ABSTRACT
The development of commodity markets remains poorly understood in comparison with other aspects of the transition to capitalism in early modern Europe. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the port of Marseille played a notable but not dominant role in France’s foreign trade. It had a complex and, for outsiders, inhospitable customs regime. Some historians have seen 1676 as the birth of the free port. In fact, Livorno had been considered a free port since the late sixteenth century, and the term continued to denote both special treatment of goods and of merchants. Disembedding the marketplace did not result in the de-socialization of commerce. Livorno’s commercial history poses a special challenge in light of the destruction of the port’s customs records in 1877. To summarize: the shipping series was reconstructed from the archives of the Health Board in Livorno, which recorded quarantine assignments for ship arrivals.
