Practices, merchants and mercantilisms. Jews and the cereal trade in Trieste between Eastern Europe, the Po and the Mediterranean (18th century)

Abstract

The article aims to highlight the role of the Jewish merchants of Trieste in the cereal trade in the eighteenth century. In particular, it focuses on analysing how, in the discontinuity in the development mechanisms of the free port of Trieste that occurred in the mid-eighteenth century, they managed to be protagonists in the construction of wider, from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, trade routes and a new geography of the grain trade. Moreover, the cereal trade, and in particular that of Continental and Eastern Europe, was a fundamental element of the further development that at the end of the century made Trieste one of the main Mediterranean trading centres.