Hard times in the Levant : trade, mobility and kinship in the early modern Mediterranean (1680s-1710s)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Tuscan traders who trafficked in the Levant at the turn of the eighteenth century. Unlike the more intensively studied merchant communities of France, Venice, the Netherlands and England, whose activities left long paper trails in the state and company archives of their respective “nations,” the story of these Tuscan economic emigrants has never been studied before. As such, their experience opens up new questions about working and living conditions in Ottoman Syria in the early modern age. This study therefore focuses on both the arc of their physical mobility and the mercantile networks in which these merchants inserted themselves in the midst of the great military and commercial rivalry between France and England in the Mediterranean theatre. Indeed, it was in the late seventeenth century that competition between European powers, notably England, France and the Dutch Republic, for the lucrative Levantine trading markets was reinvigorated. The flourishing profits made by the merchants of these nations between 1670s and 1710s reflected a period of intensifying European commercial interest in the region despite the difficult geopolitical context. When conflicts, reciprocal trade blockades, piracy, and fluctuating relations with the Ottoman administration undermined the stability of the maritime trade, European competition for Levantine market share created a new opening for the subjects of small neutral Italian states—as was the Grand Duchy of Tuscany from 1640s onwards—who worked alternately for the Levant Company or the merchants of the Chamber of Commerce of Marseille system. Specifically, the life and activities of two Tuscan merchant brothers, Francesco and Domenico Adami (1654–1702; 1655–1715), who left the port of Livorno in 1686 to gradually move towards the Eastern Mediterranean, will be analysed here. During their long period abroad, the Adami brothers experienced trading in the Levant in difficult times, a period bracketed by the War of Morea (1684–99) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–14), during which they found themselves under the protection of European powers in conflict with each other at the macro level but interested in maintaining stable and reciprocal trade flows at the micro one. Describing these individual migratory experiences in such complex scenarios has been made possible by the discovery of the extraordinary testimony left behind by the two merchants, including their private and commercial correspondence, amassed over some 30 years spent in business on the coasts of Ottoman Syria.