"How did free trade emerge in early modern times? How did the Mediterranean as a specific region - with its own historical characteristics - produce a culture in which the free port appeared? What was the relation between the type of free trade created in early modern Italy and the development...

"The Florentine traveller, merchant, and academician Filippo Sassetti was one of the premier economic thinkers of the late Renaissance. Well known for his ethnographic observations, Sassetti was also a commercial writer of the highest caliber-- at once an original thinker and a remarkable...

"This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period. In so doing, it demonstrates robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of...