English Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Italy

This book shows how England's conquest of Mediterranean trade proved to be the first step in building her future economic and commercial hegemony, and how Italy lay at the heart of that process. In her extensive use of English and Italian archival sources, the author looks well beyond Braudel's influential picture of a Spanish-dominated Mediterranean world. In doing so she demonstrates some of the causes of Italy's decline and its subsequent relegation as a dominant force in world trade.