114 michael knapton
sustained local hostility obstructed the conduct of surveys and also, there-
fore, sales. Similar effects, in favoring aristocratic and citizen landowning,
derived from state confiscation and sale of about 11,000 hectares of eccle-
siastical property from 1769 onwards.
But despite signs of modernization and higher yields in a few significant
areas, especially through drainage and improvement of land in the lower
plains of the Veronese, innovation in tenurial systems, land use, technol-
ogy, crops, etc. was limited overall, and the good intentions proclaimed in
the later 18th century—the creation of the magistracy of the Deputazione
all’agricoltura (1768), old and new agricultural academies supported by
the state, debate in newspapers—had little practical impact.54 The great-
est exception to this blanket continuity of methods and results was the
progressive spread of maize cultivation from the early 17th century, its
high yields becoming fundamental for covering peasant food needs and
therefore the general population increase mentioned above. But it was
also perfectly functional to preserving the existing organization of agri-
culture and almost all its practices and habits, including the generally
scarce propensity among nobles to invest and the reduction of the major-
ity of the peasantry to bare subsistence—just as the further increase in
the property of nobles and citizens is better considered continuity than
change. Food supply policy lost the perennial urgency it had possessed in
the century preceding the 1630 plague, only to recover it with the marked
increase in population in the mid- to later 18th century.
As for policy towards trade and manufacturing, recent research has
redressed previous historiography’s heavy dependence on source mate-
rial produced by or for central authority (especially the Cinque Savi alla
Mercanzia) and, more importantly, its tendency to evaluate economic
performance within the perspective of Venetian policy.55 Those sources,
that policy, and historical debate were particularly attentive to such
issues as: the rates, yields, and economic implications of taxes affecting
production and circulation of goods, including customs barriers inter-
nal to the state; the binomium protectionism/mercantilism-liberalism,
especially in relation to foreign competition; a primarily conflictual con-
ception of the respective roles of capital and provinces; the declining
fortunes of older manufactured products; the constrictions of the guild
54 Michele Simonetto, I lumi nelle campagne. Accademie e agricoltura nella Repubblica
di Venezia 1768–1797 (Treviso, 2001); Giuseppe Gullino, “Venezia e le campagne,” in Storia di
Venezia, vol. 8: L’ultima fase della Serenissima, ed. Del Negro and Preto, pp. 651–702.
55 Lanaro, ed., At the Centre.