Page 93 - 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. 93
The Free Port Debate: Economic Policies, International Equilibria and Mythologies ...
tual and institutional elaboration, theoretical reflection, and reformist
practice. In addition to being topics of a ‘technical’ debate (both economic
and political), free ports had gradually also become elements of the public
imaginary, featuring in a vast production of travel and geographical de-
scription of a more popular nature. Thus, between the end of the eight-
eenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, while they
were being condemned as emblems of a despotic feudal past, a positive
narrative recognizing them as factors of development and rebirth also
continued to resist.5
The nineteenth-century debate about free ports:
‘modern’ solutions or ‘old’ problems?
Later on, during the Napoleonic era, free ports became again an object
of economic and political interest. The first to claim their usefulness, af-
ter the debates of the revolutionary age, was Simonde de Sismondi in his
treatise De la richesse commerciale (Sismonde de Sismondi 1803, 2:419–
41). Starting from the now canonical definition of Savary, and the exam-
ple of Livorno, Sismondi reconstructed how, thanks to free port status,
cities such as Bayonne, Dunkirk, Marseille, Genoa, Ancona, and Trieste
had become the ‘entrepot de tout commerce de la Méditerranée’ (p. 426).
Although in the general layout of the work he referred preferably to the
theories of Adam Smith, for the specific point of the free ports, he devel-
oped his own original vision, destined to have a wide influence. Sismondi
started his analysis by quoting Jean Herrenschwand who, referring to
Smith, considered free ports as a possible intermediate step towards free
trade. After this initial phase of national development, however, he con-
sidered them as an obstacle, if not a danger, to the growth of internal
economy (Herrenschwand 1786, 94). Instead, Sismondi asserted that free
ports, not ensuring any monopoly, did not necessarily favour the ‘com-
merce de transport’ to the detriment of internal manufacturing and agri-
culture, as also demonstrated by Marseille itself (p. 428). Another of the
main objections made to free ports, of favouring smuggling, was also re-
5 As an example, see Dodsley, J. 1787, celebrating the extraordinary development
of Trieste, which, thanks to its status of free port, was able to revive the glories of
its Roman past. Moreover, see Carpaccio 1805; Dictionnaire de la conversation et de
la lecture 1836; Balbi 1841, I, no. 24. More generally, on the free port as a vector
of prosperity, see Antonelli 1839, in particular the entry ‘free port’ which offers a
global panorama of the question (Vanzon 1842) in particular the entries ‘Genoa,
‘Gibraltar’, ‘Livorno’, ‘Trieste’.
93
tual and institutional elaboration, theoretical reflection, and reformist
practice. In addition to being topics of a ‘technical’ debate (both economic
and political), free ports had gradually also become elements of the public
imaginary, featuring in a vast production of travel and geographical de-
scription of a more popular nature. Thus, between the end of the eight-
eenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, while they
were being condemned as emblems of a despotic feudal past, a positive
narrative recognizing them as factors of development and rebirth also
continued to resist.5
The nineteenth-century debate about free ports:
‘modern’ solutions or ‘old’ problems?
Later on, during the Napoleonic era, free ports became again an object
of economic and political interest. The first to claim their usefulness, af-
ter the debates of the revolutionary age, was Simonde de Sismondi in his
treatise De la richesse commerciale (Sismonde de Sismondi 1803, 2:419–
41). Starting from the now canonical definition of Savary, and the exam-
ple of Livorno, Sismondi reconstructed how, thanks to free port status,
cities such as Bayonne, Dunkirk, Marseille, Genoa, Ancona, and Trieste
had become the ‘entrepot de tout commerce de la Méditerranée’ (p. 426).
Although in the general layout of the work he referred preferably to the
theories of Adam Smith, for the specific point of the free ports, he devel-
oped his own original vision, destined to have a wide influence. Sismondi
started his analysis by quoting Jean Herrenschwand who, referring to
Smith, considered free ports as a possible intermediate step towards free
trade. After this initial phase of national development, however, he con-
sidered them as an obstacle, if not a danger, to the growth of internal
economy (Herrenschwand 1786, 94). Instead, Sismondi asserted that free
ports, not ensuring any monopoly, did not necessarily favour the ‘com-
merce de transport’ to the detriment of internal manufacturing and agri-
culture, as also demonstrated by Marseille itself (p. 428). Another of the
main objections made to free ports, of favouring smuggling, was also re-
5 As an example, see Dodsley, J. 1787, celebrating the extraordinary development
of Trieste, which, thanks to its status of free port, was able to revive the glories of
its Roman past. Moreover, see Carpaccio 1805; Dictionnaire de la conversation et de
la lecture 1836; Balbi 1841, I, no. 24. More generally, on the free port as a vector
of prosperity, see Antonelli 1839, in particular the entry ‘free port’ which offers a
global panorama of the question (Vanzon 1842) in particular the entries ‘Genoa,
‘Gibraltar’, ‘Livorno’, ‘Trieste’.
93
