Part IV
According to a well-established tradition, scholars usually refer to the decades between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries as the “Financial Revolution”—the period when, especially in England, “modern” financial organizations such as banks, public debts, and joint stock companies emerged. However, the relationship between this period and the earlier financial tradition of the Italian Renaissance has not been well studied. Even recent scholarly works that seem to challenge traditional views through interdisciplinary research and try to push back (Anne Murphy) or anticipate (Carl Wennerlind) the momentum of the Financial Revolution consider the same geographic area and a similar time frame.1
The following chapters offer a different perspective. They present texts that show that it is possible to build a connection between the financial picture of the Renaissance (the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) and that of later periods in the field of political and financial thought. They will also show the importance of ideas conceived by German scholars at the end of the nineteenth century, which were described in the introductory chapter. Furthermore, these chapters will show that an historical link between San Giorgio and later corporations—as hypothesized by the German scholars—did in fact exist. The introductory chapter of this book built the foundation for a comparison but left the question of an actual historical link open for further examination. Prior to considering the sources, I will review some the topics presented in the introductory chapter.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German legal historians reached two relevant conclusions about the connections between San Giorgio and later financial institutions. They understood the British East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to be the two first corporations and considered San Giorgio and the maona as the prototype for these two corporations. The former conclusion is widely accepted by established legal and economic understandings of financial history; the latter is not. This fate is due to the paucity of studies that connect two usually separate scholarly fields: those focused on the Renaissance Mediterranean and those focused on northern Europe and England in later periods. Another possible explanation for the lack of critical fortune of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German scholars’ hypotheses is that they envisaged the existence of similarities between the maone, San Giorgio, and later corporations, but neither looked for or found traces of clues that demonstrated an actual historical connection between these institutions. They tried to determine whether financial terms such as the loca of San Giorgio were used by later corporations and found that they were not.
In contrast, the research presented here has found a primary point of connection between San Giorgio and later corporations—territorial power. As the following pages will show, my research has established this connection via specific archival documents. Archival research alone, however, is never enough; to show the relevance of these sources, I have deployed a new understanding of the territorial power of corporations, based on ideas in Philip Stern’s work.2 His book, The Company-State, focuses on the territorial power of the EIC and shows how this characteristic was typical of important financial corporations such as the VOC and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Furthermore, he has established that nineteenth-century historiography failed to recognize the criticality of territorial power, as this historiography focused instead on celebrating state power.
Second, my research considers Oscar Gelderblom and Joost Jonker’s conclusions regarding the VOC, the most archetypical of corporations.3 They proved that what had been considered as the most fundamental characteristics of the corporations were instead acquired through a fluid and step-by-step process. If, based on their interpretations, we see the characteristics of the VOC schematically, it becomes easier to look for connections, influences, and links with older institutions such as San Giorgio.
The fortunes of the model created by San Giorgio were influential in the Netherlands (for the VOC), England (for the Bank of England), and France (for John Law’s Mississippi Company). My research has shown that a significant but not sole reason for the spread of San Giorgio’s fortunes was Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. However, it is impossible to exclude other transmission paths for information and understanding of San Giorgio’s practices for either merchants or bankers, particularly the Genoese traders who worked in Antwerp, the Netherlands, or in England. Information about San Giorgio could also have been conveyed beyond the confines of the Italian peninsula via English and Dutch traders in Genoa, or at least those in contact with Genoese traders. It is more difficult to establish an empirical understanding of the paths of transmission of knowledge regarding the practices of San Giorgio than it would be to track the transmission of an influential text. However, this research will show that individuals important for the formation of financial institutions in the Netherlands and England were in contact with the Genoese.
San Giorgio, as a bank and a manager of public debt, was a very different financial institution from those that exist now, and it was also very different from others that were its contemporaries. No other public financial institutions possessed and ruled over any territory. When seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economists, bankers, and scholars referred to the subsequent history of San Giorgio’s model, they did so either by mentioning all three of its functions (bank, public debt, and territorial possessions) or by noting only one or a discrete combination of two of them. Paul de Choart de Buzanval, whose texts are examined in Chapter 9 and who compared San Giorgio and the VOC, initially developed the argument of territorial possession. The pamphlets that mentioned the similarities between San Giorgio and the Bank of England (Chapter 10) primarily looked at the financial aspects of the bank and public debt. Finally, the anonymous biographer of John Law who compared San Giorgio to the Mississippi Company (Chapter 11) focused on financial and territorial characteristics. The way finance is structured today makes it difficult to see the fluidity of San Giorgio’s system, which encompassed three features at once: public debt, marketing of shares, and territorial possessions.
The following chapters will also outline the characteristics of San Giorgio that were considered important features of financial corporations and were independent of the critical fortunes of Machiavelli’s passage.
The San Giorgio model became more influential when the institution had returned all its territories to the Republic of Genoa (after 1562) and no longer held the plena iurisdictio and the ius gladii, the greatest extent of its territorial power. While it continued to develop and exert financial clout, in northern Europe the fate and influence of its earlier model—acquisition of territorial and financial power—grew, coming to exist in a separate form that was detached from its contemporary and historical reality. I do not focus on San Giorgio’s actual political and economic history between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries but instead at its model’s fortunes in that period. The final chapter of this book (Chapter 11) will partially focus again on the actual history of San Giorgio, through relaying an account of the gambler and economist John Law, who lived in Genoa for a few years and made his fortune in France.
Scattered information related to San Giorgio’s history in the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries circulated in the same period. My research will stress that the fortunes of San Giorgio’s model also relied on this scattered knowledge—even though Machiavelli’s passage, which referred to a distant past, overshadowed it.
Authors of the texts discussed in the following pages had access to knowledge of the financial workings of San Giorgio that refers to its foundation in the fifteenth century—or to its general structure, which could be related to any moment in San Giorgio’s history. The examples presented here do not pretend to cover the whole corpus of texts (letters, pamphlets) produced on San Giorgio and its history. We can hypothesize that the corpus was or still is much wider and that what is examined here is likely a small percentage of the information that observers, scholars, and polemicists had on this subject. What is presented here is the context of the production of these texts and the network of people who produced them. This part of the book also outlines plans and ideas for other financial institutions that were not realized, but which have similarities to San Giorgio.
Notes
1. Wennerlind’s view is more radical, since he attempts to move the momentum of the Financial Revolution back to the broad scientific debate at the beginning of the seventeenth century. However, the focus on England is common to all the interpretations. See Anne Murphy, The Origins of the English Financial Markets: Investments and Speculations Before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009); Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
2. Stern, The Company-State.
3. Gelderblom, de Jong and Jonker, “The Formative Years of the Modern Corporation.”
9
9.1. Ambassadors’ Views on the VOC’s Political Role
The aggregation of several companies in the United Provinces, anachronistically but traditionally defined as the “early companies,” led to the formation of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1602. Between 1598 and 1602, following the example of a naval fleet that departed from the Low Countries in 1595 and returned in 1597, 16 fleets were prepared to compete with the Portuguese in the spice trade.1 Traders were invested with a limited liability related to the shipment over those four years. Administrators collected the gains and divided them among investors once the fleets had returned. In 1601, to deal with the competition of English traders who had recently founded the East India Company, investors in Amsterdam united their two companies. After intense negotiations to convince the stubbornly resistant merchants of Zeeland, the other early companies united to establish the VOC.2 Investors from six cities in the Netherlands and the States General had roles in the new combined company. The first investment in the VOC’s activities reached 6.4 million guilders. The charter of March 20, 1602, stated that the States General granted the VOC a trade monopoly for 21 years. While the VOC was a united company, the financial operations were segmented shipment by shipment: each shipment’s gains were reinvested into the next one.
Politicians also played a central role in the VOC’s formation, including Jean van Oldenbarnevelt, Land’s Advocate of Holland. Historian Jonathan Israel has defined the formation of the VOC as “essentially the work of the Dutch state”—that is, the States General.3 Merchants requested that Oldenbarnevelt defend their commercial prerogatives, and the States General persuaded the companies to form the VOC.4 Despite the relevance of politics to the VOC’s formation, very few studies in recent decades have adopted a political lens to understand it. Martine Van Ittersum has argued that the lack of this perspective is a consequence of the post-colonial politics that emerged after the Second World War. During that period, politics made the study of the VOC problematic.5 More recently, the approach to understanding the VOC has been ambivalent regarding politics. In European studies, examination of the VOC has increased, but with a focus on cultural perspectives. In some post-colonial countries such as South Africa, interest in the subject has recently waned.6
The result is that an institutional history of the VOC is still lacking, and studies on the role of political figures in the making of the VOC are scarce. There are no analyses of the early investors’ meetings or information on the role of political actors like Oldenbarnevelt during the period when the so-called early companies merged. However, there are multiple relevant references to significant political information about the founding of the VOC from the perspective of foreign ambassadors. Though a series of early twentieth-century studies quoted some of the ambassadors’ memoirs, they have not been studied in depth. The reason for this lacuna is the same as noted previously: the VOC’s institutional history has been neglected. There are no quantitative analyses or systematic studies of the ambassadors’ memoirs.
The introductory chapter discussed how Oscar Gelderblom and Joost Jonker concluded that the VOC can no longer be considered the theoretical model of the nineteenth- to twentieth-century financial system nor the model for corporations—because it did not suddenly acquire all the characteristics of a corporation. For this reason, we need to revise our understanding of both the economic and political processes of the VOC’s foundation. For this, the primary sources written by the foreign ambassadors are critical.
We also find useful information in the papers of English ambassadors George Gilpin’s (1514–1602) and Ralph Winwood’s (1562–1615); in the notes of Francois Van Aerssen, the Dutch ambassador to France (1572–1641); and, of particular importance, in the writing of Paul de Choart de Buzanval, French ambassador to the United Provinces (1551–1607). These individuals were part of a refined humanistic culture and had cultural ties with humanists and antiquarians. There are no accurate inventories of their writings, which are preserved in English, Dutch, and French archives and libraries. Over centuries, but primarily between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians and antiquarians have collected and published parts of these ambassadors’ collected writings, but no careful analysis of their papers has been conducted focusing on the initial phase of the VOC’s foundation.
The following analysis presents fragments of this material to introduce a document that offers a particular view of the VOC and elaborates ideas on its foundational ties with San Giorgio. English ambassador George Gilpin provided some of the earliest information on the VOC in May 1601, approximately one year before the 1602 foundational incorporation charter. He wrote:
It is sought by his Excellence and others of the chief to agree and drawe both [the Hollanders and Zeelanders] into one company, so that they may go the stronger, and consequently more assured of th’expected profit, to which motion each part beginnes to enclyne and be comfortable enough.7
The French ambassador Francois Van Aerssen, writing in 1605 to Henry IV, stated that the VOC had been founded not only for economic, but also for political and military purposes. Its aim was to engage in not only trading with Indies, but also to oppose and undermine the domination and authority of the Spanish king, in order to free these nations and to unite them with the United Provinces, so that they and the States (States General) could receive the benefits of the commerce.
non tant seulement négotier aux Indes, mais d’en chasser avec main forte la domination et authorité du Roy d’Espagne, pour mettre ces nations en liberté, en union avec les Provinces Unies, et eux et les Seigneurs Estats avoir l’utilité du commerce.
This excerpt was first analyzed decades after its publication by Martine Van Ittersum.8 Van Aerssen’s interpretation also helps reconstruct the French attempts to imitate the VOC, initiated by Peter Lintgens, one of the VOC’s major shareholders. Later references by ambassadors, written when the States General had given the VOC an injection of capital, saw the company’s important role as an autonomous body. Ralph Winwood in 1612 wrote that the company was “a body by themselves, powerful and mighty in this State, and will not acknowledge the authority of the General States more than shall be for the private profits,” and that “they [the Company] want to make Holland the island of their Indies and Amsterdam, Bantam.”9
This perspective, which overturns geography, indicates that the VOC was perceived as a political body itself with autonomous powers. This raises the question of when this view emerged. Was this idea related to something specific in 1612, or did it appear earlier? The papers of Paul de Choart de Buzanval (or Buzenval), the French ambassador to the United Provinces, offer interesting information on this inquiry.
9.2. Paul de Choart de Buzanval
Among the various ambassadors and agents who conveyed information between France and the United Provinces in the early seventeenth century and who left intelligence reports, Paul de Choart de Buzanval is perhaps the most intriguing. Like much related to the history of the VOC, he has been insufficiently studied. Initially an agent of Henry of Navarre in England, then, when Henry of Navarre became Henry IV in France, French ambassador to the United Provinces, Buzanval built political relations with Henry IV and Jean van Oldenbarnevelt and very close contacts with Francis Walshingam in England.10 Among his contacts were the humanist Joseph Justus Scaliger, the famous antiquarian Isaac Casaubon, and the inventor Simon Stevin.11 Hugo Grotius, 32 years younger than Buzanval, found in the older man a political and cultural mentor and dedicated some of his poetry and his Triumphus Gallicus to him. When Grotius arrived at the French court in 1598 for an extended stay, Buzanval introduced him to the court and presented him to the king. Born in 1551, by 1598 Buzanval had already spent 20 years in Paris. At the end of the 1560s, he studied in Heidelberg with Jan Oldenbarnevelt, and they stayed in contact.12 After converting to Calvinism, Buzanval was in the milieu of Henry of Navarre, and after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris in 1572, he went abroad as a refugee.13 In 1574, he was in Geneva, where he remained for another nine years. In 1583, he returned to France, and Henry of Navarre gave him challenging diplomatic missions to England, the United Provinces, and the Holy Roman Empire. Along with Jacques de Ségur Pardaillan, Buzanval was tasked with finding allies for the Huguenots. He remained in England until 1591, and the following year, having fallen into disgrace with Queen Elizabeth I, Buzanval was sent to the United Provinces as ambassador for the French king. In 1601, Henry IV, now king of France and a Catholic convert, promised the papal nuncio and the Spanish ambassador to recall his ambassador from the United Provinces. In 1601, Buzanval returned to the Low Countries as an informal representative of France, as Henry IV had promised the representatives of the Catholic countries that his ambassador would deal only with his personal dispatches, not official business.14
In the United Provinces, Buzanval had the opportunity to observe the foundation of the VOC, which Henry IV supported as a way to indirectly strengthen the Netherlands and weaken the Spanish king. Supporting a commercial body such as the VOC was a less risky adventure for the French king than was supporting the States General. In the long term, however, the VOC’s success led to a conflict between the French king and the United Provinces. As he learned about the VOC, Henry IV also supported an attempt to replicate it in France. Buzanval, who had many contacts in the Netherlands, found himself in the middle of these maneuvers: Henry IV asked him to present a formal request to the States General to acquire know-how and capital in France to imitate the VOC. In fact, the first French attempts aimed at funding a company to explore the East Indies were fostered by a group of merchants in Saint Malò and preceded the VOC’s foundation in 1601. Two ships set sail, but the expedition failed.15 These early attempts are different from those aimed at directly mimicking the VOC structure, but they show that France was interested in trading with the East Indies from an early date.
In 1604, Henry IV issued a charter for the incorporation for the Compagnie des Indes orientales, which included among its shareholders not only private investors but also the Crown.16 During this period, the French king tried to acquire the resources and know-how of Dutch merchants who were part of the VOC. The first was Baltasar de Moucheron, director of the VOC until 1603, who joined in a partnership with French merchants.17 In March 1604, Buzanval presented Henry IV’s request to the States General for sailors and resources to trade with the East Indies. These actions show that the relationship between the French king and the States General was strong and that their commercial enterprises were considered important. The king’s request to the States General, however, was rejected.18 A year later, in March 1605, thanks to the official French Ambassador Van Aerssen, the duke of Sully, a powerful Huguenot at the court of Henry IV, was convinced against efforts to replicate the VOC. Nonetheless, the French king continued moving in that direction.19 In the same period, after losing faith in de Moucheron, the king looked toward Netherlands merchant Pieter Lintgens. Lintgens had been the most important investor in the VOC; having later removed his capital, he was now free to invest in France. The VOC played a military role, helping to defend Netherlands trade against Spain; Lintgens explained the removal by asserting he was an Anabaptist and pacifist and did not want to invest in a martial enterprise, which Buzanval noted.20 Despite his assertions, it is likely that Lintgens’s religion did not affect his actions, but either way, the States General protested through Buzanval, against Lintgens’s maneuvers in France.21 In the summer of 1605, however, Buzanval distanced himself from Lintgens and explained to the French king that it was impossible to persuade the merchant to replicate the VOC. Once his attempts to involve the VOC’s investors and capital were unsuccessful, Buzanval initiated new channels and contacted Florentine merchant Francesco Carletti to create a similar company. Buzanval died in 1607.
9.3. The Foundation of the VOC
In March 1602 Buzanval was in Canfere (Veere, in Zeeland), but not as an ambassador in an official capacity. His cover was to suggest that he was only visiting for religious reasons. However, he observed the foundation of the VOC. On March 13, 1602, seven days before the formal foundation of the VOC, Buzanval alerted an informant to advise the grand marshal that the VOC had been established. Buzanval wrote that “a new order” had been in existence for a month and that it was intended to attack Portuguese trade. He further added:
They reduced all the merchants who traded in the Indies down to a certain separate council, which has a fund of 5 million of gold and which will be governed and administered by this council and all the representatives of the body; and this is under the authority of the Misters the States General of the United Provinces, which has permitted these merchants to create this body and to exclude from this trade all the other merchants of this country who will not want to join this company. For this purpose they arm various large galleys, melt a large quantity of artillery, send ambassadors to the kings of the Indies with many gifts from one coast to the other, with their own consent or being forced; wherever it will be needed, in order to trade, they want to establish many fortresses and trading posts in the Indies, in the place which they will judge more suitable for the security of trade (translation).
Ils ont reduit tous les marchands qui ont traffique en particulier ausd’Indes par bandes a part en un certain corps et college qui se trouve en fond de cinq millions d’or qui sera gouverné et administré par led’ college et deputez de tout le corps, et ce souvrs l’authorité de Mr les éstat generaux des provinces unies qui ont consenty ausd’ marchands de faire led’ corps et exelurre dud’ traficque tous autres marchande de ce pais qui ne voudron entrer en lad’compagnie ils font bastir pour cest effect plusieurs grand gallions et vaisseaux fondre grand quantité d’artillerie envoyent ambassadeurs vers led’Roy desd’Indes avec plusieurs presens d’un costé et de l’autre, bonnes forces pours’establir et deleur gré et par force ou il en sera de besoin pour led’traficque se resolvans d’edifier plusieurs forteresses et maisons de contras on esd’Indes aux endroicts quils iugeron plus a propos pour la secureté de ce commerce.22
This is the first time Buzanval mentions the VOC in his papers. Buzanval’s letters are collected in various volumes, and the preceding volume has no references to the VOC, because it ends on October 14, 1601, when it was not yet clear how the companies could join into a single enterprise.23 In the previous passage, Buzanval clarifies that several merchants wanted to create a company, a sort of “body” and a “council.” He notes that the company would control many galleys and a strong artillery, with the possibility of sending ambassadors to sovereigns in the Indies and building fortresses and trading posts. These descriptions go past trade and to military structures and territorial and marine control. Despite this emphasis, there are no scholarly analyses on the territorial and military enterprises of the VOC at its foundation. Buzanval’s words compel us to consider that the VOC’s founders foresaw an organization that could be rooted in territory to create trade. In the same letter, Buzanval describes the very essence of the VOC and compared it to San Giorgio:
Someone judges this enterprise of such importance that they dare to say that if it takes root, it will be as a second state which will be formed within that of these lords [States General], so dangerous for the greatness of the king of Spain as the first and the principal has been; and that it will become more powerful in resources than that of the General Estates, which cannot be better understood and compared than to the House of St. George, which had been established in Genoa some centuries ago with such a success in a short time that it absorbed almost all the faculties and resources of that city and republic (translation).
Quelques ungs iugent de telle importance ceste entreprise quils osent bien dire que si elle prend racine cest comme un second estat qui se forme dans celuy de ces Mrs aussi prejudiciable a la grandeur du Roy d’Espaigne comme le premier et le principal a esté et qui se rendra plus puissant en moyens que n’est celuy des Estats generaux ce qui ne se peult mieux comprendre et comparer qu’a la maison de St. Georges qui fut erigee dans Gennes il y a quelques centaines d’annees avec tel succeds en peu de temps, quelle absorba presques toutes les facultes et moyens de la d[ite] ville et republique.24
9.4. Analysis of Buzanval’s Text
Buzanval’s text maintains that “someone,” probably in the States General of the Netherlands, considered the VOC’s potential acquisition of political and military power relevant to its foundation. That the acquisition of this power was a clearly defined project is supported by the mention of galleys, money, princes, and fortresses. The phrase “someone … say[s] that if it takes root, it will be as a second state” points to the existence of a political and potentially territorial project. However, the identity of the “someone” who compares the VOC and San Giorgio is unclear. Buzanval specifically wrote “someone,” indicating an external observer, or perhaps someone from the VOC’s milieu. If this reference came from someone within the VOC, then it is possible that the abstracted characteristics of San Giorgio noted in this passage could have been a model for the foundation of the VOC. This text shows that in the Netherlands, only a few days before the foundation of the VOC, there was a discussion of San Giorgio as an economic and political power that had gained the upper hand over the state.
The relationship between the state and the company was described in terms very similar to those found in the Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. However, there is a key difference. In this case, the state–company relationship applied not only to the States General of the Netherlands, but also to Spain. The VOC was seen as a potentially revolutionary asset in the confrontation with the king of Spain. The Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, highlighted how San Giorgio had led to the undermining and the fragmenting of state authority—to, that is, revolutionary change. While Machiavelli saw this as a negative, in the Netherlands the concept was inverted, with the revolutionary aspect of a second state becoming a positive. The “state within the state”—the VOC—did not weaken the States General the way San Giorgio did the Commune. Instead, the VOC was a second state; it doubled the state, giving the Dutch more ways and more power to fight the king of Spain. The potentially revolutionary implication of double sovereignty is important in Machiavelli’s passage; since this implication is also contained in Buzanval’s text, it may be that the use of “a state within a state” to describe the VOC is a direct reference to Machiavelli’s passage. In Buzanval’s writing, the references to the territorial power of the VOC and San Giorgio are separated by only a few lines. Buzanval mentions the VOC’s fortresses and then the “resources” which San Giorgio took from the city of Genoa.
The analyses of San Giorgio in the previous chapters show that the first and the second memorial from the 1460s and the passage from Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, saw San Giorgio’s role in relation to the Commune of Genoa as negative. All three analyses understood the subtraction of resources as the subtraction of territories. From an economic and financial perspective, San Giorgio was not considered to be taking away resources from the Commune. San Giorgio was entitled to control the public debt, and no analyses are currently known that describe San Giorgio’s role in weakening the Commune of Genoa economically. It is because of the complicating factor of territorial acquisition—both of the Ufficium Monetae and as described in Machiavelli’s passage—that the double image of territorial power was conceived. While the “someone” in Buzanval’s text who mentioned San Giorgio could have been unaware of Machiavelli’s passage, the idea that San Giorgio had weakened the Commune almost certainly referred to its control of territory that had previously belonged to the Commune. A more famous text than Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, that could explain the way San Giorgio had absorbed the resources (i.e., the territories) of the Commune simply did not exist.
These ideas about the territorial power of the two organizations allow for the formulation of two hypotheses: (1) the author of the comparison almost certainly knew Machiavelli’s passage about San Giorgio; and (2) San Giorgio’s schematized characteristics could have served as a model for the VOC. The VOC did not yet control any territory, but San Giorgio’s past territorial tradition was well known, meaning that mentioning San Giorgio’s territorial power was a way to refer to the VOC’s political and territorial project. The fact that this text is dated one week before the foundation of the VOC allows for the revision of the perspective of the Historische Rechtsschule on San Giorgio. We can establish not only a comparison between the VOC and San Giorgio, but even more intriguingly, we can suggest that the knowledge of the older organization could have had a role in the foundation of the VOC. While we cannot conclusively demonstrate that this was the case, the evidence allows for the possibility.
9.5. Buzanval’s Text in Context
Did Machiavelli’s ideas about San Giorgio spread in France and among French antiquarians and scholars? This question arises given the possibility that Buzanval himself drew the comparison between the VOC and San Giorgio and the possibility that it was not Buzanval and was instead someone else in the United Provinces. We know Buzanval mentioned Machiavelli’s idea in his writings to the French grand marshal. The relationship between San Giorgio and France was very close during the fifteenth century and the beginning of the following century, when Genoa came under the French signory (1499–1512). In those years, however, no references to the reception of Machiavelli’s passage, nor any analysis similar to those of the Sforza chancellery, appeared in France. A mention of San Giorgio and its territorial power is present, however, in the Six Books of the Republic by Jean Bodin. In a few lines about banks, Bodin discusses San Giorgio, which—according to him—provided 5% interest on investments, enriching San Giorgio enough that it could take control of the territories.25
Bodin connected San Giorgio’s financial power (loans at 5%) with its territorial occupation. This was one of the most important points of Machiavelli’s passage, but we cannot know for sure that Bodin was referring to Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. Moreover, even though Machiavelli was well known in France, it is not likely that Buzanval’s text was understood in France through the lens of Florentine Histories, VIII, 29. At the end of the seventeenth century, Machiavelli’s passage on San Giorgio was printed in England separately from the Florentine Histories, but there is no evidence that this version spread in France. However, as will be shown, references to San Giorgio as a state within the state and references to Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, appear in Europe in the context of the creation of financial institutions that retrospectively were defined as corporations. Even when the passage was used in connection with the Mississippi Company, an institution that was founded in France, the authors who used it came from England and their writings were published in London. It is probable that since Genoa was physically close to France and the two were politically connected, the reference to San Giorgio in Buzanval’s text was understood by readers as a comment on an important organization. Regardless, Buzanval claimed to be reporting the thoughts of an observer of the Netherlands, and it makes sense to ask how much knowledge of Genoa and Genoese merchants and finance there was in the United Provinces.
The United Provinces had many contacts with Genoa in the seventeenth century. Their economic ties were initiated in the early years of that century, the same period that Buzanval was in Zeeland.26 The Low Countries and Genoa had also had strong relationships in previous centuries. In the fifteenth century, Genoa and the southern Low Countries had significant economic exchanges: goods, artifacts, art works, and merchants moved between the two.27 By the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, Dutch authors began to analyze Genoa and its political system and compare it to that of the United Provinces.28 Exchanges between merchants were also frequent, and some merchants had relationships with humanists in Genoa and the Netherlands. Some of the people connected to Buzanval have ties to the Italian peninsula and Genoa. Pieter Lintgens, one of the most powerful early investors in the VOC, traded in Genoa, and Casper (Jasper) Quingetti and his brother Melchior were active in Venice.29 Buzanval had contacts with Horatio Pallavicino, who was active as a merchant in England and in the Low Countries. Horatio came from a Genoese noble family with powerful businesses in London, Antwerp, and elsewhere. Horatio’s uncle, Alessandro, was already active in London in 1576.30 Horatio at first had investments in the monopoly of alum, a mineral used to fix the colors of dye on fabric; the Pallavicino took over the extraction of alum near Tolfa, north of Rome along the coast from the Sauli family between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.31 Horatio and Battista Spinola, another merchant in London, did business in the Low Countries: their contract for the selling of alum was registered in The Hague in 1570.32 In the following years, Horatio acted as English ambassador. Buzanval was in England after 1583 and encountered Horatio there.33
9.6. Genoese Traders and the East Indies
The VOC very quickly inspired attempts to replicate it, but these attempts have not been studied in detail.34 In France, as we have seen, these efforts started immediately; the French efforts to build companies, even without the capital that the VOC later had, actually preceded the VOC’s foundation. The French case is particularly relevant, not only because it could potentially attract the market of the VOC, but because in France the king got involved—as we have seen—in trying to attract investors (Pieter Lintgens) and knowledge. Smaller-scale attempts to replicate the VOC through acquiring knowledge about the company also occurred in Genoa in the middle of the seventeenth century. The Genoese tradition of trade with the Indies dated back to the Middle Ages and the early sixteenth century. When one focuses on networks of merchants and investors, it becomes clear how longstanding the Genoese attempts to reach the East Indies were.35 However, few studies have yet shown how individual trades or small partnerships coalesced into larger organizations to form a company in the middle of the seventeenth century to trade with the East Indies.36 Two Genoese merchants based in England, Francesco Soprani and Filippo Bernardi, tried in the early seventeenth century to organize this trade, which until now has been little mentioned or studied. They armed a ship, the Suzan Parnel, to trade with the Indies, but it was seized by Dutch merchants who feared potential Genoese competitors.37
In 1605 another Genoese attempt, also not well documented, aimed, it seems, to follow the model of the VOC. According to the work of Sietske Barendrecht on ambassador Francois von Aerssen, when the French tried to replicate the VOC with the help of Pieter Lintgens, Lintgens told the French king that the Genoese were also trying to replicate the VOC.38 Perhaps this mention was not grounded in any real attempt and was instead made up to spur on French urgency to replicate the VOC. Regardless, Genoa would have been fertile ground for the establishment of such a company. In that city, an institutional innovation such as the VOC would have been met with the accumulation of capital, expertise in trade and business, and a solid and very old network of traders. In 1647, a Genoese Company of the East Indies (Compagnia Genovese delle Indie Orientali) was founded; however, it lasted only a few years.39 Despite its lack of success, its plans and title made clear references to the VOC. References to the Dutch companies are present in the 1638 projects of two other naval and commercial organizations: the first, the Compagnia di Nostra Signora della Libertà, was founded to set up a fleet to trade silk between Messina and Genoa; the second, described as a theoretical project rather than an established business, was intended to create a military company. The author of the papers related to this latter project wrote that he intended to use the Compagnia di San Giorgio (Company of San Giorgio) as a model.40 While this is the only documented case linking San Giorgio to these later Genoese companies, it is ambiguous, since at that time San Giorgio was referred to by various names. As an institution, it was always referred to as “Casa di San Giorgio.” The part of San Giorgio that was a bank was called “banco.” “Compagnia” (company) is not used as a term in Genoese sources. If, however, this “Compagnia di San Giorgio” refers to the Casa di San Giorgio, it would be the only documented reference in early modern Genoa that mentions San Giorgio as a model for later companies.
When the VOC was founded, Buzanval mentioned San Giorgio. Why is it then, when the Genoese traded with the East Indies in the seventeenth century, references to the VOC appear in documents and written commentary but San Giorgio does not? It is difficult to trace the history of an absence, but some hypotheses can be proposed. It is possible that the Genoese did not see many connections between San Giorgio and the seventeenth-century Genoese companies trading with the Indies, because San Giorgio’s operations were financial, not commercial, while trade was the focus of the later Dutch and Genoese companies. In addition, perhaps by the seventeenth century the territorial power of San Giorgio had been forgotten and within the VOC the control of territory was not the VOC’s primary aim. We can answer this question if we consider, at the microscale level of the archives, the role played by specific seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Genoese memoirs related to the history of San Giorgio. San Giorgio’s archives remained alive and active for centuries. People who wanted information on their investments or their family funds used the archives constantly. As Chapter 2 has shown, the existence of moltiplichi (financial funds) led to a considerable quantity of administrative material, which was progressively reassembled through time.
Jacques Heers found memoirs dated from after the sixteenth century in San Giorgio’s archives but, according to him, they were often not very reliable. In fact, as Giuseppe Felloni has shown, these sources can be used to find specific sources on San Giorgio’s history.41 These kinds of rearranged forms of memory—useful from the archival point of view although less reliable from the historical perspective—could explain how the memory of the territorial possessions was progressively lost and the similarities between San Giorgio and the VOC were not noted. This may explain why Buzanval could use San Giorgio’s model to explain the VOC, but a few decades later in Genoa the VOC’s model was replicated without any reference to San Giorgio. As we will see, the comparison between San Giorgio and the companies of the Indies primarily emerged far from the Genoese context, in northern Europe and North America. Only when Genoese historiographers studied San Giorgio in the nineteenth century did the link between the companies of the Indies and San Giorgio become apparent in Genoa.
9.7. The Following Century: Ferdinando Galiani
After Buzanval wrote his text, and more than a century before the studies of the German historiographers, Ferdinando Galiani compared the VOC to San Giorgio. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the famous abbot and economist analyzed trade companies, particularly the VOC, in his work Della Moneta. Not only was Galiani one of the finest scholars of the monetary system in the eighteenth century, he was also an observer of John Law’s Mississippi Company, the topic of the final chapter.42 What interested Galiani about these commercial companies was their transformation into financial entities. He wrote that companies were characterized by their commercial elements (although they also developed financial functions over time), such that they could be compared to the banking system in Naples, his native city:
Companies were established principally for navigation and trade with the Indies and in distant seas, which were as lucrative as they were filled with dangers, losses, and vast expenses. Their shares were often traded almost as money. Since companies in many nations issued money, or paid off the debts of the sovereign, their nature changed and in part they have become similar to our arrendamenti (collection of indirect taxes).43
Le compagnie sono state istituite principalmente per le navigazioni e i commerci delle Indie e de’ mari lontani, che quanto erano lucrosi, altrettanto ripieni di pericoli, di perdite e di spese grandissime. Le azioni loro spesso si commerciano quasi come moneta: ed avendo in molti paesi le Compagnie dato denaro, o pagati i debiti del sovrano, hanno cambiato natura, ed in parte sono divineute simili a’ nostri arrendamenti.
The transformation of the commercial and financial nature of the companies derived from the practice of using shares as money; from their acquisition of territorial sovereignty, which allowed them to mint money directly; and from the assumption of the debts of their sovereigns. At this point in his argument, Galiani suggests that the commercial elements of these companies wasted away while the financial and power links between the companies and the state remained firm.
Galiani concludes by adding a comparison to San Giorgio, written in the paragraph immediately following the prior excerpt:
Their form is always the same and can be understood from a description of that of the Banco di San Giorgio of Genoa, which can be described as the first of its kind, as it was, in fact by an old Florentine writer in the following passage.44
La forma loro è in tutte simile; e si potrà comprendere colla descrizione di quella del Banco di S. Giorgio di Genova, che si può dire la prima di tutte, fatta da un antico scrittor fiorentino.
He then cites the entirety of the Florentine Histories, VIII, 29, describing it as the work of “an old Florentine” (un vecchio fiorentino).45 Galiani clearly states that San Giorgio was “the first of its kind,” that is, the first corporation. This is one of the first sources to link San Giorgio and the VOC after the connection established by Buzanval at the time of the VOC’s foundation. Not only does this linkage precede the work of the nineteenth-century historiographers (both Genoese and German), but Galiani makes a direct connection between the VOC and Machiavelli’s passage, something that has not previously been noted.
Notes
1. Gelderblom, de Jong and Jonker, “The Formative Years of the Modern Corporation.”
2. Gelderblom, de Jong and Jonker, “The Formative Years of the Modern Corporation,” 1054.
3. Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 72–73: “The incorporation of all Dutch enterprise in Asia with the VOC was, thus, essentially the work of the Dutch state. And as an arm of the state, as well as a trading operation, the VOC was to prove astoundingly successful within a short space of time.”
4. Warwick Funnell and Jeffrey Robertson, Accounting by the First Public Company: The Pursuit of Supremacy (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 83.
5. Martine Julia Van Ittersum, Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies, 1595–1615 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), xxiv.
6. An example of this approach is the database TANAP, funded by UNESCO. Its task was to coordinate all of VOC’s global archives. TANAP has advertised this database not just as a repository of the VOC’s history per se, but as an archive that could shed light on cultures with limited written records in various parts of the world. At the moment, TANAP is a database, http://databases.tanap.net/vocrecords/.
7. Jan Den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 304. Quoted in Funnell and Robertson, Accounting by the First Public Company, 76.
8. Van Ittersum, Profit and Principle, 158.
9. George Norman Clark and Willem Jan Marie van Eysinga (eds.), The Colonial Conference Between England and the Netherlands in 1613 and 1615 (Lion: Bibliotheca Visseriana Dissertationum ius Internationale Illustrantium, Brill, 1940), 52.
10. Baguenault de Puchesse, “Un ami et un ambassadeur de Henri IV: Paul Choart de Buzenval (1551–1607),” Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 46, 1 (1909): 109–118, at 110.
11. On Stevin’s inventions and Stevin’s relationship with Buzanval, see Henk Nellen, Hugo Grotius: A Lifelong Struggle for Peace in Church and State, 1583–1645 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 68.
12. Jan Den Tex, Oldenbarnevelt (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1960), 66.
13. De Puchesse, “Un ami et un ambassadeur de Henri IV,” 109–118.
14. Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I, vol. 1 (London: Edmund Sawyer, 1725), 397, March 17, 1601.
15. Henry Weber, La Compagnie Française des Indes (1604–1875) (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1904), 55.
16. Pierre H. Boulle, “French Mercantilism, Commercial Companies, and Colonial Profitability,” in Companies and Trade, ed. Leonard Blussé and Femme Gastra (Leiden: Leiden University Press), 97–117, at 100.
17. Van Ittersum, Profit and Principle, 152.
18. Van Ittersum, Profit and Principle, 156.
19. Van Ittersum, Profit and Principle, 153.
20. Van Ittersum, Profit and Principle, 153.
21. NA, Den Haag, 3.01.14, 3141.
22. BNF, MS. Français 17921.
23. BNF, MS Français 17291.
24. BNF, MS Français 17291.
25. “La maison Sainct Georges de Genes, prend l’argent d’un chacun à cinq pour cent, et le baile au plus haut interest: e n’y a que celle là qui se soit enrichie, ayant acquis l’ille de Corse, et le plus clair dommaine de la Republique de Genes par le moyen de la traffique.” I have used the following edition: Jean Bodin, Six Livres de la Republique (Lyon: Par Jacques du Puys, 1580), 655.
26. On the relationships between Genoa and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Eco Oste Gaspard Haitsma Mulier, “Genova e l’Olanda nel Seicento: contatti mercantili e ispirazione politica,” in Atti del I Congresso Internazionale di Studi Storici: rapporti Genova—Mediterraneo—Atlantico nell’età moderna, ed. Raffaele Belvederi (Genova: Università di Genova, Istituto di Scienze Storiche, 1983), 431–444; Marie-Christine Engels, Merchants, Interlopers, Seamen and Corsairs: The “Flemish” Community in Livorno and Genoa (1615–1635) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997); Edoardo Grendi, “I nordici e il traffico del porto di Genova: 1590–1666,” Rivista Storica Italiana 83, 1 (1971): 23–69; Julia Zunckel, Rüstungsgeschäfte im Dreißigjährigen Krieg: Unternehmerkräfte, Militärgüter und Markststrategien im Handel zwischen Genua, Amsterdam und Hamburg (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997); Raffaele Belvederi, “Genova e le Fiandre nella storiografia fra Cinquecento e Seicento,” in Atti del I Congresso Internazionale di Studi Storici: rapporti Genova—Mediterraneo—Atlantico nell’età moderna, ed. Raffaele Belvederi (Genova: Università di Genova, Istituto di Scienze Storiche, 1983), 505–546; Giorgio-Giòrs Tosco, La Compagnia Genovese delle Indie Orientali e i rapporti fra Genova e le Province Unite nel Seicento, Tesi di laurea, Università di Pisa, Pisa, 2013–2014; Giorgio-Giòrs Tosco, In Pursuit of the World’s Trade: Tuscan and Genoese Attempts to Enter Trans-Oceanic Trade in the Seventeenth Century, Ph.D. dissertation, European University Institute, Fiesole, FI, 2020.
27. Engels, Merchants, Interlopers, Seamen and Corsairs.
28. See, for instance, the brothers Johan and Pieter de la Court. Arthur Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age, the Political Thought of Johan & Pieter de la Court (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 266–267; Eco Oste Gaspard Haitsma Mulier, The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980), 147–157.
29. On the brothers Quingetti, see Maartje Van Gelder, Trading Places: The Netherlandish Merchants in Early Modern (Venice: Brill, 2009), 60. On the VOC’s investors, see Oscar Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden en de opkomst van de Amsterdamse stapelmarkt (1578–1630) (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000), 158.
30. Laurence Stone, An Elizabethan: Sir Horatio Palavicino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 2; Michael Wyatt, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 144.
31. Andrea Fara, “Credito e cittadinanza: i Sauli, banchieri genovesi a Roma tra Quattro e Cinquecento,” Reti Medievali Rivista 17, 1 (2016): 71–104, at 94.
32. NADH, 3.01.14, 915, 916, 917, 918, contract of Benedetto Spinola and Horatio Pallavicino.
33. Contact between Pallavicino and Buzanval is documented in 1586. In that year, Pallavicino as English ambassador dealt with John Casimir, regent of the Palatinate, for a loan from England. Pallavicino asked Buzanval to intervene with Casimir to obtain better rates for England. See Stone, An Elizabethan, 136.
34. Grégoire Holtz, “The Models of the VOC in Early 17th Century France (Hugo Grotius and Pierre Bergeron),” in The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks, ed. Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. de Jong and Elmer Kolfin (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 319–335.
35. There are no studies on the Genoese in the East Indies, but an analysis of sixteenth-century sources could offer new information on their activities. See, for instance, the Sevillian notarial deed of Martin Centurione in 1509, who aimed at trading in Calicut, Jaime La Cueva, Regesto de documentos notariales del Fondo Enrique Otte, (1508–1509), vol. 3 (Val Paraiso: Instituto de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Valparaiso, 2016), 315 (Doc. 1316).
36. Tosco, In Pursuit of the World’s Trade.
37. Winwood, Memorials of Affairs, 1: at 397 and 415, date of June 9, 1602.
38. Unfortunately, this part of the book (91) does not refer to any source. The sources quoted in the previous and following notes do not mention this case, and I did not find any reference in the National Archives in The Hague.
39. Giorgio-Giòrs Tosco, “Importing the Netherlands: Dutch Influence on the Evolution of Genoese Shipping in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century,” Tijdschrift voor Zeegeschiedenis 40, 1 (2021): 58–72; Giorgio-Giòrs Tosco, “Written Reports and the Promotion of Trans-Oceanic Trade in Tuscany and Genoa in the Seventeenth Century,” in Trading Companies and Travel Writing, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Aske Brock, Guido van Meersbergen and Edmond Smith (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 71–91.
40. Tosco, In Pursuit of the World’s Trade, 110, note 504.
41. See particularly the registers listed here, www.lacasadisangiorgio.eu/main.php?do=genere_elenco&genere=848 (accessed February 11, 2022).
42. The influence of Galiani as an economic thinker was not insignificant, even if his role has often been underestimated. The connections between Marx’s theory of alienation and a passage in Della Moneta have been noted by Barthas, L’argent n’est pas le nerf de la guerre, 438–439.
43. Ferdinando Galiani, “Opere,” in Illuministi Italiani ed. Furio Diaz, Luciano Guerci and Riccardo Ricciardi, vol. 6 (Ricciardi: Milano, 1975), 242.
44. Galiani, “Opere,” 242.
45. Galiani, “Opere,” 242.