I would like to analyse the role of trades and markets as they were controlled by the Republic before and after the Atlantic expansion. A special focus will be addressed to the Asian markets but also to the geopolitical frame inside the Republic had to intervene. Recent researches have presented a very different framework that a traditional historiography has transmitted.

Although the ‘centre/periphery’ model was forged before the ‘global turn’ of the social sciences in the 1990s, it is crucial to acknowledge how it still operates as an underlying premise in global history. Twenty years after the Great Divergence debate, global studies transitioned from world-systems approaches to multi-scaled stories which criticize teleological narratives that only highlight “successful” historical paths – i.e Western modernity. More than just sketching a hierarchy between spaces and societies as historical actors, thinking about history in terms of centres and peripheries tends to establish a distinction between what did matter and what peripherally happened; what is worth of being told and what is not. When thinking about historical time, the model entails a research mindset that does not leave much room for historical contingency and alternative periodizations.
I conceive this presentation with the intent to spark discussions about the empirical, theoretical, and didactical challenges linked to this issue for the future of history telling. I will first present the empirical and methodological reflections I deal with in my own work which focuses on actors whose historical paths have been traditionally discarded as “backward” in the history of early modern European globalization: late 18th-century Italian States. Secondly, I will propose a brief review of the historiography on the ‘centre/periphery’ model and its critics. What can we learn from studies focussing on spaces and topics long conceived as ‘peripheries’? Is the ‘centre/periphery’ model still a useful explanatory tool for historians in transmitting their stories and, if so, what for?

The abrupt deconstruction of the Italian Empire meant that this nation did not concern itself with the procedures of decolonization or the responsibility of its former actions. This fact partially explains the intellectual immaturity, aloofness, awkwardness or in many cases the systematic downplaying of its colonial history in school textbooks and literature alike. Nationalistic denial of exploitation and past war crimes or the portrayal of Italian colonial rule as more “lenient” in relation to that of the other imperialistic powers is very much present to this day. Over the last thirty years and until recently the country’s colonial history was a secondary and forgotten part of its national history. It seems that the Italian governments and academic circles had no desire to allow or to engage into a systematic study of the Italian presence in Africa, an event which would confront them with the mistakes of the past. Indifference, disregard for the foreign sources, ambiguity and lack of debate perpetuated the study of the events with blinkers on; the inconsistencies, the contradictions, the myths and the stereotypes about a "humanitarian" and "different" colonial administration have not been entirely discredited yet. This paper revolves around Italy’s national history and the denial of its colonial past.