This dissertation explores the early-modern roots of international political economy, of which money, credit, and trade—and the institutions related to them—were crucial components. It deals with events and ideas generated by the movement of people, capital, and commodities across different states and societies that in turn have created economic opportunities as well as tensions. In trying to exploit opportunities and cope with tensions, the most disparate cast of characters—from merchants to gamblers, from artists to theologians, from physicians to philosophers—played a part in devising instruments that enabled the functioning of the economy. Discussions about money, exchange rates, balance of trade, and examples of customs and institutions in adjacent and distant civilizations that emerged from these attempts contributed to the formation of a “discourse” about political economy. Attempts to systematize this knowledge resulted in some cases in the formation of ideas about how to improve the life of people—how to increase their “ bonheur” to use a favorite eighteenth-century term. These attempts also resulted in the search for instruments and institutions that could handle changes and weather the volatility of economic life during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

On the basis of documents from Italian archives and early-modern treatises (mainly but not exclusively Italian) about money, credit, and commerce this thesis explores the crises that sparked debate about money and economics, about the policies that became the subject of discussion, about the role of groups and their differing interests, about connections among different states, and about what political economy had come to represent in contemporary discourses about politics. These sources also convey the instability of the time and inform us about contemporary observers' search for explanations as well as individuals' and governments' attempts to cope with it.

This thesis also revaluates the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian contributions to the rise of a European discourse on political economy. Although Italian ideas about money and political economy were progressively marginalized by the rise of British moral philosophers and French Physiocrats, they actually predate some of the British and French technical and intellectual advances in this field.