the project of a commercial state: ignazio donaudi and the question of piedmontese economic...

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History of European Ideas 32 (2006) 477–501

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The project of a commercial state: Ignazio Donaudiand the question of Piedmontese economic

development (1773–1789)

Giorgio Monestarolo

Via Carlo Alberto 31, 10123, Turin, Italy

Abstract

Through a discussion of a number of unpublished manuscripts by the undervalued Ignazio

Donaudi, the complexities of the Piedmontese political and economic situation of the latter decades

of the eighteenth century are presented. Donaudi argued that as a result of the late seventeenth-

century ‘Colbertist’ policies of Vittorio Amedeo II Piedmontese economic development had come to

a halt. In the mid-eighteenth-century, a sectoral imbalance in the economy corresponded to a

political system in which manufacturer entrepreneurs and their financiers were pushed out by

Turinese merchant bankers (among whom Donaudi himself had been raised) and a class of urban

lawyers. In response to this situation, Donaudi, inspired by French political thinkers like

Forbonnais, launched two consecutive reform strategies. Ironically, Donaudi’s final proposal to

devise a strategy for unlocking agricultural innovation, manufacturing and trade by creating an

internal market in the Kingdom of Sardinia led him to be accused of colonialism. Enlightenment

ideology, in the form of Raynal’s Deux indes, blocked Donaudi’s reform proposals.

r 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Keywords: Donaudi; Piedmont; Turin; Economic reform; Silk; Agriculture

Commerce and society in the Piedmont of the late eighteenth century

The last thirty years of the eighteenth century was a period of profound transformationfor Piedmont. Vittorio Amedeo III’s coronation in 1773 marked the beginning of a majorchange among governing elites. The objective of the new King’s reforms—particularly of

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ARTICLE IN PRESSG. Monestarolo / History of European Ideas 32 (2006) 477–501478

his military policies—was to guarantee the complex structure of the Savoy kingdom astable role on the European scene.1 By that time the beginnings of social change werealready evident throughout Piedmont, where in rural zones the traditional system ofmanagement based on crop sharing saw itself rapidly being replaced by what was laterdefined as the great capitalistic lease.Thus, the rural economy was transformed, with medium-sized estate farms, organised to

meet both the demands of the market and the farmers’ own needs, being turned into largeestate holdings leased to tenants by their owner-landlords (both nobles and non-nobles).Labourers replaced sharecroppers and the overabundance of manpower from thecountryside began to flood cities at a hitherto unknown rate. A solid core of workersspecialised in industry, in particular the silk industry,2 subsequently took shape.As a result, the proto-industrial and commercial features of the country began changing

as well. On the one hand, enterprises in the production of silk and wool cloth, as well as themanufacturing of luxury goods, majolica, glass and crystal goods were financed andprotected by the state, reflecting an incapacity to stand up to foreign competition. On theother hand, however, sectors such as the production of spun silk, wool mills for theproduction of wool from Biella, the manufacturing of silk-blend fabrics, as well as moretraditional sectors geared toward the domestic market, such as building materials, minesand workshops, tools in iron and wood, not only maintained a noteworthy vivacity, butgrew spontaneously.3 A remarkable shift of wealth occurred. The emergence of a labourerclass worsened the material conditions of farmers, while favouring the growth of a groupof agricultural intermediaries in the countryside with large sums of ready capital, whoworked alongside traditional landowners (nobles and clergy). With regard to Piedmont’sinternational commercial leadership a similar phenomenon occurred. Piedmont wasconsidered the European leader in the production of spun silk (the country’s mainindustry), and between 1730 and 1790 the number of enterprises with large stores of capitaldecreased, while at the same time the number of operators with medium and medium-to-low levels of ready capital increased by a considerable percentage. As a result, the mostimportant entrepreneurial group of the country was strengthened considerably.4

Remarkable developments also took place on the cultural level, where an accumulationof initiatives clearly signalled the formation of an active public opinion, a notionpreviously unimaginable in Piedmont. From 1780, under the auspices of Vittorio AmedeoIII, academies of science and agriculture were established, the circulation and sales of

1See G. Ricuperati, ‘Il Settecento’, in P. P. Merlin, C. Rosso, G. Symcox, G. Ricuperati, Il Piemonte sabaudo.

Stato e territori in eta moderna (Turin: Utet, 1994), pp. 581–592.2On these questions the studies of G. Prato remain fundamental, ‘L’ evoluzione agricola nel secolo XVIII e le

cause economiche dei moti del 1792–1798 in Piemonte’, Memorie della R. Accademia delle scienze di Torino,

second series, LX (1909), pp. 33–106 and F. Catalano, ‘Il problema delle affittanze nella seconda meta del

Settecento in una inchiesta piemontese del 1793’, Annali Istituto Feltrinelli, II (1955), pp. 429–482. See also the

interpretation by G. Levi, Centro e periferia di uno stato assoluto. Tre saggi su Piemonte e Liguria in eta moderna

(Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1985), pp. 151 and onwards.3See G. Chicco, ‘La politica economica statale e i ‘banchieri-negozianti’ nel Settecento’, in Storia di Torino, ed.

G. Ricuperati, (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), vol. V, pp. 155–186. M. Ambrosoli, ’The market for textile industry in

eighteenth century Piedmont: quality control and economic policy, Rivista di storia economica XVI, n. 3 (2000),

pp. 343–363.4Luigi Bulferetti, ‘I piemontesi piu ricchi negli ultimi cento anni dell’assolutismo sabaudo’ in Studi storici in onore

di Gioacchino Volpe (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), pp. 41–91 and G. Monestarolo, ‘Una elite chiusa? I negozianti

banchieri di Torino attraverso i censimenti fiscali (1734–1797)’, Societa e storia, n. 113 (2006), pp. 27–76.

ARTICLE IN PRESSG. Monestarolo / History of European Ideas 32 (2006) 477–501 479

books (particularly technical–scientific books) increased. A patriotic spirit grippedPiedmontese academics and public functionaries alike, and exponents of more enlightenedideas founded the Biblioteca oltremontana, which under the direction of GiambattistaVasco became one of Italy’s most esteemed journals.5

It is in this highly vibrant context that the intellectual and political exploits of IgnazioDonaudi have to be placed. Between 1775 and 1789 Donaudi conceived of a major projectto reform the Piedmontese economy, the objective of which was to untie the knots which inhis opinion impeded its development. The most interesting results of Donaudi’s experiencecan be seen in his analysis of centre–periphery relationships, in the antagonisticrelationship he established between merchants and entrepreneurs, and in his reflectionson the development of a domestic market.

The originality of his considerations lies in the decision with which he singled out themanufacturing entrepreneur as the new protagonist of the domestic economy, especially inthe silk industry. The same entrepreneurs, however, were, from a financial point of view,being crushed by elite merchant exporters who had strong ties with French, Swiss andEnglish finance and industry. Donaudi’s main goal was the integration of these merchantelites into Piedmont’s production sectors. In short, this meant putting the financial elites ofthe country at the service of Piedmontese entrepreneurs and not vice versa, as usuallyoccurred at the time. In order to do this, he felt it was essential to set up special traderelations between Piedmont and Sardinia. In this way, burgeoning Piedmontese industrycould count on a supply of raw materials from Sardinia, as well as a privileged market forits manufactured goods. Secondly, the development of this centre–periphery relationship,with the ample profit-margins it promised, would necessarily favour the creation of adomestic market founded on the interests of Piedmontese industrial entrepreneurs andreducing the power and strength of the merchant bankers.

To explain some aspects of this ambitious project, the following pages will brieflyexamine Ignazio Donaudi’s personal history and recount the fortune of his ideas. Fromthere, I will explore the type of culture he was representative of before finally dealing withhis specific political-economic proposal to consider the most concrete aspects of themoment in which Donaudi sought to put his theory into practise, clashing with prominentexponents of the Savoy establishment.

An unknown political economist

Born in Turin in 1744, Ignazio Michelangelo Donaudi grew up in one of the richest andmost prestigious silk and banking families of the capital. After the acquisition of his nobletitle and an arranged marriage of great importance to the countess Rosa Avogadro diCollobiano, Donaudi dedicated himself to the study of political economy and tried tomake a career in the Savoy economic administration. After having received numerouspromises, he was appointed adjunct advisor to the Turinese Council of Commerce. Thiswas, however, a position that by no means lived up to his expectations. The absence of any

5On Turinese political culture during the eighteenth century, see G. Ricuperati, I volti della pubblica felicita.

Storiografia e politica nel Piemonte settecentesco (Turin: Alberto Meynier, 1989); V. Ferrone, La nuova Atlantide e

i lumi. Scienza e politica nel Piemonte di Vittorio Amedeo III (Turin: Alberto Meynier, 1988); L. Braida, Il

commercio delle idee: editoria e circolazione del libro nella Torino del ’700 (Florence: Olschki, 1995); G. Marocco,

Giambattista Vasco (Turin: Fondazione L. Einaudi di Torino, 1978); F. Venturi, ‘Giambattista Vasco’, in

Illuministi italiani. Riformatori lombardi, piemontesi e toscani (Milan-Rome: Ricciardi, 1958), pp. 757–807.


further promotions and the bitterness caused by the impossibility of realising his economicprojects would deeply mark the last years of his life.6 Donaudi’s role was thereforemarginal, although until 1790 he hoped in vain to be called on to direct the economicpolicies of the state. He had prepared himself at length and with tenacity for the professionof minister, and was in fact a tireless author of papers and essays that form a uniqueliterary corpus.Between 1770 and 1790, Donaudi dedicated his energies to examining all aspects of the

Piedmontese economy, from agriculture, commerce and industry to finance and the publictreasury. No other official, economist, or intellectual of his generation—which includedGian Francesco, Galeani Napione, Prospero Balbo, Ghiliossi, di Lemie, and GiambattistaVasco7—would provide an overall picture of the problems and possibilities of theSavoyard economy so rigorously. Besides the Saggio d’economia civile (Essay on CivilEconomy), of 1776, the only treatise on political economy published in Piedmont duringthe eighteenth century,8 Donaudi also wrote several noteworthy works which, though theydid circulate in certain political and administrative circles of the period, remained inmanuscript form. This unpublished material betrays his remarkable intellectual continuity,but also elucidates some important changes in outlook. In particular, the Saggio di

economia politica,9 completed in 1775, and the Riflessioni sulle Finanze,10 completed in1779, aspired to an economic reform founded essentially on the liberalisation of the graintrade and a fiscal reorganisation that would allow the financing of public investments inwhat would today be called infrastructures (roads, canals, irrigation, schools etc.). On thecontrary, his Abbozzo di un cadastro politico11 of 1784, and above all, his Piano per la

Sardegna12 of 1788–1789, pointed to a reform of the industrial and trade sectors with theidea of gearing manufacturing toward mass-production and low-cost goods, and helpingfactory owners (especially in the silk sector) to free themselves of dependence on the creditand commercial services provided by Turin’s banking elite.The element of profound continuity which links Donaudi-the-reformer and Donaudi-

the-economist was his criticism of the main economic policies of the Savoyardgovernment—which is to say, the encumbrance of the wheat market on the one hand,

6G. Monestarolo, Negozianti e imprenditori nel Piemonte d’Antico Regime. La cultura economica di Ignazio

Donaudi delle Mallere (Florence: Olschki, 2006).7On these individuals, see A. Fossati, Il pensiero economico del conte G. F. Galeani Napione (1748– 1830) (Turin:

Fedetto e C., 1936); G. P. Romagnani, Prospero Balbo. Intellettuale e uomo di stato (Turin: Deputazione subalpina

di storia patria, 1990), G. Ricuperati; ‘Il Settecento’, p. 644, F. Venturi, Giambattista Vasco, pp.757–778 and G.

Marocchi, Giovan Battista Vasco.8I. Donaudi, Saggio d’economia civile del conte Donaudi delle Mallere all’Altezza Reale del Signor Principe di

Piemonte (Turin: Eredi Avondo, 1776).9I. Donaudi, Saggio di economia politica e pratica sovra lo stato presente delle Finanze e Commerzio del re di

Sardegna del Conte Donaudi delle Mallere (Biblioteca nazionale universitaria di Torino, Ms. N-VI-6: 1775,

cc.1–274).10I. Donaudi, Riflessioni del Conte Donaudi delle Mallere sovra varij rapporti delle Finanze col Commercio con

alcune osservazioni riguardanti le Finanze ed il Commerzio negli stati di S.M (Biblioteca civica centrale di Torino,

Mss 104: 1779, cc. 1–314).11I. Donaudi, Abbozzo ragionato di un cadastro politico del Conte Donaudi delle Mallere Consigliere al Real

consiglio del Commercio. 1784. Parte prima (Biblioteca Reale di Torino, St. Ptr. 900y: 1784, cc. 1–171).12I. Donaudi, Abbozzo d’ un piano in cui si disaminano alcuni mezzi per istabilire un fisso e regolato commerzio tra

la Sardegna e gli altri Stati di terra ferma di S. M. e si prendono ad un tempo stesso in considerazione quei rami di

traffico, che sembrano i piu conducenti ad ottenere un sı rilevante oggetto (Biblioteca Reale di Torino, St. Ptr. 38:

1788–89, cc. 1–347).


and the unconditional support for the Turin merchant bankers on the other. Donaudi’sdecision to denounce the negative consequences of the social and economic contract thatsustained eighteenth-century Piedmont led him into conflict with the Savoyard managerialelites, a conflict which would discredit his works and end his political career.

If the motives that contributed to the misfortune of Donaudi are understandable, moresurprising is the fact that, after being forgotten for many decades, a radically negative opinionof his intellectual contribution had been consolidated by end of the nineteenth century. Thisinterpretation has essentially remained unchanged to this day, so much so that the eighteenth-century economist has become, especially among historians of economic thought, thechampion of Piedmontese backwardness in the field which Alessandro Roncaglia recentlycalled ‘‘the wealth of ideas’’.13 It therefore seems useful to explain the curious transformationof an Enlightenment reformer into a low-quality conservative.

A victim of historiography

Donaudi was read and judged principally for his Saggio d’economia civile, the only workpublished and released in Turin, through the printer Avondo in 1776. Donaudi’smanuscripts, and in particular his four great studies written between 1775 and 1789, havebeen almost completely ignored. His memoirs, written for private use or as a member of theCouncil of Commerce, received even less attention. Yet, it is precisely in these unpublishedworks that Donaudi formulated his most liberal and courageous positions, both intheoretical terms with regards to political economy. The work published in 1776, which,according to the intentions of the author, served to consolidate in the public opinion theimage of a cultured but substantially moderate economist, revealed that he was more attunedto the mainstream economic thought of the day, represented in Italy by the work of AntonioGenovesi; politically, however, his interventions were reduced to a sort of eulogisticcomment on economic legislation in Piedmont. Unfortunately for Donaudi, this choice didnot have a felicitous outcome. The publication of the book, rife with self-censorship, was ofno help to his career as a government official, and his ideas became known though the workwhich least represented the liberal and original aspects of his thought.

Thanks to the studies of Ricca-Salerno, Alberti, and Gabbi, a great organisation of thehistory of Italian economic thought in relation to European and Anglo-Saxon cultures wasborn in the 1880s. The critical methodology followed by these post-Risorgimentohistorians was very clear-cut: economists who distanced themselves from mercantilistaffirmations and who approached or sustained theoretical hypotheses and politicalpractises based on free-market doctrine were judged as innovators.

As for Donaudi, he was judged as an eclectic and non-speculative thinker, andconsidered an expression of a cultural environment that was nowhere near as stimulatingand vibrant as the intellectual scenes in Milan, Florence, Naples and Venice during thoseyears.14 The simple but efficacious force of such an interpretative model was not put up fordiscussion even in an article by Pasquale Jannaccone in 1903. The great merit of that essaywas the rediscovery of the vast scope of Donaudi’s manuscripts. Particular attention was

13See A. Roncaglia, La ricchezza delle idee. Storia del pensiero economico (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2001).14See Ricca-Salerno, Storia delle dottrine finanziarie in Italia (Palermo: Reber, 1896), pp. 337–339; Giuseppe Alberti,

Le corporazioni d’arti e mestieri e la liberta del commercio interno negli antichi economisti italiani (Milan: Hoepli, 1888),

pp. 77–109; Ulisse Gobbi, La concorrenza estera e gli antichi economisti italiani (Milan: Hoepli, 1884), pp. 155–157.


given to Saggio di economia politica, with emphasis on the author’s criticism of theintrusiveness of the clergy and, above all, pointing out his membership in the party thatsupported the free trade of wheat. This, however, did not mark Donaudi’s completerehabilitation, inasmuch as Jannaccone confirmed, in other areas, the cultural poverty andtheoretical weakness of Donaudi. Indeed, from this point Donaudi would be known as agenerous functionary but a mediocre economist.15

In a post-World War II essay, Venturi came across Donaudi on his journey ofrediscovery and reconstruction of the age of Enlightenment and reform in Italy. Thedissertation project assigned to Adriana di Giulio by Venturi in 1962 continued in thisdirection.16 Donaudi, so very ‘technical’ and so unpolitical, with his indecision on centralthemes such as that of the nobility, his pragmatic approach to the church, and his non-committal stance on changing public opinion, was certainly interpreted as a reformer,albeit one who lacked energy. Di Giulio’s dissertation was severely hampered because itcompletely ignored the relationship between Donaudi and the world of the Turinmerchants (as it was based solely on an analysis of his only published work withoutstudying the author’s entire body of writings). Yet, her work has the merit of revealingDonaudi the politician. Her dissertation, however, was never published, thus in a senseconfirming the idea that Donaudi was undeserving of greater attention.The non-rehabilitation of Donaudi by Venturi meant that the old interpretations, especially

among historians of economic thought, would remain fundamentally unchanged. In morerecent works on Donaudi, considered only for his lone published work and Jannaccone’scritical essay, the figure returned in some way to being a symbol of Piedmontese conformityand conservatism in general. The reference here is to Luciano Pallini, who participated in theresearch on the birth of the chairs of political economy in Italy, and to the recent andpraiseworthy history of Italian political economy written by Riccardo Faucci.17 Indeed, Fauccientitled a sub-chapter ‘Piedmontese Backwardness’ and provides as an example the ‘latemercantilist’ essay by Donaudi, which is, in contrast to Smith-sympathiser Giambattista Vasco(to whom the chapter is dedicated), an isolated example.Giuseppe Ricuperati’s approach has in this sense been entirely different, as he used

Donaudi as a privileged starting point to investigate the state of the Piedmontese economyin the late eighteenth century, and rightly posed the problem of homogeneity, or lackthereof, of functionaries such as Donaudi in the Savoyard administration, dominated as itwas by other socio-cultural and political experiences.18

The unfortunate intellectual legacy of Donaudi reveals a continuity between the hostilitywith which his proposals were received by the Savoyard cultural and political world, andhis rediscovery a century later. The point is that, like many thinkers that may be defined asneo-mercantilist, Donaudi is difficult to place.19 He was criticised by the majority of his

15P. Jannaccone, ‘Di un economista piemontese del secolo XVIII (Donaudi delle Mallere). A proposito di alcuni

suoi manoscritti inediti’, Atti della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino XXXVIII (1903), pp. 352–377.16A. Di Giulio, Un economista e riformatore del’700: Ignazio Donaudi conte Delle Mallere, Ph.D. dissertation,

University of Turin, Arts and Humanities Faculty, a. a. 1965/66, supervised by Franco Venturi.17R. Faucci, L’economia politica in Italia. Dal Cinquecento ai giorni nostri (Turin: Utet, 2000), p. 117.18G. Ricuperati, ‘Il Settecento’, p. 645.19For an innovative interpretation of classic mercantilism see L. Magnusson, Mercantilism. The shaping of an

economic language (London-New York: Routledge, 1994); for a strong criticism on the rigid concepts of political

economy see J.C. Perrot, Une histoire intellectuelle de l’economie politique (XVII– XVIII siecle) (Paris: Ed. de

l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences sociales, 1992).


contemporaries because he was too innovative, while the minority, already won over byphysiocratic thought or Smith’s free-market ideas, criticised him for being tooconservative. Then, in the era of triumph of classical political economy, his so-calledeclecticism was open to overly severe judgement.

To approach the figure of Donaudi objectively and to gain above all a historiographicsense of his work, it is necessary to consider his body of works as a whole. This requiresplacing Donaudi’s intellectual production in a perspective that takes into account theman’s own particular experience as a conspicuous representative of one of the mostimportant banking and business firms of the Savoyard capital. Finally, it is opportune tofocus on the actual works of Donaudi and to understand them within their own socio-political and cultural context.20

Donaudi’s formation as a political economist

Donaudi’s formative period was between 1767 and 1773, between the end of his studiesof jurisprudence at the University of Turin and his first efforts as a memoirist. AntonioGenovesi and Pietro Verri were doubtlessly his primary influences in these years.21 Indeed,Lezioni di Commercio (Lectures on Commerce) and Meditazioni sull’economia politica

(Meditations on Political Economy) provided the main teachings and some key notionswhich Donaudi would later use in some of his more demanding works, such as Saggio di

economia politica (1775) and Riflessioni sulle finanze (1778).From the work of Genovesi, Donaudi mainly seized upon the call to remove, culturally

and politically, those obstacles that curbed economic development and condemned theeconomies of Italy to the under-use of their notable human, natural and capital resources.It was the battle against underdevelopment and the inertia of administration, against thepersistence of forces that were hostile to progress, that Donaudi picked up from thewritings of the Neapolitan abbot. Thus it was mainly Genovesi’s ethical-political messagethat Donaudi attempted to adopt on Savoyard ground, even explicitly recommending thatVittorio Amedeo III institute, after the Neapolitan model, a chair in civil economy at theUniversity of Turin.22 But it is also easy to spot, in terms of economic analysis, at least twomajor issues that the Turinese economist assimilated through the lessons of Genovesi. Thefirst regards the relationship between poverty, large landed estates, and victualling boards.

20An interesting take on the interconnection of history of ideas and cultural history is provided by V. Ferrone

and D. Roche, Postfazione in L’illuminismo. Dizionario storico, Eds. V. Ferrone and D. Roche (Rome-Bari:

Laterza, 1997), pp. 511–592; see also J.Y. Grenier, L’economie d’Ancien Regime: un monde de l’echange et de

l’incertitude (Paris: A. Michel, 1996).21On Antonio Genovesi see F. Venturi, Settecento riformatore. Da Muratori a Beccaria (Turin: Einaudi 1969),

pp. 523–645; on Genovesi’s economic thought see C. Perrotta, ‘Il contributo di Genovesi alla teoria illuminista

dello sviluppo’, in Moneta e interesse negli economisti napoletani dei secoli 17– 18, ed. A. Roncaglia (Bologna: Il

Mulino, 1995), pp. 68–95. See also the notes and introduction in the recent critical edition by M. L. Perna of A.

Genovesi, Delle lezioni di commercio o sia di economia civile (Naples: Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici, 2005).

On Pietro Verri see C. Capra, I progressi della ragione. Vita di Pietro Verri (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002).22Donaudi, Saggio di economia politica, c. 25: ‘The best way, I believe, is for example, like in every civil nation

there is a chair of Civil Economy at the University of Turin, in which they deal on an educational level with the

study principles of Commerce, and Finance, besides developing the science, they will always have more people

capable of exercising economics jobs, the population bit by bit will be enlightened, and knowing what the needs of

the state are will pay more willingly, when they understand that they are less weighed down by burdens and cuts

than foreign countries, mainly France and England’.


According to Donaudi, the clearest indicator of poverty in a country is given by theimpossibility for landless peasant farmers to contribute to the fiscal burden. The solutionto the problem of poverty lay, in other words, in a more equitable distribution of land.23

Donaudi held that providing as many incentives as possible for small and medium-sizedfarms was not the right strategy. Reform efforts should focus explicitly on makingagriculture profitable. On this point Donaudi sided openly with Genovesi and denouncedthe victualling boards, which impeded the free sale of wheat and thereby tended todramatically devalue labour and the investments of producers—especially smallproducers—thus generating conditions of a stagnant and depressed market.24 Donaudirealised however that free market reforms, however, were not enough to kick-start acountry’s economy.Once again, it was Genovesi’s cultural battle that Donaudi showed to have learned so

well when he affirms that without the general diffusion of basic education, Piedmont wouldnot wake from its slumber. He felt it was necessary to invest in the spread literacy amongfarmers and textile factory labourers, and in the training of agricultural and water-servicetechnicians. Only by creating a true link between learned culture and traditional culturewould it be possible to attain the aspired economic and civil progress.25

Donaudi’s relationship with the ideas of Pietro Verri, whose Meditazioni sull’economia

politica constituted a constant point of reference in the writing of his most theoreticalwork, Riflessioni sulle finanze (1778), was just as complex and profound, and it isinstructive to point out Donaudi’s indebtedness to the great Lombard reformer.First of all, Donaudi copied his own theory of money directly from Verri’s Meditazioni.

More significant, even, is the fact that Donaudi at the outset of his reasoning on whatdevelopment actually means, adopts Verri’s concepts of ‘annual reproduction’ and ‘annualconsumption’, identifying the difference or the equality between the two as the means ofjudging the economic equilibrium of a country. Donaudi’s discussions of fiscal and taxdoctrines also started from the treatment of these subjects by Verri, taking up on bothdescriptive and operational levels the lesson of Meditazioni, with the corollary logic ofrefusing the single tax proposed by the physiocrats and the inclination towards a mixedsystem of direct and indirect taxes.26 But it is the entire body of Verri’s work that animatedDonaudi’s economic outlook. A fine example of this regards his request, implicitly stated

23Donaudi, Saggio di economia politica, c. 20, cc. 64–65, cc.116–118.24Donaudi, Saggio di economia politica, c. 151: ‘In one word, the poor and the artist are miserable, and to the

public good it is more pernicious that the poor and the artists are without work than the price of wheat be

expensive; grain is never expensive if there are ways to earn it’.25Donaudi considers ‘very important’ the expenses that the state must spend to educate ‘all classes of people’.

Moreover he specifies that particular care should be given to the labourers, ‘the wealth and the strength of the

nation’, Riflessioni sulle finanze, c. 34. The training of agricultural technicians, village by village, is proposed in

Saggio d’economia politica, cc. 129–130.26Donaudi, Riflessioni sulle finanze, cc. 80–102. It is important to note that Donaudi retained that work was the

source of wealth and not land: ‘The work of man constructs in a nation a true and real deposit of wealth, which

may be greater than that which is extracted from the production of the earth. Moreover a farmer that cultivates

his own deposit, is in one sense in the same condition as the labourer. The first works the earth, from which we

gather what we need to live, and the sale of the extras procures the means to attain other commodities in life. The

labourer works, and practises his craft to earn what is necessary to exist, and to render more comfortable the

situation. If the farmer does not cultivate the land, it produces nothing and it remains uncultivated. If the labourer

does not work or does not utilise his capabilities, he closes the path to his survival’, Donaudi, Riflessioni sulle

finanze, c. 131.


in an important passage in Saggio di economia civile, that the national budget beconsidered public information. Reconnecting to what Verri himself had written in 1764,Donaudi put forward a proposal that had the double aim of opening up an importantdialogue with public opinion and interrupting a view of power that was deeply rooted inthe doctrine of the State, a doctrine still very much favoured in Piedmont throughout thesecond half of the eighteenth century.27

Besides the masterpieces by Genovesi and Verri, and showing remarkable continuitywith them, a pivotal role in the development of Donaudi may be attributed to the vastnessand originality of works published in the mid-1750s by a group of intellectuals, economists,and merchants concentrated around Vincent de Gournay and Veron de Forbonnais inParis. It would not be worth the effort to list all the themes and ideas assimilated byDonaudi through his readings of Forbonnais and other exponents of the ‘School ofCompetition’ (to adopt the definition suggested by Simone Meyssonier).28 Donaudi’sachievement was in fact to re-elaborate and finally surpass, in an original manner, the ideasthat came out of these earlier works on economic development, and the influence byFrench authors such as Forbonnais would remain constant throughout his life.

Two instances of French influence, however, are worth noting at some length, also fortheir intrinsically problematic character: one was the conception of commerce as theperhaps most powerful factor of civilisation, the other the persistence of a realistic vision ofmarket expansion which did not eliminate, through a sort of providentialistic optimism,the dimension of conflict, power, and war.

Commerce, as understood by Donaudi following the school of competition’s break withmercantilist canons, is a ‘reciprocal exchange’ which tends to unite all nations andcountries of the world. It is the international division of natural resources that defines theneed to activate reciprocal exchanges of ‘useful’ goods, i.e., raw materials or basicfoodstuffs, and luxury goods. The international specialisation of work is only aconsequence of this first and essential difference on a climatic and geographical level.Trade is not, however, merely necessary for survival. While it does away with theimpossibility of satisfying man’s needs in a natural environment that may either be hostileor benign, depending on the degrees of latitude and longitude, and on the circumstances,trade also helps to carry man from his isolation. Most of all, trade is never a zero-sumgame. Based on exchange aimed at satisfying needs and breaking isolation between people,commerce provides space for everyone, and the advantages are virtually reciprocal.International markets thus appear more as an opportunity than a threat.29 If the priority

27Donaudi, Saggio d’economia politica, c. 46: ‘The interests of the state and the dignity of the prince demand

that the finances are not only wisely administrated, but the rule, and the good order of the finance is notable to

everyone’. On the polemics provoked by the publication of the budget of the State of Milan, by Pietro Verri, see C.

Capra, I progressi della ragione, pp. 233–345.28On the reformer’s role, with strong implications in terms of civil liberties, played by Gournay and his student

Forbonnais, see S. Meyssonier, La Balance et l’Orloge. La genese de la pensee liberale en France au XVIIIe siecle

(Montreuil: Ed. de la Passion, 1989) and Ead., ‘Deux negociantes economistes: Vincent de Gournay et Veron de

Forbonnais’, in Cultures et formations negociantes dans l’Europe moderne, sous la direction de F. Angiolini et D.

Roche (Paris: Edition de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1995), pp. 513–555. A recent contribution

where G. Longhitano gathers the political-social dimension of the clash between the physiocrats and the positions

of Forbonnais is ‘Mercato e governo: l’economia e i modelli sociali. Momenti di un dibattito europeo nel secolo

XVIII’, in Studi in onore di Nino Recupero (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004), pp. 99–159.29The positive view of international commerce, that unites and does not divide, is present in the same definitions

of commerce proposed by the author; see Donaudi, Saggio d’economia civile, p. 44: ‘Commerce is nothing but an


remains that of exporting more than is imported, the advantage or disadvantage of tradeoperations is considered an artificial fact, a mistaken political economic calculation ratherthan the result of a natural law according to which how much is imported from abroad issubstantially the result of potential or current destruction of manufacturing or of a sectorof the national economy.The positive assessment of the interdependence of trade on a local, national,

international, and world scale triggers consequences of a certain importance. Firstly, themain objective of the state is no longer territorial expansion.30 It is evident that, as far asthe European situation in the second half of the eighteenth century is concerned, the lustfor power on the part of nations, among which Savoyard Piedmont played a secondary butby no means negligible role, could no longer be measured according to the terms of afeudal spirit. Having numerous nobles ready to take up arms to defend the independenceof the country or to plan new conquests was no longer a prerequisite for power. ForDonaudi, following Coyer step-by-step, the nobility is not an authoritative counterbalanceto the strength of the state inasmuch as it does not possess economic and organisationalautonomy. Its only social function of importance—the one which legitimises the nobility—is the personal administrative, technical, and military function, firmly framed within themonarchical bureaucratic apparatus.31 The main objective, then, can be none otherthan economic development, because the major area of action on an international levelis centred on trade and commercial competition with other European countries. Thereemerges a clear-cut subordination of military interests to economic and commercialinterests, and thus attention is turned to domestic reform rather than military reform;investments must be aimed at agricultural innovation, fiscal systems, education, andtrade policies. Consequently, competition in trade leads to policies that tend to favourpeace or neutrality precisely because economic development is impeded when a state’sresources are absorbed by military spending.32 In the final analysis, economic developmentbecomes the true foundation upon which a state’s foreign policies can be independentlybuilt. Donaudi, like Melon, Montesquieu and Forbonnais—who undoubtedly are hismasters—is certainly to be counted among the supporters of capitalism before its triumph,

(footnote continued)

exchange. The divine providence, who wanted men united among themselves, gave them various inclinations, and

desires, and enriched different climates with diverse productions. Therefore mutual concrete needs, or opinions,

that are born in men according to the variety of their inclinations, could only be satisfied by reciprocal

communication, or the exchange of things’. See Riflessioni sulle finanze, c. 23: ‘Commerce is nothing other than a

mutual exchange. It expands in proportion to the expansion of reciprocal interests of nations and their union’.30The abandonment of an expansionist view in favour of a neutral view is expressed very clearly at the

conclusion of Saggio d’economia politica, cc. 270–271: ‘European political systems no longer permitted that one

Prince could acquire such strength as to be a threat to the others. Therefore the nations have to study a method of

increasing their power by using good domestic policies. This is because the strength of a state is not to be

measured by its geographic holding but the number of citizens and the advantage created by their work and

industry’.31Donaudi, Saggio d’economia politica, cc. 157–164. Donaudi recalls in particular that the nobility that do not

trade grow poor and, secondarily, in modern war it is often the availability of money offered by the merchants to

decide the outcome of conflicts. The references obviously are G.-F. Coyer, La noblesse commerc-ante (London:

Fletcher Gyles, 1756).32Commenting on the negative consequences caused by the entrance of France into the American Civil War on

the side of the American colonies against England, and on the exportation of Piedmontese spun silk, Donaudi

noted that the only positive point of the situation was the neutrality of Piedmont which permitted it to plan

economic and social reforms. See Abbozzo di un cadastro politico, cc. 5–9.


since he considered it more useful and convenient that the state be guided by thecommercial spirit as opposed to the feudal spirit, which in his opinion was anachronisticand unreasonable.33 In fact, regarding this specific point, as shall be seen further on, in hismemoirs the Turinese economist unleashes a diatribe against Vittorio Amedeo III’schoices for the appointment of ministers, who, according to Donaudi, were connected tooclosely to a juridical background and were out of step with public opinion, which by thenhad already grasped the importance of an economic culture for the good governing ofpublic matters.34 At the same time, the doubtlessly peaceful inclination in the politicalvision embraced by Donaudi does not eliminate the question of the use of power inrelations, mainly economic, between states. A concrete example appears in his Piano per la

Sardegna (1788), which is among the author’s most interesting and creative essays. Thiswork posed the problem of the creation of stable trade between Piedmont and theMediterranean island to which the Savoys owe their highest royal title. In a plan of thiskind, the problem of constructing a civil and military navy for a landlocked state likePiedmont is naturally of prime importance. Here Donaudi makes two very interestingobservations. The first regards the fact that trade with the island had for severalgenerations been completely in the hands of foreign merchants. Tuna fishing andprocessing, and the coral industry—to name just two of the island’s most prestigiousexports—were in the hands of Neapolitan, Tuscan, Spanish and Dutch merchants.Sardinian merchants, to say nothing of their Piedmontese counterparts, were completelycut out of the major and most profitable branches of commercial traffic. In light of such asituation, two roads could be taken. Either the Piedmontese could concentrate on openingup new areas of trade, thereby causing no disturbance to existing schemes; or they couldattempt to compete with the foreign navies, in which case the status quo necessarily wouldhave to be changed, since, Donaudi sustained, no power would accept to lose profitabletrade that it had controlled for some time. At sea, peaceful competition quicklydegenerates to military conflict, and Piedomont, Donaudi warned, writing to thePiedmontese Minister of the Interior, Ignazio Amedeo Corte, must realize that takingaway a secure source of wealth from the foreigner powers requires either providingcompensation or the adoption of strategies of dissuasion, which may include the use or thethreat of force.35

33See A. Hirschman, The passions and the interests: political arguments for capitalism before its triumph

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).34The criticism that the formation of the Savoy administration was exclusively juridical appears in all the works

of Donaudi. He in this sense joined those, like Forbonnais, who spoke of the importance of state officials’ study of

commerce. See Donaudi, Saggio di economia politica, c. 15 and F. (Veron Duverger de) Forbonnais,

Considerations sur les finances d’Espagne. Seconde edition augmentee de Reflexions sur la necessite de comprendre

l’etude du commerce et des finances dans celle de la politique (Dresde: n. p., 1755).35Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, cc.130–135: ‘These discussions naturally lead to an exact knowledge of the

diverse goods, which other populations provide to Sardinia [y] All these things and many more stabilise the basic

principles that are useful for gaining insight before opening with the Island. Otherwise many efforts and expenses

will go to waste. If we consider as a useful thing the introduction of direct trade with Sardinia, the other

populations already in possession of real advantages from the business with the Sardinians have by consequence a

personal interest in conserving that business. Now, it being easier to keep a correspondence rather than

establishing a new one, the more we do to construct trade, the more others will do to destroy it. Therefore it is

necessary to evaluate whether in reality this important undertaking can be achieved, as it is fundamental to believe

that it can’.


The commercial revolution in Piedmont during the 1770s also had an impact on thesocial and civil life of the region, including the education system and the freedom ofthe press, and on choices made in foreign and military policies. It would be wrongto judge such positions as backward and rearguard in comparison to the more ambitiousand radical reform projects in line with the development of European Enlightenment culture,which was traversed by the debate on equality, the struggle against the church, thephysiocratic battles in favour of economic freedom and land rights, the definition of citizens’rights, and the deepening of constitutional criticism of the absolute monarchy. As alreadystated, Donaudi was an economist who essentially addressed the Prince, and operated withinan ambiguous and difficult political context. He fervently hoped that Vittorio Amedeo IIIwould perform ‘enlightened’ actions, convinced that significant results could be achievedonly through energetic action by the government administration from the top down. His wasa realistic attitude, which took into account the weakness of public opinion duringPiedmont’s ancien regime and the strength of the aristocracy’s social hegemony. Thispragmatic option is well summarised in the economist’s views regarding trade’s civilisingmission, which he considered a force able to change the rules of the ancien regime’s policies,but only to a certain extent. The virtues of trade, for Donaudi, did not annul the tensions ofwar and the conflict that characterised aristocratic monarchies. More modestly, he proposedto convince his audience of the necessity of changing paradigms, i.e., to not consider thefiscal situation (and therefore trade and agriculture) only in the interests of war; only if trulynecessary, the use of force might be considered in order to defend or facilitate commercialexpansion.

The Saggio d’economia politica: Free grain trade and the noblesse commerc-ant

In the intellectual production of Donaudi, one observes a clear split between his earlier,juvenile writings and those as a more mature man. The profound change in the approachof these works regards the identification of the causes of insufficient economicdevelopment and the remedies he proposed.As already mentioned, Donaudi’s writings of the 1770s were most prominently

influenced by French writers such as Forbonnais. Donaudi’s central idea was to enact aseries of demanding reforms in an effort to adjust several defects in Piedmontese trade,which in his eyes acted as restraints to development. Donaudi felt that the policy ofsustaining the silk industry, that had been set up during the reign of Vittorio Amedeo II inthe late seventeenth century, on the advice of people like Gropello, had wound up creatingprofound imbalances.36 Agriculture was greatly damaged by the prohibition of the wheattrade. Donaudi directly connected the lagging agricultural sector to the pressure of theTurinese silk traders to maintain the ban on trade in wheat. They claimed that an increasein the price of bread, which would result from the end of state control of the wheat trade,would provoke wage hikes for silk workers, price hikes for spun silk and cloth, and the lossof consistent market shares. Donaudi shared the discontent, widespread mostly amonglandowners (a good part of whom were nobles), against the monopolistic Turinese silkmerchants and called for the end of industrial Colbertism in order to make Piedmont a

36On the economic policies of Vittorio Amedeo II see G. Symcox, Victor Amadeus II. Absolutism in the

Savoyard state, 1675– 1730 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983).


wheat-exporting country.37 This request for liberalisation was accompanied by proposalsthat followed mainstream agronomic reform ideas of the eighteenth century: the sale ofcommon goods; the fencing in of farmland; the use of fallow fields as grazing land for thedevelopment of breeding and the production of manure for fertilizer; the use of artificialfatteners, etc. Donaudi, however, did not aim, as one might suppose, for the creation, ipsofacto, of a self-regulated agricultural market. Instead, he wanted the public administrationto treat agriculture with the same attention it dedicated to industry and trade. He thusasked for the state’s regulatory intervention so as—for example—to reduce the inequalityof land ownership; to force or to entice landowners to reduce the employment of labourersin favour of sharecroppers; to bring about, through fiscal incentives, the creation of newfarmlands, and so on.38 In particular, Donaudi considered the spread of large agriculturalenterprises, entrusted by contract to tenant farmers who used hired labourers formanpower, very dangerous. He in fact voiced—from an owner’s perspective—concernover social phenomena caused by the spread of hired-labour practises in the countryside,such as pauperism and peasant rebelliousness. At the same time he rigorously applied therules of competition and considered it essential to liberalise the wheat trade, seeing thegrowth in the number of small and medium-sized landowners capable of putting the brakeson price increases and investing in continuous improvements. He was not at all convincedby a free-market situation dominated by large landed estates without competition. The roleof the state would also be decisive in the extension of water systems and the renewal of theroads network. Such works could be carried out through fiscal reform which called for, atleast in theory, tax increases aimed primarily at the rich.39

The effects triggered by the dismantling of the victualling system and the impingementstrategy with respect to agricultural problems would have positively affected manufactur-ing as well. Here the major difficulties were seen in the factories which produced spun silkand in those which produced valuable silk textiles and fabrics. Donaudi noted that VittorioAmedeo II’s grand ‘Colbertist’ project of creating a national silk industry, strong inthe production of raw silk, spun silk and above all silk cloth, had not yet been achieved.

37Demanding the establishment of a body to coordinate the interventions in agriculture, Donaudi openly

denounced the lobby of the merchants. See Donaudi, Saggio d’ econiomia politica, c. 89: ‘If agricultural formed a

branch separate from commerce, the consequence would be that it could take from the countryside men and

labourers to tend to things of less importance than that of the cultivation of the land. If agriculture formed a

branch separate from commerce, the consequence would be that to favour manufacturing. The Council of

Commerce could dedicate itself to over-reducing the cost of wheat necessary to sustain the population, therefore

damaging agriculture, causing irreparable damage to the wealth of a nation’. On the real meaning of

‘‘Colbertism’’, in eighteenth-century government, see P. Minard, La fortune du colbertisme. Etat et industrie dans

la France des Lumieres (Paris: Fayard, 1998).38Liberalism and managerialism are two typical choices adopted by Donaudi. An example is the idea of dividing

great landed estates in favour of labourers in one scenario, but, with free trade in wheat. See Donaudi, Saggio

d’economia politica, cc. 115–6: ‘The great landed estates which some families possess are a grave threat to the

progress of agriculture y and it is certain that land divided among ten farmers would produce one-third more

than if it was in the hands of only one farmer. Obliging owners to sell would be against all property rights, it

would be worthwhile to use more simple means and easier means such as dividing the estates into tenant farms.

Specifying that no one tenant farm can be over a hundred giornata’. One giornata was a unit of surface area used

in Piedmont in the eighteenth century, equal to 3810 square metres.39Liberty, competition and the diffusion of small-medium properties are the key words that Donaudi uses in

criticising the model of the large capitalistic agricultural estate and its physiocratic supporters. See G.

Monestarolo, ’Piu mezzadri, meno fittavoli. La fisiocrazia in Piemonte negli scritti di Ignazio Donaudi delle

Mallere’, Studi settecenteschi 24 (2004) pp. 253–287.


The Piedmontese silk industry undoubtedly led Europe in Mulberry silkworm breeding,while the Piedmontese were even further ahead when it came to spun silk production.However, despite Piedmont’s protectionist policies, its silk fabrics were not as competitiveas those produced in France or England.40 Hardly inclined to satisfy the requests of thosewho sought the liberalisation of the silk market by removing the ban on exporting raw silk(a move that doubtless would have damaged the Turinese merchants but favoured thelandowners), Donaudi proposals regarding these issues were rather unoriginal. He blamedthe lack of success of Piedmontese cloth on the manufacturers themselves, who, due to amiscalculation, did not respect the Savoyard rules of production and thus lowered the levelof quality of their merchandise. A similar discourse was applied to traders who limitedthemselves to production and export of spun silk, as they too appeared interested only inuncouthly economising, with the risk of severely damaging the image of the quality ofPiedmontese silk thread. To correct problems in this sector—something he deemed verydifficult to do—Donaudi suggested intervening with greater controls and applying, ratherthan abolishing, Vittorio Amedeo II’s severe legislation.41

The economic programme identified by Donaudi in the Saggio d’economia politica aimedat making the Piedmontese production structure more dynamic—for he claimed it wasoverly conditioned by the monoculture of the silk industry. By liberalising the wheatmarket, the economist supported the interests of the landowners, who felt their interestsjeopardised by the ‘Colbertism’ of silk. At the same time he did not go so far as to ask forthe free extraction of raw silk, confirming, although with severe criticism, the privilegedsituation that such measures created for the merchant–bankers of Turin. He completed hisproject on reform by taking on the question of the noblesse commerc-ant—the commercialnobility. The primary cause of the Piedmontese incapability to stand up to the competitionof merchant nations of the eighteenth century such as England and Holland, was to beseen, according to Donaudi, in the conservatism of Savoyard society, representedsymbolically by the ban on wheat exports. The constriction of agricultural profits hadallowed the growth of the silk industry, but the price paid by the merchants on a social,rather than economic level was their formal exclusion from the elites’ politicaladministration of the state.42 Indeed, Savoyard administrative officials were recruitedfrom the ranks of noble landowners and lawyers, and from the members of the nobilitypursuing professions. Since the 1720s, the merchant classes of Turin had essentially beenousted from positions on the City Council and commercial tribunals. The growingeconomic importance of the silk industry and the social mobility it created were in this wayrestrained and rendered compatible with the equilibrium of a hierarchical society,separating the business elite from the political and judicial elite. In the second half of theeighteenth century, Donaudi maintained that this pact no longer functioned in the bestinterests of the country. He also considered the removal of obstacles from the wheat tradeessential for economic renewal, and felt it advantageous to modernise the elites byincluding the best and most capable among merchants in a new governing group, whichwould be able to adapt the necessity of commercial development to agricultural

40See G. Chicco, La seta in Piemonte. Un sistema industriale d’Ancien Regime (Milan: Angeli, 1995), pp. 95–114.41Donaudi, saggio di economia politica, cc. 182–187.42See S. Cerutti, Mestieri e privilegi. Nascita delle corporazioni a Torino, secoli XVII-XVIII (Turin: Einaudi,

1992).


development and launch ‘civil’ reforms indispensable for making Piedmont a truemerchant nation.43

The proposals contained in the Saggio d’economia politica are not, therefore, particularlyoriginal or overly disruptive. The most interesting aspect is certainly Donaudi’s capacity touse analytical categorisations from the schools of de Gournay and Forbonnais toreconstruct the economic contours of a well-structured and solid social world. In this wayhe surmised the weaknesses that conditioned Piedmont in the twenty years prior therevolution. It would be the changed political climate, experience gained as an economicfunctionary, the abandonment of his naive hope for reform from the top, thatcharacterised a change in his capacity to investigate and identify new prospectives onthe crisis which was maturing in the shadow of a solid but suffocating social pact that,according to the pages of the Saggio d’economia politica, sustained Savoyard Piedmont.

The Piano per la Sardegna: A change of plan for triggering economic growth

Two among Donaudi’s later writings, the Abbozzo di un cadastro politico (Draft for apolitical land registry) and the Piano per la Sardegna (Plan for the island of Sardinia)should be read as attempts to offer responses to a very complicated situation—that of the1780s, rife with famine and obvious difficulty in the silk sector. On a strictly politicalplatform, Donaudi abandoned the hypothesis of a mesaillance between the nobility and themerchants as a general framework in which to consider modernisation of the state in theAbbozzo (1785), as he fully recognised the anachronism of the institution of nobility.Without the possibility of calling on alternative ruling classes in the short term, he becameconvinced of the impossibility of reforming agriculture and of making it competitivewithout eliminating the market restraints connected to feudalism. He thus declared itnecessary that all feudal rights be rendered redeemable by single communities.44 What’smore, the state should not concede to new landowners feudal estates devolved through theextinction of ancient family lines, thus actuating an ‘easy’ but indisputable way out of theancien regime’s juridical feudality.45 The reflections that are most interesting and brimmingwith consequences are those which Donaudi dedicates, in Piano per la Sardegna

(1788–1789), to the merchant class and its internal expressions. Indeed, the solution tothe merchant question becomes, in his opinion, the key to launching solid and enduringeconomic development of the nation.

As already observed in the Saggio d’economia politica (1776), Donaudi had formedrather severe judgements regarding the Turinese merchants. He was no less concerned—asCoyer, Forbonnais, and Plumard d’Anguel had been—by the fact that the principlecapitalist players remained excluded from the ranks of the state’s decision-makers. He felttheir inclusion at such levels would provide powerful reinforcement and rationalisation forthe country’s political leadership. His opinion changed radically in 1785. Donaudi, in fact,

43On this point, see G. Monestarolo, Negozianti e imprenditori, pp. 239–245.44Donaudi, Abbozzo ragionato d’un cadastro politico, c. 47: ‘The annual taxes can be borne but the taxes to be

paid sales are a great obstacle for the exchanges. The Government should force the community to side with such

rights’.45Donaudi, Abbozzo ragionato d’un cadastro politico, cc. 39–40, denouncing the bad management of noble

property, he writes: ‘It is necessary to examine if case by case it is worthwhile for the state to re-acquire feudal

goods. In the extinction of noble families their property must be sold by the state as property free from feudal

rights’.


no longer speaks of merchants in general, but identifies differences within the group, whichwere enough to bring about strong antagonism between the main components. On one sidethere were the powerful merchant bankers of the capital (among whom Donaudi himselfhad been raised); on the other side were the merchant manufacturers or entrepreneurs, whomainly operated in the provinces. He had no doubt that of the two groups themanufacturers were the most important for the nation, since they were the ones who dealtdirectly with the production of spun silk and fabrics, employed manpower, and werepushed by competition to constantly improve their work. Their contribution to theeconomic development of the nation was, however, limited inasmuch as they dependedcompletely on the bankers of Turin for access to capital.46 Donaudi analysed in detail themechanisms of credit used by the bankers of the city to crush the silk entrepreneurs. Thosemechanisms consisted mainly of loans for silkworm farming, the payment of workers’salaries, the storage of goods in Turin, and the sale of silk products on foreign markets.The strength of the bankers was such that the fixing of the sale price of spun silk dependedmainly on them.47 Moreover, by reducing the profits of the entrepreneurs, the bankersmade investments in maintenance, expansion and innovation of machinery more difficult.The main problem, however, was not so much the limitation of positive effects oncompetition, i.e., in the oligopolistic actions of the Turinese bankers. The point directlyregarded the specific role played by the merchants of Turin in silk trading at theinternational level. The capital needed to set up Piedmontese production was provided tothe Turinese bankers (who in turn, as was discussed earlier, loaned the money to theentrepreneur merchants) by the merchant bankers of Lyon, who owned the most soughtafter cloth businesses in Europe. The Turinese merchant bankers were, according toDonaudi, actually agents of the capitalists from Lyon, and carried out on essentialfunction in the subordination of Piedmontese trade and industry to the French. This wasaccomplished primarily by keeping prices below cost for spun silk bought by the Grande

Fabrique; secondly, by blocking (consciously or unconsciously) the development of anational textile industry, which would have been a potential competitor of its Lyonesecounterpart, by skimping on credit to local merchant entrepreneurs and a lack of directinvestments in the creation of truly competitive textile factories businessmen.48 In the essayof 1788–1789, unlike that of 1775, the problem of unsuccessful development in Piedmont isidentified by Donaudi not as the lack of liberalisation of the wheat market, but in thenegative role played by the Turinese merchant bankers, who were more interested inserving the interests of the bankers from Lyon than in facilitating the growth of acompetitive industry in Piedmont. The problem of development in eighteenth-centuryPiedmont hinged on the dependent relationship that had been created between Turin andLyon. As providers not of simple raw materials, but of semi-finished goods, Piedmont was

46Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, c. 217: ‘In all the nations of the world, the manufacturers are considered the

most useful and main dealers. Our nation is probably the only one in which this necessary citizen is not well

appreciated. This situation is so diffused that very few manufacturers are considered honourable’.47Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, c. 220: ‘The provincial manufacturers by buying cocoons and spinning them

deserves help and support. Instead he pays very much interest, he cannot negotiate the price of his goods. In the

end, he must adhere to the law of the Turinese merchant banker’.48Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, cc. 251–252: ‘But if in one country where the so-called merchant bankers are

the dominators, to find a point of union between them would be the worst thing that could happen to our nation.

Because as I said the merchants try to keep the manufacturers in a suffocating state of dependence. They in the

end they do more for the interests of the English and Dutch merchants than their own fellow citizens’.


on the semi-periphery of a centre which was located outside its borders, and mainlyfocused in Lyon. The major profits of the silk industry fell into the hands of capitalistsfrom Lyon, while the Turinese merchant bankers were a fundamental link in a chain ofcommand whose head lay on the other side of the Alps.49 The originality, the intellectualvalue, as it were, of Donaudi’s work lies not only his lucid analysis of this relationship ofdependence, but above all in the consequences he reveals on a political economic level, andwhich he presents in his masterpiece, Piano per la Sardegna.

With extreme pragmatism Donaudi realised that the agricultural and industrialstructures of production in Piedmont could not compete on the same level as those ofthe more developed French, English and Dutch, or even with those of certain parts ofGermany.50 It is important to point out that at the time this competition referred to a veryrestricted market, directed toward a small group of demanding consumers essentially madeup by aristocrats and the richest among the urban bourgeoisie. The products that attractedand stirred the interest of merchants, but also of governments, were luxury goods.51 It washere that the first important revision of the nation’s economic policy should have takenplace, by accepting that luxury goods would be supplied to Piedmont by other countriesand by enacting a new policy to encourage trade. The government needed to favourspecialisation in, as we would put it today, mass consumption sectors, which requiredgoods that were not particularly refined, but suitable for larger markets and less affluentconsumers. Such goods comprised a vast array of products (from textiles for furniture toutensils, etc.) aimed at satisfying mostly domestic customers, though these products couldeasily have been exported thanks to a combination of quality and price.52 To reach thisgoal, which Donaudi considered the first serious step towards development, thegovernment would have to start by putting an end to financing the creation of luxuryindustries (such as Vinovo porcelain) and abandon its practise of granting exclusivemanufacturing rights.53

The critical point, however, was another. To turn Piedmont into a centre of theEuropean economy, it was necessary to find and create for its development a specificperiphery. Donaudi expressed himself clearly and maintained that the Piedmontese shouldwork with the Sardinians—it is obvious that the Mediterranean island of Sardinia was theperiphery that Donaudi had been seeking—just as Lyon had done with Piedmont. The role

49The characterisation of Piedmont in the eighteenth century as a semi-periphery of the French and English silk

industry is shared by G. Chicco, La seta in Piemonte. The concepts of centre, periphery and semi-periphery were

introduced by I. Wallerstein, The modern world-system. I. Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European

world-economy in the sixteenth century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).50Referring to England and France, Donaudi affirms: ‘Let’s accept that foreign merchants bring us fine cloth,

wool cloth, silk cloth, the designs for garments. We have a thousand other products with which can render active

our trading if it were to be passive. With these products we can make the balance, if in the case it was in our

favour, even more advantageous’, Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, c. 43.51On the production of luxury garments, see C. Poni, ’Moda e innovazione: le strategie dei mercanti da seta di

Lione nel secolo XVIII’, in La seta in Europa. Secoli XIII– XX, ed. S. Cavaciocchi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1993),

pp. 17–55. On the relevance of the luxury industry, see M. Sonenscher, ‘L’ impero del gusto: mestiere, imprese e

commerci nella Parigi del XVIII secolo’, Quaderni storici 87 (1994) pp. 655–668.52As an example of manufacturing for widespread consumption, Donaudi used cotton: ‘Take a look at cotton

manufacturing. In reality we don’t have the raw material but why not go out and buy it and use it to produce at

home ordinary products? Mr. Revelli, an expert in this type of manufacturing, told me that the state imports

cotton goods to the value of three million lire while the price of the raw cotton is one hundred thousand lire. The

difference between the two prices is due to manpower’, Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, c. 49.53Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, cc. 33–37.


the economist assigned to Sardinia was that of main provider of raw materials and semi-finished goods that would be transformed into medium–low quality goods by industrieslocated in Piedmont.54 It is important to note that Donaudi made a sharp distinctionbetween an arrangement of this sort—which he deemed useful for Piedmont as well as forSardinia—and a policy of colonisation. The latter was founded on violence, i.e., theobligation of trading only with the motherland, the ban of manufacturing finished goods,the arbitrary setting of prices.55 It is evident, however, that being forced to defend hisproposal against such accusations revealed the exasperated realism and the ruthless logicof business to which the solution to the problem of development in the final analysis wassubject to.In any case, Donaudi specified that the inauguration of such a trade quickly would

favour the economy of the island. He claimed that most of Sardinia’s natural resourceswere valuable and unutilised. In the hands of the Piedmontese manufacturers, suchresources could have easily provided raw materials not only for the mining industry, butalso for industries that would have profited from the production of semi-finished goods.A class of Sardinian merchants and businessman could have sprung up—a class whichDonaudi claimed did not exist at that time, as the main part of the trade on the island washandled by the Genovese, Livornese, Spanish, Dutch, as well as by merchants from theNorth African principalities. As for how to integrate the island’s economy into thePiedmontese economy, Donaudi called for significant breaks with respect to the traditionalmodus operandi. Firstly, companies with exclusive trade monopolies were to be considereddangerous and to be avoided. Next, the state should not directly finance or grant exclusiverights to single or groups of merchants. In Donaudi’s view, the only way to launch such atrade scheme was to found it exclusively on profit, based on assessments of economicadvantage to be carried out by the merchants themselves. It was thus up to the governmentto remove obstacles and facilitate contact between Sardinian producers and Piedmontesemanufacturers. For this reason it was essential to open a Chamber of Commerce inCagliari, and possibly invite delegations of Piedmontese businessmen to visit the island.Moreover, a preliminary issue, though one of absolute importance, centred on the fact thatif the government really aimed to approve Donaudi’s plan, it would in a short time have toeliminate all customs duties that existed between Piedmont and Sardinia, and—even moreimportantly—eliminate the customs duties which continued to plague the other twostates—Savoy and the Duchy of Aosta—which composed the Savoyard kingdom.56 Onlyonce free trade had begun could the government set about discussing the creation of amerchant company to optimise, in particular, exports of Piedmontese products.

54Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, cc. 121–122: ‘This would be an economic commerce that can start without

reducing the money in circulation in Piedmont as well as in Sardinia. This reciprocal trade would be of great

benefit for both nations. Sardinia would pay to Piedmont, with its raw materials and its manufactured products,

that which today is necessary to procure from foreign populations through money or wheat. In Piedmont,

Sardinian goods would easily be bought and so new factories would be introduced and industrial production

would increase. With the development of work in Piedmont, it would have the comfort of receiving from Sardinia

most of the raw materials as aforementioned. Piedmont should not need to turn to other nations to sustain its

industry, Sardinia would see its agricultural economy develop [y]’.55Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, c. 59: ‘I say, first of all, one thing is keeping Sardinia in a type of slavery by

obliging them to buy from Piedmont all that it needs. The other is Sardinia depending on Piedmont for

widespread consumption and luxury goods. The first method is barbaric and violent and not dignified of a civil

and learned nation. The second conforms to the concepts of efficient policies’.56On these proposals as a whole, see G. Monestarolo, Negozianti e imprenditori, pp. 267–271.


Besides the project’s great and perhaps excessive ambitions, it appears important tomention the last essential objective that Donaudi set out to achieve. If trade with Sardiniahad been able to take off, entrepreneurial merchants—those most ill-treated in Piedmont,stigmatised for belonging to what was considered a mechanical art, to the point thatpersons who practised this trade directly would be accused of being uncivil—would haveat last become the most important and essential mercantile group of the nation. InDonaudi’s mind, the success of this undertaking would have painlessly and naturallyinverted the anti-national role played by the Turinese merchant bankers. Once awareof the great profits to be had by trade with the island and the political support ofthe government for Piedmontese manufacturers, they would have no doubt sought tobecome involved in the management of this new traffic. In such a way, their supply ofcredit and services would at last be directed toward the development of a nationalindustry, considerably increasing its strength, capacity for expansion and internationalprestige.57 The integration of Sardinia into the Piedmontese economy represented forDonaudi not only the best method of responding to the economic crisis of the 1780s, butan instrument for the structural reorganisation, certainly in the medium-term, of thecountry’s entire economy. This direction would lead to specialisation in productioncapable of overcoming the silk monoculture. It also gave a promotion to merchantentrepreneurs, making them the leading group within the Savoyard merchant world; andfunctionally reconverted, in the interests of Piedmontese manufacturing, the strength ofthe sole group with sufficient capital and a solid, hard-nosed business culture, the merchantbankers. Consequently, a space would be created—with a centre and a periphery—inwhich merchant entrepreneurs, not hindered by customs barriers, could build up thedomestic market.

With the Piano per la Sardegna Donaudi reaches all-new levels of quality in his work,not only in terms of economic analysis, but inasmuch as he identifies, in the relationship ofdependence, the true key to development, as well as the definition of a coherent economicpolicy, which without renouncing the profound teachings of the school of competition,decidedly places more faith in the capacity of the social players to create their owndestinies. The role assigned to the state is no longer the demiurgic one, as seen in theSaggio d’economia politica, but rather it accompanies, defends, and promotes the socialand economic action of the merchant entrepreneurs.

Naturally, it would not be correct to draw out and focus on only the original aspects ofDonaudi’s reflections. Many questions, and in particular the necessity to overcome silkmonoculture, along with attention to the production of non-luxury goods, were shared, forexample, by many of the experts at work during those difficult years.58 Moreover,Donaudi’s most radical proposals cannot be isolated from the permanence of topics,language, and compound problematic knots which echo traditional positions. At any rate,it is an accepted fact that his contemporaries, and in particular the highest-level stateeconomists, from Pietro Giuseppe Graneri to Ugo Vincenzo Botton, judged Donaudi’s

57I. Donaudi, Piano per la Sardegna, c. 311: ‘This is one of the most secure ways to interest all kinds of people in

the factories and manufactories In this way, silk merchants and bankers would become without realising it,

entrepreneurs’.58See the judgements of the Intendants, reported by G. Prato, Il problema del combustibile nel periodo pre-

rivoluzionario come fattore della distribuzione topografica delle industrie (Turin: Bona, 1912), pp. 72–76.


ideas too dangerous for the political and social equilibrium of the Savoyard state.59 Thisemerges from the exchange of letters between Botton, at the time Intendant General ofSardinia, and Donaudi.

Accused of colonialism: The correspondence with Botton

To follow up his plan for developing trade between Piedmont and Sardinia, Donaudiwrote on April 22 and May 6, 1789 to Count Ugo Vincenzo Botton, a top-ranking officialof the court of Vittorio Amedeo III, Intendant General of Sardinia and the island’s chiefeconomic administrator. In the letters, consistent to what appeared in his Piano, theTurinese economist proposed to Botton the elimination of royal taxes on Piedmontesegoods sent to Sardinia. Botton replied with a long letter dated June 19, 1789, to whichDonaudi replied a month later.60 The correspondence represents precious documentationnot only concerning the intellectual biography of Donaudi, but above all for the topicsraised and for the unusual frankness, or more precisely, harshness with which the twoSavoyard officials confronted one another. This is not the moment to enter into the detailsof the commercial and fiscal arguments used by Botton to reject, without any hesitationwhatsoever, Donaudi’s ideas; nor is it the place to get into the exhaustive self-defenceconducted by Donaudi. It is more important to examine the political and culturalproblems that the exchange of letters highlights. Indeed, the exchange clearly reveals thedifficulties that the reformist positions of Donaudi, which in some way were anomalous,met with during those years so decisive for the fate of the old absolutist monarchies.The political problem in question is that of the nation—or rather the problem of nations

and the trade between them. According to Botton, the elimination of taxes on goodsexported by Piedmont constituted an intolerable restriction on the sovereignty of Sardinia,which had fundamental laws, institutions and forms of government which must berespected. Donaudi’s plan was not acceptable because it infringed upon an exclusivepatrimonial bond—expressed through a contemporary historiographic concept—whichconstituted the union of Piedmont and Sardinia under the Savoy dynasty. Moreover, heconsidered such reforms to be detrimental to the island’s fiscal administration andcommerce, and Donaudi’s proposal was thus interpreted as not only contrary to thejuridical set-up of the government of Sardinia, but directly against the interests representedby that system, which were interests that concerned the protection of Sardinian commerce,industry and agriculture. The most ferocious criticism in this regard was, therefore, levelledagainst the proposal of an economic plan which, according to Botton, humiliated thesovereignty of the Sardinian kingdom, and more than anything else, resulted in an unfairpolicy that relegated Sardinia to a relationship of colonial dependence upon Piedmont.Donaudi was most dryly and explicitly rebuffed for the accusation that his project most

59Pietro Giuseppe Graneri was Minister of the Interior, and in practice Prime Minister for Vittorio Amedeo III,

from 1789 to 1797; on Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte, the author of a famous pamphlet Saggio sulla

legislazione romana (Florence: s.e., 1772), who corresponded with Cesare Beccaria and became a member of the

Piedmontese Republic after 1798, see G. Vaccarino, ‘Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte, l’esperienza

giacobina di un illuminista piemontese’, Bollettino storico subalpino piemontese, LXIII (1965), pp. 161–202.60See ‘Letter from Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte to Ignazio Donaudi delle Mallere, dated June 19,

1789’ and ‘Reply by Ignazio Donaudi delle Mallere to Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte, dated July 19,

1789’, in I. Donaudi, Memorie di commercio (Biblioteca Fondazione Luigi Einaudi di Torino: R. 16. 1. 1–3) vol. 3,

pp. 301–319, pp. 320–357.


clearly aimed at colonisation. ‘Sardinia, most illustrious sir,’ wrote Botton, ‘is not, withrespect to Piedmont, a colony y which must buy everything from the capital. The two aresister provinces, whose trade must be government-controlled in order to respect theirphysical positions and respective moral circumstances.’61 Donaudi’s proposals, continuedBotton, damaged finances and trade with other nations, so that such ‘y considerationswill convince you, most illustrious sir, that the Royal Exchequer is not capable ofsacrificing the yield of customs duties for the progress of Piedmontese trade.’62 Botton’smessage is essentially anchored to a juridical vision of economic relations between the twoprimary partners in state business. In this sense, even if Botton’s prose was influenced bythe anti-colonial language of Raynal63 and by events such as the American Revolution, therequest for the elimination of customs duties is interpreted exclusively as a threat and notas an opportunity for a different organisation of economic space and political-institutionalrelations between Sardinia and Piedmont.

Despite Botton’s tranchant reply, Donaudi, in his second letter, tries to clarify the senseof his project, or rather the significance and the limits of the idea of an extended domesticmarket. The essential point here is that Donaudi seeks to unify the economies of theKingdom, and does not substitute a new economic logic with the juridical logic of Botton,according to whom Sardinia and Piedmont were united only by loyalty to a commonsovereign, while they remained independent with regard to material and commercialinterests. The two nations, it was true, had different laws, customs and traditions, but theyalso belonged not only to the same sovereign, but to the same state. They were simplycomponents of that which, for Donaudi, constituted a living organism whose lifeblood wasrepresented by commerce, trade, and opportunities for prosperity and well-being. On thebasis of a similar perspective, if Sardinia had favoured the development of Piedmont withits raw materials, its semi-finished goods industry, and its markets (naturally, finding insuch an arrangement an advantage, or at least not losing out), the entire state would havederived benefits and would have consequently divided the acquired advantages among itscomponent parts.64 In other words, it is the logic of the state’s search for wealth throughfree trade unions among nations which, according to Donaudi, should have pushed for theelimination of trade barriers, and more generally, progressively remove all obstacles tocommon growth. It is evident that the Botton–Donaudi exchange of letters represents ageneral process, from the point of view of a very specific case. Donaudi, on the crest of atype of culture founded on pre-eminence in production tended to go somewhat beyonda concept of the state that is based essentially on the juridical-territorial dimension, andconceives of reforms as the best, most suitable instruments to bring about such anundertaking.

61Botton, ‘Letter from Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte’, p. 305.62Botton, ‘Letter from Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte’, p. 312.63See G.-T. Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des Etablissemens et du commerce des Europeens dan les

deux Indes (Geneva: Chez Jean-Leonard Pellet, 1780).64See Donaudi, ‘Reply by Ignazio Donaudi delle Mallere’, p. 357: ‘We are all equal subjects of the same King to

whom all subjects of Piedmont and Sardinia have the honour to serve. Therefore, together we must with

enthusiasm contribute to the good of the state. The operations which favour Piedmont, and do not damage

Sardinia have to be courageously achieved. This will allow the state to prosper, and when the state is in good

health the natural relationship between all its entities will finally feel the good effects, even the entity which was

indifferent at the beginning’.


Of course, alongside the different conceptions of the state’s role, there also flourishedanother way of interpreting the government’s strategy. Specifically, for Donaudi, thepolicy of short steps undertaken by Carlo Emanuele III’s key minister and advisor, GiovanBattista Bogino—whom Botton had referred to—had obtained only modest results inSardinia.65 Donaudi, for example, asked why alienating custom duties absorbed by thecities and the barons had not occurred thirty years earlier, when it would have cost thestate less. He asked why there had been no progress made in levelling out the fiscal burden,placing land taxes at the focus of fiscal revenues. He also queried as to why development ofsilkworm farming had been impeded in Sardinia, and why, in short, the idea ofharmonising trade policies of the two main poles of the kingdom had not been taken intoconsideration.66 It was clear that Donaudi showed outright intolerance towards an attitudewhich, in Sardinia and Piedmont alike, was careful not to excessively damage the interestsof the dominant players—to the detriment of the poorer and most numerous segment ofthe population.In their letters, the two officials also defined their positions on a purely economic-

cultural level. Botton noted the contradictions in which Donaudi would have fallen whentaking into consideration the precepts of his economic ‘school’. With a certain irony,Botton pointed out Donaudi’s demode preferences for Necker and the new followers ofColbert; Botton also brought up Donaudi’s dislike of the physiocrats—with the explicitobjective of challenging him on the point that, by following to the letter the spirit of hisapproach, for the good of the Sardinian manufacturers, it would have been more useful toincrease the customs duties:

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But I ask you: would such sacrifice really conform to the principles of politicaleconomy? You, who are full of zeal and desire to shake the industry of Sardinia fromthe hibernation in which it lies; you, who are an enemy of modern systems, and of thefamous tableau economique; you, who have drawn your economic inspirations fromthe school of Colbert and of Necker; you, who teach me that the best way toreawaken the industry of a nation consists in imposing duties on raw materials andforeign goods, which might in turn be re-exported. If you facilitate the introductionthereof, instead of hindering it, a new source of indolence arises, and the fear ofcompetition from foreign goods would further keep the Sardinians from buildingnational industries y67

The response by Donaudi is interesting, inasmuch as it shows a reflection on his ownoriginality. Donaudi stated that he felt more like a follower of Sully than of Colbert,especially with regard to his positions on agriculture. Thus, Donaudi explained that hisadherence to the school of Gournay, Forbonnais, and Herbert, which itself had begun the

the reforms in Sardinia, see A. Mattone, ‘Istituzioni e riforme nella Sardegna del Settecento’ in Dal trono

ro della liberta (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 325–419.

the reclamation of duties adsorbed by the city, Donaudi wrote that if such an operation had been ‘carried

rty years ago, the time when customs were rendered less, the king would have been able to buy the rights to

ties without spending exorbitant sums as would be asked today’. See Donaudi, ‘Reply by Ignazio Donaudi

allere to Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte’, p. 324. On the necessity to redistribute the fiscal burden

barons and without passing the convocation of Sardinian parliamentary members, see pp. 346–347. With

to the decision by Minister Bogino to ban the cultivation of mulberry trees so as to avoid competition with

ont, see p. 333.

tton, ‘Letter from Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte’, p. 313.


reassessment of Henry IV’s minister, with the specific aim of providing arguments infavour of liberalisation of agricultural markets that did not penalise commerce.68

Secondly, without distancing himself from Necker (although Donaudi’s ideas on theliberalisation of the wheat market did denote a certain difference), he specified that histheoretical elaboration (Saggio d’economia politica and Riflessione sulle finanze) hadalready been completed when the star of the protestant banker had yet to shine in France.Donaudi’s, however, was above all a claim of original analytical relativism against thoseabstract principles considered valid at every time and in every place (and thus, perhaps,nearing the method of Galiani in the Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds):

68On

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Not the name of the authors, but the reasoning convinces me. The system which suitsone country would be detrimental to another. In Piedmont we have manpower foragriculture, we have manpower for manufacturing. It is not so in Sardinia. The firstfocus must be on agriculture; followed by grazing lands, fishing, and finallymanufacturing. On these bases have I worked out my plan.69

Free trade between Sardinia and Piedmont was not harmful for manufacturing on theisland just because the two were at different levels of development and the possibility ofcommercial relations between them did not present antagonistic characteristics, but rathermutual functions. Donaudi’s originality in his response to Botton, which basicallysummarised Piano per la Sardegna, can be brought together in the following three points:

(1) The phase-oriented conception of development, according to which Piedmont wassituated at an intermediate level, characterised by a fairly well-organised agriculturalsituation and the presence of factories capable of competing with products of medium, butnot high quality—while Sardinia would be characterised by low standards of living, thanksto its incapacity in terms of recognising the true value of its raw materials;

(2) The realisation that the path toward growth is a consequence of the fact that,inevitably, economies at different levels of development compensate for one another andmutually stimulate their capacity through a relationship that in today’s terms would bedefined as centre-periphery;

(3) The idea that within each single state formation the centre-periphery polarisationmust be favoured through the elimination of customs duties, and by creating a commoncommercial space of an extended domestic market. For Donaudi, the creation of centre-periphery relations within the same state (which may be composed of more than onenation) appeared to be the fundamental method of breaking away from dependence onmore developed foreign countries, and thus beginning the perfecting which inevitably, inDonaudi’s view, would also lead to benefits for the domestic periphery.

It is evident that such a view of political economy (defining it as ‘theoretical’ seems a bitexcessive) did not enter the classification scheme for schools of economic thought used byBotton—for whom either one was a physiocrat, and was thus oriented toward reforms thatwere essentially agricultural, or ‘Colbertist’, i.e., in defence of state protection ofmanufacturing. The anomalous position of Donaudi—with his eclecticism on the one hand

the use of Sully in particular from part of the physiocrats, see G. Wuelersse, Le mouvement physiocratique

nce (de 1756 a 1770) (Paris: Alcan, 1910), vol. 1, pp. 84–85. Herbert was one of the members of Gournay’s

the most appreciated also by the physiocrats for his radically liberal positions on the subject of the wheat

see Herbert C.-J., Essay sur la police general des grains, sur leurs prix, et sur les effets de l’agriculture (Berlin:

755).

naudi, ‘Reply by Ignazio Donaudi delle Mallere’, p. 348.


and his empiricism on the other—naturally exposed him to a great deal of criticism andwound up weakening the persuasiveness of his proposals, which were judged as lackingcoherence in terms of economic doctrine and, above all, as we have already seen,superficial and rash on a political level. Botton’s manifest hostility toward a dilettante ofancien regime politics like Donaudi (to which the economist, at a certain point in his letter,wrote, and not without reason, ‘Permit me to tell you that your official letter tends not somuch to examine my projects as to demolish them’70), pushed him to raise another issue.The Intendant General had criticised Donaudi’s proposal to step up commerce in Sardinia,which, according to Botton, would only spoil the sober customs of the Sardinians andintroduce luxury that would do more harm than good. The learned Savoyard functionaryonce again played with themes of Enlightenment debate, which this time were taken fromRousseau, depriving them of critical capacity, and putting them to the service of adiscourse which, though in rhetorical terms well-organised, was marked by unequivocalconservatism. As Botton argued:

70Do71Bo

I will add, that the amount of duties to which foreign goods are subject on thisIsland, is not by venture a grave act, as it may at first appear. The little or no wealththat one observes in the villages is probably linked to the height of the prices offoreign goods. In Sardinia there exists the truly useful manufacturing of orbaccio

(translator’s note: a fabric made of coarse wool typical of Sardinia), which composesthe garment of the majority of the nation. Here, they make prickly wool cloaks tocover themselves, here they create the red and yellow dyes that decorate theirgarments. In one word, the Sardinian farmers, and the nobles themselves of theIsland, who live in villas built like the ones of ancient Patriarchs and the heroes ofHomer, are indebted to foreigners for very few articles.71

Attacked in his productionist credo, and what’s more, in the name of criticism of luxurywhich does not connect to the discussion of equality, but is essentially literary, Donaudiallowed himself a vehement response, ridiculing the naive taste of the Intendant Generaland confirming the indissoluble relationship between wealth, civilisation (and in somesenses, social discipline), and development.

If God wishes that a certain level of wealth were introduced into the villages, it wouldsoften the customs and render possible the management of those Sards who are stillsomewhat wild, it would shake their indolence and allow them to adopt the rulesproposed to improve agriculture and grasslands. Of what importance is it to me thata Sardinian wears mean orbaccio, that he covers himself with prickly cloaks? But thatat the same time he wants to live in his own way, work little, and does not exploit thefertility of the land and the happy position of the island (yes, that interests me,editor’s note) y Let’s take a village of one hundred people living in the fashion thatyou indicated: in it the production of agriculture and the industry that is directlyalongside it, is one hundred. Introduce luxury goods, even foreign items, and this onehundred will no longer be enough: therefore they will work so as to double theirproduction in order to satisfy their newly born needs. A large part of this growth willbe transferred abroad, but in one way or another a portion will remain in the

naudi, ‘Reply by Ignazio Donaudi delle Mallere’, p. 348.

tton, ‘Ugo Vincenzo Botton di Castellamonte’ to ‘Ignazio Donaudi’, p. 313.

ARTICLE IN PRESS

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G. Monestarolo / History of European Ideas 32 (2006) 477–501 501

kingdom, and in the meantime the inevitable excellent effects will have been broughtabout: an increase in the population, considerable improvements in agriculture, andgreater docility and kindness in customs.72

The conflict on the theme of wealth provides a clear measure of the distance whichseparated the two men on all questions with a proposal such as the elimination of customsduties was capable of raising, from a political, as well as economic and cultural point ofview. Botton sided with Raynal against Donaudi’s ‘colonialist’ view; with Rousseauagainst Montesquieu on the theme of wealth; with Quesnay against Forbonnais on thetopic of agriculture. Nevertheless, such openness served only to confirm the existing orderand the impossibility of changing a system of components so complex and ossified as toappear inalterable. In the figure of Botton, one gets a glimpse of the limits, the exhaustionof a reform experience which was aimed at reducing the intensity of conflicts andcombining interests, and which progressively lost incisiveness and direction.73 Donaudi,somewhat barbaric and brutal, a merchant banker who had turned to politics, respondedto the big questions raised by the development of mercantile culture and the acceleration ofeconomic competition by calling upon a doctrinal baggage which we would be wrong todefine as traditional, since, on the contrary, he was able to represent new interests and seizeupon problems which required entirely new solutions.

Leading among these solutions, as we have already seen, was Donaudi’s clearidentification of the merchant entrepreneurs as the true protagonists of economicdevelopment, to whom a truly enlightened government had the duty to guarantee,primarily, an economic space, a market and raw materials. Based on this structuraldemand, Piedmont should have considered Sardinia its main trading partner, with theawareness of the need to win back shipping routes, ports, and commercial outlets which forsome time had been in the hands of northern European merchants. These are originalthemes that Donaudi envisaged and partially developed, sometimes with crude realism,sometimes with the passionate spirit of one convinced that, sooner or later, economic andcivil development would coincide.

naudi, ‘Reply by Ignazio Donaudi’, p. 351.

his letter of July 1789, Botton expressed the idea that the project of reforming the old monarchy from

was in crisis. Subsequently, his positions became more moderate and similar to those republicans and

ontese jacobines who entered government in 1798.

the project of a commercial state: ignazio donaudi and the question of piedmontese economic...

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