ABSTRACT
This volume represents an extension of the range of topics undertaken by this series in two ways. It centres upon a major theme in the development of Western Europe rather than Britain, and it is essentially concerned with the problems of economic decline and adaptation rather than economic growth. Succeeding volumes will widen the range still further to include medieval Europe and the non-European world. Such extensions may well be considered as pushing the series more into the territory of historians than economists, just as some of the later volumes will feature more in the bibliographies of economics courses than history syllabuses. Beyond the widening common ground over which both disciplines exercise grazing rights (to their mutual advantage), this lies in the logic of any eclectic subject. Even so, the economists' perspectives of past economic change have too often been circumscribed by assumptions which have led them to prescribe the Industrial Revolution in Britain as the first case history relevant to students interested in the problems of backwardness and growth in more recent times. This surely is perverse and misleading. To the extent that historical case studies have any relevance at all - not by exact parallel but by analogy, by widening the range of awareness about problems and interrelationships - it could be argued that, in the extent of backwardness, in levels of wealth, in the degree of 'monetization' or subsistence, in the general nature of problems of political unity and administrative efficiency, many countries today face situations more comparable with those in early-modern or medieval Europe than in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Moreover, case histories of economic decline, relative if not absolute, can prove as illuminating as those of growth. Generalizing on the basis of a handful of success stories can give a very foreshortened perspective,
Dr Pullan's volume takes up one of the classic sequences in
the economic development of Western Europe. Venice, wealthiest commercial power in Europe in the fifteenth century, the hinge between East and West, between Christian and Turk, strongest Western colonial power in the eastern Mediterranean, had her fame resting, by the eighteenth century, upon carnival and the arts. Splendour still was hers, but the Doge now cast his ring into a sea which had long granted dominion to other powers. This metamorphosis from commercial hegemony to fashionable pleasure and landed wealth was a complex process. It resulted, not so much from the Portuguese adventures round the Cape at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but from Dutch and English incursions at its end, plague and war, and industrial competition from other states in Italy as well as from beyond the Mediterranean. The articles chosen by Dr Pullan, several of them appearing here in English for the first time, plot the different aspects of these changes. Competing claims brought stresses in economic strategy and policy only too familiar in later times : the shift in capital from commerce to land; the conflict of interest between shipping and shipbuilding, between the demands of entrep6t prosperity and the protection of home industry, between aliens and residents, between excluding foreign ships and merchants in the interests of Venetian trade or welcoming them to maximize activity in the port. As always, the realities of the process of economic change are most significantly revealed in this tension between external constraint and internal response, between situation and policy, context and motivation.
