Clapp, The Port of Hamburg, 50. The city’s old warehouses became bonded warehouses when the ‘freer’ warehouses of the Freihafen were constructed: ibid., 64.

81 Turbin, ‘“Native” Vladivostok vs. “Alien” Dal’nii’ in this volume.

82 Hettstedt, Die internationale Stadt Tanger, 27 (where geteilten is glossed as both ‘shared’ and ‘divided’.). The colonial regime had antecedents in such institutions as the Conseil Sanitaire du Maroc (1840), the Commission d’Hygiène et de la Voirie (1892), and the International Lighthouse administered at Cape Spartel (1865); in spite of the formal autonomy of the zone, however, in practice the colonial powers could exert important influence over the administration of the zone during times of crisis. Ibid., 9, 24, 203–4, 228, 247–53, 260–2; see too Pennell, Morocco, 60, 85–6, 167–8; 195–7; 293.

83 Stuart, The International City of Tangier, 56. On the phenomenon of ‘internationalisation’, implemented to defuse rival economic or nationalist claims over the same territory, see Ydit, Internationalised Territories.

84 Stuart, The International City of Tangier, 173.

85 Raffles, Statement, 54–5, quote adapted from Borschberg, ‘Three Questions,’ in this volume. On the trading regime before the nineteenth century, see Selden et al., China, East Asia, and the Global Economy; and Kang, East Asia before the West. We would like to thank Doohwan Ahn for his assistance with the East Asia historiography.

86 See Stapelbroek, ‘The failure of the Dutch free ports,’ in this volume.

87 See Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on China Coast; Hamashita, Tribute and Treaties; Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism; Bickers and Jackson, eds., Treaty Ports in Modern China.

88 See Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 455.

89 Zevin, Liberalism at Large, 51; for The Economist’s advocacy of free ports, see in this volume Tazzara and Hinshelwood, ‘Free Ports in the Liberal Imagination’.

90 As in Latin America, British and American overseas investment and trade were in competition with each other, but they also often dovetailed in their joint objectives. Yet this did not mean that American and British strategies were underpinned by the same policies or that these policies were stable over time. From an American perspective, the ingredients of protectionism, Anglophobia and imperialism, treaties, protectionist tariffs, and overseas investment, all in function of the national economy, were imagined beyond Latin America and in relation to the wider Pacific from at least the 1840s. Yet, identifying the existence of an ‘imperialism of economic nationalism’, inspired by Friedrich List’s political economy and shared by American Republicans, does not help much to explain how Treaty Ports functioned in the years after their establishment. See Palen, The ‘Conspiracy of Free Trade,’ 24; and Moazzin, Foreign Banks and Global Finance, 110; and our discussion of free-trade imperialism above.

91 Moazzin, Foreign Banks and Global Finance, 105–10 (for historiography 17–9); So, ‘Modern China’s Treaty Port Economy’; Henriot and Bickers, ‘Introduction’; Hao, The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-Century China; van de Ven, The Onrush of Modern Globalization in China’.

92 Grimmer-Solem, Learning Empire, 238.

93 Moazzin, Foreign Banks and Global Finance, 266; Lin, ‘China’s “Dual Economy” in International Trade Relations’.

94 Orenstein, Out of Stock, 103, 123; George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting. Of note, among other treaties – especially the Anglo-Chinese Mackay Treaty of 1902 – is the 1903 American-China ‘Treaty for the extension of the commercial relations’ that stipulated consent ‘to the establishment by citizens of the United States of warehouses approved by the proper Chinese authorities as bonded warehouses at the several open Ports of China, for storage, re-packing, or preparation for shipment of lawful goods’ (article 6, see https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1903/d93) and which was negotiated by McKinley’s appointee Edwin H. Conger, who was also deeply involved in the American concession of Tianjin and the American China Development Company, on which Braisted, ‘The United States and the American Development Company’. The Sydney Morning Herald of 9 October noted the new treaty and commented that the same strategy followed by China could be advantageous for Manchuria and that it was ‘probably in Russia's own interest to open the door in order to make the vast new territories she has won for her trade accessible’. On this context see the contribution by Turbin in this volume.

95 Moazzin, Foreign Banks and Global Finance, 18–9.

96 Ibid., chap. 6

97 Jack Manning in the New York Times, as quoted by Tazzara and Hinshelwood, ‘Free Ports in the Liberal Imagination’ in this volume. For overviews of the SEZ, see the literature cited at the beginning of this introduction.

98 See Maruschke, Portals of Globalization, 30, 42–3, 53, 81–3, 95; and her article in this volume, ‘Spatial Frameworks of Comparison’.

99 As Wallerstein and his followers have often observed and a point emphasised (from a different theoretical perspective) by Maruschke, ‘Spatial Frameworks of Comparison’. One might add that private property regimes may also be spatially inflected, as in the enclosure movement of Renaissance England, or the incorporation of indigenous lands into the legal regimes of settler colonies: on the latter process, see Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land.

100 Dermigny, ‘Escales, échelles et ports francs,’ 522.

101 The Wealth of Nations, Bk. 3, ch. 1, 411.

102 Questions about Europe’s inverted developmental trajectory were not only asked by eighteenth-century writers, but over time have engaged numerous thinkers: consider, for instance Max Weber’s ‘only in the Occident’ perspective and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘provincializing Europe’: see Leonhard, ‘Conceptual History’.

103 The Wealth of Nations, Bk. 3, ch. IV, 444.

104 See Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 1–156.

105 On Smith, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments; and Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered.

106 Smith, ‘Report dated 1766,’ 514 (actually to be dated to 1763–4).

107 Cesare Federici, as quoted in Tazzara, ‘Ports and Free Ports in the Old World’.

108 E.g. Mokha (Barendse, The Arabian Seas, 175); a port site in Persia (Steensgaard, Carracks, Caravans and Companies), 326; Canton (Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 117).

109 Huber, ‘Connecting Colonial Seas,’ 142.

110 See Tazzara and Hinshelwood in this volume for some comparisons.

111 See Polanyi et al., Trade and Market in the Early Empires; for a discussion of the applicability of this model to the early modern Mediterranean, see Addobbati, ‘Espace de la guerre et du commerce’; and Tazzara, ‘Port of Trade or Commodity Market?’

112 Veevers, The origins of the British Empire in Asia.

113 Referring to White, The Middle Ground.