Page 9 - Mocarelli, Luca, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2020. Maize to the People! Cultivation, Consumption and Trade in the North-Eastern Mediterranean (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Century). Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 9
ze in the north-eastern Mediterranean:
new insights and researches
Luca Mocarelli
University of Milan Bicocca, Department of Economics, Management and Statistics
This volume is a first attempt at examining one of the most important and
yet little studied aspects of the Colombian exchange: the introduction and
diffusion of maize in some countries of Southern Europe. While the pota-
to and its impact on European history have been examined in quite some
detail, thanks to a large number of articles and monographs (McNeill 1948;
Langer 1975; Salaman, 1985; Komlos 1998; McNeill 1999; Ó Gráda, Paping,
Vanhaute 2007; Gentilcore 2012), the same cannot be said for maize – de-
spite the incontrovertible importance this crop has achieved as a food-
stuff in many rural areas of the Mediterranean region, as is probably most
true of Italy (Alfani, Mocarelli, Strangio 2017, 46-47). But even in the case
of Italy, after the seminal work of Messedaglia (1927), we can mostly find
only short contributions or a few insightful syntheses (Mantelli 1998; Doria
2002; Finzi 2009; Gasparini 2015). However, much the same may be said
with regard to other Mediterranean regions and countries since the his-
toriographical ‘state of the art’ regarding maize is quite similar if not even
more scarce (Panjek in this volume). Apart from the generally unsatisfying
number of specific regional studies on maize in the earlier stages of its dif-
fusion, one thing is certainly even more true: we lack a comprehensive vi-
sion and a comparative perspective on this process that would embrace the
whole of Southern Europe.
For this reason, this volume is made up of a collection of contribu-
tions, each with a specific geographical scope. By combining regional
doi: https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-6963-09-1.7-23 7
new insights and researches
Luca Mocarelli
University of Milan Bicocca, Department of Economics, Management and Statistics
This volume is a first attempt at examining one of the most important and
yet little studied aspects of the Colombian exchange: the introduction and
diffusion of maize in some countries of Southern Europe. While the pota-
to and its impact on European history have been examined in quite some
detail, thanks to a large number of articles and monographs (McNeill 1948;
Langer 1975; Salaman, 1985; Komlos 1998; McNeill 1999; Ó Gráda, Paping,
Vanhaute 2007; Gentilcore 2012), the same cannot be said for maize – de-
spite the incontrovertible importance this crop has achieved as a food-
stuff in many rural areas of the Mediterranean region, as is probably most
true of Italy (Alfani, Mocarelli, Strangio 2017, 46-47). But even in the case
of Italy, after the seminal work of Messedaglia (1927), we can mostly find
only short contributions or a few insightful syntheses (Mantelli 1998; Doria
2002; Finzi 2009; Gasparini 2015). However, much the same may be said
with regard to other Mediterranean regions and countries since the his-
toriographical ‘state of the art’ regarding maize is quite similar if not even
more scarce (Panjek in this volume). Apart from the generally unsatisfying
number of specific regional studies on maize in the earlier stages of its dif-
fusion, one thing is certainly even more true: we lack a comprehensive vi-
sion and a comparative perspective on this process that would embrace the
whole of Southern Europe.
For this reason, this volume is made up of a collection of contribu-
tions, each with a specific geographical scope. By combining regional
doi: https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-6963-09-1.7-23 7
