The silk industry of Renaissance Venice: The challenge of innovation in a mercantilist economy

The silk industry constituted one of the most important economic activities of Italy from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Historians, however, have usually considered the Italian entrepreneurs' focus on the production of high-quality cloths as the main reason for their exclusion from the booming sixteenth-century market for light fabrics that came to be dominated instead by the industries of northern Europe. The silk industry of the Renaissance is therefore considered a dry branch in the history of Italy and hence a field unworthy of study.;The dissertation focuses on the body of laws, petitions, memorials, and debates on the silk industry of the Venetian State during the period 1450-1600. This research is set in the wider context through a survey of the literature on the European silk industries. The analysis of this material is then structured in three parts: the first considers the growth of international competition in the Renaissance, when the industry spread from a few cities of the peninsula to most European countries; the second deals with sericulture, spinning, and weaving in the Terraferma (the mainland part of the Venetian State) in order to assess the distribution of silk activities in a regional state; the third is dedicated to the trade of raw and semi-finished materials, to the demand for fabrics, and to their standards of production in Venice itself.;The creation of many new silk industries in Italy and the consequent growth of competition compelled Venice to change continually the characteristics of its production. This goal was attained through the promulgation of elastic industrial regulations, capable of guaranteeing both the traditional high-quality features of Venetian fabrics and the quick realignment of its products to accommodate the novelties proposed by foreign manufacturing. The Venetian case-study demonstrates that in the Renaissance the structure of the Italian industry was flexible enough to adapt to the changing tastes of consumers, that it competed with northern European countries by using the weapon of innovation, and that therefore its success calls into question the current theory about the economic decline of Italy in the early modern period.