CAPITAL CITY, RULING CITY, PRIMARY CITY: A Questionable Hierarchy in the Economy of Early Modern Naples

The prevailing opinion among historians is that the considerable demographic size and the same economic structure of Naples in the early modern period depended above all on its role as the capital city and on the fiscal, jurisdictional and provisioning privileges that the sovereigns granted to its inhabitants to the detriment of the rest of the country. The importance attributed to Naples as a capital and ruling city has relegated, if not denied, Naples as an industrial and tertiary city, thus fuelling, even in the economic field, the narrative that makes the city appear indecipherable and paradoxical, capable in this case of feeding 400,000 inhabitants despite not having a productive structure worthy of a primary city. However, the intellectual assumptions and the arguments supporting the historiographical mainstream are weakened by recent studies, in the light of which the chapter re-examines the economic role of the privileges and of the status of capital enjoyed by Naples in the 18th and 19th centuries, and concludes that they had a variable but not predominant influence on the structure and dynamics of the urban economy depending on the period.