Venetian shipbuilders and the fountain of wine

Past & Present, August, 1997 by Robert C Davis

The Arsenal of the Republic of Venice has evoked superlatives since the era of Dante. Even an economic historian as measured in his writings as Frederic C. Lane had to describe it as nothing less than `the biggest industrial establishment in all Christendom, perhaps the biggest in the world'.(1) In early modern terms, the Venetian Arsenal was indeed immense: a factory complex that was both a vast munitions storehouse and a manufactory for ships, rope, sails, hardware, powder and artillery (Plate 1). Not only was it big by every measurement of the times--sprawling over more than sixty acres, providing work for up to 2,500 craftsmen and labourers, and eating up nearly 10 per cent of the Republic's annual budget--but it was also renowned for an efficiency that by all accounts made it the premier producer of weaponry of the age.(2)

All these superlatives have posed a challenge for generations of business and economic historians seeking to explore and explain how the Venetians could have coped with such masses of men and materiel assembled in a single location, at a time when manufacturing in western Europe was for the most part still being carried out on an organizational scale not much more complicated than the family workshop. Lying behind much of this scholarly interest has been a conviction--not always explicitly stated--that the Arsenal, as a flourishing example of the proto-industrial `machineless factory', was a kind of testing ground for many of the problems that would eventually have to be solved by the first `true' factory operators in the British Midlands.(3) As a result, a great deal of attention has been paid to how Venetians solved such classic manufacturing challenges as designing a production-line system, disciplining an army of craftsmen to the demands of factory-style work rhythms, or overcoming bottlenecks in supply by securing monopoly control over such vital raw materials as wood and hemp.(4) This reliance on modernization theory to set the research framework for the Venetian Arsenal has been profitable for opening up such a large and complex subject, but it has also encouraged scholars to overlook those aspects of the Arsenal's operation that apparently were not linked to present-day notions of what constitutes efficient and rationalized industrial practice. This has been unfortunate, for in seeking the roots of the modern in the ways that Venetians ran their manufactory, historians have tended to neglect or marginalize certain facets of the Arsenal's operation that did not, inconveniently, presage today's practices. Yet it is here on the margins, where Venetian ways of doing things might seem most contrary to economic common sense, that we can best glimpse elements of the social contract that underlay Venice's workplace culture, indications of just how profoundly different in its guiding premises this pre-industrial community was from our own.

One such element, which played a peculiar and dominant role in the workings of the Venetian Arsenal, was wine.(5) Outlays for wine constituted one of the principal expenditure lines in the Arsenal's annual materials budget. Second only to timber for the ships, wine purchases represented two to five times what was spent on either pitch, crude iron, canvass, or hemp for rope.(6) Every year, it turns out, the state allocated anywhere from twenty to forty thousand ducats just to keep the Arsenal supplied with over half a million litres of wine: a product that has no apparent connection with constructing ships, except to keep the ship-builders from going thirsty. Looking back from a modern perspective, where we tend to assume that wine and work inhabit separate worlds, weaning craftsmen from their traditional delight in drinking on the job has often been considered as one of the essential steps in the making of a true working class. That an employer--in this case the state itself--should not only allow workplace drinking but actually encourage it also seems distinctly inefficient, if not indeed actively contrary to self-interest.(7) Yet this is just what the otherwise notoriously frugal Venetian government regularly did, as it spent upwards of 2 per cent of its annual budget to make sure that the state's largest industrial workforce always had plenty to drink; moreover, it kept up such outlays even when they were clearly a painful drain on the national treasury.

Examining the story of wine in Venice's state shipyards can raise a number of questions that are not otherwise likely to come up in studies restricted to the Arsenal's more prosaic activities of building and procurement. What were the social and economic priorities of those who ruled Venice, that they were willing to divert so much of the Republic's increasingly limited resources to such seemingly unproductive ends? What role did wine play in the social and economic fabric of this giant `machineless factory' that would have made such expenditures seem worthwhile? And, finally, but no less importantly, just why was the Arsenal's wine bill so enormous?