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Thomas, the second of John Earle’s sons, specialized in trade with Italy. He spoke the language fluently and acquired his initial capital by acting as agent in Livorno (Leghorn) for a famous privateer. He then, in the early 1750s, set up as a merchant in Livorno in partnership with another Liverpool man, Thomas Hodgson. Some 12 or 15 English merchant houses comprised the Livorno “factory” and their organization and the nature of their trades are discussed, using both English and Italian sources, as well as the particular activities of Earle & Hodgson. Sources used include shipping data, reports on imports in the Liverpool papers and letters written to Earle & Hodgson by their customers. The chapter also examines the social and family life of Thomas in Italy, using descriptions of his household by visitors and letters written to Thomas’s wife Mary by his former clerk, Joseph Denham.

The battle of Trafalgar left the Mediterranean open to British shipping, but Great Britain had not yet gained incontestable mastery over the sealanes. The bitter struggle for control of Sicily and southern Italy between Britain, acting in support of King Ferdinand of Naples, and Napoleon’s armies, acting in support of Marshal Murat, who was trying to usurp the Neapolitan throne, reached a high point in July 1806 at the battle of Maida (a British victory, deep in Calabria). Maida demonstrated that Napoleon had been foolish in allowing so many troops to be pinned down in miserable conditions far from the areas in northern and central Italy he most wished to control. Earlier dreams of using Taranto as a base for controlling southern Italy and the entrance to the Adriatic and Ionian seas evaporated. Yet the British fleet was far more stretched than the story of its victories suggests. The British needed to keep open the channel of communication linking Malta to Trieste, for Trieste had become an important source of supplies from the Austrian empire, now that routes through Germany were blocked by Napoleon’s armies. And by 1808 the French seemed to be clawing back their control of the Mediterranean; they had re-established their fleet at Toulon, and there were fears of a naval attack on Naples and Sicily. The British government wondered whether there was any point pursuing war in the Mediterranean. Other concerns intruded: the French were trying to take control of Spain, and with the outbreak of the Peninsular War attention shifted to formidably tough land campaigns in Iberia. How difficult conditions were can be seen from the size of the British fleet, which had plenty of other duties to perform close to England, in the Caribbean and elsewhere. On 8 March 1808 fifteen ships of the line lay under the control of Admiral Collingwood, Nelson’s capable successor; one at Syracuse, one at Messina and one off Corfu; twelve stood guard at Cádiz. These large warships were supported by thirty-eight frigates, sloops, brigs and bomb-vessels within the Mediterranean, most of which were patrolling and reconnoitring as far afield as Turkey and the Adriatic.

From a Mediterranean perspective, the First World War was only part of a sequence of crises that marked the death throes of the Ottoman Empire: the loss of Cyprus, Egypt, Libya, the Dodecanese, then the war itself with the loss of Palestine to British control, soon followed by a French mandate in Syria. All these changes had consequences, sometimes drastic, in the port cities where different ethnic and religious groups had coexisted over the centuries, notably Salonika, Smyrna, Alexandria and Jaffa. At the end of the war, the Ottoman heartlands were carved up between the victorious powers, and even Constantinople swarmed with British soldiers. The sultan was immobilized politically, providing plenty of opportunities for the Turkish radicals, in particular Mustafa Kemal, who had acquitted himself with great distinction fighting at Gallipoli. Allied mistrust of the Turks was compounded by public feeling: the mass deportation of the Armenians in spring and summer 1915 aroused horror among American diplomats based in Constantinople and Smyrna. Marched across the Anatolian highlands in searing heat, with harsh taskmasters forcing them on, men, women and children collapsed and died, or were killed for fun, while the Ottoman government made noises about the treasonable plots that were said to be festering among the Armenians. The intention was to ‘exterminate all males under fifty’. The worry among Greeks, Jews and foreign merchants was that the ‘purification’ of Anatolia would not be confined to persecution of the Armenians. In its last days, the Ottoman government had turned its back on the old ideal of coexistence. In Turkey too, as the radical Young Turks often revealed, powerful nationalist sentiment was overwhelming the tolerance of past times. Smyrna survived the war physically intact, with most of its population protected from persecution, partly because its vali, or governor, Rahmi Bey, was sceptical about the Turkish alliance with Germany and Austria, and understood that the prosperity of his city depended on its mixed population of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, European merchants and Turks. When he was ordered to deliver the Armenians to the Ottoman authorities, he temporized, though he had to despatch about a hundred ‘disreputables’ to an uncertain fate.

The main protagonists of this book, the rabbinic emissaries dispatched from Palestine to raise funds for the Holy Land among the Jews of the diaspora, are the focus of this chapter. The chapter explores the conditions under which the emissaries undertook their missions, mechanisms developed to ensure trustworthiness and arbitrate conflicts, and the interaction between emissaries and Jewish communities outside Palestine. Livorno, Italy, serves as a case study. The chapter looks at the rabbinic emissary as a traveler and cultural intermediary, linking Jewish communities from different cultural backgrounds, relying in part on the travelogue of an eighteenth-century emissary and his account of his visit to Tunisia.

This chapter turns to the Ottoman victims of Catholic corsairs and pirates who were carried off to Malta and Livorno to be sold as slaves and/or held for ransom. It focuses on the Ottoman magistrates (kadis) who, as judge-notaries, as captives, and as official mouthpieces of the Ottoman state, were involved in every stage of the ransom slavery industry in the eastern Mediterranean. From the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, a number of Ottoman judges could always be found imprisoned in Maltese dungeons, where their legal expertise proved critical for preparing surety agreements and ransom contracts acceptable in courts throughout the Ottoman Mediterranean. The phenomenon of the kadis of Malta reflects the essential paradox of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Mediterranean: the inverse relationship between Ottoman maritime security and the importance of Ottoman law as an almost universally acceptable legal lingua franca from Istanbul to Malta.

This chapter explores trade between Britain, Southern Europe, and the Mediterranean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In detail, it examines Spanish and Portuguese shipping and the wool and wine trades; the growth in corn trade quantities; trade with Italy and shipping from the port of Livorno; and the Levant company’s monopoly of the silk trade with Syria and Asia Minor. It includes shipping statistics and contemporary correspondence to provide a well-rounded representation of the international shipping trade between these nations.

This chapter explores the late eighteenth century relationship between North America and the states of the Italian Peninsula, in attempt to challenge the notion of a homogenous Atlantic world. It reveals a myriad of complex networks - commercial, political, and familial - that facilitated trade between Tuscany, Genoa, Naples, British North America, and the United States. It examines these networks primarily through the cod trade, but also considers wheat, tobacco, sugar, and others. It follows case studies of prominent traders, including Filippo Mazzei; Anton Francesco Salucci; Nicola Filicchi; and Stefano Ceronio, and concludes that, despite popular scholarly opinion garnered from factors such as the failure of diplomacy between the nations, trade between the United States and Italy before 1815 was consistently strong and bolstered through business and familial networks.

This chapter further explores the trade relationship between the United States and Italy during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars by examining the role of American consuls in the complex web of trade relationships between them. It investigates American consular records in attempt to determine how central their role was, and studies the way this role adapted over time. It provides case studies of the consulates of Livorno, Naples, and Sicily by analysing consul activity such as requests for military intervention against French authorities; negotiation tactics used to broker peace with monarchs and authority figures; connections made with local merchants; and the promotion of commerce. It concludes that despite the complexity of the role and the frequent changes to regime and personnel, American consuls established and developed political, social, and economic networks between America and Italy that benefitted American trade tremendously.

This final chapter provides an overall conclusion to the findings of this volume. It reiterates that the combination of global economic growth and European military conflict opened up trade opportunities for neutral nations such as the United States and the Ottoman Empire. It uses the history of the British Levant Company to provide final insights into Mediterranean trade; the Tripolitanian War; the importance of the port of Livorno and American naval bases; and the necessity of American diplomats to facilitate and strengthen trade. It concludes by asserting that the political and economic circumstances surrounding Mediterranean trade permitted America to trade goods under their own flag and to re-enter Europe as an independent entity.

Chapter 1 explores how the fortunes of Livorno, Benamozegh’s place of birth and of lifelong residence, where his parents had settled after leaving Morocco, shaped his understanding of diversity, his assertive engagement with the Christian world, and his feeling of alienation from a place once vibrant, but by his time relegated to the commercial and intellectual margins of Europe. His Moroccan background exemplifies the importance of commercial and rabbinic networks in the Mediterranean and accounts for his view of Kabbalah as an essential part of the Jewish tradition in an age when it had generally fallen out of favor among the enlightened figures of Judaism.