Luca Clerici (ed.), Italian Victualling Systems in the Early Modern Age, 16th to 18th Century, PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ECONOMIC HISTORY, 2021
The Sicilian provisioning system in the early modern period (XVI-XVIII centuries) remained broadl... more The Sicilian provisioning system in the early modern period (XVI-XVIII centuries) remained broadly unchanged from the institutional point of view during the entire period extending from the Viceroyalty to the end of the ancien régime. The system sought to establish a mechanism that guaranteed both the subsistence of large and small cities, each with its own highly distinct institutional identity, and, at the same time, the income of the great aristocratic landowners that were interested in the international grain market and the domestic market. Cities and large wheat producers were sometimes in contrast, while other times they worked synergistically, depending on whether the communities were feudal or state property and whether they were located in the producing or the consuming areas of the diversified island territory. In cities large and small, a set of economic mechanisms, social practices and political conflicts unfolded around the urban "abbasto" system: the bread production process, influenced both by the need for financial stability and by policies to support subsistence; grain and flour distribution for the urban area, with the consumer price system of mete run by the local political elites; contracts for the procurement of supplies, mostly wheat, but also wine, oil, meat and cheese. In addition to Palermo and Messina, notable for their demographic, commercial and political importance, a few medium-sized centres of the Kingdom allow us to focus more closely on the economic dynamics and the protagonists of the supply and redistribution mechanisms of the victualling system.
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