Filippo Sassetti on Trade Institutions and Empire

<p>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 caliber—at once an original thinker and a remarkable witness to how Europeans even at the margins of empire were beginning to reconceptualize power and wealth.</p><p>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 <i>Discourse on Mediterranean Trade </i>and a selection of the principal <i>Indian Letters</i> with extensive historical notes. These are preceded by a lengthy essay positioning Sassetti as a figure in late Renaissance political economy. It makes the case that Sassetti was an early theorist of what might be termed the pragmatic tradition of free trade—in his case a project linked to his analysis of commercial institutions in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.</p><p>Provoking an invaluable overview of trade in the Indian Ocean in the late sixteenth century this volume is an excellent specialist text for postgraduate students and professional historians.</p>