Lecture by Lavinia Maddulano, assistant professor of early modern history in the Department of Humanities at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and 2025-2026 research-fellow at the Paris IAS, organized by the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Pisa in Italy.

Lecture on-site and in Italian. Open to the public.

Presentation

This seminar explores the links between political-economic ideas and scientific practices between the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with a particular focus on the Duchy of Milan under Habsburg and Napoleonic rule. Rather than placing political economy exclusively within the framework of the history of ideas, the seminar proposes to study its relationship with the history of practices, showing how economic and political concepts were tested, adapted, and translated into concrete experiences: reforms required the intervention of craftsmen, mechanics, bakers, surveyors, and chemists, whose work gave substance to otherwise abstract principles. Through artifacts, texts, and initiatives—from wheat-grinding machines, emblems of physiocratic ideals, to marsh drainage projects inspired by Joseph II's reforms, to chemistry textbooks extolling republican values—techno-practices translated political and economic visions into concrete applications, while paying attention to the constraints imposed by the environment. In this way, they did not merely serve as intermediaries between theory and government, but also helped to spread the Enlightenment ideals of public happiness and social utility.

The case study thus highlights the central role of the city of Milan in European networks for the circulation of technical and economic knowledge, while bringing out another dimension of the discourse: awareness of the limits of universalist economic knowledge, which is constrained by local and natural conditions.

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