Business organisation in the Mediterranean Sea: Genoese galley entrepreneurs in the service of the Spanish Empire (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries)

Abstract

This article analyzes the business organisation and activities of Genoese naval entrepreneurs who managed galleys for the Spanish Empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While conventional narratives of business history begin with the Industrial Revolution and focus on the rise of the modern corporation, this article brings to the fore early modern entrepreneurs from Italy and shows how they led family-controlled firms running permanent navies in the Mediterranean. By using private ledgers and merchant correspondence, the paper aims to understand how these naval entrepreneurs governed their affairs and managed resources internationally. We find that delegation (through family ties, hierarchy, and networks) was the main solution chosen to deal with distant commodity, labour, and capital markets. We retrace the different forms this delegation took and explain its determinants considering alternative options and providing comparative insights.

Keywords:

• Military entrepreneurs
• galley contractors
• organisation theory
• family business
• business of war
• early modern business history
• slaves
• merchant networks
• transnational history
• Genoa
• Spanish monarchy
• Mediterranean studies

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Carlos Álvarez Nogal, Andrea Caracausi, and Yasmina Rocio Ben Yessef Garfia, as well as two anonymous referees, for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Regina Grafe, the members of the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute (EUI) and the participants of the workshop State-building in non-democratic societies organised at the EUI in May 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral studies of the European University Institute. It has been completed under the frame of the Mobility & Humanities project of the University of Padova’s Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and the Ancient World (DiSSGeA) and has benefitted from the research project ‘Res Publica monárquica. La Monarquía Hispánica, una estructura imperial policéntrica de repúblicas urbanas’ [PGC2018-095224-B-I00] directed by Manuel Herrero Sánchez (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville).

Notes on contributors

Benoît Maréchaux

Benoît Maréchaux is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Università degli Studi di Padova. He earned his PhD in Economic History at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and was a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute in 2018–2019. His research focuses on the nexus between navies, outsourcing of war and international finance in Early Modern Europe, with a particular interest for naval entrepreneurs and merchant-bankers in the Italian and Hispanic worlds.