Trade, Commerce and Industry

The early modern period experienced a gradual shift of economic activity away from the Mediterranean region, especially Italy, towards the Atlantic seaboard countries, particularly to the United Provinces in the seventeenth century and Great Britain in the eighteenth century. The number of cloths produced in Venice, 1520–1710

1520	3,639	1620	23,000
1530	6,065	1630	13,275
1540	7,000	1640	11,719
1550	11,558	1650	10,082
1560	17,569	1660	7,861
1570	9,492	1670	5,226
1580	21,387	1680	3,820
1590	20,607	1690	2,009
1600	24,719	1700	2,033
1610	17,129	1710	2,057

Source: D. Sella, ‘The rise and fall of the Venetian woollen industry’, in B. Pullan, ed., Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1968), pp. 109–10.