Francesca Trivellato

The organisation of business transactions in the preindustrial period, once a central concern in scholarly debates about the rise of capitalism, currently plays only a marginal role in the literature on long-run economic development. Our survey of the contents of five top-tier business and economic history journals published in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2000 to 2016 finds that only 20 per cent of the articles concern the entire period before 1800 and that, among those articles, most are national or regional in scope, with a disproportionate focus on Europe, and on England in particular. At the same time, our survey suggests that a strong theoretical foundation and rich empirical data exist on the basis of which we can develop a comparative business history of the preindustrial world. We identify four areas of enquiry that are especially conducive to further comparisons within and beyond Europe: the corporation, the family firms, the economic role of women, and the funding of private businesses.

The few Anglophone readers for whom the name Gino Luzzatto (1878–1964) still has a familiar ring know him as an economic historian of medieval Europe, with a focus on Italy and on Mediterranean trade. But throughout his career he also cultivated a consistent if secondary interest in Jewish history and weighed in on controversial debates on the role of Jews in the development of Western capitalism. A socialist and an assimilated Jew, Luzzatto was persecuted first for his political ideas and later as a consequence of Mussolini’s Racial Laws. This article examines his largely forgotten contributions to the economic history of medieval and early modern Italian Jews in order to illuminate a little-known chapter in the ever-contentious relationship between economic history and Jewish history. By placing Luzzatto alongside his contemporaries, it elucidates his commitment to integrate Jewish history into general European history and compares his approach to competing interpretations dating from the inter- war and immediate post-war periods. It thus broadens our knowledge of the range of scholarly traditions that have sustained the study of Jews’ economic roles before the current revival of interest in the topic.

At first sight, global history and microhistory have little in common, and this essay takes stock of where their methods and goals diverge. But in the past two decades a host of scholars have written microhistorically-inflected studies of men and women whose lives transcended narrowly bounded geographical, religious, and linguistic areas. The article assesses what these studies have in common with and how they differ from the main contributions that Italian microhistorians articulated in publications, which appeared from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. It then suggests complementary and alternative ways of drawing inspiration from Italian microhistory to nourish the future agenda of global history.

This article focuses on the consequences of a single major international affair — the shipwreck of a French ship carrying 165 Muslim pilgrims along the southern shores of Sicily in 1716 — to address two pivotal issues in the reordering of eighteenth-­century legal and political systems: the limits of domestic sovereignty in absolutist states and the status of non-Christian polities in the theory and practice of the law of nations. Both the time and place of this episode, which had a vast resonance at the time, have broad implications for how we write about the development of modern international law. While much of the debate on the maritime dimension of the eighteenth-century law of nations focuses on the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, we spotlight the Mediterranean, where endemic corsairing activities coexisted with age-old diplomatic and day-to-day practices of accommodation and mutual recognition between Christian and Muslim polities. Here we draw attention to shipwrecks that occurred in foreign territorial waters and their heuristic potential for better understanding controversial issues of maritime law, such as the status of shorelines, neutrality and the law of the flag. Even after the Peace of Utrecht (1713–15), which is often regarded as a watershed moment in the history of international law, these rules were far from settled and shipwrecks continued to fuel legal and philosophical battles that extended well beyond the confines of the famous controversy between supporters of mare liberum and advocates of mare clausum. The close examination of the 1716 shipwreck leads us to challenge the land/sea divide as constructed by Carl Schmitt and demonstrate that territorial waters were objects of sovereign disputes in much the same way as land territories. We also show how the emerging Eurocentric discourse about the ‘barbarity’ of non-Christian peoples and nations coexisted with intellectual, economic and diplomatic forces interested in establishing formal agreements between Western European nations, the Ottoman Empire and its North African provinces.

This article discusses a number of scholarly trends that fall under the rubric of global history, with particular regard for those that address the early modern period (c.1400–1800). It stresses the rubric’s lack of coherence from both a methodological and ideological perspective. Most importantly, it revisits longstanding debates about the intersection of microanalysis and global history by assessing landmark works by Italian microhistorians, scholars of the so-called great divergence, and historians of climate and the environment. In so doing, it also asks how recent contributions build on insights that classic studies had already yielded – at least on the margins of the profession – beginning in the 1970s.