1,720,981 research outputs found
The Twentieth-Century Origins of the Medieval Lex Mercatoria Thesis
Full text linkThis article reappraises the early intellectual formation of the medieval "lex mercatoria"thesis: the idea that the international merchants of medieval Europe (or perhaps beyond) enjoyed a universal, autonomous, and customary body of commercial law created and administered by themselves. The debate over its existence, raging for at least 120 years, shows no signs of slowing, in part because the idea is of undoubted usefulness to both proponents (so-called "mercatorists") and critics. The article offers a new account of the origins of this idea and looks to disaggregate different mercatorist conceptions. Revising the conventional genealogy that traces the theory through the work of Berthold Goldman to the nineteenth-century German scholar Levin Goldschmidt, who is much misunderstood in Anglophone scholarship, it argues that the idea's powerful re-emergence in the second half of the twentieth century was mediated through two distinct channels, one centred around the British-German jurist Clive Schmitthoff and the other around the British historian William Mitchell. The latter yoked Goldschmidt's emphasis on the medieval merchant class as a source of legal innovation to a thoroughly Anglophone concept: the "law merchant". Critics, however, have engaged primarily with Schmitthoff's conception, whose "strong"mercatorist argument was not only unusually forthright but reoriented the debate to focus on commercial law's supposed autonomy from the law of territorial states, an even less plausible proposition in historical terms
Mapping trade, risk and extreme weather in the first globalization: The AveTransRisk database
No full textThis research note introduces the award-winning AveTransRisk database, the result of an extensive project capturing data on early modern maritime trade, specifically in the Mediterranean region. It focuses on the concept of General Average, where shipmasters voluntarily sacrificed cargo to save their vessels from peril. General Average procedures, including accident reports and damage calculations, provide valuable information for economic and maritime historians. The AveTransRisk database offers detailed insights into routes, cargo, weather conditions, ships, seafarers and transaction costs. It enables scholars to examine broader topics such as comparative maritime economies, the evolution of legal institutions and risk management. Fully relational and equipped with advanced search functions and mapping capabilities, the database facilitates comprehensive analysis. As it expands to include voyages from other European archives, its usability and resilience increase. Supported by the University of Exeter's digital infrastructure, the AveTransRisk database contributes to the sustainability of digital resources in historical research
ONE HUNDRED BARRELS OF GUNPOWDER GENERAL AVERAGE, MARITIME LAW, AND INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMACY BETWEEN TUSCANY AND ENGLAND IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 17TH CENTURY
No full textMaritime "Average" refers to partial damage affecting one or more parties directly interested in a maritime voyage. In certain cases, and under certain conditions, the cost of this damage can be redistributed among the ship-owners and cargo owners by means of a procedure: "General Average". This is possible thanks to a very ancient piece of maritime law which assumes that all members of a maritime venture form a single community of solidarity. Faced with common danger, self-interest is forgotten, and the collective whole becomes a guarantor for the parts. The archives of maritime courts preserve an impressive number of acts which show different commercial actors confronting the problem of estimating the two sums in play which determined redistribution: the value of the whole, and the value of the part which was sacrificed. This type of documentation could, in theory, provide us with econometric data which in turn could allow for statistical analysis. The following microhistory demonstrates the limits of that approach by identifying certain contingencies which shaped these procedures and the gap which existed between theoretical assumptions and their translation into the real world. This investigation is based on a 17th century cause celebre, a General Average adjudicated by the Consoli di Mare in Pisa in 1670 which became the centre of a diplomatic controversy between the English and Tuscan governments
The Technical Challenges of Measuring Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Livorno and Genoa
No full textThe AveTransRisk database was recently published by the ERC project “Average-Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Century)”. It captures data on early modern maritime trade thanks to the use of an understudied source: General Average procedures. The database contains information on thousands of cases, aiming to become the repository for such records. The article discusses the particularities of the data from Genoa and Livorno and the solutions put in place to capture it, outlining the choices that confronted the database creators during the four-year period of construction. It then outlines the technical solutions implemented and show the database’s potential for historical analysis thanks to its built-in computational tools
Mapping trade, risk and extreme weather in the first globalization: The AveTransRisk database
Full text linkThis research note introduces the award-winning AveTransRisk database, the result of an extensive project capturing data on early modern maritime trade, specifically in the Mediterranean region. It focuses on the concept of General Average, where shipmasters voluntarily sacrificed cargo to save their vessels from peril. General Average procedures, including accident reports and damage calculations, provide valuable information for economic and maritime historians. The AveTransRisk database offers detailed insights into routes, cargo, weather conditions, ships, seafarers and transaction costs. It enables scholars to examine broader topics such as comparative maritime economies, the evolution of legal institutions and risk management. Fully relational and equipped with advanced search functions and mapping capabilities, the database facilitates comprehensive analysis. As it expands to include voyages from other European archives, its usability and resilience increase. Supported by the University of Exeter's digital infrastructure, the AveTransRisk database contributes to the sustainability of digital resources in historical research
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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