The history of Mediterranean free ports as the invention of free trade?

The ‘invention’ of free ports in the Mediterranean can be seen as an outgrowth of a complicated European history of territorial control and jurisdictions on land and in ports that interconnect territorial and maritime spaces. The administrative, legal, and intellectual expressions around its functioning created a pre-ideological discursive formation around freedom and trade from the sixteenth century in the Mediterranean that influenced later developments in practices and thinking about institutions of commerce and political oppositions about trade.