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Organized by: Ca' Foscari School of International Relations, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, University of HelsinkiCall for papers International project: Historical instruments of European integration: The commercial configuration of the ‘Balance of Power’ 2014-2019 (Academy of Finland Nr. 276191: Koen Stapelbroek, Antonio Trampus)Location: Ca’ Bembo, Dorsoduro 1075 Venezia, Università Ca’ Foscari Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati, School of International RelationsThursday-Friday April 23-24, 2015Working languages: English/ItalianAs central and widespread as the idea was in the eighteenth century that commerce enhanced liberty, so unsure and divided were the opinions of political writers about how exactly the underlying mechanisms functioned and what policies and institutions benefitted humankind. The great debate of the time about commerce, liberty, rights of men, and the internal and external reform of national economies, however, did not just take place in intellectual and abstract, schematic terms, but also intersected with longstanding institutional realities and practices. In this way, between the second half of the seventeenth century and the second half of the nineteenth century (the ‘long eighteenth century’) debates about how trade could civilise human behaviour and political rivalry mixed also with the existence of freeports across Europe and beyond.  The idea of a political and fiscal free zone that could serve specific purposes and state interests evidently did not arise in this period. Freeports were a considerably older phenomenon. Yet, the continuing existence of older freeports and the establishment of new ones during the ‘long eighteenth century’ fed into the eighteenth-century debate about the freedom of commerce, more specifically the question how to neutralise “Jealousy of Trade” and turn commerce into an agency of wealth and stable peace.  The central question in this seminar is whether or not and, if so, how freeports were held to contribute to the liberty of trade and to the institutional transformations, specifically in the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century. Answering this basic question requires detailed reflection upon the mechanisms that create or diminish modern commercial liberty in relation to the specific functions that freeports fulfilled. The history of freeports coming into the modern period may perhaps be sketched as a punctuated sequence of usages from the understanding of their potential for furthering the aims of English commercial republicanism in the middle and later seventeenth century onwards. Arguably, the phenomenon had a late heyday following the Congress of Vienna in Europe’s smaller states that went along with the Chinese and Japanese Treaty Port tradition, after which it continued into the twentieth century and twenty-first century as an instrumental mechanism for floating underdeveloped economies through attracting capital and for remedying the collapse of international trade in times of economic crises. Within the eighteenth century the phenomenon of freeports should be connected to questions about the organisation of international trade and politics, the integration of national economies and markets, individual and group interests and mercantile monopolies and privileges and, in Italy as well in other European states, the territorial identities and the nation building process. Of particular interest is the relation between Europe’s dominant larger territorial states and smaller states and the way in which freeports conditioned the dynamic of commercial competition in the Balance of Power and the Balance of Trade. How did political writers reflect upon the existence of freeports in relation to themes such as constitutional stability, inequality of economic and human rights and the rights of states in wartime? More generally, the question is how freeports were included at various stages within different visions of peace and trade as instruments to devise a stable global constellation of national economies. Certainly, the freeports – whether zones or entire cities – in the old Italian states (from Villefranche and Nice in the Kingdom of Sardegna, via Genova, Venezia, Trieste, Fiume and Livorno, Ancona and Civitavecchia, to Naples and Messina in the Kingdom of Naples) provide excellent cases for opening up the topic in this way – especially, when the Italian dynamic of transformed political usages of freeports gets connected to the development of trade policies elsewhere in Europe (Austria, France, Britain, Spain, Portugal, the United Provinces) and outside Europe (both in the East and the Americas). By merging the conceptual realms of intellectual history, international law and economics to the institutional reality we aim to shed new light both on the history of freeports and the politics of commerce in the rise of modernity.For further informations:  Prof. Antonio Trampus (trampus@unive.it), Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e culturali comparati, Ca’ Foscari School of International Relations Prof. Koen Stapelbroek (kstapelbroek@gmail.com), University of Helsinki, Department of History)