ABSTRACT
This chapter sets the Plowman case in historiography, showing how the case is used as an analytical tool to challenge well-established historiographical paradigms.
Putting the case in its European context, the introduction shows how Anglophone historiography has underestimated the importance of the Mediterranean in the growth of English wealth and power. It criticises the overly categorising tendency of contemporary historiography to consider the Mediterranean of secondary importance compared to the Atlantic. This chapter focuses then on Livorno, showing how the Tuscan port became a world trade centre. It illustrates how this work contributes to the field of the ‘new diplomatic history’, highlighting in particular the role of merchants as diplomatic actors.
This chapter also focuses on seventeenth-century Tuscany, disproving the three-centuries-long historiographical prejudice that has so far described the Grand Duchy as a weak and decadent country and Cosimo III de’ Medici as a weak and bigoted ruler.
