Giovanni Botero and the Commercial Waterscape

As a political-economic thinker, Giovanni Botero is mostly remembered for identifying the importance of industrial production to economic growth. This article expands our understanding of his political-economic thought by examining his ideas about wealth-producing effects of aquatic resources. In several publications from the late 1580s and 1590s, he discussed waterways as strategic technologies of commercial navigation and urged princes to improve their territories to create this affordance where it lacked naturally. I argue that orderly waterscapes, which facilitated access to sundry resources and occasioned all manner of economic activity, were for Botero among the most critical determinants of secular grandezza, or greatness.