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Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the products exchanged between Milanese enterprises set up in Venice and their agents settled in the port of Lisbon I explain how merchants used financial instruments to organize trade circuits and to what extent their economic connections were articulated within new spaces.

Paper long abstract:

During the 16th century, the maritime expansion triggered connections among distant territories developing international trade. A transnational approach, focused on the dynamics of markets generated from the mobility of both traders and commodities, allowed to gauge commerce in its repetitive and concrete dimension. Moreover, since the expansion of overseas markets, ocean seaports developed economic policies of attraction of foreign merchants.

Starting from this consideration, my research focuses on the products exchanged between Milanese enterprises set up in Venice and their agents settled in the port of Lisbon. It focuses on Lisbon, one of the main seaport of the multi-territorial Spanish empire, involved in a zone of interconnection between Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. By the analysis of the socio-economic relations of the traders involved in these routes, I investigate the impact of exchange of goods on the building of economic space. As merchants controlled the economic resources through the access to credit, financial tools are as well considered to analyze the links between commerce of goods and the supply of credit. These connections can define competitions among merchants' groups but also allowed to experiment new alliances and synergies.

The empirical evidence - such as notarial records - casts new light on socio-economic relations by which agents build new bounded spaces that integrated local, regional and global markets. I explain how, breaking up cultural and geo-political frontiers, merchants used financial instruments to organize trade circuits and to what extent their economic connections were articulated within new spaces to create stable markets.