Page 90 - Mellinato, Giulio, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2022. Complex Gateways. Labour and Urban History of Maritime Port Cities: The Northern Adriaticin a Comparative Perspective. Koper: University of Primorska Press.
P. 90
plex Gateways
harmful to the internal equilibrium of the port cities and the nations
that hosted them, and even as emblems of a despotic power.
This contribution examines the debate about free ports: how they
were defined after their institutional creation, how they were then scru-
tinized and criticized, but also how they were transfigured in powerful,
positive (even salvific) images and mythologies.1 Ultimately, despite a dis-
continuous history (free ports were continuously reconfigured, created,
and cancelled) at an institutional level, this contribution shows how the
concept of a free port became a well-established one, creating a lasting
image which played a primary role in economic and political debates, and
even in cultural imaginaries.
The Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Debate:
Free Ports between Definitions and Imaginaries
As is known, the first free ports were established in Genoa and Livorno
in the early 1590s with different goals and different regulations but un-
der the same image, namely that of a welcoming and blooming port.
While the first one was a very contingent answer to the victual crisis the
Genoese Republic was experiencing because of the severe cooling of tem-
peratures in the first phase of the Little Ice Age, the second was part of a
largescale project envisaged by the Medici rulers to revitalize the Tuscan
economy and to insert the Grand Duchy in the international arena.2 By
the eighteenth century, albeit with significant tariff and legislative dif-
ferences, the free port model was to find application throughout the en-
tire Mediterranean (Naples, Venice, Civitavecchia, Tangiers, Marseille,
Fiume, Trieste, Messina, Ancona, Nizza-Villafranca), in Northern Europe
(Dunkirk, Bayonne, L’Orient, Ostend, Althona, Hamburg, Marstrand) and
in the Caribbean (Curaçao, Saint Thomas, Saint-Domingue, Martinique,
Jamaica, and Dominica) (Tazzara 2017; Trampus 2021).
Around the mid-seventeenth century, inside the European debate on
trade, the free port as a concept took on a positive connotation, espe-
1 The preliminary results presented in this text are part of an ongoing wider re-
search project focused on new communication strategies in free ports in the sev-
enteenth-nineteenth centuries in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic.
2 The theoretical economic framework in which free ports are traditionally ascribed
is that of mercantilism (Reinert 2011; Magnusson 2015): this aspect is more thor-
oughly discussed in the forthcoming volumes by G. Delogu (L’emporio delle parole)
and G. Delogu, K. Stapelbroek, A. Trampus, eds. (Free trade and free ports in the
Mediterranean. New York-London: Routledge).
90
harmful to the internal equilibrium of the port cities and the nations
that hosted them, and even as emblems of a despotic power.
This contribution examines the debate about free ports: how they
were defined after their institutional creation, how they were then scru-
tinized and criticized, but also how they were transfigured in powerful,
positive (even salvific) images and mythologies.1 Ultimately, despite a dis-
continuous history (free ports were continuously reconfigured, created,
and cancelled) at an institutional level, this contribution shows how the
concept of a free port became a well-established one, creating a lasting
image which played a primary role in economic and political debates, and
even in cultural imaginaries.
The Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Debate:
Free Ports between Definitions and Imaginaries
As is known, the first free ports were established in Genoa and Livorno
in the early 1590s with different goals and different regulations but un-
der the same image, namely that of a welcoming and blooming port.
While the first one was a very contingent answer to the victual crisis the
Genoese Republic was experiencing because of the severe cooling of tem-
peratures in the first phase of the Little Ice Age, the second was part of a
largescale project envisaged by the Medici rulers to revitalize the Tuscan
economy and to insert the Grand Duchy in the international arena.2 By
the eighteenth century, albeit with significant tariff and legislative dif-
ferences, the free port model was to find application throughout the en-
tire Mediterranean (Naples, Venice, Civitavecchia, Tangiers, Marseille,
Fiume, Trieste, Messina, Ancona, Nizza-Villafranca), in Northern Europe
(Dunkirk, Bayonne, L’Orient, Ostend, Althona, Hamburg, Marstrand) and
in the Caribbean (Curaçao, Saint Thomas, Saint-Domingue, Martinique,
Jamaica, and Dominica) (Tazzara 2017; Trampus 2021).
Around the mid-seventeenth century, inside the European debate on
trade, the free port as a concept took on a positive connotation, espe-
1 The preliminary results presented in this text are part of an ongoing wider re-
search project focused on new communication strategies in free ports in the sev-
enteenth-nineteenth centuries in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic.
2 The theoretical economic framework in which free ports are traditionally ascribed
is that of mercantilism (Reinert 2011; Magnusson 2015): this aspect is more thor-
oughly discussed in the forthcoming volumes by G. Delogu (L’emporio delle parole)
and G. Delogu, K. Stapelbroek, A. Trampus, eds. (Free trade and free ports in the
Mediterranean. New York-London: Routledge).
90
