Genoese Entrepreneurship and the Asiento Slave Trade, 1650–1700

Alejandro García-Montón

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000513639
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire du monde

This book explains how Genoese entrepreneurs transformed the structures of global trade during the second half of the seventeenth century. The author reconstructs the business network built by the Genoese merchant Domenico Grillo between the 1650s and the 1680s. Grillo's business interests stretched from the Mediterranean to Pacific South America, traversing and joining the Spanish, Dutch, and English Atlantics. He and his associates created a new business model that was to be emulated by Dutch, French, and English traders in subsequent decades: the monopolistic asientos for the exploitation of the trans-imperial and intra-American slave trade to Spanish America. Offering a connected history of capitalism across trans-continental geographies and different empires, this book challenges established views of a period which has traditionally been interrogated from a northern European mercantile perspective. Cutting across the histories of the slave trade in the Atlantic world, early modern capitalism, and early modern empire, this study has much to offer to students and scholars interested in the agents, economic practices, and geographies of trade that do not easily fit into and therefore disrupt the traditional narratives of the Rise of the West.

Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

1 From Mediterranean Galleys to the Transatlantic Slave Trade The Tale of the Grillo Family

DOI: 10.4324/9781003242215-2

Introduction

This chapter describes and contextualises the trajectory over several centuries of the family branch to which Domenico Grillo belonged, the Grillo de Mondragones. This is a useful exercise to show that Genoese families flourished beyond the “Age of the Genoese.” Traditional approaches circumscribe the apogee of the great families of the Genoese oligarchy to this period spanning 1550s–1620s. When family histories are examined within this chronological framework, they implicitly anticipate a story of social and economic success followed by a period of decline beginning in the 1630s. These historical accounts are inserted into wider and well-consolidated narratives, such as the one behind the notion of “the crisis of the 17th-century,” the “trahison de la bourgeoisie,” or the more general framework about the decline of Italian businessmen and northern Italy during this century.¹ These are ideas that percolate the existing bibliography stealthily and seamlessly. Even the ground-breaking work about the Balbi family published in 1997 by Edoardo Grendi seems to fail in the “Age of the Genoese” trap. Grendi made a commendable effort not only in explaining how a family of silk weavers became a powerful clan of top-tier businessmen at a European level, but he also showed how the family fortune declined afterwards. That was not a random choice. Grendi intentions were clear: he aimed at offering “a healthy corrective to capitalist exaltation and its commonplaces.” Yet, the social timing of the Balbi’s career, both the family’s ascent and wane, mirrored and exemplified the dawn and the twilight of the “Age of the Genoese.”²

The history of the Grillo de Mondragones invites the historian to think the fate of Genoese businessmen and the Genoese oligarchy in general from a different angle. In contrast to what we might expect in view of the grand narratives about the rise and fall of Italian capitalism during the early modern period, for this family the “Age of the Genoese” was not the moment that presented the greatest opportunities. During those decades, the Grillo de Mondragone family had a negligible presence in the political institutions of the Republic of Genoa, the structures of the Spanish Empire and the Church apparatus. Meanwhile, many other Genoese families acquired nobility titles, controlled state offices, produced leading warlords, and raised some of the most important bankers of the period at the European level. Similarly, in stark contrast to other Genoese families of the moment, the Grillo de Mondragones’ activity as artistic sponsors, builders of great palaces and villas, churches and chapels was hardly outstanding. This trend only changed later, during the second half of the 17th century and the opening decades of the 18th century. During this period, the Grillo de Mondragones found ways to thrive and to improve their social standing. Led by the entrepreneurship of Domenico Grillo, the family pursued new avenues for investment – among them, the trans-imperial African slave trade in the Atlantic – and managed to prosper in a period in which the Genoese businessmen had apparently succumbed to their northern European competitors.

The story that I propose for this chapter frames the analysis of the history of the Grillo de Mondragone family as a problem of social reproduction in different historical junctures. This was the real challenge faced by European families during the early modern period. This challenge was especially relevant for those who, like the Grillo de Mondragone, were part of the ruling elites of a state like the Republic of Genoa. As pointed out by Osvaldo Raggio in his study of the Durazzo family, during the 18th century the Republic of Genoa’ position in the international arena was limited, but “there is no automatic link between general political history and the ascent and decline of [Genoese] families.”³ This statement can also be applied, in extenso, to cover whole business arena. The Grillo de Mondragone family was not the only one to thrive beyond the “Age of the Genoese” and in a period of relative decline for Italian businessmen, like the 17th century. In the early 18th century, other Genoese families such as the Crosas, the Cambiasos, the Maranas, the Paretos, or the Saporitis, which often came from the lowest social strata, turned successful business strategies into a tool for rapid social promotion.⁴

Moreover, shedding light on the trajectory of the Grillo de Mondragone family and the close links that existed between their social promotion and their involvement in transatlantic trade emphasises even more the crudity with which some economic historians have characterised the economies of Venice and Genoa, which allegedly “did not experience any direct or indirect benefits from Atlantic trade.”⁵ This family not only illustrates the profit European trading dynasties obtained from Atlantic trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it reveals that Mediterranean elites also fuelled their social reproduction through the exploitation of the business opportunities offered by the Atlantic world, as did other trading dynasties, such as the Perry family in London and the Gradis family in Bourdeaux.⁶

Locating a Small and Discreet Family during the Age of the Genoese

The transition between the Middle Ages and the early modern period was not particularly kind to the Grillo family. From at least the 12th century, the name of Grillo had been among the most prominent in Genoa, but by the 15th century, the albergo Grillo was found in the middle tiers of the Genoese social ladder, like the Centurione, Imperiale, and Lercari families.⁷ The alberghi were private “kinship associations and family grouping that took up a shared name, symbols, emblems and colours.” They had a topographic dimension and encouraged their members to mutually support one another.⁸ During the early modern period, the Grillo and other Genoese families dwindled in numbers; of the 34 family branches attested between the 12th and 15th centuries only six made it into the 16th century.⁹ The trend did not stop there, and of these six branches only two survived into the early 18th century, the Grillo Cattaneo family and the Grillo de Mondragone family, on which we shall be focusing.¹⁰ Despite this trend, the Grillo evaded the fate of other families that simply disappeared during the early modern period, owing to biological limitations or to the impact of plagues in the city.¹¹ During the first half of the 16th century, the Grillo family’s social standing deteriorated further in relative terms, but despite this, the name of Grillo still counted for the city’s oligarchy.

The constitutional reforms that took place in the Republic of Genoa in 1528 provide us with a good standing point to establish who were the Grillo de Mondragones during the “Age of the Genoese.” These reforms aimed to reorganise access to government positions and to mitigate the factional strife that, until then, had dominated political events in the Republic. In the Middle Ages, the alberghi had been a successful way to convene different families and interests under a single name, but the reforms enacted in 1528 failed to reproduce the system’s previous success.¹² In 1576, the Leges Novae dissolved the alberghi created in 1528 and, as a rule, the families that had entered one of said alberghi recovered their original name.¹³ The reforms of 1528 endorsed alberghi (28 in total) which had at least six houses open in the city. New families were incorporated into the traditional alberghi which now comprised all citizens eligible for government duties. Of the 600 names to be distributed among the 28 alberghi, 22 were placed under the albergo Grillo.¹⁴ This included a total of 47 eligible citizens, that is, 2.31% of the total (2,031). The albergo Grillo had the second-lowest number of eligible citizens. In contrast, the albergo Spinola had 227, the albergo Doria 111 and the albergo Lomellino 109, numbers which allowed these family groups to continue to dominate Genoese politics and society as they had done in the preceding centuries.¹⁵ As such, by 1528 the Grillo kept a place in the elite, but always near the bottom of the hierarchy in terms of prestige, influence, and patronage.

If we were to look for the participation of the Grillo de Mondragones in the state apparatus of the Republic of Genoa, the results would be meagre. The distribution of government responsibilities was one of the main items in the institutional reforms undertaken by the Republic of Genoa in 1528, but also in those which took place later in 1576, the so-called Leges Novae. These new laws brought an end to the civil war that in 1575–76 had pitted the nobili nuovi and popolari against the nobili vecchi, including the Grillos. This reform aimed to bring both sides under a common government system that facilitated the formation of a single ruling elite. As argued by Carlo Bitossi, eligibility to the most prestigious political office, the dogato, is a good yardstick to measure the relative weight of each family in the political arena between 1576 and 1657. What was the Grillos’ position in the race for political influence?

Only four years after the Leges Novae were enacted, the Grillos ceased featuring in the list of possible candidates to the dogato. Between 1576 and 1657 43 doge were appointed, 21 of which were nuovi and 22 vecchi. However, these appointments do not seem to have been a simple function of political influence, wealth, and social status. Of the 49 families that presented candidates, only 25 succeeded. The most successful among the nobili vecchi during the early 17th century were the Grimaldi, Negrone, and Di Negro families, later replaced by the Lercari, De Mari, and De Marini families. Yet the Grillos’ absence from the list of possible candidates cannot be explained solely by its small size, since Carlo Bitossi has shown that small families, including the De Marini and Lercari, rose to the dogato. Similarly, economic power alone did not guarantee access to the dogato. A clan like the Balbi, which, alongside the Durazzo, Moneglia, and Saluzzo families, was among the richest nobili nuovi of the city, had to wait until the second half of the 17th century to present a candidate for the dogato.¹⁶ A search for members of the Grillo family, and specifically of the Mondragone branch, in the main government bodies like the Maggior Consiglio and the Minor Consiglio, between 1576 and 1657 yields few results.¹⁷ Therefore, the Grillos, and especially the Mondragone branch, were barely present in the government and administration of the Republic of Genoa during the period known as the “Age of the Genoese,” be it because of their small numbers, bad luck in selection processes, or lack of political ambition.¹⁸

The participation of the Grillo de Mondragones in the royal patronage system of the Spanish Empire is another observatory from which we can assess the trajectory of this family during the “Age of the Genoese.” During the first half of the 16th century, the Genoese consolidated their position as Charles V’s main bankers and as his best naval forces in the Mediterranean. Charles V started rewarding the services of his closest Genoese associates with cash and precious metals, but also with administrative and political posts in the imperial apparatus. For instance, the loans secured by Tommaso de Fornari and Domenico Sauli during the 1520s resulted in their appointment as general treasurer of the imperial army in Italy and as president of ordinary revenue in the Duchy of Milan, respectively.¹⁹ Another usual compensation mechanism was the concession of nobility titles and jurisdiction over communities and territories in the Spanish Empire. This reward mechanism was implemented often, and the number of such grants multiplied over time. The Dorias, the Spinolas, the Centuriones, or the Serras were among the families that benefitted the most. ...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 From Mediterranean Galleys to the Transatlantic Slave Trade: The Tale of the Grillo Family
• 2 Resiliency and Adaptation: Genoese Entrepreneurs during the 17th Century
• 3 A New Business Model for the Atlantic World: Monopolistic Asientos and the Slave Trade to Spanish America
• 4 The Backbone of the Asiento: Factors, Ships’ Captains and Judges
• 5 Penetrating the Dutch and the English Atlantic: Slaves, Merchandise, and Trans-imperial Entanglements
• 6 Implementing the Asiento and Smuggling: A Perspective from the Isthmus of Panama and Pacific South America
• 7 Genoa: A Mediterranean Hub for Overseas Entrepreneurs
• Epilogue
• Index