This book, edited by Renato Pasta, provides a stimulating synthesis of the thought of Filippo Mazzei, a multi-faceted merchant, physician and traveller from Tuscany. Originating from the conference held in 2016 to celebrate the bicentenary of Mazzei's death, the volume begins with a biography, then carries the reader through the transition in international and economic history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a transition that would launch Europe into a new socio-institutional dimension. Clearly, this was not an instantaneous process, but an enduring one, destined to culminate at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The volume presents ten essays which outline Mazzei quite clearly as a versatile man and a cultural mediator between Europe and America. He was an active protagonist of the American Revolution and an attentive observer of the French Revolution, as well as becoming a point of reference for the Polish king Stanisław August Poniatowski, at a rather special time for his country. Mazzei found himself operating in a particularly complicated international context, managing to extricate himself from markets which were unstable due to political unrest. One of the contemporary debates he took part in was the discussion about monetary theory and inflation, which had engaged the most important economists and thinkers of the time. According to Mazzei, the excessive use of paper money was a symptom of the economic instability which had become rife on both sides of the Atlantic. He clearly emerges from his essays as a man attentive to the political economy and economic policy which informed his analysis of the world around him.
For historians of the ancien régime Italian states, the study of a personality such as that of Filippo Mazzei becomes particularly significant after his return to Peter Leopold's Tuscany, to which he brought the experiences acquired during his diplomatic and trade activities, together with an aspiration towards progress and modernisation. Relationships with renowned figures such as Condorcet, Lafayette and Jefferson prompted the development of the concept of egalitarianism in Mazzei's thought. In the period of enlightened despotism, he questioned the efficiency of the English model compared to the American one, which placed the citizen at the centre of the political system. Social ascent thus became an essential element of human action. In such a vision, which Mazzei understood as practical and not utopian, a fundamental value was assigned to factors such as the enhancement of productivity and knowledge, the separation of State and Church, and rationality with respect to superstitions – and with respect to property. The latter can be defined as a cornerstone of Mazzei's thought, which saw in popular participation and progressive inclusion two key elements to ensure a modicum of control in relations between rulers and subjects. Pasta is correct to identify in Mazzei's attention to literacy a variable explaining economic growth, consequential development, and natural progress.
The Tuscan experience was meaningful for Mazzei because he actively participated in a movement of political-institutional reform in line with his thinking. During his period in Tuscany, he actively encouraged commercial relations between the Grand Duchy and Virginia, thus promoting an international dimension for the Tuscan economy, in an attempt to free it from its role as an ancien régime economy.
This also informed Mazzei's commitment to the reorganisation of health provision in Tuscany and the system of assistance to the poor (Riflessioni sui mali provenienti dalla questua e su i mezzi per evitargli). With the solid bases provided by the studies of Beccaria, whose ideas Mazzei also tried to export in America, this work paid particular attention to poverty, a problem which a modern state was bound to have to confront.
Economic liberalism was an area of complete agreement between Mazzei and the Grand Duke, in particular on the removal of customs barriers on grain and the subsequent opening of external and internal markets, and on the suppression of the corporations. This last measure must be seen as a key step in transitioning from a city economy to a regional dimension. All this is in addition to the restructuring of community institutions and the different attempts to distribute land, in order to foster the creation of a yeoman-type property ownership. Liberating land from the yoke of ancient laws would, Mazzei believed, lead to the development of agriculture governed by physiocratic thought (the belief that agriculture was the source of all wealth, that its produce should be highly priced, and that it should operate in the context of free trade). For Pasta, these theories on the development of agriculture contrast with the model of land ownership founded on sharecropping. However, this is difficult to postulate, since significant studies of economic history by Francesco Galassi have generated new research questions on sharecropping. New economic history allows for study of land management in Tuscany, to assess the efficiency of the farms and individual production units.
In conclusion, it should be highlighted that the volume falls squarely within international historiographical debates, but also opens up new research scenarios, in particular on the economic policy of the ancien régime Italian states and on how the institutions dealt with the structural changes brought about by the late eighteenth-century revolutions.
