TOWARDS A SOCIAL DIMENSION OF THE COMMERCIAL GEOGRAPHY

Commercial geography and geography for economics - At the beginning of the 20th century the commercial geography “both comprehended and coincided with the entire dominium of what, nowadays, we call economic geography” (Nice, 1964, p. 387), later on it restricted and specialized its field of research in order to become first a branch of the economic geography linked to the geography of the peoples’ circulation and, secondly, to come closer and closer to the urban geography. In 1959 Toschi wrote «the sort of the commercial geography is curious as, in a certain sense, the matrix of the economic geography has been. In the mid of the twentieth century and even more in the second half of it, practical needs determined both the printing of a certain number of handbooks and the starting of the commercial geography as a specialized teaching in Higher Schools for Commerce» (1959, p. 214). As a matter of fact we can fully understand the research fields of the commercial geography by reading the scientific publications of that period. One of the most important studies is the one synthesized by Tinacci Mossello in his «study of the regional and national productive specializations and of the following exchange of the surplus» (1990, p. 275). The commercial geography was well introduced in the liberal and colonial political contest of the period as it used to give the interested governments all the information they needed, both during the conquest phase and during the commercial development (Ibidem, 1990). An important confirmation of what we stated is given by Lanzoni, who, in the introduction of the handbook «Geografia commerciale economica universale»1, stated that the aim of the book «was both to describe the countries and to study their peoples according to all the economic aspects, such as updated production, industries, communications, trades, migration and colonialism» (1898, p. 1). The wide range of the commercial, economic and political geography came out also in the studies of Bonaschi «the necessity to excite the Commercial Geography’s spirit of exploring, a geography that is about immigration toward any country, the free colonization or state property of our territories or of those territories under our influence, a geography that establishes the advantages that our commerce can gain if it will know places and peoples where it could or would be dealt; and last but not least, a geography that regards the spreading of exact concepts about all the above-mentioned arguments that are very important for the profit of our economy and morality» (Bonaschi, 1895, p. 288). At the beginning of the 20s researches on inland commerce started thanks both to the studies of Roletto about «Le condizioni geografiche della fiera di Pinerolo» and to the researches of Mori (1932-1933) about the problem of food staff delivery to the cities of Rome and Zara.