The Casa di San Giorgio (1407–1805) was an institution created in Genoa to manage the public debt, run by members of the local nobility. Over time, it took on fiscal, political, and territorial powers. Since the Renaissance, the San Giorgio model has attracted the attention of historians and scholars. Some have described it as being in clear opposition to the commune, the self-governing body ruling the Republic. Machiavelli's argument, according to which San Giorgio was a well-organized institution and better suited to rule than the corrupt commune, is one of the best-known examples. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Italian and foreign academics published numerous studies on the subject, trying to solve this puzzle. Giuseppe Felloni (La Casa di San Giorgio: il potere del credito [2006]), author of numerous publications and architect of a monumental reorganization of the San Giorgio Archives, is perhaps the best-known scholar but not the only one.
Carlo Taviani considers his research on San Giorgio as an addition to the literature on the historical roots of modern corporations. This literature, particularly the Anglo-Saxon strand of the historiography, has long researched the origin of the modern corporation, starting from current models and going back in time, until coming across institutions such as joint-stock companies. Multinational companies operating during the colonial period, in this view, are agents of civilization that played a pivotal role in the economic development of Asia, South America, and Africa. European-based enterprises, such as the Dutch (VOC) or the British East India Company (EIC), are often considered the ideal ancestors of our contemporary concept of the modern corporation.
Taviani's approach in this book goes in the opposite direction. The author focuses on the study of an ancient institution of medieval origin, San Giorgio, in order to trace its framework as the forerunner of later corporations, including the VOC. In this sense, the author acknowledges a debt to Germanic historiography that had assumed such a path since the end of the nineteenth century (e.g., Levin Goldschmidt, Karl Lehmann, and Max Weber), despite the paucity of recent studies. The book's introductory chapter reconstructs the debate between these two historiographical traditions.
The book is divided into four parts, and Taviani develops his argument in different, often thematically focused, chapters. The first two parts, which are consistently organized around San Giorgio's key features, benefit from the extensive research carried out by legal, economic, and political historians in recent decades, to which the author applied his own methodology.
The first part reconstructs the origins and functioning of San Giorgio. Taviani manages to escape some of the common clichés in the literature on the Republic of Genoa: chiefly, the recourse to the concept of exceptionality and the respect for what the author himself describes as the “traditional doctrine” (p. 26). One example of the latter is the institutionalist approach to the maona, broadly definable as a partnership for shared investment that was long considered a Genoese peculiarity, closely linked to the origin of San Giorgio. Taviani reconstructs the influences exerted by the theories of Roberto Cessi—who worked in the early twentieth century on the legal history of the maona in Chios—on Raffaele di Tucci and Frederic Lane. Although di Tucci and Lane are considered today among the main points of reference on San Giorgio, they were biased by Cessi's crystallized and ahistorical model. Taviani reconnects the Genoese maona to other examples of Venetian maone in Syria and Egypt during the medieval period, thus putting it in a wider historical context. On the one hand, the chosen approach is interesting and allows Taviani to zoom in on a number of specific issues and concepts to make his case. On the other hand, this approach requires the reader to have a minimum prior knowledge of the history of the Genoese commune, of international credit and banking, and so on.
Proceeding in a similar fashion, the book's second part deals with San Giorgio's territorial power, and Part III with the relationship between San Giorgio and the commune. The management of territorial as well as financial/commercial power is one of the main points of contact with later corporations such as the VOC. In these parts, the separation between San Giorgio and the commune is evident. The argument on local factions in Genoa presented in Part I (sec. 3.1) is developed further at the beginning of Part III. In fact, the opposition between San Giorgio and the commune is often dismissed with the argument that the same families sat on the councils of both institutions and therefore they necessarily cooperated. A check on individuals in the period from 1490 to 1528, however, shows a more fluid and less clear-cut situation than would arise with the advent of the Republic in the sixteenth century. Also, chapter 7 contains an anonymous memorandum about the possibility that San Giorgio could take over the commune by capturing its territories—not quite a peaceful coexistence based on shared interests.
The book's most significant contribution, however, is Part IV, which deviates sharply from the previous parts. It aims to reconnect the San Giorgio model with some of the best-known corporations of the Financial Revolution. Taviani succeeds in demonstrating how “the fortunes of the model created by San Giorgio were influential in the Netherlands (for the VOC), England (for the Bank of England), and France (for John Law's Mississippi Company)” by resorting to what he defines as a “scattered knowledge” transmitted through anonymous pamphlets, private letters, and memorials (p. 165). By doing this, Taviani shows a clear link between an early system of managing public debt, San Giorgio, and the later so-called business corporations. In this sense, Part IV outlines a possible approach for other financial institutions that could be studied in a similar way. As this volume shows, we need to revise and better understand the dynamics that determined the functioning and the evolution of institutions between the Renaissance and the early modern period, despite the power of hegemonic traditions.
