The making of a transnational marketplace. Naples and the impact of Mediterranean cross-border trade on regional economies

摘要

This paper aims to discuss the relationship between migration, transnational entrepreneur-ship and regional development by analyzing the case of Naples. In recent years, Naples has emerged as an important destination for North African traders. The transformation of this city into a transnational marketplace urges us to rethink some of the assumptions made in the literature dealing with local development in Italy and immigrant entrepreneurship and the extent to which these studies have paid scant attention to the impact of transnational networks on the evolution of spaces of localized production and consumption. I propose a modified framework for studying immigrant transnational economic activities by taking into account both the multilocal embeddedness of immigrant strategies and the cosmopolitaniza-tion of Mediterranean marketplaces.