NEW WORLD, NEW MARKET. A MERCHANT’S MISSION TO TRADE BETWEEN PHILADELPHIA AND TRIESTE IN 1783
NEW WORLD, NEW MARKET. A MERCHANT’S MISSION TO TRADE BETWEEN PHILADELPHIA AND TRIESTE IN 1783

Summary/Abstract: Merchant voices in the eighteenth century tend to be obscured by their businesses. The records left to us by merchants generally come in the form of their financial records or, in some cases, their personal correspondence. However, letters exchanged between merchants often relate similar stories of transactions or potential investments. Few letters can connect a particular merchant to the wider world or to events in world history which drastically changed their fortunes. This is not the case with Domenico Francesco Belletti in Trieste and his desire to establish trade between the Habsburg port of Trieste and the newly independent United States of America. Belletti was a merchant of considerable repute in Trieste and his endeavour to facilitate new transatlantic trading links can be seen through two main sources: his correspondence with noted American revolutionary, Benjamin Franklin, and the local advertisements for Belletti’s goods for sale in Philadelphia. Combined together these sources provide an insight into changing mercantile aspirations as the Central European region felt the impact of the new nation across the Atlantic. In essence Belletti’s example demonstrates the key theme of a localised response to opportunity for economic expansion in the late eighteenth century.

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