Between interest and solidarity. Merchant families and undivided ownership in Trentino (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries)

The chapter contributes to the debate on family businesses from a historical perspective, focusing on a particular type of family firm, namely merchant families who maintained undivided ownership, similar to Venetian fraterne. Three cases from Trentino in the early modern age are analysed to shed light on how undivided property was used as a tool for the social and economic advancement of the family and what factors influenced it. Particular attention is paid to the role of demographic risk, the cooperation of multiple family members in the enterprise and the configuration of vertical and horizontal relationships. It emerges that undivided ownership was part of a more complex strategy of family wealth management involving divisions and consolidations of assets in relation to marriages, deaths and changes in family status, which made undivided ownership a flexible instrument in terms of duration, actors involved and assets concerned, highlighting the complexity of the dynamics at work within merchant families. The importance of demographic vicissitudes, the presence of a mix of cooperation and conflict, solidarity and self-interest, and a prominent role of women stand out, as well as the need to consider the broader institutional and socio-economic framework to correctly understand the nature and strategies of family businesses.