At the Centre of the Old World traces the transformation of various manufacturing industries in Venice and on the Venetian mainland from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The volume opens with a survey of the economic historiography and history of Venice and its Terraferma and concludes with an assessment of its contributions and lacunas to the understanding of the Venetian relative industrial decline. The book itself consists of nine essays that add empirical support to a growing literature on the ability of Venetian manufacturers to adjust to new European economic trends. It touches on the role governmental policies and guild regulations played in shaping technological progress, product innovation, and labor restructuring; the impact of fashion and demand-driven markets in production specialization; the relationship between trade and industry; and the emergence of regional markets and proto-industry districts.

Each essay illustrates how a particular industry reacted and adapted to new foreign competition based on more technologically advanced manufacturing processes, fashionable designs, and cheaper modes of production. We thus learn that the knitting industry in Venice and the ceramics manufacturers on the Venetian Plain staved off decline by keeping up with foreign inventions whose introduction was favored by the Venetian patent system. In contrast with their modern counterparts, Venetian patents were generally granted to those who introduced processes and products that were new to Venice but well-known in the international market, thereby encouraging technological diffusion over technological discovery. Once the temporary monopoly conferred by the patent expired, the new manufacturer was typically assimilated into the guild system, which in this way consolidated and preserved innovations that had been introduced with patents. In the case of the knitting frame—an English invention brought to Venice by a craftsman from Lyon who was granted a ten-year monopoly in 1671, it was necessary to create a new guild, as there was no guild of framework knitters for the privileged manufacturer to join once his renewed patent ran out. However, not all innovations were incorporated into the guild system. Production of majolica, china, and English-style Earthenware, which had been introduced in various small Venetian towns during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was systematically organized within factories.

The silk industry, in contrast, specialized in the production of traditional goods that did not require technological innovation but yielded high profits. “By producing less fine crystals (now made more inexpensively in Bohemia and England), more small mirrors (in contrast to the large mirrors made in France) and exorbitant amounts of cheap glass beads for export,” Venetian glass manufacturing doubled in size from the late sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries, thus growing during a period in which it was previously assumed to have declined (p. 167). Crucial to this specialization was the ability of the old guild system to accommodate itself to a sort of double regime, where luxury products with reduced demand and high-skills requirements continued to be made within the traditional corporate structures in Murano and low-quality goods for broad consumption were produced in Venice itself by less skilled and lower paid workers who were excluded from guild protection, such as immigrants from Friuli who made small mirror plates and women in the case of sea beads.

The Venetian silk industry also responded innovatively to competition. Silk manufacturers in Venice continued to prosper until 1770 by specializing in the production of traditionally made luxury fabrics for export to the Middle East, a market that had hardly been penetrated by the more fashionable and cheaper cloths from Lyon. But manufacturers also competed for the local market, by imitating foreign fashion to perfection and employing female labor on weekly wage contracts. As in the glass sector, an urban putting-out system developed at the margins of traditional guild organizations. Other essays in this volume highlight similar processes of transformation in other industries.

Although most essays are short in analysis, each one makes an empirical contribution and some, particularly the one on glass-making by Francesca Trivellato, are first-rate. Yet, the reader is left without a clear idea of what is the contribution of the book as a whole. Its main argument, that Venice adjusted to new patterns of competition and hence experienced a relative, rather than an absolute, decline has already been well established. Also, the essays remain detached, in spite of the efforts made in the introduction and conclusion to relate them to one another. For example, of the two scholars who specifically deal with relationships among patents, modes of production, and technological progress, only the less well established acknowledges the other's contribution and neither explains why the Venetian establishment sometimes granted patent rights to factories and at other times to craftsmen who promised to join the guild when their rights expired.

Similarly unsatisfying is the focus on the urban economy. As Maurice Aymard notes in the conclusion, the demographic stagnation of the urban centers and rapid growth of the rural population in the Venetian Territory from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries “suggest that adaptation and progress, if there was progress, [are to be found] in the countryside, in a redistribution of work between the countryside and the cities, and in a different use, without a doubt more intensive, both of the land itself and of the work force” (p. 369).

Finally, the strategy of making each individual author responsible for the translation of his or her piece into English has proved ill advised. Sloppy translations make some chapters difficult to read and undermine one of the volume's possible contributions, namely, to provide English readers with an introduction to recent Italian scholarship.