The project of a commercial state: Ignazio Donaudi and the question of Piedmontese economic development (1773–1789)

Abstract

Through a discussion of a number of unpublished manuscripts by the undervalued Ignazio Donaudi, the complexities of the Piedmontese political and economic situation of the latter decades of the eighteenth century are presented. Donaudi argued that as a result of the late seventeenth-century ‘Colbertist’ policies of Vittorio Amedeo II Piedmontese economic development had come to a halt. In the mid-eighteenth-century, a sectoral imbalance in the economy corresponded to a political system in which manufacturer entrepreneurs and their financiers were pushed out by Turinese merchant bankers (among whom Donaudi himself had been raised) and a class of urban lawyers. In response to this situation, Donaudi, inspired by French political thinkers like Forbonnais, launched two consecutive reform strategies. Ironically, Donaudi's final proposal to devise a strategy for unlocking agricultural innovation, manufacturing and trade by creating an internal market in the Kingdom of Sardinia led him to be accused of colonialism. Enlightenment ideology, in the form of Raynal's Deux indes, blocked Donaudi's reform proposals.