Antonella Alimento – författare

This edited collection explores the histories of trade, a peculiar literary genre that emerged in the context of the historiographical and cultural changes promoted by the histoire philosophique movement. It marked a discontinuity with erudition and antiquarianism, and interacted critically with universal history. By comparing and linking the histories of individual peoples within a common historical process, this genre enriched the reflection on civilisation that emerged during the long eighteenth century. Those who looked to the past wanted to understand the political constitutions and manners most appropriate to commerce, and grasp the recurring mechanisms underlying economic development. In this sense, histories of trade constituted a declination of eighteenth-century political economy, and thus became an invaluable analytical and practical tool for a galaxy of academic scholars, journalists, lawyers, administrators, diplomats and government ministerswhose ambition was to reform the political, social and economic structure of their nations. Moreover, thanks to these investigations, a lucid awareness of historical temporality and, more particularly, the irrepressible precariousness of economic hegemonies, developed. However, as a field of tension in which multiple and even divergent intellectual sensibilities met, this literary genre also found space for critical assessments that focused on the ambivalence and dangers of commercial civilisation. Examining the complex relationship between the production of wealth and civilisation, this book provides unique insights for scholars of political economy, intellectual history and economic history.

This book is the first study that analyses bilateral commercial treaties as instruments of peace and trade comparatively and over time. The work focuses on commercial treaties as an index of the challenges of eighteenth-century European politics, shaping a new understanding of these challenges and of how they were confronted at the time in theory and diplomatic practice. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the time of the Napoleonic wars bilateral commercial treaties were concluded not only at the end of large-scale wars accompanying peace settlements, but also independently with the aim to prevent or contain war through controlling the balance of trade between states. Commercial treaties were also understood by major political writers across Europe as practical manifestations of the wider intellectual problem of devising a system of interstate trade in which the principles of reciprocity and equality were combined to produce sustainable peaceful economic development.