Filippo Sassetti on Trade, Institutions and Empire [Paperback]

Table of Contents, Acknowledgements, Texts and Translations, Abbreviations, Monetary Units, Maps, Preface: Filippo Sassetti and Portuguese India (Sanjay Subrahmanyam), Chapter 1. The World is a Village? Filippo Sassetti on Trade, Empire, and Institutions in the Renaissance, Chapter 2. Discourse on Mediterranean Trade, Chapter 3. Indian Letters, Index

The Florentine traveller, merchant, and academic Filippo Sassetti was one of the premier economic thinkers of the late Renaissance. Well known for his ethnographic observations, Sassetti was also a commercial writer, original thinker and witness to how Europeans at the margins of empire were beginning to reconceptualize power and wealth.

Corey Tazzara is Associate Professor of History at Scripps College. He is the author of The Free Port of Livorno (Oxford, 2017) as well as the editor (along with Paula Findlen and Jacob Soll) of Florence after the Medici: Tuscan Enlightenment, 17371790 (Routledge, 2019).

The Florentine traveler, merchant, and academician Filippo Sassetti was one of the premier economic thinkers of the late Renaissance. Well known for his ethnographic observations, Sassetti was also a commercial writer of the highest caliberat once an original thinker and a remarkable witness to how Europeans even at the margins of empire were beginning to reconceptualize power and wealth.

Unique among commercial theorists of the period, Sassetti offers a first-hand perspective on commerce in both the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. This volume translates (for the first time) the Discourse on Mediterranean Trade and a selection of the principal Indian Letters, with extensive historical notes. These are preceded by a lengthy essay positioning Sassetti as a figure in late Renais