Francesca Trivellato
Biographic Data
| ID | 259325 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francesca Trivellato |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francesca |
| FAMILY NAME | Trivellato |
| SIGNATURE | TRIVELLATO F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institute for Advanced Study |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6864-1451 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 79 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
« Il ne porte pas la chemise noire »: Marc Bloch et Gino Luzzatto
Si l’histoire et l’historiographie italiennes n’étaient pas au cœur des préoccupations de Marc Bloch, il s’y intéressa néanmoins à la fois comme auteur de La société féodale et comme codirecteur des Annales . Cet article propose d’éclairer d’un jour nouveau ses liens avec les chercheurs italiens, en identifiant en Gino Luzzatto (1878-1964) – lui aussi médiéviste et historien de l’économie – le collègue avec lequel Bloch se sentit le plus proche, …
“The Normal Exception”: Edoardo Grendi, Microanalysis, and Generalizations
“The normal exception” has long been a slogan of microhistory. This oxymoronic phrase is the iconic rendering of an incidental sentence that appeared in a 1977 article by Edoardo Grendi. His article, titled “Micro‐analisi e storia sociale” (Microanalysis and Social History), is cited more often than it is read. In this issue of History and Theory , Grendi's seminal article appears in English for the first time. This companion piece introduces Gre…
There’s More to Debt Than Meets the Eye
On the first landing of the staircase, there is a door with a name tag: “D. Graeber.” I am inside an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo, Ca’ Corner della Regina, which since 2011 has been turned into an exhibition space by the Fondazione Prada (the contemporary art foundation of the famous fashion brand). From 1834 to 1969 the palazzo was home to the municipal pawnshop, called Monte di pietà after the lending institutions for the poor establishe…
As Gods among Men: A History of the Rich in the West
Paradoxes of Global History
Do we know what global history is? Since it is fair to say that we cannot agree on a definition, why do we institutionalise global history and argue over its pros and cons? This piece lays out and pries open some of the paradoxes that grip academic debates concerning global history today, at least in most of Western Europe and North America. It suggests that one way out of our current predicaments is to downgrade global history from the status of…
The Shipwreck of the Turks: Sovereignty, Barbarism and Civilization in the Legal Order of the Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean
This article focuses on the consequences of a single major international affair - the shipwreck of a French ship carrying 165 Muslim pilgrims along the southern shores of Sicily in 1716 - to address two pivotal issues in the reordering of eighteenth-century legal and political systems: the limits of domestic sovereignty in absolutist states and the status of non-Christian polities in the theory and practice of the law of nations. Both the time an…
Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective
Social media have produced echo chambers. Today's public opinion is extraordinarily polarized, and most of us trade ideas only with like-minded people. With the end of this state of affairs nowhere in sight, the University of Chicago Press has published a book that puts on display the best kind of scholarly disagreement, showing that contrasting interpretations of well-studied sources need not lead to relativism but that, rather, they can foster …
Toutes les dettes ne se valent pas
Cet article répond aux remarques formulées par Jean-François Chauvard, Luisa Brunori et Jean-Louis Halpérin, Pierre-Cyrille Hautcœur ainsi que Maurice Kriegel sur mon livre The Promise and Peril of Credit, traduit en français sous le titre Juifs et capitalisme. Le livre examine les significations culturelles attachées à la diffusion des instruments de crédit de la finance privée à partir du xviie siècle. Il s'intéresse tout particulièrement à déc…
Les Juifs, la lettre de change et la foire de Lyon
Financiarisation Finance dérive de l’ancien français finer , « mener à sa fin une transaction ». Au XIV e siècle, finance signifie « versement ». La financiarisation marque la rupture entre le commerce des produits manufacturés et la recherche du profit grâce à des opérations de crédit
What Differences Make a Difference? Global History and Microanalysis Revisited
This article discusses a number of scholarly trends that fall under the rubric of global history, with particular regard for those that address the early modern period ( c. 1400–1800). It stresses the rubric’s lack of coherence from both a methodological and ideological perspective. Most importantly, it revisits longstanding debates about the intersection of microanalysis and global history by assessing landmark works by Italian microhistorians, …
Chapter 6 Marriage, Commercial Capital, and Business Agency: Transregional Sephardic (and Armenian) Families in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean
Chapter 6 Marriage, Commercial Capital, and Business Agency: Transregional Sephardic (and Armenian) Families in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean was published in Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond on page 107
Gino Luzzatto and the contested place of Jews in the economic history of Mediterranean Europe
The few Anglophone readers for whom the name Gino Luzzatto (1878–1964) still has a familiar ring know him as an economic historian of medieval Europe, with a focus on Italy and on Mediterranean trade. But throughout his career he also cultivated a consistent if secondary interest in Jewish history and weighed in on controversial debates on the role of Jews in the development of Western capitalism. A socialist and an assimilated Jew, Luzzatto was …
And Thereabout: A Quantitative and Comparative Approach to Notarial Records
This article asks a simple question that nevertheless has broad implications for historians of premodern continental Europe: What did notaries do? It answers it by applying descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, and clustering techniques to the typological distribution of all deeds preserved in the notarial collections of six French and Italian cities—Paris, Toulouse, Mende, Turin, Florence, and Livorno—for the year 1751, as well a…
Renaissance Florence and the Origins of Capitalism: A Business History Perspective
From the 1940s to the 1970s, the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages was a historiographical concept with considerable traction. This article revisits the literature that brought about and engaged with that concept, with specific reference to Florence. In so doing, it draws attention to the place once held by business history in the study of Europe's takeoff. It also discusses the preliminary results of an ongoing project on limited partners…
The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society
How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalismThe Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credi…
The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society
The Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West's centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants…
Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society
The Setting: Marine Insurance and Bills of Exchange
This chapter examines the quotation claiming that Jews invented marine insurance and bills of exchange, which can be read from a compilation of maritime laws assembled with commentary by a provincial French lawyer, Étienne Cleirac, published in Bordeaux under the title Us et coustumes de la mer ( Usages and Customs of the Sea ). By adding bills of exchange to his commentary on marine insurance, Cleirac paired two credit contracts that by the mid-…
Economic and Business History as Cultural History: Pitfalls and Possibilities
The business history of the preindustrial world: Towards a comparative historical analysis
The organisation of business transactions in the preindustrial period, once a central concern in scholarly debates about the rise of capitalism, currently plays only a marginal role in the literature on long-run economic development. Our survey of the contents of five top-tier business and economic history journals published in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2000 to 2016 finds that only 20 per cent of the articles concern the entir…
The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period
Taking a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, this book blends archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis to understand how the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, Tuscany, traded in regions near and far in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesca Trivellato tests assumptions about ethnic and religious trading diasporas and networks of exchange and trust. Her extensive research in international archives incl…
‘Usages and Customs of the Sea’: Étienne Cleirac and the making of maritime law in seventeenth-century France
This article focuses on an influential but today little-known book first published in Bordeaux in 1647 and later reprinted in multiple editions: Étienne Cleirac’s Us et coustumes de la mer (Usages and Customs of the Sea). It is the earliest and most extensive vernacular treatise on maritime law composed in early modern Europe, assembling and commenting on a large body of legal norms issued from the twelfth century to the then present, including t…
Between Usury and the “Spirit of Commerce”
By bringing French history and Jewish history into dialogue, this article intervenes in the vast scholarship on the relationship between commerce and toleration in eighteenth-century French thought. It focuses on the place of Jews in Montesquieu's ideas about doux commerce and explores the legacy of Montesquieu's views on the debate on Jewish emancipation in the 1770s and 1780s. It traces the survival and adaptation of the medieval trope of the J…
The Cambridge World History: Volume 6, the Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800 CE, Part 2, Patterns of Change
The era from 1400 to 1800 saw intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections on an unprecedented scale. Divided into two books, Volume 6 of The Cambridge World History considers these critical transformations. The first book examines the material and political foundations of the era, including global considerations of the environment, disease, technology, and cities, along with regional studies of e…
Amphibious Power”: The Law of Wreck, Maritime Customs, and Sovereignty in Richelieu's France
The precise length of territorial waters, the swath of sea along the coast over which a state extended sovereign control, remained an object of debate during the seventeenth century. Some authors still adhered to the 100-mile boundary established by medieval glossators, whereas others embraced the so-called cannon-shot rule that set the limit to the reach of a shot fired from the land. But no one disputed the existence of territorial waters. Even…
The business history of the preindustrial world: Towards a comparative historical analysis
The organisation of business transactions in the preindustrial period, once a central concern in scholarly debates about the rise of capitalism, currently plays only a marginal role in the literature on long-run economic development. Our survey of the contents of five top-tier business and economic history journals published in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2000 to 2016 finds that only 20 per cent of the articles concern the entir…
Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory
This article was first delivered as a talk at a symposium in honor of Jacques Revel. It focuses on Revel's manifold contributions as a scholar, teacher, and university administrator in order to reflect on the different meanings that the label "microhistory" has acquired over the past forty years. More specifically, it examines the evolution of the microhistorical approach in relation to the Italian, French, and American historiographical traditio…
Renaissance Florence and the Origins of Capitalism: A Business History Perspective
From the 1940s to the 1970s, the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages was a historiographical concept with considerable traction. This article revisits the literature that brought about and engaged with that concept, with specific reference to Florence. In so doing, it draws attention to the place once held by business history in the study of Europe's takeoff. It also discusses the preliminary results of an ongoing project on limited partners…
The Port Jews of Livorno and their Global Networks of Trade in the Early Modern Period
(2004). The Port Jews of Livorno and their Global Networks of Trade in the Early Modern Period. Jewish Culture and History: Vol. 7, No. 1-2, pp. 31-48
Juifs de Livourne, Italiens de Lisbonne, hindous de Goa: Réseaux marchands et échanges interculturels à l'époque moderne
Cette étude entend mettre en oeuvre les outils de l'analyse réticulaire dans l'étude des échanges interculturels à l'époque moderne. Dans ce but, elle s'inspire (du point de vue analytique plutôt que mathématique) de la network analysis britannique et des travaux de Fredrik Barth. Face aux débats récents polarisés autour des diasporas négociantes et des réseaux marchands, le recours à l'analyse de réseau présente trois avantages : il oblige l'his…
Credit, Honor, and the Early Modern French Legend of the Jewish Invention of Bills of Exchange
What Differences Make a Difference? Global History and Microanalysis Revisited
This article discusses a number of scholarly trends that fall under the rubric of global history, with particular regard for those that address the early modern period ( c. 1400–1800). It stresses the rubric’s lack of coherence from both a methodological and ideological perspective. Most importantly, it revisits longstanding debates about the intersection of microanalysis and global history by assessing landmark works by Italian microhistorians, …
Amphibious Power”: The Law of Wreck, Maritime Customs, and Sovereignty in Richelieu's France
The precise length of territorial waters, the swath of sea along the coast over which a state extended sovereign control, remained an object of debate during the seventeenth century. Some authors still adhered to the 100-mile boundary established by medieval glossators, whereas others embraced the so-called cannon-shot rule that set the limit to the reach of a shot fired from the land. But no one disputed the existence of territorial waters. Even…
Un nouveau combat pour l'histoire au XXIe siècle
Cet article noue un dialogue avec certaines des questions soulevées par David Armitage et Jo Guldi dans 'Le retour de la longue durée : une perspective anglo-américaine ' et évalue la résonance de leur article chez les lecteurs des Annales. En particulier, il conteste le classement, sous la catégorie de micro-histoire, d'une variété d'études historiques menées sur de courtes périodes de temps. Il interroge également l'argument selon lequel ces ét…
Economic and Business History as Cultural History: Pitfalls and Possibilities
Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical Work
Salaires Et Justice Dans Les Corporations Vénitiennes Au 17eSiècle Le Cas Des Manufactures De Verre
Comment s'établissaitétablissait le salaire dans un marché du travail corporatif et spécialisé ? Existait-il une rétribution moyenne ou modale pour chaque catégorie de travailleurs ? Quel rôle jouait la justice civile quand elle réglementait les rapports de travail et les niveaux des salaires ? Cette recherche voudrait répondre à ces questions à propos des maîtres et des compagnons des verreries de Murano entre 1638 et 1692, questions qui sont en…
Between Usury and the “Spirit of Commerce”
By bringing French history and Jewish history into dialogue, this article intervenes in the vast scholarship on the relationship between commerce and toleration in eighteenth-century French thought. It focuses on the place of Jews in Montesquieu's ideas about doux commerce and explores the legacy of Montesquieu's views on the debate on Jewish emancipation in the 1770s and 1780s. It traces the survival and adaptation of the medieval trope of the J…
Echi della periferia Note sulla circolazione e la produzione delle perle di vetro veneziane nei secoli XVII-XVIII
Salaires Et Justice Dans Les Corporations Vénitiennes Au 17eSiècle Le Cas Des Manufactures De Verre
Comment s'établissaitétablissait le salaire dans un marché du travail corporatif et spécialisé ? Existait-il une rétribution moyenne ou modale pour chaque catégorie de travailleurs ? Quel rôle jouait la justice civile quand elle réglementait les rapports de travail et les niveaux des salaires ? Cette recherche voudrait répondre à ces questions à propos des maîtres et des compagnons des verreries de Murano entre 1638 et 1692, questions qui sont en…
Juifs de Livourne, Italiens de Lisbonne, hindous de Goa: Réseaux marchands et échanges interculturels à l'époque moderne
Cette étude entend mettre en oeuvre les outils de l'analyse réticulaire dans l'étude des échanges interculturels à l'époque moderne. Dans ce but, elle s'inspire (du point de vue analytique plutôt que mathématique) de la network analysis britannique et des travaux de Fredrik Barth. Face aux débats récents polarisés autour des diasporas négociantes et des réseaux marchands, le recours à l'analyse de réseau présente trois avantages : il oblige l'his…
The Port Jews of Livorno and their Global Networks of Trade in the Early Modern Period
(2004). The Port Jews of Livorno and their Global Networks of Trade in the Early Modern Period. Jewish Culture and History: Vol. 7, No. 1-2, pp. 31-48
A Republic of Merchants
Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical Work
Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences Since the Middle Ages
While the current discussion of ethnic, trade, and commercial diasporas, global networks, and transnational communities constantly makes reference to the importance of families and kinship groups for understanding the dynamics of dispersion, few studies examine the nature of these families in any detail. This book, centered largely on the European experience of families scattered geographically, challenges the dominant narratives of modernization…
Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages
Lucia Frattarelli Fischer Vivere fuori dal ghetto. Ebrei a Pisa e Livorno, secoli XVI-XVIII, Turin, Silvio Zamorani, 2008, 383 p
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early-Modern Capitalism (1600–1800). Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Credit, Honor, and the Early Modern French Legend of the Jewish Invention of Bills of Exchange
Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900
This book focuses on trade across religious boundaries around the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during the second millennium, when transportation technology was fragile and religion often a primary marker of identity. It examines a wide range of commercial exchanges from first encounters between strangers who worshipped different gods and originated in different continents to everyday transactions between merchants who live…
The Cambridge World History: Volume 6, the Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800 CE, Part 2, Patterns of Change
The era from 1400 to 1800 saw intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections on an unprecedented scale. Divided into two books, Volume 6 of The Cambridge World History considers these critical transformations. The first book examines the material and political foundations of the era, including global considerations of the environment, disease, technology, and cities, along with regional studies of e…
Amphibious Power”: The Law of Wreck, Maritime Customs, and Sovereignty in Richelieu's France
The precise length of territorial waters, the swath of sea along the coast over which a state extended sovereign control, remained an object of debate during the seventeenth century. Some authors still adhered to the 100-mile boundary established by medieval glossators, whereas others embraced the so-called cannon-shot rule that set the limit to the reach of a shot fired from the land. But no one disputed the existence of territorial waters. Even…
Microstoria/Microhistoire/Microhistory
This article was first delivered as a talk at a symposium in honor of Jacques Revel. It focuses on Revel's manifold contributions as a scholar, teacher, and university administrator in order to reflect on the different meanings that the label "microhistory" has acquired over the past forty years. More specifically, it examines the evolution of the microhistorical approach in relation to the Italian, French, and American historiographical traditio…
Un nouveau combat pour l'histoire au XXIe siècle
Cet article noue un dialogue avec certaines des questions soulevées par David Armitage et Jo Guldi dans 'Le retour de la longue durée : une perspective anglo-américaine ' et évalue la résonance de leur article chez les lecteurs des Annales. En particulier, il conteste le classement, sous la catégorie de micro-histoire, d'une variété d'études historiques menées sur de courtes périodes de temps. Il interroge également l'argument selon lequel ces ét…
‘Usages and Customs of the Sea’: Étienne Cleirac and the making of maritime law in seventeenth-century France
This article focuses on an influential but today little-known book first published in Bordeaux in 1647 and later reprinted in multiple editions: Étienne Cleirac’s Us et coustumes de la mer (Usages and Customs of the Sea). It is the earliest and most extensive vernacular treatise on maritime law composed in early modern Europe, assembling and commenting on a large body of legal norms issued from the twelfth century to the then present, including t…
Between Usury and the “Spirit of Commerce”
By bringing French history and Jewish history into dialogue, this article intervenes in the vast scholarship on the relationship between commerce and toleration in eighteenth-century French thought. It focuses on the place of Jews in Montesquieu's ideas about doux commerce and explores the legacy of Montesquieu's views on the debate on Jewish emancipation in the 1770s and 1780s. It traces the survival and adaptation of the medieval trope of the J…
The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period
Taking a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, this book blends archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis to understand how the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, Tuscany, traded in regions near and far in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesca Trivellato tests assumptions about ethnic and religious trading diasporas and networks of exchange and trust. Her extensive research in international archives incl…
The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society
How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalismThe Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credi…
The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society
The Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West's centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants…
Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society
The Setting: Marine Insurance and Bills of Exchange
This chapter examines the quotation claiming that Jews invented marine insurance and bills of exchange, which can be read from a compilation of maritime laws assembled with commentary by a provincial French lawyer, Étienne Cleirac, published in Bordeaux under the title Us et coustumes de la mer ( Usages and Customs of the Sea ). By adding bills of exchange to his commentary on marine insurance, Cleirac paired two credit contracts that by the mid-…
Economic and Business History as Cultural History: Pitfalls and Possibilities
The business history of the preindustrial world: Towards a comparative historical analysis
The organisation of business transactions in the preindustrial period, once a central concern in scholarly debates about the rise of capitalism, currently plays only a marginal role in the literature on long-run economic development. Our survey of the contents of five top-tier business and economic history journals published in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2000 to 2016 finds that only 20 per cent of the articles concern the entir…
History (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Art (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (12 works) · Economics (9 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Humanities (8 works) · Ancient history (7 works)