Davis Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal

Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City
Erscheinungsjahr 1991
ISBN: 978-0-8018-9609-5
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 109, 0 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science

Winner of the American Catholic Historical Association's Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History

The master ship builders of seventeenth-century Venice formed part of what was arguably the greatest manufacturing complex in early modern Europe. As many as three thousand masters, apprentices, and laborers regularly worked in the city's enormous shipyards. This is the social history of the men and women who helped maintain not only the city's dominion over the sea but also its stability and peace.

Drawing on a variety of documents that include nearly a thousand petitions from the shipbuilders to the Venetian governments as well as on parish records, inventories, and wills, Robert C. Davis offers a vivid and compelling account of these early modern workers. He explores their mentality and describes their private and public worlds (which in some ways, he argues, prefigured the factories and company towns of a later era). He uncovers the far-reaching social and cultural role played by women in this industrial community. He shows how the Venetian government formed its shipbuilders into a militia to maintain public order. And he describes the often colorful ways in which Venetians dealt with the tensions that role provoked—including officially sanctioned community fistfights on the city's bridges.

The recent decision by the Italian government to return the Venetian Arsenal to civilian control has sparked renewed interest in the subject among historians. Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal offers new evidence on the ways in which large, state-run manufacturing operations furthered the industrialization process, as well as on the extent of workers' influence on the social dynamics of the early modern European city.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davis, Robert C.

Fachgebiete

• Technische Wissenschaften Verkehrstechnik | Transportgewerbe Schiffbau, Seeverkehr
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Workers in the Factory of Marvels
1. Formation and Nature of the Arsenal Workforce
2. The Arsenal Worker Managers
3. The Community of the Arsenalotti
4. Arsenalotti as Agents of Disorder in Venice
5. The Civic Role of the Arsenalotti in Venetian Society
Appendix 1: Suppliche in Venice
Appendix 2: Organization of the Arsenal Workforce in the Mid-1600s
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Davis, Robert C.
Robert C. Davis is a professor of Italian Renaissance and early modern Mediterranean history at the Ohio State University. His publications include The Jews of Early Modern Venice, The War of the Fists, and (coedited with Judith Brown) Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy.