This article tries to analyze the transformations of the economy of the Republic of Venice from the recovery after the War of the League of Cambrai (1517) until the fall of the aristocratic regime in 1797. Unlike a recent historiographical tendency which aims to empathize the significance of craftsmanship and proto-industry in the structure of the venetian preindustrial economy, the analysis focuses on the development of the primary sector, that maintained for all the considered centuries a key-role. Different sets of data coming from various historical sources are used to verify the long-term transformations of the main production sectors, and the consequences of the general economic trends on the movement of the population and on the social structure. From a commercial and industrial power, the Venetian State changed into an agriculture-based economy, mainly oriented to the production of raw materials (raw silk, timber) and foodstuffs. Even if its internal economic cohesion was greater, at the end of its long Republican experience the venetian State discovered itself more depending on agriculture than three centuries before.
