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578 Daniele Andreozzi

As these trade flows gradually gathered pace and expanded, the
bonds between Trieste and the Atlantic Ocean became denser.
In 1765, for example, two Trieste merchants brought bulls in from
Hungary, butchered them, salted the meat and sent them on to
Marseilles. In 1768 they began sending them to the Americas too. In
the 1750s trade in potash, used in the textile industry, had developed
and potash produced in the empire’s inland areas and in Venetian
24
Istria was imported into Trieste . There was even a sort of war for
control of this trade between merchants located in Trieste and the
imperial land owning aristocracy and it was principally sent to England
from where it went on to the Americas too. It soon became one of the
most sought after goods by Northern European ships in Trieste and
was fundamental in filling up these ships. In the early 1760s, following
on from increases in this trade, the Viennese court attempted to make
money by raising the customs duties on potash but this had the
opposite effect. The English merchants began making it in Northern
Europe and also in the Americas but the quality of these was much
lower and merchants thus returned to Trieste where it was now in
short supply. In 1778, two merchants, one in Genoa and the other in
Verona, asked permission to launch potash production in Trieste in
25
order to introduce it into this trade .
The Trieste merchant class was primarily successful in ‘segmented
trade’, attempting to take control of intermediate sections on trading
circuits and Mediterranean ones in particular in order to strengthen
the port’s intermediary role between East and West, Mediterranean and
continental Europe and the oceans. In this way the port became a
linchpin in global trading networks. Trieste’s merchants thus attempted
to replace ocean going ships guaranteeing trade from the west of
colonial products with their own ships, sailing to load up these goods
in other Mediterranean and European ports where they arrived in
larger quantities and more easily. To shore up this strategy Trieste
suggested customs policies to Vienna in 1770 – modelled on the
English Navigation Act of 1651 – designed to guarantee superiority for
goods loaded onto Trieste ships over both those travelling by land and
those transported on ‘foreign’ ships. To beat the competition for
Western goods, merchants requested customs reductions of over 50%
for goods loaded onto ships sailing under the imperial flag where these
were sailed directly «by the original states» meaning «those European

24 Sat, Intendenza, 363, 134 and 137.
25 Sav, Savi, 754, 11 Agoust 1773 and 756, 25 May 1778; Inquisitori, 619, 12 Feb-
ruary 1757.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XV - Dicembre 2018 n.44
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)