‘The place for such business’: The business of war in the city of Genoa, 1701-1714

Abstract

Scholars long have examined the early modern European business of war – the recruitment, supply, and payment of combatants by non-native contractors. With such attention on who conducted this commerce, however, scholars have ignored where the business of war took place. As Peter Wilson and Marianne Klerk recently have argued in this journal, war business was often conducted in politically autonomous cities. This article takes their findings further by showing how naval contractors and army victuallers conducted the business of war in substantially different spatial settings in one fiscal-military hub, Genoa, during one conflict, the War of Spanish Succession.