Within the frame of political and economic mutations that interested Trieste, main Habsburg port in the Mediterranean sea, of the tensions belonging to the Habsburg Empire and of the changes involving the means of transportation, commercial techniques and the economy as a whole, the essay’s intent is to retrace the process by which the figure of agent became professional in Trieste differentiating itself vertically and horizontally from the other figures employed in the commercial sector and, at the same time, to analyze how relations changed between owners and agents in a moment during which opposite tendencies assigning competitive advantages, sometimes to one and sometimes to the other, intersected with complex outcomes. Such a process, moreover, was also an important element in the strategies applied by the elites in Trieste in the course of the competition for the supremacy both in the local context and in the complex of competitions started in the imperial area.
