In narrating his circumnavigation of the world at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Florentine Francesco Carletti became the first European merchant to leave an account of travel on existing commercial routes. A repentant ex-slave trader and smuggler turned dealer in Chinese goods, Carletti travelled “at the edge of empires,” providing a unique perspective on the promise and peril of a connected globe. With his long stays in Lima, Mexico City, Manila, Nagasaki, Macao, and Goa, as well as travels across the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia, Carletti documents a changing world in which European powers and traders interacted and often clashed with other empires and polities. Trading at the Edge of Empires brings together 24 scholars to situate and unpack how Carletti’s travels illuminate our understanding of trade, slavery, empire, religion, language, ethnography, cartography, cosmography, and material culture in the early modern world.

Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize

A new history explores how one of Renaissance Italy’s leading cities maintained its influence in an era of global exploration, trade, and empire.

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was not an imperial power, but it did harbor global ambitions. After abortive attempts at overseas colonization and direct commercial expansion, as Brian Brege shows, Tuscany followed a different path, one that allowed it to participate in Europe’s new age of empire without establishing an empire of its own. The first history of its kind, Tuscany in the Age of Empire offers a fresh appraisal of one of the foremost cities of the Italian Renaissance, as it sought knowledge, fortune, and power throughout Asia, the Americas, and beyond.

How did Tuscany, which could not compete directly with the growing empires of other European states, establish a global presence? First, Brege shows, Tuscany partnered with larger European powers. The duchy sought to obtain trade rights within their empires and even manage portions of other states’ overseas territories. Second, Tuscans invested in cultural, intellectual, and commercial institutions at home, which attracted the knowledge and wealth generated by Europe’s imperial expansions. Finally, Tuscans built effective coalitions with other regional powers in the Mediterranean and the Islamic world, which secured the duchy’s access to global products and empowered the Tuscan monarchy in foreign affairs.

These strategies allowed Tuscany to punch well above its weight in a world where power was equated with the sort of imperial possessions it lacked. By finding areas of common interest with stronger neighbors and forming alliances with other marginal polities, a small state was able to protect its own security while carving out a space as a diplomatic and intellectual hub in a globalizing Europe.