Where will the LVIII Settimana di Studi take place?

The conference will be held in Prato, ITA.

What is the primary focus of this year's Settimana di Studi?

The conference will focus on the role of foreign communities in the economic growth of pre-industrial Europe and the Mediterranean area from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century.

When does the conference begin?

The conference is scheduled to begin in the spring.

What historical period does the conference cover?

The conference covers the period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century.

LVIII Settimana di Studi 2027 – Il ruolo delle comunità straniere nella crescita economica dell'Europa preindustriale e dell'area mediterranea (XIII-XVIII secolo)

Name: LVIII Settimana di Studi 2027 – Il ruolo delle comunità straniere nella crescita economica dell'Europa preindustriale e dell'area mediterranea (XIII-XVIII secolo)
Start: 2027-05-09T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-05-13T00:00:00Z
Location: Prato

May 9–13, 2027Prato, ItalyIn-person

Registration open

The LVIII Settimana di Studi will convene in Prato, ITA, to explore the significant contributions of foreign communities to the economic development of pre-industrial Europe and the Mediterranean region between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. This event offers a crucial platform for scholars to delve into historical economic dynamics and the often-underestimated role of diverse populations in shaping regional prosperity. This gathering aims to foster a deeper understanding of how various foreign communities, through their unique skills, networks, and cultural practices, influenced trade, production, and financial systems across a vast geographical and temporal span. The focus on the Mediterranean area highlights its historical role as a crossroads of cultures and economies, making it a rich case study for this interdisciplinary inquiry.

Committees & topics

Topics
Legal Status and Integration of Foreign Communities in Preindustrial Europe and the Mediterranean · Professional Communities and Economic Functions of Foreign Merchants and Artisans · Networks and Mobility: Diasporas, Correspondence, and Circulation · Conflict, Competition, and Resilience of Foreign Communities · Cultural and Technical Transfers through Foreign Communities · Comparative and Transregional Approaches to Foreign Communities

Why it matters

Understanding the historical impact of foreign communities on economic growth provides valuable insights into contemporary discussions surrounding migration, trade, and cultural exchange. The pre-industrial period, characterized by nascent global trade routes and evolving social structures, offers a compelling backdrop to analyze the long-term effects of diverse populations on economic resilience and innovation. This historical perspective can inform current policy debates regarding the integration of migrant populations and their potential contributions to modern economies.

Furthermore, the conference's emphasis on the Mediterranean region underscores its enduring geopolitical and economic significance. Historically, this area has been a melting pot of civilizations, with various foreign groups playing pivotal roles in its economic vibrancy. Examining these historical precedents can illuminate the complex interplay of cultural identity, economic activity, and political power in a region that continues to be a focal point for international relations and economic development. The event serves as a reminder that economic prosperity is often a product of interconnectedness and the dynamic contributions of diverse groups.

By focusing on these historical interactions, the Settimana di Studi contributes to a more nuanced understanding of economic history, moving beyond purely national narratives to embrace a more global and interconnected view. It encourages a re-evaluation of how economic success has been achieved and sustained through periods of significant social and political change, highlighting the enduring relevance of cross-cultural engagement.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the themes of the LVIII Settimana di Studi, participants should consider a multi-faceted approach to their research and presentations. A strong understanding of historical economic theories, particularly those pertaining to trade, migration, and labor in pre-industrial societies, will be essential. This includes familiarity with the economic structures of various European and Mediterranean powers during the specified centuries.

Participants should also prepare to analyze the social and cultural aspects of foreign communities, as these often intertwined with their economic roles. Understanding concepts such as cultural adaptation and cross-cultural communication competence will be beneficial. Consider how different communities maintained their identities while contributing to the host economies, and the potential for both cooperation and conflict arising from these interactions. Lessons on mapping relationships and identifying hidden stakeholders could prove useful in this context.

Furthermore, given the geographical scope, familiarity with the historical political and economic landscapes of key Mediterranean and European countries will be crucial. This includes understanding the specific trade routes, legal frameworks, and social norms that governed interactions between local and foreign populations. Preparing case studies that illustrate specific examples of foreign communities' economic impact, perhaps utilizing a dynamic analysis approach, would be highly valuable for fostering rich discussions.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 8 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Italy

As the host nation, Italy (ITA) provides a central geographical and historical context for the conference, particularly given its historical role as a hub for trade and diverse foreign communities in the Mediterranean.

Role in topic

Italy, with cities like Venice, Genoa, and Florence, was a major center for trade and banking in the pre-industrial era, attracting numerous foreign merchant communities from across Europe and the Mediterranean. These communities, including those from FRA, ESP, and the Ottoman Empire (TUR), played a crucial role in its economic growth and cultural exchange.

Türkiye

The Ottoman Empire (TUR) represented a significant economic and cultural power in the Eastern Mediterranean, with its diverse population contributing to trade networks that connected Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Role in topic

Foreign communities within the Ottoman Empire, as well as Ottoman merchants and artisans operating in European territories, were integral to the extensive trade routes and economic prosperity of the Mediterranean basin. Their presence facilitated the exchange of goods, technologies, and ideas across vast distances.

Netherlands

The Netherlands (NLD) emerged as a dominant maritime and commercial power, with its cities becoming centers for international trade and finance, heavily reliant on the contributions of foreign merchants and skilled laborers.

Role in topic

The Dutch Republic's economic success in the early modern period was significantly bolstered by immigrant communities, including Jewish refugees and Protestant exiles from other parts of Europe. These groups brought capital, skills, and international networks that fueled the Dutch Golden Age.

Spain

Spain (ESP) played a pivotal role in global trade through its colonial empire, with foreign communities contributing to its economic activities both domestically and in its overseas territories.

Role in topic

While often associated with its own vast empire, Spain also hosted and interacted with various foreign communities, particularly in port cities. The expulsion of some groups, like the Moriscos, also highlights the complex relationship between foreign populations and economic policy, offering a contrasting perspective on the topic.

France

France (FRA) was a major European power with significant internal and external migration patterns, where foreign communities contributed to its diverse economy, particularly in crafts, finance, and trade.

Role in topic

From Italian bankers to Flemish weavers and German miners, foreign communities in France brought specialized skills and capital that enriched various sectors of the French economy throughout the pre-industrial period. Their integration, or lack thereof, often had profound economic consequences.

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom (GBR) saw significant economic development driven by trade and early industrialization, with foreign communities playing a role in its commercial expansion and the introduction of new industries.

Role in topic

Foreign merchants, artisans, and financiers, including those from the Low Countries and Huguenot refugees from France, contributed significantly to the commercial and industrial growth of Great Britain. They introduced new technologies, expanded trade networks, and spurred innovation in various sectors.

Germany

Germany (DEU), as a collection of diverse states, experienced varied impacts from foreign communities, particularly in trade, mining, and urban development, often at the crossroads of European commerce.

Role in topic

Across the various German states, foreign communities, such as those involved in the Hanseatic League or skilled miners from other regions, played a vital role in economic specialization and trade. Their presence helped connect German economies to broader European and Mediterranean networks.

Portugal

Portugal (PRT) was a pioneering maritime power, with foreign communities contributing to its global trade networks and the economic activities associated with its vast overseas empire.

Role in topic

Foreign merchants and navigators were instrumental in Portugal's Age of Discovery and its subsequent establishment of a global trading empire. While Portuguese explorers ventured outwards, foreign communities also contributed to the economic life of its port cities and colonial ventures.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Legal Status and Integration of Foreign Communities in Preindustrial Europe and the Mediterranean

From the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, European and Mediterranean polities developed a dense legal vocabulary to accommodate—and contain—foreigners residing on their territory. Italian maritime republics granted privileges to Genoese, Venetian, Catalan, and Florentine merchants through treaties such as the chrysobulls issued by Byzantine emperors and the capitulations later extended by the Ottoman Porte from 1453 onward. In northern Europe, the Hanseatic Kontore in London, Bruges, Bergen, and Novgorod operated under negotiated charters, while Iberian crowns regulated Genoese bankers in Seville and Lisbon, and the Dutch and English granted denizenship or naturalization to Huguenots, Sephardim, and Armenians. The core legal questions concerned jurisdiction (consular courts versus host tribunals), fiscal obligations, residence rights, property ownership, confessional tolerance, and access to guilds and citizenship. Status was rarely binary: ranks of foreignness ranged from privileged 'nation' members and protected dhimmi or müstemin in Ottoman lands, to naturalized burghers, tolerated minorities, and stateless refugees. Integration trajectories varied enormously between Venice's Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Livorno's Leggi Livornine of 1591–1593, Amsterdam's confessional pluralism, and Marseille's échelles regime. Historians today debate how far legal privilege fostered or hindered assimilation, and how foreign communities negotiated belonging across generations. The topic invites delegates to compare frameworks of incorporation across Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Islamic polities, and to assess how legal pluralism underpinned commercial expansion in the long preindustrial era.

Key players

Professional Communities and Economic Functions of Foreign Merchants and Artisans

Foreign communities in preindustrial Europe and the Mediterranean specialized in identifiable economic niches that host economies could not easily replicate. Genoese and Florentine bankers financed Iberian crowns and Habsburg armies; German Fuggers and Welsers brokered silver and copper across central Europe; Sephardic merchants connected Amsterdam, Hamburg, Livorno, and the Atlantic sugar and diamond trades; Armenians from New Julfa wove a silk-trade network from Isfahan to Venice and Manila; Greeks and Ragusans served as intermediaries between Ottoman and Italian markets. Beyond high finance and long-distance trade, foreign artisans transferred specialized skills: Flemish weavers in England and Italy, Venetian glassmakers abroad despite emigration bans, Huguenot silk workers in Spitalfields and Berlin after 1685, and German miners in Slovakia, Sweden, and the Iberian colonies. Host states often actively recruited such communities through privileges, tax exemptions, and confessional guarantees, recognizing that foreign expertise underwrote shipbuilding, textiles, mining, banking, and insurance. Scholarship increasingly questions older 'middleman minority' models, emphasizing instead how these communities co-produced host economies rather than operating as detached enclaves. The topic asks delegates to map the division of economic labor between resident foreigners and local actors, and to weigh how guild structures, credit instruments, and state protection shaped the functional specialization of foreign nations.

Key players

Networks and Mobility: Diasporas, Correspondence, and Circulation

Preindustrial foreign communities functioned as nodes within transregional networks held together by kinship, correspondence, credit, and shared confession. The Datini archive of late fourteenth-century Prato, the Sephardic letters between Amsterdam and the Caribbean, the Armenian ledgers of the Sceriman family, and the Hanseatic registers all reveal how mobility was structured by family firms, factor systems, and partnerships such as the Italian commenda and compagnia or the Dutch rederij. Mobility ranged from seasonal merchant travel and apprenticeship circuits to permanent settlement, forced displacement of Jews and Moriscos, religious refugee flows of Huguenots after 1685, and the captive trade across the Mediterranean. Information traveled along the same routes as goods: bills of exchange, price currents, manuscript newsletters, and consular dispatches knit together Lyon, Antwerp, Genoa, Cairo, and Smyrna. The reliability of these networks depended on reputational mechanisms and the ability to enforce contracts across jurisdictions. Recent historiography, drawing on social network analysis and global history, stresses how these circuits constituted an integrated preindustrial economy long before the nineteenth-century 'first globalization.' Delegates should examine how foreign communities sustained mobility under constraints of war, plague, and political rupture, and how networks adapted to shifts in trade routes, from the Levant to the Atlantic.

Key players

Conflict, Competition, and Resilience of Foreign Communities

The economic prominence of foreign communities regularly generated friction with local merchants, guilds, urban populations, and sovereigns. Anti-foreign legislation, expulsions, and pogroms punctuated the period: the expulsion of Jews from England (1290), France (1394), Spain (1492), and Portugal (1497); the persecution and expulsion of Moriscos (1609–1614); the dismantling of the Hanseatic Steelyard in London (1598); recurrent attacks on Italian merchants in northern Europe; and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Even privileged communities faced sudden reversals through war, confiscation, or fiscal extortion. Competition operated at multiple levels: between rival foreign nations within the same port, between foreigners and incumbent guilds, and between host states seeking to capture trade through mercantilist policies, navigation acts, and consular reforms. Foreign communities responded with strategies of resilience—diversifying locations, cultivating patrons, intermarrying with local elites, converting, or relocating to more hospitable jurisdictions such as Livorno, Amsterdam, Hamburg, or Trieste. Historiography has moved from narratives of victimhood toward analyses of adaptive capacity, examining how communities institutionalized self-government, mutual aid, and dispute resolution to absorb shocks. Delegates should evaluate the political economy of toleration and the conditions under which host societies oscillated between welcome and exclusion.

Key players

Cultural and Technical Transfers through Foreign Communities

Foreign communities were vectors of cultural and technical transfer that reshaped European and Mediterranean economies. German miners brought amalgamation and drainage techniques to Iberia and Spanish America; Italian engineers diffused double-entry bookkeeping, marine insurance, and fortification design; Flemish and Dutch shipwrights transmitted hull construction and land-drainage know-how; Venetian and later Bohemian glassmakers exported skills across Europe despite tight controls; Huguenot refugees carried silk weaving, watchmaking, and printing techniques into Prussia, England, and the Dutch Republic. Transfers were not only technical. Foreign communities introduced new commodities, consumption patterns, and tastes—coffee from Ottoman lands, sugar and tobacco via Sephardic Atlantic networks, Asian textiles through Armenian and Levantine traders, and printed books in vernaculars sustained by Greek, Armenian, and Hebrew presses in Venice, Amsterdam, and Constantinople. Religious and linguistic infrastructures—synagogues, churches, schools, printing houses—anchored these transfers in durable institutions. Scholarship has emphasized that transfers were rarely unilateral: host environments adapted, hybridized, and sometimes rejected imported practices. The topic invites delegates to assess foreign communities as carriers of human capital and tacit knowledge in an age before formal patents, industrial laboratories, or state-led technology transfer.

Key players

Comparative and Transregional Approaches to Foreign Communities

Comparative scholarship on foreign communities has moved beyond city- or nation-specific case studies toward transregional frameworks that juxtapose the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Baltic, and Indian Ocean worlds. Models such as Philip Curtin's 'trade diaspora,' Francesca Trivellato's 'communitarian cosmopolitanism,' Avner Greif's coalition analysis of the Maghribi traders, and Sebouh Aslanian's study of the New Julfa Armenians invite systematic comparison of how diasporic groups organized trust, credit, and governance across distinct political ecologies. Key comparative axes include the contrast between Christian and Islamic legal regimes for foreigners, the differential roles of confession in Sephardic, Huguenot, Armenian, and Greek networks, the variable strength of state protection from Venetian consulates to Dutch and English chartered companies, and the interaction between European foreign communities and parallel Asian merchant diasporas such as Gujaratis, Hokkien, and Hadhrami. The transregional approach also asks how the rise of Atlantic empires after 1500 reconfigured Mediterranean networks rather than simply displacing them. The topic encourages delegates to draw structured comparisons—across regions, confessions, and centuries—about why some foreign communities flourished and institutionalized, while others dissolved or were forcibly removed, and what this reveals about the economic foundations of preindustrial Europe and the Mediterranean.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for LVIII Settimana di Studi 2027 – Il ruolo delle comunità straniere nella crescita economica dell'Europa preindustriale e dell'area mediterranea (XIII-XVIII secolo).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

US Job Openings at 6.7M

Trump's Economic Reset

Trump's Economic Approval Hits 30% Amid Iran

GOP Promotes Trump's Tax Savings on Deadline

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Gender Dynamics Across Cultures

Mapping Relationships

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Conflict Resolution

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

By committee

Frequently asked questions

LVIII Settimana di Studi 2027 – Il ruolo delle comunità straniere nella crescita economica dell'Europa preindustriale e dell'area mediterranea (XIII-XVIII secolo)

May 9–13, 2027Prato, ItalyIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Legal Status and Integration of Foreign Communities in Preindustrial Europe and the Mediterranean · Professional Communities and Economic Functions of Foreign Merchants and Artisans · Networks and Mobility: Diasporas, Correspondence, and Circulation · Conflict, Competition, and Resilience of Foreign Communities · Cultural and Technical Transfers through Foreign Communities · Comparative and Transregional Approaches to Foreign Communities

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 8 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Role in topic

Role in topic

Role in topic

Spain (ESP) played a pivotal role in global trade through its colonial empire, with foreign communities contributing to its economic activities both domestically and in its overseas territories.

Role in topic

Role in topic

Role in topic

Role in topic

Portugal (PRT) was a pioneering maritime power, with foreign communities contributing to its global trade networks and the economic activities associated with its vast overseas empire.

Role in topic