Brigitte Marin is Professor of Modern History at Aix-Marseille University and Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France). Director of Studies in modern and contemporary history at the Ecole française de Rome between 2000 and 2006 she has directed the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme (Aix-en-Provence) since 2009 and the unit of excellence “Social Sciences and Humanities at the heart of multidisciplinary research for the Mediterranean” (LabexMed) since 2011. Her research focuses on the urban, social and cultural history of Italy during the Old Regime and more specifically on the city of Naples in the 18th century, on urban reforms during the Enlightenment in Southern Europe, on the genesis of the police apparatus and on subsistence administration.

Publications (selection) :

• with C. Virlouvet (dir.), Nourrir les cités de Méditerranée (Antiquité-Temps modernes), 2003;
• « Commerce du blé et politique internationale. L’affaire des grains de Marseille durant la disette de Naples (1764)», in B. Salvemini (ed.), Lo spazio tirrenico nella “grande trasformazione”, Bari, 2009 ;
• « Historiographie », in D. Albera, M. Crivello, M. Tozy (eds), Dictionnaire de la Méditerranée, 2016 ;
• with C. Virlouvet (eds), Entrepôts et trafics annonaires en Méditerranée. Antiquité –Temps Modernes, Rome, 2016.

Feeding Mediterranean Cities 

This paper proposes a synthesis of recent studies on cities’ grain supply systems within the Mediterranean basin from the Antiquity until the end of the modern period. The early and continuous urbanisation of this area would not have been possible without the setting up of annonaire systems involving public administrations at various levels to provide enough sustenance at a reasonable price for people in the cities. More than any other commodity cereal production was supervised and regulated by political authorities from the organisation of agricultural production to urban market controls, as cereals were subjected to climatic hazards and transport difficulties whilst at the same time essential to people’s diets. Through a comparative reflection on the workings of subsistence markets in Mediterranean cities and in relationship with a recently published collective study we will focus on the role of grain storehouses in public authorities’ intervention systems which relied greatly on the regulation of market prices through the management of supplies. The authorities’ control of the production, transport and distribution of supplies operated precisely thanks to storehouses, which represented strategic points in public supply routes. Throughout their long history, their location, their typology, their function in the conservation process, their management and their economic role storehouses therefore constitute a good observatory in order to better understand supply systems themselves and their transformations throughout time.