Koen Stapelbroek – författare

"Love drives and gives life to the commerce of mankind." Thus, the sixteen year old Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787) presented his project to understand the sociable nature of man. This observation, a reflection of his own position on the relation between trade and virtue, hinted at what the mature works of Galiani, one of the most noteworthy economists and wits in eighteenth-century Italy, would eventually yield.In Love, Self-Deceit, and Money, Koen Stapelbroek reconstructs the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment debate on the morality of market societies, a debate that hinged on the preservation of Naples' independent statehood in a global arena of commercial and military competition. Galiani rejected the moralizing and mercantile ideas of his contemporaries regarding the dangers threatening Naples, and, in his Della moneta (1751), he justified the systems set in place by the Neapolitan government. With reference to early, previously unstudied lectures on self-deceptive 'Platonic love,' Koen Stapelbroek examines Galiani's role in the wider debate, arguing that his early moral philosophical and historical work suggests a great deal about his political-economic stance, including his assertion that money is the ultimate ordering principle in the universe.As a study of one of the most idiosyncratic minds of the Enlightenment period, Love, Self-Deceit, and Money shows how diverse ideas of the development of individual passions into social dispositions, commerce, and reform politics dovetailed seamlessly in the intellectual climate of eighteenth-century Europe.

How did free trade emerge in early-modern times? How did the Mediterranean as a specific region – with its own historical characteristics – produce a culture in which the free port appeared? What was the relation between the type of free trade created in early-modern Italy and the development of global trade and commercial competition between states for hegemony in the eighteenth century? And how did the position of the free port, originally a Mediterranean ‘invention’, develop over the course of time? The contributions to this volume address these questions and explain the institutional genealogy of the free port.Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean analyses the atypical history and conditions of the Mediterranean region in contradistinction with other regions as an explanation for how and why free ports arose there. This volume engages with the diffusion of free ports from a Mediterranean to a global phenomenon, whilst staying focused on how this diffusion was experienced in the Mediterranean itself. The contributions to this volume bring together the traditional issues of religious openness and tolerance in physically separated areas and the role of consuls and governors, via fiscal techniques, architectural and administrative aspects, with questions about geopolitical balance and primacy.The book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of historical sub-disciplines (early modern, Mediterranean, global economic, political, and institutional, just to mention a few) and to students wishing to perfect their knowledge of the Mediterranean and its global interconnections, and of the origins of free trade.

This edited collection offers a reassessment of the complicated legacy of Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens, first published in 1758.

This edited collection offers a reassessment of the complicated legacy of Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens, first published in 1758.

The 1st part of the volume engages with the theme of inclusion and exclusion in the history of ideas from different perspectives. The 2nd part of the volume discusses debates on natural law, human nature and political economy in early-modern Europe. Its contributions explore the sorts of political and moral visions that were relevant in post-Hobbesian moral philosophy and the development of economic thought.

This book is the first study that analyses bilateral commercial treaties as instruments of peace and trade comparatively and over time.