11 - The Wool Trade, Venice and the Mediterranean Cities at the End of the Sixteenth Century

Summary

In recent decades the circulation of people and goods has become the subject of renewed interest in the fields of social and economic history. This attention has stimulated new studies in the ways in which products have been transferred, appropriated and consumed. ‘Trading diasporas’ have been largely reconsidered and revaluated. As informal institutions, these groups ensured transactions and economic success across spaces, as well as sustaining exchanges beyond religious, cultural and social borders. The concept or research strategy of the ‘network’ allows researchers to focus on boundaries rather than on the homogeneity and structures of those groups. Moreover, it shows how modern institutions (normally conceived as legal) were not antithetical to ‘pre-modern’ ones (based on trust, reputation and reciprocity) and state commercial powers did not replace stateless merchant groups in dominating trade. Impersonal exchanges, which were placed on the market, were not automatically more efficient than personal exchanges, which were based on values such as kinship, friendship or communitarian membership. Thanks to these studies, the evolution of commercial institutions as a teleological process has been deeply criticized.

This essay aims to enrich this field of research by focusing on the role of a raw material – wool – and the social and economic interactions it created across the Mediterranean cities at the end of the sixteenth century. With respect to the most common approaches in recent studies of trade history, I will shift the focus from traders to products.