«THE JOURNEY BEYOND THE FARM GATE». Note sul commercio del grano tra età moderna e «rivoluzione commerciale» ottocentesca

Often shrouded in a sort of «industrialist prejudice», historiography tends to underestimate the extent, timing, and dynamics of the gigantic transformations – technological, financial, organizational – that invested the strategic sector of the food commodity trade in the nineteenth century, starting with the most vital of all: wheat. Once determined the turning point (that is, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the debut of a world cereal market, whose fundamental bases were Chicago and Liverpool, with ramifications around the world), the article aims to measure the dimensions of such an epochal transformation and seeks to reconstruct the methods of trade in wheat, by sea and by land, in different areas of pre-industrial Europe. Rather than focusing on quantities and flows, the article investigates actors and methods of exchange, mainly local and short-range, surrounded by a dense, suffocating web of political and fiscal sways and limitations, conditioned by the absence of reliable information and conducted almost perpetually under the threat of scarcity and violent price fluctuations.