Abstract

In the modern period, the exercise of rights on the banks of the city of Venice are the key to understanding the institution of boatmen’s collectives, making them organisations recognised by the urban magistracies and exercising power over the place. The specific case of the Venetian boatmen opens the way to a wider reflection on the phenomenon of associations, the organisation of work in Ancien Régime societies and the importance of spatiality in defining monopolies, the obligations of the trades and the community logics that flow from them. The places in which professional activities took place therefore have a much greater value than is generally accorded to them in studies of the trades and the institutions that governed them.