How to influence Venetian economic policy: collective petitions of the Netherlandish merchant community in the early seventeenth century

Abstract

Protectionist legislation traditionally excluded immigrant merchants from Venetian trade, yet by 1600 the commercial balance of power had changed. This article argues that immigrant merchants with strong ties to the northern trading world were able directly to influence Venetian legislation. It does so by examining the collective petitions for commercial privileges submitted by Netherlandish merchants and the ensuing reactions of Venetian institutions, such as the Venetian Board of Trade (Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia). Through targeted collective actions, the Netherlandish merchants found ways to mitigate the inequalities imposed by the Venetian government on immigrant traders and to obtain significant communal trading privileges.

Venetian Finance, 1400–1797

“…The government was well aware that, in order to maintain Venice's crucial role in the market, it had to satisfy the merchants' requests, even though most of them had nothing to do with the halls of power. It is not surprising, then, that the Flemish community, cleverly claiming to be the essential link between Venice, the trading centres of Northern Europe and the new Asian routes, were listened to kindly by the magistrates of St. Mark's 70 .…”

Dutch Migration History. Looking Back and Moving Forward

“…71 From the fijifteenth century onwards, Dutch merchants created ethnic communities, through which they were connected to their countries of origin and to each other, and through which goods and people travelled, as well as mores and ideas, as M. van Gelder showed. 72 In the 1980s, when the guest worker migration regime came to an end and refugees became more visible, the number of historical studies on refugee migration increased. Refugee migration was under-studied compared with the study of labour migration or colonial migration, and refugees were seldom compared with other categories of migrants.…”