Italian merchants in Amsterdam : ca 1650-1700

Abstract

This thesis studies the thirty Italian merchants that operated from Amsterdam in the second half of the seventeenth century from a transnational, actor-based approach. It engages with the debates on the role of informal networks and formal institutions in creating the necessary conditions for long distance trade in early modern Europe. It assesses the extent to which a common Italian origin was a basis for their social, religious, political, and economic activities. To this end, it reconstructs patterns in their socio-economic behavior on the basis of notarial, fiscal, accounting sources and correspondence kept in Dutch and Italian public archives, as well as in private Italian family archives. The thesis makes three main interventions. The first concerns the basis on which these Amsterdam-based Italian merchants may be considered a community. That Amsterdam did not recognize merchant nations and that religious diversity reigned among the Italians undermined the group’s social cohesion. Yet this was not the case in their business partnerships and capital. For these they overwhelmingly relied on family and fellow townsmen, specializing in buying and selling goods in Amsterdam in commission for fellow Italian merchants. In finance, they collectively operated as the market-makers for long-distance payment and credit market though the circulation of bills of exchange in cooperation with other Italian merchant-bankers across Europe. The second intervention of this thesis concerns the means underpinning the Amsterdam-based Italian merchants’ commercial and financial undertakings. The thesis argues that merchants relied on different informal and formal institutions for different purposes. Formal institutions did not replace informal ones. Rather, informal practices adapted to, and intertwined with, new institutions. This calls into question the prevailing view that sees changes in the structure of early modern European trade in terms of the rise and decline of various territories’ commercial standing: commercial success of the Dutch Republic does not account for the Italian decline. The third intervention of this thesis is therefore an attempt to see what the Italian merchants in seventeenth-century Amsterdam elucidate about Europe’s commercial history. A close examination of the activities and lives of merchants involved in trade offers a newpicture, one that shows that the European commercial system actually became better integrated and more efficient in this period. Casting light on patterns in and fault lines of transactions and interactions of those who constituted the commercial and financial backbone of Europe, this thesis opens up fresh perspectives on the history of the European economy and the communities that comprise it, within but also beyond firms, corporations, and the nation-state.