Untitled - UTSC Humanities Research Projects server - University of ...

The View from the Customs House 215
in promoting exports, and that it was concerned in its administration
of trade only with the supply of strategically significant
materials and the revenues that it could raise at harbours. 42
Even at Genoa, from which the richest late-medieval customs
records survive, there is no hint of the least protectionist intention
in the management of harbour taxes before the fifteenth
century. 43 The same is naturally true of the Counts of Barcelona
in their manipulation of the privileges of different communities
against the background of the normal regime of customs exactions
in their harbours: the development of naval capabilities, in
the age of the conquest of the Balearics, and the intrusions of
Christian states southward across the Ebro, and their immediate
fiscal advantage, were prominent in their planning. But
what they can be seen most clearly to be doing is building the
edifice of their regional power on the interplay of advantages,
privileges, and opportunities in a fragmented and interconnected
world. Another socioeconomic phenomenon which is
strongly promoted by customs institutions, which displays distinctively
Mediterranean characteristics, and which is illustrated
by comparable material from both ancient and medieval
periods, is therefore an essentially economic diplomacy.
The latter returns us to the theme proposed at the beginning
of the paper: the ways in which the study of the Mediterranean
environmental infrastructure supports and shapes the social
and political structures of the history of Mediterranean communities,
small and—especially—large.
4. managing interdependence:
the nature of the network
The material so far presented reveals a cellular world of separate
productive communities interlinked by intricate webs of normal
exchange—an interdependence so usual and basic that it
required no encouragement, could be regarded as a rhythm
42 Ibid. 264–5: ‘le souci majeure du gouvernement égyptien est de se
procurer un certain nombre de denrées indispensables à son économie ou à
sa puissance; secondairement il cherche aussi à effectuer de fructueuses opérations
fiscales, mais il a tendance à considérer que toute marchandise emportée
par les étrangers appauvrit le pays auquel elle est prise.’
43 J. Day, Les douanes de Gênes, 1376–1377 (Paris, 1963), p. xi.