Brian Brege @ Early Modern Studies Colloquium

The Early Modern Studies Colloquium, in partnership with the Department of Italian Studies is super duper excited to welcome Brian Brege, Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University, for lunchtime lecture entitled ‘Forever Florentine: Family, Global Commerce, and Intergenerational Elite Status.’ 

The talk will take place on Friday, November 11th at 12:30pm in HQ276 and food will be provided. This will also be a hybrid event. The Zoom link is: https://yale.zoom.us/j/91975238066

Abstract: The seventeenth century decline of Florence’s wool industry and the rise of the free port of Livorno have been cast as marking an eclipse of Florence’s role as a leading economic center. Emblematic of this eclipse has been a caricature of a decadent elite that retired from its role as avatars of capitalist modernity to create opera and debate pastoral poetry in proliferating academies on those occasions when they could bestir themselves from the country villas.  Far from turning inward, Florentine patricians operated as merchants, bankers, plantation owners, and colonial political elites from China and Japan to Southeast Asia and India and all over the Atlantic world. This talk considers how some of these overseas Florentine patricians sought the intercession of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany in their bids to be recognized as both Portuguese nobles and members of the Florentine nation. This paper emerges from a larger project on the global commercial activities of private Florentines. It seeks to foreground the continuing vitality of family capitalism as an effective mode of engagement with the opportunities of the First Global Age and cast light on the very long run stability of the Florentine elite. 

Bio: Brian Brege is Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University. His Stanford dissertation, “The Empire That Wasn’t: The Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Empire” received the Ezio Cappadocia prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies. In 2019-2020 he was an I Tatti Fellow and his monograph, Tuscany in the Age of Empire was published in the I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History (Harvard 2021) and awarded the 2021 American Association for Italian Studies Book prize in the category of History, Society, and Politics. Following a conference at I Tatti this spring, he is co-editing Trading at the Edge of Empires: Francesco Carletti’s World, ca. 1600 with Giorgio Riello, Paula Findlen, and Luca Molà and completing a new translation and critical edition of Francesco Carletti’s account of his circumnavigation. His new book project is tentatively titled, The Global Merchants of Florence: Florentine Patrician Families and Early Modern Capitalism.