Corey Tazzara's excellent book examines the history of Livorno, the earliest and most successful model of a free port in early modern Europe, and its importance in the theorization of free trade during the Enlightenment. In the eight chapters of the book, organized chronologically to trace the development of the city, Tazzara effectively reconstructs the rise and fall of Livorno in the wider context of Mediterranean and Atlantic trade and the parallel debates in the field of economic politics.

Livorno became a relevant port only in the last decades of the sixteenth century, when the Medici grand duke Francesco I enlarged the city and his brother and successor, Ferdinand I, developed it into a free port. With the issue of two charters in 1591 and 1593, known as the Livornine, Ferdinand welcomed merchants of every nation and religion, promising privileges and fiscal exemptions. English, Dutch, French, Armenian, and Greek businessmen as well as a significant Jewish community settled in the city. In the same years, the arrival of Northern ships loaded with grains during the great famine of the 1590s made Livorno the redistribution center for the peninsula and, soon, the main entrepôt of long-distance commerce connecting northwestern Europe, Italy, and the Levant. The twenty-three merchants residing in the city in 1601 increased to almost 300 in 1642.

While Livorno undeniably facilitated Northern European commercial penetration into the Mediterranean, Tazzara stresses its equally important role in creating a competitive trading zone that hindered any monopolistic efforts. He also challenges the thesis that identified the free port as both the cause and the effect of Italian decline in the seventeenth century, highlighting the way in which Livorno helped to integrate the peninsula into the new commercial networks and generated revenues from commercial services.

The growing rivalry among the maritime powers after 1650 reinforced the role of Livorno as a neutral and secure depot. Livorno's success was also bolstered by the fiscal reform of 1676 that eliminated tariffs and imposed only a one-time stallage tax, reducing any bureaucratic and political oversight on the market to a minimum. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the city became an even more relevant center of multilateral trade practiced by English, Dutch, and French merchants, but began to suffer the competition of the other free ports developing throughout the Mediterranean. In the first decades of the following century, trade with Northern Europe and Italy fell mainly because of the rise of Marseille and Ancona; by 1734, Livorno's golden age was over.

Just as free ports began to lose their commercial relevance in the Mediterranean, the theoretical debate on free trade became a central fixture of Enlightenment economic thought. Tazzara effectively shows how the ideas on free trade discussed in the eighteenth century and perfected by Adam Smith had their foundations in a set of practices and policies introduced in the previous centuries in the organizations of free ports, particularly that of Livorno. It was, in fact, in Livorno and in the mercantile circles familiar with the Tuscan city that the term free port was integrated into the discourse of political economy, and its meaning was the result of a long sequence of formal and informal bureaucratic procedures. The needs and requests of the merchants and the usually accommodating responses provided by Livorno's officials gradually generated the main elements that would become central to the definition of the free port. Tazzara effectively shows this process through the analysis of 772 supplications received by Livorno's two main bureaucratic centers, the Customs Office and the Governor's Office. The gradual development of the free port was therefore the product of the interaction of economic operators with the institutions in charge of regulating economic life. In fact, Tazzara argues quite effectively that the genesis of economic ideas should not be considered purely a matter of intellectual history, as the early history of political economy relies on a pragmatic, bureaucratic foundation. The case of Livorno demonstrates clearly how the expansion of the marketplace and the impact of commercial realities were more relevant than mercantilist policies in shaping European commerce. Only in the eighteenth century, when scholars and academic societies replaced merchant councils and customs offices with the development of a science of commerce, were expertise and experience finally separated.

Tazzara has written a first-rate work that, through a rigorous examination of a broad array of primary and secondary sources, provides an effective synthesis of the histories of Livorno and the early modern Mediterranean commercial networks, as well as a thought-provoking analysis of the development of the ideas and policies of free trade.