The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early by Francesca Trivellato

• Selected for the long list for the 2010 Cundill Prize in History given by McGill University
• Co-winner of the 2010 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for the best book in Early Modern and Modern Jewish History published in English between 2006 and 2010, awarded by the Association of Jewish Studies.
• Winner of the 2010 Leo Gershoy Award given by the American Historical Association

 

Taking a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, this book blends archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis to understand how the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, Tuscany, traded in regions near and far in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesca Trivellato tests assumptions about ethnic and religious trading diasporas and networks of exchange and trust. Her extensive research in international archives—including a vast cache of merchants’ letters written between 1704 and 1746—reveals a more nuanced view of the business relations between Jews and non-Jews across the Mediterranean, Atlantic Europe, and the Indian Ocean than ever before.

The book argues that cross-cultural trade was predicated on and generated familiarity among strangers, but could coexist easily with religious prejudice. It analyzes instances in which business cooperation among coreligionists and between strangers relied on language, customary norms, and social networks more than the progressive rise of state and legal institutions.

Francesca Trivellato is professor of history at Yale University. She lives in Cranston, RI.

Francesca Trivellato specializes in the social and economic history of Italy and Mediterranean Europe in the early modern period.

Her publications include The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (Yale University Press, 2009), a book on Venetian glass manufacturing (Fondamenta dei Vetrai: Lavoro, tecnologia e mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento, Rome: Donzelli, 2000), and two co-edited books of essays, including Trans-regional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages, with Christopher H. Johnson, David Warren Sabean, and Simon Teuscher. She has published numerous articles on craft guilds, merchant networks, and Jewish commercial activities.  Her current book project is The “Jewish” Bill of Exchange: A Forgotten Chapter in European Debates about Jews and Capitalism.

She received her BA from the University of Venice, Italy (1995), a PhD in economic and social history from the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan (1999), and a PhD in history from Brown University (2004).  The American Council of Learned Societies and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University recently supported her scholarship.

Her undergraduate and graduate teaching spans many themes in the history and historiography of early modern Europe, Renaissance Italy, and the Mediterranean, as well as economic history.

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Fuente:  YALE University Press