Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450–1700. By Maria Fusaro.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi+408. $120.00 (cloth); $96.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsPolitical Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450–1700. By Maria Fusaro.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi+408. $120.00 (cloth); $96.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).Dennis RomanoDennis RomanoSyracuse University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs Maria Fusaro notes at the end of her dense and fascinating study of the fortunes of the Venetian maritime empire in the early modern period, many in Victorian England were preoccupied with understanding the causes of Venice’s decline two centuries earlier in the hope of avoiding a similar fate. The prevailing Victorian interpretation blamed immorality and tyrannical government for the loss of Venetian maritime hegemony. For her part, Fusaro takes up the perennial question about Venetian decline, which, following David Landes, she states is better imagined as “loss of leadership” (x), and seeks to locate it in the context of larger debates about the nature of empires and the beginnings of globalization. Specifically, she investigates the means by which the English replaced the Venetians in the early modern period as the commercial brokers handling trade between Europe and the Levant.Fusaro begins by noting that for a variety of reasons having to do with Venetian self-perception, chronology, and function, Venice has not been part of recent scholarly debates on the nature of empire and contends that although the Venetians may not have thought of their realm in imperial terms, “Venice’s political economy shaped its strategy and policies in a way that made it act like an empire” (8). The composite nature of the Venetian state and the legacy of Venice’s origins as a city-state prevented it from extending full citizenship to its imperial subjects and from making them “real stakeholders of the empire” (20). That error was crucial because it created an opening for English merchants to find common commercial cause with Venetian colonial subjects. Venice’s other error was strategic and the result of “misjudged imperial preoccupations” (350); it chose to concentrate on military defense against the Ottomans and even expansion of its territory (especially in Dalmatia and Albania) rather than expand commercial opportunities. As Fusaro states, “In short, whilst talking like a commercial empire, Venice was acting like a territorial empire” (351).Fusaro explores this complex of issues through a dense, source-rich analysis of the commercial, diplomatic, and social links between Venice and England from the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. The early chapters explore the origins of Anglo-Italian commerce, English ambitions to undercut the Venetians as laid out in the “Walsingham Memorandum” of 1578—ambitions facilitated by the papal excommunication of Elizabeth I, which opened the door to more contact between the English and the Ottomans, and the creation of the Levant Company. Whereas English interests were almost purely commercial (as evidenced by the fact that the English ambassador to the Porte was paid by the Levant Company), Venetian interests were perforce political and military. By the 1620s, the English takeover of commerce was successful: the English controlled 40 percent of Ottoman trade; the Venetians only 25 percent (79).The middle chapters concentrate on, among other topics, diplomatic contacts between England and Venice, the composition of the English community in Venice, and the goods of the trade. Fusaro makes two central points here. First, she argues that the small community of English merchants resident in Venice—never more than about twenty—was able to take advantage of commercial contacts and Venetian infrastructure to undermine Venetian trade from within. Second, and more importantly, she argues that up until the sixteenth century, there had been a nearly perfect “overlap” (178) between the Venetian commercial and political elite, but as the Venetian nobles withdrew from trade, the gap was filled by others, especially Jews and Greek colonial subjects, but who could not mobilize Venice’s political and diplomatic apparatus in the same way as the nobles had once done. Thus Venetian traders lost an important competitive advantage.The last part of the book explores most directly the English eclipse of Venetian commerce by examining the currant trade in the Ionian islands of Cephalonia and Zante, a subject that Fusaro has examined before (Maria Fusaro, Uva passa: Una guerra commerciale tra Venezia e l’Inghilterra, 1540–1640 [Venice, 1996]). Because the Venetians were blind to the needs of their colonial subjects and refused to give the locals any say in governance, the inhabitants of the islands found common cause with the English who had a nearly insatiable demand for currants, who maintained good relations with all social strata on the islands, and who managed to stay out of a revolt on Zante in 1628. The sudden possibility of large profits led to major social and political dislocations, and by the 1670s the English were exporting nearly 85 percent of Zante’s currants (321). Fusaro sums up the situation this way: “The currant tale highlights Venice’s major problem in its imperial policy: privileging defense over development created a gulf between rulers and ruled. A fissure developed which allowed commercial competitors to penetrate, exploit, and ultimately dominate the colonial economy” (339).By forthrightly placing Venice into the debates on early modern empire building and by concentrating on the city’s political economy rather than the supposed moral laxity of its ruling elite, Fusaro’s book is certain to have a valuable leavening effect on studies of Venetian “decline.” Nevertheless, the author seems to have set the bar for her subjects almost impossibly high by, in essence, saying that Venetians should have overcome their city-state mentality (something that was nearly impossible for all the Italian states) and to have sacrificed territorial loss to an age-old enemy in favor of commercial innovation. Only in retrospect are those solutions obvious.My criticism of the book concerns the presentation of the argument. Although the division of the chapters into four parts is briefly mentioned in the preface, there are very few signposts thereafter to guide the reader and to help keep her or him on track. Similarly there are few clear-cut transitions between chapters or even within sections of chapters. The reader has to do a lot of the work of pulling the disparate and multifaceted parts of this illuminating book together. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 89, Number 1March 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690148 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.