The Seventeenth-Century Crisis Revisited. The Case of the Southern Italian Silk Industry: Reggio Calabria, 1547-1686

Abstract

This essay examines the silk trade in Southern Italy through a quantitative study of exports from the dry-customs port of Reggio Calabria. It traces the experience of Reggio’s silk industry from its heyday in the sixteenth century to its collapse in the seventeenth, and it places that experience in the context of the economic decline of Southern Italy and of the literature on the crisis of the seventeenth century.