Organizing Charity: Social Support Structures in the Republic of Genoa During the Early Modern Period

This chapter illustrates criteria that informed the social support system in the territory of the Republic of Genoa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It highlights the fact that charitable organizations in small towns and villages, where about three-quarters of the state’s population lived, were promoted, funded, and managed at a local level without systematic supervision by state authorities. These institutions thus enjoyed wide margins of discretion and autonomy, often resulting in archaic and ineffective structures and giving rise to situations of mismanagement. The Republic was aware of this situation but did not intervene to structurally reform social support systems in the peripheral districts, as it had in the city capital. Consequently, poor-relief activity was unable to significantly mitigate the widespread poverty that characterized the territory of the Republic of Genoa during the pre-industrial age.