The State Archives in Turin hold a curious 65-page manuscript, written in French for the King of Sardinia and Duke of Savoy Vittorio-Amedeo II, probably at the very end of the 1720s. Entitled “Origin of the Filibusters established on the Island of Madagascar (...) with a plan to King Victor to receive them under his Protection”, it aimed to rally the pirates of Madagascar to the sovereign of the Kingdom of Piedmont. During the reign of Vittorio-Amedeo II (r. 1675-1730), numerous projects for overseas commercial expansion arrived on the tables of the king’s secretaries. Although they were hardly ever implemented, they do testify to the growing maritime ambitions of the Duchy of Savoy in the early 18th century. More broadly, they invite us to consider the role of the Italian states in 18th-century plans to explore the world and, on a methodological level, they raise the question of how to read and study projects that were never implemented.
Guillaume Calafat is Associate Professor (maître de conférences) at the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His research focuses on shipwrecks, slavery and the relationships between Southern Europe and Ottoman North Africa during the early modern period. He is the author of Une mer jalousée: contribution à l’histoire de la souveraineté (Méditerranée, 17e siècle) (Le Seuil, 2019), and more recently, co-authored with Mathieu Grenet, Méditerranées. Une histoire des mobilités humaines (Points, 2023). He is the editor of the journal Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales.
