Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal: Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City

by Robert C. Davis

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.

Genres: History

280 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1991

About the author

Robert C. Davis is professor emeritus of Italian Renaissance and pre-modern Mediterranean history at Ohio State University. He has studied Naples, Rome, Palermo, Venice, the Vatican, and Perugia, and mostly works on the lives of ordinary people and the values they cherished. His subjects have ranged from shipbuilders, bull fighters, and amateur boxers in Venice to the corsairs who terrorized the Mediterranean everywhere else. He has co-authored studies of Venice as the world's most touristed city and of Renaissance men and women. He has also been in a number of television documentaries, on shipbuilding, Carnival, and the Mediterranean slave trade, and is currently writing a textbook on the history of modern Europe.

Reviews

[Paul Van Cleave]

A quirky read of history. Not so much about events or prominent people or even details of what shipbuilders of Venice actually did to build ships. More about how they as the city’s Arsenal organized themselves. Underpaid and sometimes overworked, these shipbuilders were the heart of Venices 1000 yrs as a republic (USA is only 250 yrs!). They were the instrument of the Doge’s extended power into the city-state’s populace at large. Ironically, it was the adherence to building archaic ships that doomed Venice to Spain’s domination in the 18th century. The book begins as a dry read, but if you are a persistent history buff, the book delivers on the world of the Arsenal society.