I Dialogues di Ferdinando Galiani: controversie metodologiche e geoeconomia del commercio granario nel tardo Settecento

Grain was a strategic resource in pre-industrial societies, for importance it had the same role that today is played by energy resources. In France, in the second half of Eighteenth Century, Physiocratic School stressed the theme of development of agriculture, particularly the grain sector. By the early 1760s, Physiocrats’ arguments for liberalization and deregulation of grain trade had huge impact in intellectual and court circles, dominating discussions of concrete issues of economic policy. So, two laws enacted in 1762 and 1764 abolished virtually all restrictions on trade in grain. The years 1769 and 1770 saw a severe subsistence crisis: supplies contracted, prices rose, and grain and bread riots swept large parts of the country. The implementation of policy of liberalization caused a lot of controversy. Ferdinando Galiani’s Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (1770), summarize cleverly different opinions on the grain trade and offer, at the same time, an alternative scientific solution to Physiocrats’ arguments. From Galiani’s analysis emerges a particular view, that we can call geo-economic, in which the availability of grain, caused by different characteristics of weather, morphology and geographic position, becomes the essential factors on which the development policies must be based. This paper examines the geo-economic debate on the grain trade, that precedes and follows the issue of Dialogues, highlighting philosophical background, particularly the opposed influences of Giambattista Vico’s historicism and pre-Enlightenment and rationalism of Bartolomeo Intieri’s intellectual circle.