ABSTRACT
English policymakers should find a source of inspiration in the economic policies that the “wise” Venetians had already enacted in order to promote trade. This was one of the advices made by a seventeenth-century English pamphleteer. Indeed, emulating Venice in a time in which the Serenissima was apparently going through a stagnating commercial situation may sound like a rather bizarre strategy. Venice had enjoyed an entrepôt condition for a long time. The city’s rise to eternal glory precisely resulted from its staple condition. The port had long been a continental-wide redistribution centre for eastern luxuries and spices and a re-export centre for northern European clothes. Venice, like Amsterdam much later, had risen out of nothing (at the turn of the ninth century, people fleeing terror had found refuge in a set of islands located faraway mainland where only salt could be exploited) to become the centre of the known world. The Serenissima had gradually enlarged its domain both mainland and all across the Adriatic golf, transforming it in its mare clausum. 1
