The question at the heart of Francesco Guidi Bruscoli's new book is an important and intriguing one: how did the Florentine – and more generally the Italian – economy contribute to, or even direct, the development of Portugal's empire, which, from the late fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, emerged as one of Europe's premier colonial powers? There is an implicit problem that follows: while the adjective ‘Portuguese’ has a clear meaning in the context of the preceding question (referring to the Portuguese monarchy and its institutions), the adjective ‘Florentine’ refers to a geographical location and to a set of cultural practices in which Florentine entrepreneurs had excelled for at least two centuries before the creation of the two Iberian overseas empires. Guidi Bruscoli is fully aware of the central question's significance. The problem that arises from it is addressed only indirectly in his book's pages.

The book's subtitle, Un mercante fiorentino a Lisbona e l'impero portoghese (‘A Florentine merchant in Lisbon and the Portuguese empire’), points to the imbalance between Guidi Bruscoli's protagonists: on the one hand, a single merchant, Bartolomeo Marchionni, from Florence; on the other, the capital of Portugal's empire. This is an analytical issue that is worth exploring. Indeed, Guidi Bruscoli offers more than a tantalizing hint to explain the great success enjoyed by Marchionni in Portugal. For if this entrepreneur managed to garner the compliment of one contemporary Portuguese, who called him (as per the book's subtitle) an ‘homem de grossa fazenda’ (‘a man of great estate’), it was because of his excellent relations with the Portuguese monarchy. This success, in turn, was based on Marchionni's willingness – indeed, his anxiety – to advance very substantial loans to the Portuguese monarchy. Is there an echo here of a lesson that a Florentine merchant would have learned back at home? Unfortunately, as happens more than once in this book, the author gestures to an issue, only to skirt around its analytical complexities.

Guidi Bruscoli's focus is the commercial activity of Bartolomeo Marchionni, who in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was based in Lisbon, and of his constellation of assistants and collaborators. Marchionni is not unknown to modern historians. Both Federico Melis and Virginia Rau have written about him (though the latter had not completed her major study of this Luso-Florentine figure before her death). Guidi Bruscoli picks up the pieces of these previous studies, and, in a sense, carries Rau's intended book to its completion. Such is his indebtedness that, from the perspective of method or analysis, it is hard to know how, if at all, Guidi Bruscoli has gone beyond the intellectual horizons of these two historians of the economy, both of whom dominated their respective fields half a century or more ago.

Be that as it may, the two substantial parts of Guidi Bruscoli's book are devoted, in turn, to people and to commercial goods (though the second part also contains a considerable amount of information on the expeditions of famous sea captains such as Pedro Alvarez Cabral, Vasco da Gama, and Francisco de Almeida, which are woven into its narrative). Both parts are based on meticulous and extensive research carried out in an impressive number of archives. In them, Guidi Bruscoli has unearthed mountains of mostly unknown documents (nineteen of which are presented in extenso in the book's appendix). The author's palaeographical and philological standards are very high, and readers time and again are challenged to rise up to them as they are invited to draw on their knowledge of Portuguese, Italian, Latin, and English to understand the many citations from documents repeatedly inserted in the middle of sentences. The harvest of the author's patient researches is abundant, and the documents he has unearthed will surely serve other scholars in their own studies. It is a pity, then, that Guidi Bruscoli did not himself take advantage of his findings to develop an analytically robust interpretation of the historical phenomena he wished to study.

One detects an appreciation of network analysis that is much in fashion these days. But nowhere in the book's first long part is there an attempt to suggest how the many individuals whose biographical cameos are carefully presented add up to anything more than a group of individuals who were Marchionni's dependants or collaborators. The same criticism could be levelled at the book's second part, where Guidi Bruscoli's attention rests on the objects that were traded by Marchionni and his partners. We find there excellent overviews of the staples of slaves and spices, with a chapter devoted to each, but also of gold, sugar, fabrics, melegueta (a pepper spice), and others. The author's reticence to venture a more analytical approach is evident as he examines these products seriatim, while he himself is aware of the need to understand more precisely the dynamic nature of this trade and the need to link analytically Marchionni's shifting focus from one product to another. For example, in the midst of an interesting exposition on Marchionni's engagement in the slave trade, Guidi Bruscoli remarks that ‘seppure … l'interesse di Marchionni si rivolse maggiormente verso l'altrettanto proficuo mondo delle spezie asiatiche, qualche legame con l'importazione degli schiavi africani dovette comunque mantenerlo’ (‘although Marchionni's interest turned more towards the equally profitable world of Asiatic spices, he nevertheless maintains some links with the importation of African slaves’; p. 122). A little more attention to the meaning of the adjective qualche and the adverb comunque might have strengthened the author's presentation.

In fact, one finds sufficient information throughout the book to encourage the reader to pursue the topics discussed here further. This is especially the case with Guidi Bruscoli's presentation of Marchionni's engagement in the African slave trade, where one finds impressive amounts of data about the direction of the slave trade (from Lisbon, where they would arrive, to Valenzia and Seviglia, but also to Florence, albeit to a lesser extent), the numbers of slaves imported by Marchionni, and their prices. It is at the very end of this chapter, almost as an afterthought, that Guidi Bruscoli suggests that a new moral climate (p. 134) may have influenced the redirection of Marchionni's interest away from the slave trade to the commerce in spices. Here is an issue that, if properly pursued and not just mentioned in passing, could have made Guidi Bruscoli's discussion more noteworthy, perhaps even more convincing.

For a reader of this Journal, who is likely to have more than a passing interest in the interconnections between different parts of the world, and in the economic and other exchanges between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas at the time of the great early modern explorations, this book is likely to be a disappointment. Guidi Bruscoli's undivided attention is on Marchionni – the great entrepreneur – and his collaborators. But behind the details of Marchionni's story, the story of his successes and the challenges he had to overcome, there was another series of stories that Guidi Bruscoli surprisingly seems to overlook: those about the native traders in Africa and India with whom European merchants and sailors had to interact and with whom elaborate deals often had to be struck. Recent studies on intercultural trade in the early modern age have suggested new questions and methods (see, for example, the studies by Francesca Trivellato). So it is a double pity that Guidi Bruscoli was reluctant to open his inquiry to the insights that one may derive from these and other comparable studies.

The reader will be grateful to Guidi Bruscoli for the truly impressive amount of research undertaken for his book. Yet, in the end, one cannot help but be disappointed that the conclusions of this massive research effort are not very different from those reached by Melis and Rau two scholarly generations ago. Rather predictably, Guidi Bruscoli concludes that Bartolomeo Marchionni was un tipico mercante del Rinascimento (‘a typical Renaissance merchant’; p. 193.) Fair enough; but we already knew that from previous studies. Could not one have expected a somewhat bolder, more stimulating conclusion from an author who has such a remarkable command of the sources?