Sharing the Medici Archive with the World.

MAP FORUM – COREY TAZZARA – “Filippo Sassetti on Trade, Institutions and Empire in the Renaissance” – Tuesday, 20 January 2026 @ 5pm EST/11pm CET

The Florentine traveler, merchant, and academician Filippo Sassetti was one of the premier economic thinkers of the late Renaissance. Well known for his ethnographic observations, Sassetti was also a commercial writer of the highest caliber―at once an original thinker and a remarkable witness to how Europeans even at the margins of empire were beginning to reconceptualize power and wealth. This talk argues that Sassetti was an early theorist of what might be termed the pragmatic tradition of free trade―in his case, a project linked to his analysis of commercial institutions in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.