75 © Te Author(s) 2018 M. Lorenzini et al. (eds.), Financing in Europe, Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58493-5_4 Financing Trade Through Limited Partnerships: Evidence from Silk Firms in Eighteenth-Century Trentino Cinzia Lorandini Introduction Tis chapter provides new evidence about the role of limited partnerships in the fnancing of early modern trade. 1 Partnerships were widely used to raise start-up capital for new businesses and to share risks among associ- ates. It is generally agreed that in most cases they resembled what today we would call a general partnership, their main feature being that the associates contributed both labour and capital, and were unlimitedly and individually liable for the frm’s obligations. However, this study high- lights the fact that many frms that seemed to be general partnerships, or even sole traders and family frms, were indeed limited partnerships. Te term ‘limited partnership’—which might seem anachronistic when applied to business associations of the early modern period—is used here to denote a partnership that resembled what, even before mod- ern commercial codifcations, was called società in accomandita in some Italian States, and société en commandite in France. Tis type of business C. Lorandini (*) Università degli Studi di Trento, Trento, Italy