A Political Economy? Some Preliminary Thoughts on Economic Privileges in Early Modern Venice

The paper provides a general view of different typologies of privilege existing in the Republic of Venice from 1500 to 1800, connecting together the results of previous research on the subject to build a more complex view of the Venetian “political economy”. The focus on the Venetian case is justified by its alleged exceptionality, which challenges both the usual assumptions about the operation of economic and political privileges, and the general interpretations of their historical evolution. Yet Venice is here used as a laboratory in which historians could elaborate new questions and concepts useful in the investigation of privileges in pre-industrial economies. In this perspective, the authors deal with 1) fair and export privileges of subject cities, their origin and adaptation from the Renaissance up to the fall of the Republic; 2) the role of commercial privileges and how they were used by central authority in order to allow business cooperation, market integration and industrial development; 3) the functions that industrial privileges performed as tools of the Venetian mercantilist policy in order to foster import-substituting and export activities.