Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

DANIEL JÜTTE
Here I in essence adopt Aryeh Shmuelevitz’s classification and
definition of the following organizational forms. 31
(1) Partnerships. This refers to partnerships between a number of
merchants who each invested proportionately in start-up capital and
shared the workload equally. 32 This kind of organization was widespread
in the trade between the Ottoman Empire and Venice, and
generally assumed the form of one partner taking up residence in the
Serenissima while his colleague remained in the Ottoman Empire.
Financial investment and profits varied according to the economic
importance of each partner. Sometimes ‘managerial skills’ could be
accepted as a substitute for a capital investment. Equal shares in the
capital were common, however, especially in partnerships between
‘established families’, ‘in order to guarantee the continuity of their
wealth’. 33
(2) Fattoria. In this form a merchant or company engaged one or
more factors (fattori) in one or more places. 34 The factors were bound
by the instructions of their employer. The fattoria system also existed
in the surrounding Christian world. 35 The pay of factors was linked to
services rendered, with profit-sharing ranging from 2 to 9 per cent. 36
This success-driven wage policy, whose advantages need hardly be
discussed, is believed by some historians to have been introduced into
the Ottoman Empire in a significant form by Jews. 37 For example,
Moses Orfali sees the introduction of an efficiency-related wage as
31 Aryeh Shmuelevitz, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire in the Late Fifteenth and
Six teenth Centuries: Administrative, Economic, Legal and Social Relations (Lei -
den, 1984).
32 Ibid. 142.
33 Moises Orfali, ‘Doña Gracia Mendes and the Ragusan Republic’, 185.
34 See also Minna Rozen, ‘The Fattoria: A Chapter in the History of Mediter -
ranean Trade in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ (in Hebrew),
Miqqedem umiyyam, 1 (1981), 100–31; and ead, ‘La vie économique des Juifs du
bassin méditerranéen de l’expulsion d’Espagne (1492) à la fin du XVIIIe siècle’,
in Shmuel Trigano, La société juive à travers l’histoire, 4 vols. (Paris, 1993),
iii. 296–352, at 336. See also Shmuelevitz, Jews of the Ottoman Empire, 143.
35 On Christian factors see Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, Medieval
Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents (New York, 1955), 213.
See also Tucci, ‘Le colonie mercantili’, 17.
36 Rozen, ‘The Fattoria’, 129.
37 Shmuelevitz, Jews of the Ottoman Empire, 143
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