Written reports and the promotion of Trans-Oceanic trade in Tuscany and Genoa in the seventeenth century

Abstract

This chapter analyses some texts related to the attempts at extra-European expansion that were promoted in the seventeenth century by the Republic of Genoa and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In the beginning and the conclusion, I will expose the way it advances the main themes of the volume. In fact, the people who backed these attempts promoted the production of a wide array of texts (mostly written projects and memoranda, and in one case a travel memoir), which set guidelines for a prospective naval and commercial expansion. There was a feedback process between these works and the different companies or expeditions that were started as a result of their circulation. Moreover, the characteristics of these texts, and the way they circulated, were heavily influenced both by the social and economic background of their producers, as well as by their expected readers. My essay, then, will show the importance that written plans and reports had in European trans-oceanic expansion, even in the cases in which this expansion was eventually aborted.