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The constraints of the warehousing system in the United States spurred on demands for an alternative to the bonded warehouse. For forty years merchants and real estate developers in port cities from Seattle to Boston campaigned, accordingly, for the spatial form of the free zone, the allure of which is the focus of this chapter. Most often associated with the Freihafen of Hamburg, Germany, the free zone was an update of the free port, the port city accessible to all comers during the age of mercantilism. The free zone rationalized the space of the free port into an extraterritorial enclave—a fenced-in parcel of land set aside strictly for the free movement of capital, not labor. It sat outside the customs territory or Zollverein of the nation-state that hosted it. By this logic, it was a “handmaiden of protectionism,” serving as a “vestibule” outside the tariff wall rather than as an open door. Free zones grew popular in Europe and Latin America especially after World War I, nodes of the emergent infrastructure of globalization. The United States at long last adopted the model during the New Deal in the guise of the Foreign-Trade Zones Act of 1934.

Chapter 8 situates Livorno amidst a larger picture of competition in the central Mediterranean. It analyzes the spread of free ports by considering the two axes along which Italian ports liberalized during the early modern period: hospitality toward merchants and openness toward goods. Despite much institutional variation, a maritime free trade zone was in existence by the mid-eighteenth century. The intellectual legacy of free ports such as Livorno was nonetheless ambivalent. Though some Enlightenment thinkers used free ports to formulate general theories of free trade, others believed they promoted the subjection of state policy to foreign merchants.

Tuscany of the mid-seventeenth century was renowned for its luxury crafts and had one of the most vibrant scientific communities in Europe. The Medici family presided over a state whose political stability astonished contemporaries, in which wise rule and good fortune had spared their subjects the worst ravages associated with the Thirty Years' War. The city of Livorno was the Medici state’s greatest prize and the most innovative port in Italy. The introduction examines the development of Livorno and other free ports in three registers: as part of the Italian response to the rise of the Atlantic world; as implicated in the creation of a new kind of commodity market; and as a neglected problem in the history of economic thought. It suggests that free ports should be central to our interpretation of economic change in early modern Europe and the Mediterranean.

Chapter 3 shows that the legislative framework erected by the Medici was full of lacunae and uncertainties. A system of supplications, or personal requests for ducal favor, was responsible for elaborating the theory and practice of the free port in the first half of the century. Although the central government played a formal role in resolving requests, in practice local officials made decisions in particular cases. The supplications functioned according to a bureaucratic logic that tended willy-nilly to serve the interests of the growing business community in Livorno: foreigners of any ethno-religious affiliation could trade in Livorno by virtue of its character as a free port.

Burke became involved with West Indian issues at the very beginning of his political career. The brief Rockingham administration of 1765–6 was committed to measures to improve flows of trade around the British Atlantic, of which the West Indies was a crucial component. As the prime minister’s secretary, Burke was deeply involved in these measures. The main problem which they sought to remedy was the inability of the British West Indies to produce commodities needed in other parts of the Atlantic in sufficient quantities. These commodities were principally sugar and raw cotton for Britain and molasses for British North America. The remedy chosen was to allow foreign supplies of these commodities to enter the British system through what were called free ports in two British islands—Dominica and Jamaica. Burke was particularly influential in the provisions of the act relating to Dominica, whose ports were intended to draw in produce, especially raw cotton, from French islands that the British had occupied during the war. In return, they would export British manufactures and slaves to foreign colonies. Getting the act through Parliament required the careful balancing of interests, notably those of the North American colonies and of the West Indies. Burke was in the thick of these negotiations, forming many contacts with merchants. The act, by letting in foreign produce to British islands, marked a significant breach in the hitherto sacrosanct doctrine of imperial self-sufficiency.

This chapter focuses on how western European states introduced limited changes to the Jews' status in the eighteenth century. England introduced a policy of naturalization for Jews in its colonies in part to compete with Holland's successful free port (St. Eustatius). However, only the wealthy could aspire to naturalization. The merchant elite's effort to gain easier naturalization with the “Jew Bill” (1753) failed when it became embroiled in the general Whig-Tory conflict. In France, the Jews of Bordeaux reached the acme of corporate privileges by gaining residential and commercial freedom throughout the kingdom. In contrast, Alsatian Jewry continued to suffer from major restrictions. The privileges it brought from the Holy Roman Empire were at odds with a centralizing French administration. Moreover, occupational and residential restrictions that forced Alsace's Jews into moneylending and petty trade created enduring tensions with the surrounding populace. Louis XVI's patents (1784) removed one demeaning law but otherwise imposed harsher laws on most Jews while further privileging the wealthy. Since Louis XVI's Edict of Toleration for Protestants (non-Catholics) did not apply to Jews, his government attempted, but failed, to produce legislation for Jews modeled on Joseph II's.

This chapter discusses Zephaniah Kingsley’s life as a ship captain engaged in the Atlantic slave trade and inter-island commerce in the Caribbean. After changing national allegiance from the United States of America to Denmark, he made Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, his home port. Charlotte Amalie possessed one of the best natural harbours in the West Indies and was ideally located to facilitate transit of retail merchandise from Europe and human cargoes from Africa to other islands and to mainland ports in the Americas. It was also a free port where merchants of all nations carried on commerce unburdened by import and export fees. The Caribbean islands colonized by Denmark were also “neutral” during the Anglo-French wars, which provided a degree of protection from seizure by privateers. While residing at Charlotte Amalie, Kingsley was employed as a captain and business agent for ships engaged in the Atlantic slave trade and the inter-island transit trade in enslaved Africans. He purchased ships of his own to “smuggle” slaves into the islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coast, and to carry human cargoes to Havana, Cuba, and other Spanish colonies where the slave trade was still legal.

This chapter examines the evidence for annual fluctuations in Rhodian wine production during the second century BC to draw attention to the impact of climate variability on ancient economies. It also assesses to what extent the data gathered calls for a re-evaluation of current understanding of the Rhodian wine trade, in particular the impact of the establishment of Delos as a free port in 166 BC.